Introduction
First, I’d like to thank everyone here and especially the organizers for inviting me. It is a great honor and I hope I can offer something useful.
I generally prefer spontaneous and interactive exchanges, both as a speaker and when attending events. For that reason, I will try to keep this talk, which is prepared in advance to help with translation, and which I therefore have to deliver from a script, relatively short.
So to begin…back when I was in college, nearly forty years ago, I was in our leftist national student organization, called Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS.
Our chapter of SDS, at MIT where I was a student, was called RL SDS. The RL stood for Rosa Luxembourg, the great German revolutionary.
Rosa Luxembourg once said, "you lose, you lose, you lose, you win." She meant, I believe, that even major setbacks are part of a process of historic social change.
Rosa Luxembourg gave her life fighting for change but when we win, finally, so will
But win what?
The long answer appears in a book I have written titled Parecon: Life After Capitalism, among other places. The shorter answer, I will try to summarize here tonight.
The word "Parecon" in the title of the book is an abbreviation for Participatory Economics.
The phrase "Participatory Economics" is in turn the name for a vision of how to conduct economic life very differently than under capitalism.
First we can consider parecon’s origins.
Parecon owes its most distant roots to the first working people who tried to improve their conditions.
Going way back, I am told the first labor strike was in
The Pharaoh then – and as I heard the story this was the only female who was ever a Pharaoh – decided that beyond working six days and being given sufficient pay for food, which was the workers’ usual situation, it might be nice to require them to work for all seven days with no pay at all. Perhaps women Pharaohs had to be especially Pharaonic!
Can you imagine building a tomb, in the desert, cutting and lugging massive rocks in the deadly sun, seven days a week, for zero pay? How long before death?
This lady Pharaoh might not have been very smart, but you have to admit it was a natural progression. If you can maintain nearly murderous conditions, why not try maintaining actually murderous conditions?
I was told the decision to revoke the slaves’ day off and withhold their food supplies provoked the first labor strike.
Parecon stems from that strike and from every effort by working people, and by consumers too, to improve their conditions and incomes.
More recently, revolutionary marxists like Antonio Gramsci from Italy, Rosa Luxembourg from here in Germany, and Anton Pannekoek from the Netherlands – and anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin from Russia and Rudolf Rocker again from Germany, have expanded our insights into what it might mean for people to contribute sensibly to and share justly in society’s product. These revolutionaries and many others began to conceptualize people making economic choices cooperatively.
Movements with similar inclinations have included the left opposition to the Bolsheviks in
But what were more immediate factors that pushed my co-author Robin Hahnel and I toward conceptualizing parecon?
Needing Vision
First, back in the 1960s, we continually encountered people asking, what do you want? What is your alternative?
At first we were put off by this question. We thought it was raised to rationalize ignoring current injustice.
Why did we need to know an economic replacement for capitalism to oppose the war in
Why did we need to know how our future economy would operate to oppose corporations crushing workers?
In time, however, we decided the questions were often fair and sincere. We saw that people wouldn’t fight for change without knowing what the change would be.
So the first factor contributing directly to parecon being born was our seeing the importance of having a compelling vision that could overcome cynicism.
When
Thatcher knew what she was saying. We realized we needed to overcome the fatalistic belief she was celebrating.
Wanting Real Classlessness
A second factor fostering parecon occurred due to a woman named Barbara Ehrenreich and her then husband John publishing an essay which helped us arrive at a new view about classes.
Their essay, later published in a fine book called Between Labor and Capital, was about people in modern day capitalism who reside between labor and capital.
This middle group that the Ehrenreichs highlighted didn’t have property, and therefore weren’t capitalists. But this group did have considerable control over their own lives and the lives of workers below and also had higher income and more status than
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