Looking Forward. By Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel Go to Table of Contents 5. Allocation Without Hierarchy

In sum, the workers fight over bread, they snatch mouthfuls from each other, one is the enemy of the rest, because each searches solely for his [sic] own well-being without bothering about the well-being of the rest; and this antagonism between individuals of the same class, this deaf struggle for miserable crumbs, makes our slavery permanent, perpetuates misery, causes our misfortunes-because we don't understand that the interest of our neighbor is our own interest, because we sacrifice ourselves for a poorly understood individual interest, searching in vain for well-being which can only be the result of our interest in the matters which affect all humanity. -Ricardo Flores Magon Speech in El Monte, California, 1917 "For "participatory accounting" the economy must therefore provide information allowing producers and consumers to reason effectively about their own needs and how they fit with everyone else's. " I never would believe that Providence had sent a few rich men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden. -Richard Rumbold Statement on scaffold before being hung for rebellion, 1685 Money doesn't talk. It swears. -Bob Dylan Liner Notes

Socially Planned Indicative Prices and Accounting Money Imagine that you want to buy a typewriter and have material goods but no money. Bartering furniture for a typewriter would be needlessly complicated. If the person with the typewriter doesn't like your furniture or doesn't want furniture at all, it may require a three, four, or many party trade to accomplish what monetary exchange could facilitate with minimal inconvenience. Yet in a capitalist society, money plays an additional role. Individuals with wealth can use it to expropriate part of what others produce. This can take many more or less transparent forms, but when those who do little or no work often live far better than those who shoulder the burdens of social labor there can be no doubt that money can be not only socially beneficial by facilitating exchange but also socially detrimental as a vehicle for exploitation. Moreover, since market demand is measured in quantity of dollars spent which in turn determines what is produced, in market economies members of different classes exert disproportionate influence on production. Thus, there is nothing democratic about "consumer sovereignty" when there is an unequal distribution of wealth. It follows from this that in a participatory economy, while we want the convenience that prices and money offer, we do not want associated ill effects. We want producers and consumers to be able to determine the social costs and benefits of different commodities, and we want producers and consumers to be able to distinguish reasonable from overly-frugal and overly-greedy consumption requests, and we want convenient transactions. But we do not want decisions to be based solely on reductionist accounting. Likewise, since there is no more reason to insist that people's consumption match their effort in a given year than in a given day, we want people to be free to arrange the timing of what they give and take from society to their own convenience as much as possible. That is, we want people to be able to save or borrow and to work harder or less hard to get greater or lesser purchasing power at different times in their lives. We therefore want something like money to facilitate participatory decision making and exchange but we do not want to introduce the exploitative evils of capital. Likewise, we want something like prices to facilitate social planning by allowing comparisons of different goods, and also something like income to allow us to compare the overall social burden proposed by different consumption bundles. But we do not want to substitute reductionist measures for social assessments of the human dimensions of work and consumption. Typical market prices fluctuate because of bargaining by large corporations (seeking increased profits), unions and workers (seeking better wages and working conditions), and consumers (seeking a better deal). Moreover, advertising, monopoly, and government policies also affect prices. In a participatory economy, in contrast, we want "prices" to reflect only the true social costs and benefits of goods including scarce resources used, other products needed as inputs, work efforts, and positive and negative byproducts such as pollution and changes in producers' and consumers' skill levels, personalities, and social relations. We will argue that the participatory "prices" generated by the social, iterative procedure we call participatory allocation reflect true preferences, technological constraints, and resource limitations far more accurately than do market prices. But even though participatory prices are more accurate than competitive market prices, we do not want to become overly dependent on quantitative indicators in place of a richer, qualitative understanding of social relations. Even if accurate participatory prices could be generated without a social assessment of all the material, human, and social factors associated with production and consumption, we would not want to reduce our decision making to calculating a numerical bottom line. This would diminish our sensitivity to our fellow workers and to the intricate tapestry of human activities that determine what we can and cannot consume or produce. Moreover, due to tendencies of prices to increasingly diverge from accuracy unless they are periodically socially updated, we cannot preserve accurate participatory prices without a periodic qualitative social assessment of all the factors involved in production and consumption. We thus need accurate indicative prices that reflect insights gleaned from periodic qualitative social evaluations. Similarly, though "money" in our participatory society must allow workers to earn more (or less) now for a greater (or lesser) work effort, and consumers to purchase more (or less) now by borrowing on future rights (or saving for a future of greater need), it must not distort balanced job complexes or yield inequities in the form of some people living off the labor of others. To remind ourselves that participatory prices and money are similar to their capitalist counterparts in only some respects and that we will take pains to strip them of their exploitative and reductionist characteristics, we will call them "indicative" or participatory prices and "accounting" money. Indicative prices in the sense that they indicate the social costs and benefits of things as accurately as we can, and accounting money to emphasize that money is only a measuring tool.