by Michael
Albert
311 pages, 26 chapters.
Published by Verso Books
London, England
Three Brief Excerpts
Excerpt 1:
From the Introduction
Excerpt 2: From the Introduction
Excerpt 3: Chapter 25: Asset or
Debit?
Excerpt 1:
From the Introduction
[After briefly answering the question what do anti-corporate globalization
activists want instead of the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization,
the introduction to Parecon: Life After Capitalism argues that the
problem of "what we want" extends much further…]
Anti-Capitalist Globalization And Economic Vision
…When activists offer a vision for a people-serving and
democracy-enhancing internationalism we urge constructing a very good
International Asset Agency, Global Investment Assistance Agency, and Global
Trade Agency on top of the very bad domestic economies we currently endure.
Suppose we win the sought gains. Persisting corporations and multinationals
in each country would not positively augment and enforce the new
international structures, but would instead continually emanate pressures to
return global relations to more rapacious ways. At an intuitive level people
actually understand this. When average folks ask anti-globalization
activists “What do you want?”, they aren’t only asking us what we seek
internationally. They also wonder what we seek domestically. What do we want
inside countries that would augment the international gains we seek and make
fighting for them more than useless posturing?
If we
have capitalism, many people rightly reason, there will inevitably be
tremendous pressures toward capitalist globalization and against
anti-capitalist internationalism. New international trade institutions and
more local alliances and structures sound positive, but even if immense
exertions put them in place, won’t domestic economies around the world undo
the gains? The question is warranted.
Capitalist globalization is markets, corporations, and class structure writ
large. To replace capitalist globalization and not just temporarily mitigate
its effects or stall its enlargement, don’t we have to move toward replacing
capitalism as well? If efforts to improve global relations through creating
the new international regulatory institutions we propose are an end in
themselves, won’t they be rolled back? To persist, don’t they have to be
part of a larger project to transform underlying capitalist structures? If
we have no vision for that larger project, if we offer no alternative to
markets and corporations, won’t our gains be temporary?
So,
many people deduce, why should we apply our energies and time to the
struggles that you propose when we believe that even if we successfully won
all the gains you seek, in time those gains would be wiped out by resurgent
capitalist dynamics? You keep telling us how powerful and encompassing
capitalism is. We believe you. If the efforts you propose don’t lead to
entirely new economies, they will eventually be rolled back to all the same
old rot. It isn’t worth my time to seek gains that will be undone.
This
assessment is fueled by the reactionary belief that “there is no
alternative.” To combat this belief anti-globalization activists must not
only offer an alternative regarding global economics, but also an
alternative regarding domestic economies. People need to feel that the
application of their energies to opposing corporate globalization won’t have
only a quickly undone short-term impact, but will win permanent gains. So
what should replace capitalism?
[At this point the introduction summarizes the vision the book later lays
out and defends…]
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Excerpt 2: From the Introduction
[After providing a summary overview of the economic vision, participatory
economics, the introduction to Parecon: Life After Capitalism concludes with a brief section situating the ideas in the book relative to
activist practice.]
Parecon and Visionary Practice
In
today’s world large movements espousing similar aspirations struggle
worldwide to better the lives of disenfranchised and abused populations
around the globe. Some undertakings pressure elites to beneficially alter
existing institutions. Other efforts seek to create new institutions to
“live the future in the present.” Some efforts are small and local. Some
encompass whole geographic regions. If we look at a selection of visionary
practices, we can see many features which have led to the reasoning
presented in this book. Parecon doesn’t float in space, that is, but arises
from the aspirations and the insights of a huge range of activist efforts.
Here are a few examples.
Historically almost every instance of working people and consumers even
briefly attaining great control over their own conditions has incorporated
both in locales and in workplaces institutions of direct organization and
democracy. These have been called councils or assemblies, and given other
names as well. Their common feature, however, has been providing a direct
vehicle for people to develop, refine, express and implement personal and
collective agendas. Both the successes of such endeavors, and also the
undeniable fact that they have been repeatedly destroyed by counter forces,
fuel and inform our advocacy of workplace and consumer councils in parecon
and our efforts to conceive a context in which such councils can thrive
rather than be thrashed.
Throughout the history of struggle against injustice there has also been
great attention to matters of equity and specifically to the idea that
people ought to enjoy life possibilities in a fair and appropriate manner.
We should be able to earn a bit more or less by our choices, of course, but
not for unworthy reasons. In times of upsurge and self-determination such as
in Spain during the Spanish Anarchist struggles there, or earlier in the
Paris Commune, and at many other moments as well from major national strikes
in the West to movements for freedom in the East and South, seekers of
economic justice have realized that there is something horribly wrong with
remunerating those who enjoy more fulfilling work and who have more say in
social life more than those who do more rote and damaging work and have less
say in social life. Parecon’s priority to remunerate only effort and
sacrifice arises from these aspirations and also gives them more precise
substance than they have previously enjoyed.
But
what about instances from the present? Is parecon connected to current
exploratory and innovative economic efforts?
Consider collective workplace experiments around the world, including
co-ops, worker-owned plants, and collective workplaces. Workers gain control
over their factories, perhaps buying them rather than having capitalists
close them down entirely, or perhaps originating new enterprises of their
own from scratch. The newly in-charge workers attempt to incorporate
democracy. They try to redefine the division of labor. They seek narrower
income differentials. But the market environment in which they operate makes
all this horribly difficult. By their experiences of such difficulties,
workers’ and consumers’ efforts at creating worker-controlled enterprises
and consumer co-ops provide extensive experience relevant to the definition
of parecon. Not only co-op successes, but also their difficulties—such as
tendencies for old-style job definitions to re-impose widening income
differentials and tendencies for market imposed behaviors to subvert
cooperative aims and values—teach important lessons. Indeed, in my own
experience, the effort to create the radical publishing house South End
Press and to incorporate equity and self-management in its logic and
practice powerfully informed many of the insights that together define
participatory economics, particularly the idea and practice of balanced job
complexes. Likewise, a number of on-going current experiments in
implementing parecon structures continue to inform the vision and its
various features.
On a
grander scale, consider the movement for what is called “solidarity
economics” that has advocates in many parts of South America (and
particularly Brazil), Europe, and elsewhere. Its defining idea is that
economic relations should foster solidarity among participants rather than
causing participants to operate against one another’s interests. Not only
should economic life not divide and oppose people, it should not even be
neutral on this score but should generate mutuality and empathy. Advocates
of solidarity economics thus pursue ideas of local worker’s control and of
allocative exchange with this norm in mind. Parecon takes their insight that
institutions should propel values we hold dear and extends it in additional
directions. We want a solidarity economy in the same sense as its advocates
do. But we also want a diversity economy, an equity economy, and a
self-managing economy. Indeed we want one economy that fulfills all these
aspirations simultaneously. Parecon thus arises from, respects, and seeks to
provide additional dimensions to solidarity economics.
Or
consider the efforts, some years back, in Australia of labor unions to
influence not only the conditions and wages of their members’ work lives,
but also what people produced. They developed the idea of “Green Bans” which
were instances where workers in building trades would ban certain proposed
projects on the grounds they were socially or environmentally unworthy.
Sometimes they would not only ban the proposed endeavors that capitalists
sought to undertake, but would also undertake alternative projects of their
own design intended to treat environment and people appropriately. This
experience of course foreshadows and informs both parecon’s norms for
deciding work and its apportionment of power to affected constituencies.
Parecon extends the logic of Australia’s Green Bans into a full economic
vision for all facets of economic life.
Or
consider the efforts in Porto Alegre and other Brazilian cities and in
Kerala and other regions of India to incorporate elements of participatory
democracy into budget decisions for cities and regions. Indeed, in Brazil
this project is named “participative budgeting” and the idea is to establish
means of local direct organization via which citizens can affect decisions
about collective investments regarding government services such as parks,
education, public transport, and health care. Parecon’s participatory
planning has the same aspirations and impetus, but writ larger, encompassing
not only public goods but all goods, and facilitating not only proportionate
participation by consumers, but also by workers.
Indeed, for all the examples noted above and many more as well, advocates of
participatory economics could be expected, once organized in sufficiently
large movements, to pursue similar struggles—the only difference being the
way pareconists would explain their actions as being part of a process
leading to a whole new economy they would advocate, and perhaps how they
would try to create new infrastructure and consciousness by not only
fostering the immediate aims, but by also empowering participants to win
still more gains in a trajectory leading all the way from capitalism to
parecon. Pareconist workers’ control efforts would seek to attain allocation
gains as well, plus new divisions of labor. Pareconist attempts to institute
“participatory budgets” would seek as well to address norms of remuneration
and job allocation and to engender participation not only in communities
regarding public goods, but also in workplaces regarding all goods.
Pareconist union and workers councils would seek to affect not only the
conditions and circumstances of members’ jobs, but also the worthiness of
undertaken projects, and would likewise try to link with consumer movements
and spread the efforts to government sectors and consumer behavior.
In
other words, the participatory economic vision put forth in coming chapters
not only springs from and is consistent with past and present struggles to
better people’s immediate lives in diverse ways, it also offers encompassing
values and logic to link all these efforts and to enlarge each consistent
with its own best aspirations but also with the logic and aspirations of
others beyond.
And
what about the newest and certainly very promising World Social Forum? Here
is a remarkable amalgamation of movements, constituencies, activists, and
projects from all over the globe linked by an open and experimental
attitude, a commitment to participation, feelings of mutual respect, and
attention to diversity and democracy, all celebrating the sentiment that
“another world is possible.” In 2002, at its second incarnation, roughly
50,000 participants began to enunciate features that that better world might
have. The most widely shared sentiments were rejection of markets and
support for self-management, rejection of vast differentials in income and
support for equity, rejection of homogenizing commercialism and support for
diversity, rejection of imperial arrogance and support for solidarity, and
rejection of ecological devastation and support for sustainability. No doubt
WSF 2003 will have taken this agenda many steps further by the time this
book appears. And like the WSF, parecon contributes visionary economic ideas
in hopes that political, cultural, kinship, global, and ecological visionary
aims will prove compatible and mutually supportive.
Participatory economics provides a new economic logic including new
institutions with new guiding norms and implications. But parecon is also a
direct and natural outgrowth of hundreds of years of struggle for economic
justice as well as contemporary efforts with their accumulated wisdom and
lessons. What parecon can contribute to this heritage and to today’s
activism will be revealed, one way or the other, in coming years.
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Excerpt 3: Chapter 25: Asset or
Debit?
Does Vision Produce Sectarianism?
[Part Four of Parecon: Life After
Capitalism is a series of relatively short chapters dealing with critical
concerns about the new model — will it be productive, is it intrusive, what
about privacy, human nature, flexibility, and so on. The next to last
chapter addresses an unusual concern — is vision a positive things at all,
even if well conceived — and is reproduced here in full.]
There
is a surprisingly prevalent type of criticism of economic vision as
extensive as parecon that we have yet to address. It doesn’t charge that
parecon is unable to meet human needs by reason of poor incentives, or
impossible requirements, or anything else explicitly identified. Quite the
contrary, it finds no fault on this score. And it doesn’t charge that
parecon is deficient because despite being able to effectively accomplish
economic functions, parecon subverts values that we aspire to, whether by
accidental omission or willfully. Quite the opposite, this criticism praises
the values and sometimes even the structures of parecon. This critical
response resists aggressively advocating parecon, in fact, precisely because
parecon has every appearance of being an economically and socially positive
vision. Parecon is resisted, that is, because it appears to be so good. How
can this be?
Any
kind of vision, these critics claim, is detrimental to improving society,
because however wonderful it may seem vision is never truly perfect and also
because vision inevitably leads to closed-minded sectarianism, which
entrenches its faults. These critics argue as follows.
First, society and people are too complex to perfectly predict. Thus, in
some fashion all efforts to project future institutions, however insightful,
must fall short of optimal and be flawed compared to what would be ideal.
Experience is the only corrective, and to have instructive experience
requires experimenting and evaluating practical results, step by step,
without prejudging possible destinations. We should not adopt a full vision
until we implement one. Preconception of a full institutional vision, rather
than just of clear values, overextends our capacities.
Second, in espousing a set of institutional aims and trying to get people to
share them, people will inevitably become invested in those aims. Identities
will become wrapped up in their worthiness. Energies will go to defending
them irrespective of actual logic and evidence. Inflexibility will set in.
Arrogance will arise. Advocates of fully formulated institutional vision
will lose the ability to learn and will begin to mechanically impose their
aims even on the supposed beneficiaries of vision. Little attention will go
to alteration, improvement, addition, or reconstruction, as compared to if
we were guided by practice alone, not preconceived vision.
These
critics of preconceived vision conclude that the right way to attain vision
is through the experience of everyone experimenting, without detailed
pre-envisioning and without sectarianism-inducing espousal of compelling,
encompassing aims, and without efforts to get widespread shared agreement.
We should say only very general things about what we want—such as that the
future should be just, equitable, reduce hierarchy, and so on.
We agree that error and sectarianism are both possible faults. But how
should we respond to these insights? Consider two opposed approaches.
The
first approach employs what ecologists call the “precautionary principle,”
which says that in the face of uncertainty and inevitable human
subjectivity, we should be aware of our limitations and should act very
cautiously to minimize tendencies toward negative consequences.
The
second approach we call the “red-light principle.” It says because of
uncertainty and possible sectarianism, we should stop any attempt to
pre-envision the future. We should not develop and share full and compelling
vision like that put forth in this book, whether for economics or for any
other sphere of social life, because such vision will not serve as an aid to
moving forward, but as an obstacle.
I
believe the precautionary principle is far more appropriate than the
red-light principle. For one thing, before stopping the pursuit of
compelling vision, we ought to understand the cost of doing so.
Suppose a movement obeys the red light principle and chooses to forego a
widely shared compelling vision that reveals how new defining institutions
would operate, why they would get their assigned tasks completed, and why
they would yield vastly superior outcomes than current institutions.
First, this movement will not have a good notion about what experiments to
undertake to learn as it proceeds. Just as scientists need theoretical
frameworks to guide their choice of experiment, so too political activists
need overarching vision to guide their choice of social experiment.
Second, lacking widely shared vision to inspire membership, generate hope,
sustain commitment, and provide coherence and identity, the red-light
movement will not have a sufficiently wide base of membership and
participation to grow beyond a small scale.
Third, lacking a widely shared compelling vision will not mean there will be
no such visions operating on the left. Quite the contrary, those who don’t
care at all even about the precautionary principle will still develop and
employ vision, most likely with market coordinatorist values and
aspirations, which will then guide (and limit) experiments in new relations
as well as strategies for winning change. There will not be an absence of
vision if those attuned to not overreaching our experiential and conceptual
bounds and to not being sectarian entirely eschew vision, but instead there
will be a vision developed and held by narrow elites who don’t have such
concerns. So the movement that doesn’t seek shared public vision will either
fail to inspire support sufficient to win significant gains (which is our
prediction), or if it does inspire such support, it will implement a
narrowly held vision contrary to all but elite aspirations.
So
yes, inaccurate prediction and sectarian attachment to vision are indeed
possible problems of pursuing shared vision. But we believe that stop-light
advocates have chosen the wrong solution to averting these problems: namely,
dismissing serious and compelling institutional vision entirely. This
“solution” repeats a more common mistake that operates in many venues. Here
are two related examples:
Someone sees that technologies, medicine, and science can oppress people.
Their proposed solution: dump technology, medicine, and science.
Someone sees that many reforms in practice coopt dissent and legitimate
existing oppressive structures. Their proposed solution: dump reforms.
In
these cases, as with vision, there is an unwarranted leap from justified
precaution to red-light debilitation. A true critical characterization of
some instances of technology, science, medicine, reforms, or (in our case)
seeking vision, wrongly extrapolates into a rejection of these things
outright.
Of
course many technologies are oppressive, including destructive weapons,
pollution-generating cars, and alienating and disempowering assembly lines,
not to mention nuclear or biological weapons. But these are not the only
technologies we have, and there are other technologies that are positive–
shoelaces, cooking utensils, aspirin, eyeglasses, solar generators. The
whole category— technology—isn’t, in fact, infected. Moreover, the reason
that many technologies are oppressive isn’t that there is something
intrinsically harmful in creating innovations of design that incorporate
knowledge of laws of nature. Rather, the harm arises from social relations
that create sectors of people able to produce and use technologies to harm
some constituencies to the advantage of others.
More,
the choice to do without technologies is even worse than the problem of
having many defective ones. If implemented, it would plunge us into a range
of suffering that would be unfathomable. What ought to be ruled out is
therefore not technologies (or medicine or science) per se, but oppressive
technologies (medicine and science), and what ought to be sought is ever
more effective means of producing desirable technologies while guarding
against their misuse as well as against the harmful elitist trajectories
imposed on technology creation and use. Following the precautionary
principle in this case, in other words, doesn’t lead us to suicidally reject
all technologies but to carefully pursue desired technologies so as to
maximize positive effects and avoid ill effects. Yes, of course we should
have humility before the complexity of technology. But we should not have so
much humility that we entirely cut off our capacities to innovate. Paralysis
is not progress.
Consider now the example of reforms. Sure a reform’s accomplishments can be
insufficient to warrant the effort expended to win it. And certainly a
reform’s desirable consequences can be outweighed by the extent to which it
dulls dissent or ratifies existing oppressive structures, or by intended or
even unintended negative consequences. But to notice these potential
problems and in response rule out reforms per se would mean ruling out all
changes that fall short of entirely transforming social relations. It would
mean not fighting against unjust wars, not seeking better wages, not trying
to gain more power for grassroots constituencies and their organizations,
and not attempting to diminish racist or sexist relations, and in these
ways, it would lead to becoming a callous movement that ignores immediate
suffering and therefore deserves little support.
So
the problem is not reforms per se, but pursuing reforms as the best gains
that we can possibly hope for and thus in ways that presuppose maintaining
underlying injustices. The problem is not reforms, that is, but reformism.
And the alternative to reformism is not to dump all reforms (following the
red-light principle), but to fight for reforms in ways that not only seek
worthy immediate gains, but increase movement membership, deepen movement
commitment, enrich movement understanding, develop movement infrastructure,
and in short, create preconditions for winning still more gains and
ultimately fundamental change.
The
above examples may seem a needless digression, but I suspect that those who
reject technology, those who reject all reforms, and those who reject
compelling institutional vision are all making essentially the same error. A
real problem is rightly identified. In the case of vision the problem is
that we can have incomplete, inadequate, or wrong vision and we can misuse
desirable vision. But it is wrong to propose as a solution that we dump
vision. We should abide the precautionary principle by trying to develop and
employ vision well, not put up a red light.
So
how can we make serious, compelling, shared institutional vision an asset
rather than a debit? We can work to ensure:
1
That vision illuminates the new society’s defining features but does not
overstep into utopian wish fulfillment or pursue details that transcend
what we can reasonably imagine.
2
That vision is accessible and becomes widely known, understood, and
publicly shared, so that vision’s creation, dispersal, and use is itself a
participatory phenomenon fostering a growing movement of informed,
careful, and always learning advocates.
3
That vision is debated, dissected, refined, and improved as thought and
experience permit. That is, it is not statically defended, but instead
steadily enriched. Vision is not seen as an end point, but as a source for
continuing creation, innovation, experiment, and development.
4
That flexible, evolving, and enlarging vision is rooted in careful thought
and experience and helps guide current programs so that our contemporary
efforts lead toward what we desire for the future.
In
this book we have sought to pose a particular vision clearly and accessibly,
based as best we could not only on our own logic and experience, but on that
which has accumulated during the history of leftist struggles in past
decades. We have tried to respect the limitations of social prediction and
the dangers of dogmatism by promoting a critical, evaluative, experimental,
and open process. But as to the future trajectory of pareconish vision,
there is a little ditty that applies nicely:
The
viewer paints the picture,
The reader writes the book,
The glutton gives the tart its taste,
And not the pastry cook.
Put
differently, the implications of a vision depend ultimately on movement
responses. It is not books that will determine how vision is used, but those
who read books and extend, alter, apply, and utilize their offerings.
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