ParEcon Questions & Answers
Work in a Parecon?
Consider how workers in a book publishing enterprise define and assign tasks. (I start with publishing because my own experience of helping found and define South End Press was impacted by and in turn enriched my understanding of participatory economic work-place relations.) Publishing always involves editorial, production, and accounting work, each of these including tasks ranging from rote to conceptual and repetitive to diverse. But workers can organize and carry out these and more general maintenance tasks in different ways in different economies.
The criteria capitalist publishing uses to determine how to combine diverse tasks into job complexes are profitability and maintaining hierarchies of power and income. Each book is a commodity to be sold for maximum revenue and produced at minimum cost. Whether people read the book is incidental. Capitalist budgeting maximizes profits by holding off small creditors, taking advantage of new authors who lack bargaining power, and when possible setting high prices for few offerings. Will consumers buy their how-to book or ours, their romance or ours, their 90-day diet fad or ours, are central considerations. Given society’s race, class, political, and gender biases, what shibboleths must be observed? Given reviewers’ attitudes, which books are likely to be discussed? Which books should we give up for dead? To be sure, many people enter the publishing field committed to promoting humane values. But the dynamics of the capitalist market require first one compromise, then another, until humane values are buried by profits. Jobs are defined, behavior patterns enforced, pay scales determined, and pink slips and promotions dispersed all to preserve hierarchy and extract sufficient labor to keep the business profitable. Employers “respect” prior repressive attitudes of more dominant new employees. Social hierarchies born outside the firm thereby reappear inside. Most women do what is considered “women’s work.” Most blacks do what is considered “blacks’ work.” Cleaning “girls,” secretaries, receptionists, typesetters, and cleaning “boys” do the most deadening work. For their above average effort and sacrifice they receive the lowest wages. Even more than other oppressive attributes, two bear special comment.
The result is considerable waste of human resources, immoral denial of most workers’ capacities, and reduction of the publishing function to that of producing commodities for a quick killing. (And all this typifies one of the nicest industries to work in that capitalism offers.)
So what about in a parecon, say in a participatory publishing called Northstart Press? Naturally, the hypothetical pareconist Northstart Press organizes jobs to accomplish tasks efficiently and at high quality. But Northstart’s participatory priorities also require that all workers exercise their talents and express their wills. Instead of selling books to make profits, Northstart’s workers consider themselves successful when readers are entertained or enlightened. Northstart workers choose among manuscript sub- missions by deciding whether readers will benefit sufficiently to merit the resources, time, and energy required to publish the book in question. No one’s income is correlated to volume of sales. Writing, editing, and design occur largely as before parecon but we can imagine that to save trees and other resources and to reduce onerous tasks, most books might be electrically conveyed to portable book-size hand-held computers that have the heft, look, and feel of traditional books but allow readers to alter the size, layout, design, and resolution of the book’s pages on their system. Only volumes of special merit or specific orders would be printed and bound traditionally, reducing preparation and distribution costs dramatically, protecting scarce resources, and providing consumers easy, direct, and nearly free access to whole libraries of information. Computer programs also facilitate easy manipulation of graphics, charts, type style and size, and page alignment, so people can adapt pages to their own preferences. While some of these technical changes would occur in a capitalist future, many would not or would be channeled less desirably, to avoid conflict with profitability and preserve hierarchy. Whether they will occur in a parecon future will be determined solely in light of their human and social effects on work, consumption, libraries, bookstores, the ecology, and the reading experience. Many business tasks would also differ in a participatory publishing house. Due to technological innovations, most North- start filling of orders and tracking of inventory occurs electronically. Large warehouses are no longer necessary. Oversupply with subsequent shredding is eradicated. Workers who fulfill customers’ orders maintain records of how many people access different titles, since this information is useful to authors, researchers, and Northstart employees. Regarding promoting and publicizing titles, participatory publishers would help potential readers decide whether they want to take a closer look at titles, but there would be no effort to trick people into “buying” books they couldn’t benefit from. Participatory workers would not want to waste resources, energy, or time producing inferior products. With this in mind, Northstart sends informative promotional messages to people most likely to enjoy, appreciate, or learn from new titles, but is not interested in enticing readers who won’t benefit. Similarly, the Northstart finance/budget department oversees scheduling within limits set by council decision-making. Financial and budgetary work differs from familiar capitalist norms in both data handling and data dissemination because guiding values are different. In a capitalist firm, data assembled by the finance/budget department is restricted so that only top managers and owners have access. Were non-privileged workers able to access such infor- mation, they might use it to better gauge what wages to demand or when they might best strike. In contrast, at Northstart everyone works with any information they choose. Not only can those who work in promotion access budget data, so can those in fulfillment, and people in fulfillment and promotion can access data from each other’s departments as well. It is not productive for everyone to analyze all data endlessly. But it is desirable to organize information so every actor can understand Northstart’s operations and experiment with projections.
What about balanced job complexes? What other changes might result from participatory organization? The most fundamental structural change is that each Northstart worker has a job complex that includes some editorial, some production, and some business responsibilities and encompassing roughly average positive and negative work attributes. The total array of tasks associated with producing play scripts, for example, is divided among a team so that each member has comparable tasks. Similarly, the editorial team working on novels allocates editing, working with authors, and soliciting new novels so that everyone gets to use their special talents in different ways that fulfill their particular interests, but also so that no one enjoys an unfair abundance of creative tasks or gets stuck with an excess of numbing tasks. Instead of having head editors, proofreaders, and secretaries, each parecon editorial team has equal members who fulfill diverse responsibilities suited to their own tastes and talents. One person might do more copy-editing and another might take more notes, but conceptual work would not be allocated mainly to one set of people and rote work mainly to another. Education in a society with a parecon would have to provide its citizens with the skills, knowledge, and experience essential to playing a creative, self-managing role in the special fields of their choice. In capitalism, in contrast, schools prepare most citizens— the 80 percent who wind up wage slaves and not coordinators or capitalists—to endure boredom and expect to take orders.
And councils? Beyond equitable job definition, there is also a council of all Northstart workers, where each member has equal voice and vote, as well as smaller councils responsible for appropriate sub-areas such as editing and producing fiction, general nonfiction, and technical books. Still smaller overlapping councils represent each business division. A variety of teams prepares particular books or researches a particular reorganization of workplace technology, for example. In assigning special jobs, there is no need to make work the same for everybody at every moment. Equity comes on average and over reasonable spans of time, as when individuals get vacations at different times or spend months doing a time- consuming creative project and catch up on rote tasks later. Northstart’s yearly plan evolves through negotiations that occur each May. Decisions are made about how many plays, novels, and books to accept and release during the year, and about workload, materials needed, work allocation, hiring new workers, and establishing new rules and technologies. Initial proposals come from all participants in the economy, go through a number of revisions, and finally are shaped into a feasible plan, including a work plan for Northstart. Northstart budget and finance workers facilitate this iterative process at each stage by providing useful data and suggestions to all Northstart workers. No one expects everyone to have the same priorities, nor is it assumed that everyone will agree that the final plan is the best possible one. But all will agree that it was arrived at fairly, with everyone having appropriate proportional influence. Northstart’s proposals are altered from iteration to iteration by a process of give-and-take guided by information from other councils. Finance/budget workers facilitate the updating and are overseen by the whole Northstart council. Once a plan for the upcoming year is determined, work for the new period begins. As the year progresses, most decisions are taken within particular Northstart teams and councils, though some require ratification by the whole Northstart council and others require the approval of industry or consumer councils. Decisions of different types utilize different procedures, sometimes consensus, sometimes one-person-one-vote majority rule, or two-thirds, etc. But none of this implies that every decision is equally everyone’s affair. Sometimes people delegate authority and autonomy to others with whom they work. Participatory organization allows democracy without intrusiveness. In a participatory workplace, of course, there may be males and females, homosexuals and heterosexuals, blacks, whites, Asians, and Native Americans, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Jews. But Northstart employees recognize that the cultural diversity that members of different social groups bring to work should be allowed to express itself in the context of job complexes balanced for empowerment and agreeableness. To help ensure this, every month optional caucus meetings discuss whether any workplace issues affect minority group interests. Workplace caucuses have auton- omous rights to challenge arrangements they believe are sexually or racially oppressive. But since the rationale for these requirements stems from theories of kinship and community relations and not from a theory of economic relations, we do not address the justification for employing such caucuses in further detail here. Finally, notice that nothing in what we have described precludes exercising leadership. At Northstart, production leaders on particular books exert influence over team members regarding quality and pace of work necessary to get the books completed. Finance department decisions have authority regarding budgeting. People working in personnel exert leadership over disputes about job assignments. Editorial decisions determine what is published. Similarly, not having an editor-in-chief does not mean there is no editor with final responsibility for particular titles. Rejecting a fixed hierarchy does not imply rejecting discipline, monitoring, evaluation, and accountable leadership. Moreover, even as in capitalist companies, the ultimate sanction of dismissal still exists, but with crucial differences. First, the decision is made democratically, not by individuals with ownership rights or vested authority. Second, the threat of dismissal does not endanger the employee’s survival. Other employment opportunities are offered, and a person’s basic consumption needs are in any event guaranteed when looking for new work. Moreover, dismissal has to be ratified by the individual’s council co-workers and then, if appealed, by higher councils as well, assuming such procedures were chosen. To get a better picture we need to describe actual workdays. So here is a typical average week at the Northstart publishing house— remembering, of course, that many of the features are optional and might be handled differently in other firms, even in the same industry.
How about if we get very specific and look at a particiular person’s work week? On Wednesday Larry helps sort mail for a few hours. He does this one morning every tenth week. On Wednesday and Friday next week, for two hours he will help with general clean-up. The following Wednesday Larry will work the front desk, Friday he will do some rote data entry work. Next month Larry has a different rotation, but he always has some rote tasks assigned on Wednesday and Friday mornings. Of course, should Larry want to trade responsibilities for a certain Wednesday or Friday to attend his child’s school play or tennis tournament, for example, this would be fine. Larry’s rote work is evaluated by other Northstart members responsible for intervening if unscheduled task switching interrupts orderly functions. The council for producing drama books has six work teams and Larry’s does production on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons. Although many employees prefer working on only one production project at a time, Larry happens to like doing a variety of different tasks simultaneously so he’s currently working on one drama as typesetter, one as designer, and a third as a proofreader. The design and proofing are done in teams of three, and Larry is team leader for design. On alternate Monday afternoons, Larry’s editorial council meets first in teams for an hour and then as a whole department for two more hours to address concerns about possible new titles, com- plaints, and suggestions. Each week Larry also reads his share of submissions. Each title that Larry reads is also read by another member of the team and, after they give a summary report, if they both agree to reject the book it is returned to its author—unless some other member wishes to hold onto the title for whatever reason. If both Larry and the other reader want others to read it, the submission is held. If they disagree, a team vote decides whether to reject the title or keep it for more serious evaluation. In other publishing houses of course other approaches might be adopted. Each week, Larry also works on his allotment of manuscripts that have passed initial evaluation. Which manuscripts he reads depends partly on his preferences and partly on how much time he and other members have for new assignments. Ultimately, books are accepted or rejected after everyone is ready to vote. Of course there is appropriate discussion to ensure that everyone is able to air their sentiments and exert proportionate influence in the vote. Three-quarters support is needed to accept a submission, and serious attention is paid to the feelings of minorities even to the point of holding up decisions for further debate. Another very particular norm (if Northstart is small) is that any single member can veto up to two books a year, even against three-quarter support, if they feel strongly enough. This is because in a small press every book project affects each employee dramatically in that if an employee really despised a book it would be a serious hardship for him or her. The point is, various decision-making methods are utilized to balance the efficient disposition of tasks with providing participants proportionate influence taking into account the actual circumstances involved. Once accepted, each title goes to a particular team member, who becomes its editor. Larry has responsibility for editorial work on three titles yearly. On the Mondays that Larry doesn’t have editorial meetings he sometimes attends the bi-weekly Northstart policy meeting as a representative of his editorial/production council. Each of the three editorial/production councils, the four business area councils, and any major policy work teams that happen to be functioning at the moment send representatives. Representatives serve for six meetings each year, with rotation staggered so that each council always has a representative who has attended at least the four previous meetings. At these sessions, personnel representatives report on problems, sometimes asking for help with interpersonal conflicts, and the general progress of the press’s efforts is discussed and evaluated. On the Tuesday following policy meetings, editorial and business councils meet for an hour to hear reports. Special teams discuss reports whenever they can arrange time. The rest of Larry’s work concerns promotion. He is currently helping produce a new catalog, working with potential authors, and soliciting new plays. He schedules all this into his work week, along with cleaning his own office, updating his own files, and impromptu clerical tasks shared with others. Details of Northstart’s arrangement seem sensible to Larry and his workmates, but may not appeal to other publishing houses. Different workplaces could adopt longer or shorter time-lines for job assignments and meeting schedules and adapt other practices leading to less or even more varied job complexes. While basic principles must be respected in all parecon workplaces, how they are implemented changes from workplace to workplace due to different conditions and preferences. To continue, Larry is gay and meets every fourth Thursday with other gay workers to discuss the character of editorial and business decisions and the changing patterns of daily work in light of the particular needs, tastes, and values of gay employees. Suggestions are often brought back to work teams and councils and sometimes to the whole Northstart collective. If these caucuses feel threatened by proposals otherwise supported by majorities of workers at North- start, they may bring their complaints to outside councils for political adjudication. And of course Larry doesn’t work only at Northstart. Rather, Northstart has an above average average job complex, so Larry does some rote work in the neighborhood and community where he lives to attain an overall balance. But what about workplace decision making under capitalism or in a parecon?
What about decision-Making – say – at a Capitalist Firm? How does a capitalist firm decide how much to produce, who will work at what jobs, how much work each person will do, how to alter products or introduce new ones, what investments to make in the firm, and other matters? In a capitalist firm the lordly capitalists have ultimate authority. Those in the coordinator class have jobs that are overwhelmingly empowering and they administer and otherwise define daily operations. Workers have jobs that are overwhelmingly low-level and uncreative. They obey, or resist. The owners are interested in profits and in maintaining the conditions that allow them to accrue profits. Markets impose these motives on them. If the firm doesn’t maximize the surplus available after it sells what it produces, and if it doesn’t utilize a considerable portion of its surplus to enhance its market share, not only will owners complain for want of profits, but other firms will gain technological or market-share advantages which, in the future, will cause the low profitability firm to suffer grave loses or even bankruptcy. So owners wish to reduce costs (including wages), to disempower workers so the workers do not try to battle owner’s agendas or raise their wages, to increase productivity per asset, to dodge expenses for by-products such as pollution, to raise prices and increase sales regardless of the impact on those buying the products, and to invest profitably in competition with other firms. But the owners cannot oversee every aspect of workplace activity and must hire special intermediate employees who we call coordinators, who will, they hope, pass on commands or even help in formulating them. Thus we have the coordinator class of managers, lawyers, accountants, engineers, and others who are empowered by their positions and responsible for much daily decision-making and definition of workplace structure and activity. But these coordinators turn out to have dual interests. On the one hand, as employees hired by owners, they can try to improve their incomes and conditions by carrying out the owners’ agendas. On the other hand, they have the potential to advance their own careers by using their monopoly over knowledge and decision-making levers to their own advantage even in ways that are sometimes at odds with profitability, but for which owners cannot punish them because coordinators hold hostage the operations of the firm. Then we have workers hired to carry out the will of those above. They also have dual interests. On the one hand, as employees hired by coordinators at the behest of owners, they can try to advance their incomes and conditions by pleasing their employers. On the other hand, they can utilize their numbers and organizational might, including the threat to strike, to try to increase their incomes and improve their conditions even against the interests of their employers and managers. So what about decisions? Markets establish the context. Owners will seek profits and maintain the conditions of their dominance, including reducing the incomes and power of those below to whatever extent possible. Coordinators will to some extent obey owners in pursuing profitability, and to some extent seek to enhance their own independent power against both owners above and workers below. Workers will to some extent obey coordinators out of fear of being punished or fired, and to some extent seek to enhance their own independent power. Thus, decisions are overwhelmingly authoritarian. Either the owners decree them, or some subset of the coordinators (managers, division heads, vice-presidents) decree them, overseen more or less by the owners above. Those most affected, the workers and consumers, have marginal if any impact, often not even knowing what decisions are being made, when, where, and to what ends. This holds for the large scale—what we should produce, in what quantity, to sell at what price, paying what wages, using what ingredients, with what pollution which we avoid responsibility for by what avenues, and so on. And it holds for the small scale—what time and for how long do workers get a lunch break, when can they go to the bathroom and for how long, and so on. The overwhelming context of decision-making is the market-enforced capitalist drive to maximize surplus, accumulate profits, and invest in enlarging market share regardless of the social benefits and costs to workers and consumers. Less operative is the coordinators’ drive to enhance their own relative bargaining position by gaining ever greater control of critical information and contacts and of the workforce below, even against profitability. Opposing the defining logic of the system are workers’ efforts to improve their incomes and circumstances against the obstacles of coordinators and owners above. Missing is unconflicted attention to the actual opportunities for personal fulfillment and growth that workplace processes and products could have on all concerned. If the reader sees an analogy to a politically dictatorial system … that is perfectly apt. In Stalinist Russia, for example, we had the inner sanctums of the ruling party and the dictator himself, then the functionaries and political operatives of the bureaucracy, then the populace. We decry this as horrific in its authoritarian subordination of the many to the few. But the capitalist workplace is quite similar—with the owner or owners, the coordinator class of empowered employees, and the subordinate working class—and the degree of regimentation in the capitalist workplace is, if anything, more severe. Not even Stalin’s dictatorship thought to oversee meal times and bathroom breaks and to examine all mail and calls. There is nearly absolute disenfranchisement at the bottom of a corporation, even more than the political disenfranchisement of citizens in dictatorships. And where political subordination is enforced by the threat of incarceration, corporate subordination is enforced by the threat of impoverishment and even starvation. In both the dictatorship and the capitalist corporation there is risky pursuit of personal power in the middle—political or economic palace intrigue—and domineering authority at the top.
Every firm in a parecon makes day-to-day decisions about how to fulfill the firm’s agreed responsibilities. These are made within councils with appropriate input from everyone affected. Different methods may be used for different decisions. We could spend time detailing such interactions for hypothetical cases—how a work team schedules its work, how the firm decides on hiring, and so on. But there is one facet of decision-making more unique to parecon and probably more instructive to detail, and which in any event sets the context in which more specific and narrow choices must occur— participatory planning. What does the participatory planning process look like at Northstart publishing house? When workers begin their yearly planning, first they review the prior year’s plan and particularly any changes from the initial proposal. They understand that work always uses inputs, including social relations in the workplace, workers with specific skills and social characteristics, and resources, equipment, and intermediate goods. Work also generates outputs, including social relations, personalities, and skills of workers as well as products others will use. Workers’ plans thus always include three lists: material and social/personal inputs; work relations, policies, motivations and logic; and material and personal/social outputs. Then, regarding the composition of these lists, more outputs require more inputs, certain work relations choices require more inputs for given outputs, and a different mix of inputs with a fixed set of work relations may yield different outputs. Primary outputs are computer records of books, communication of books to readers, relationships with readers, and changes in worker attributes and plant social relations. Secondary products include some bound books, waste materials, used equipment, and leftover supplies of paper and other materials. Primary inputs are workers’ skills and efforts, plant social relations, utilities such as gas, water, electricity, and communication, a building, old equipment, new equipment, paper, and office supplies like light bulbs and pencils. Inputs are broken into roughly two major categories: investment goods which allow alteration of the scale or methods of production, and normal production inputs which allow operations at a chosen scale with determined social relations. The main work related choices are to determine how work will be organized, how many hours will be expended each day, and what technologies will be employed. Any change of work relations will likely require some changes in inputs and outputs, and vice versa. One way to envision these relations would be to graph outputs for varying combinations of inputs for each possible choice of technology and work relations. A more practical tool for analysis would be simple programs showing inputs required per outputs preferred for possible work relations. These programs would facilitate estimating work |