Winning could mean that we won an end to a war, or to the IMF or World Bank. It could refer to winning higher wages, better work conditions, open information in a workplace, race or gender affirmative action, new ecological laws, or many other important gains.
But the question’s intention is, “what would it mean to win another world?” And by “another world” is meant one that leaves behind the racism, sexism, classism, authoritarianism, ecological devastation, and international violence, and that in their place has profound virtues such as promoting diversity, enhancing solidarity, attaining equity and justice, conveying self managing power to all citizens, preserving the environment, and attaining international peace.
If that’s the question’s intent, then winning would mean establishing new institutions able to accomplish necessary political, cultural, familial, social, and economic tasks of society while furthering the positive values we aspire to. It would mean establishing:
- new ways of legislating norms, adjudicating disputes, and carrying out shared social projects: new polity.
- new ways of procreating, nurturing, and socializing the next generation and of living in our households and enjoying our sexual and emotional potentials: new kinship.
- new ways of celebrating and exploring collective identities, whether ethnic, racial, religious, or others: new community.
- and new ways of producing our means of life, allocating it, and consuming it: new economics.
About politics, kinship, culture, and economics, we understand current relations and their authoritarian, sexist, racist, and classist flaws. We know less, however, about institutional features that would make a new world worthy and viable. Yet to make organizing progress, we need to know more about the goal and about how to communicate it in ways suited to orienting and guiding immediate activity.
Regarding economics, Participatory Economics, or parecon, is my preferred replacement for capitalism. Parecon is built on four institutional commitments.
The broad structures by which people participate in economic life and decision making become nested workers and consumers councils of the sort common when workers and consumers seek to control their own economies. As an additional feature parecon’s councils would incorporate self management as the logic of decision making so that people influence decisions in proportion as they are in turn affected by them. Sometimes this self management would require one person one vote and majority rule. Sometimes it might require a different tally, or that only a segment of the whole populace votes, or full consensus. In parecon such options are tactics to attain self managing say for all actors.
Next, in a parecon remuneration would be for effort and sacrifice, not for output of one’s property or even output of one’s labors, and not for bargaining power either. To have equity, we earn more if we work producing desired outputs longer or harder, or under more harsh or harmful conditions. Remuneration is for duration, intensity, and harshness endured – and not for property, power, or output.
This means that parecon rejects the that someone should earn by virtue of having a deed in his or her pocket. There is neither a moral or an incentive warrant for that. It also rejects a thuggish economy in which one gets what one has the power to take, as in market exchange. And, most controversially, parecon rejects that we should get back from the economy the amount we contributed to it by our personal labors. This is because our personal output depends on many factors we can’t control such as having better or worse tools, working in a more or less productive environment, producing more or less valued items, or having innate qualities that increase or fail to increase our productivity. Parecon doesn’t reward individuals for any of that.
Third, if a new economy were to remove private profit and incorporate self managing councils with remuneration for effort and sacrifice, but were to simultaneously retain the corporate division of labor, its economic commitments would be internally inconsistent. Having 20 perent of the workforce monopolize largely empowering and more pleasurable work while leaving 80 percent left with more obedient, rote, stultifying, and less pleasurable work – which is what the corporate division of labor does – would guarantee that the former group, which I call the coordinator class dominates the latter working class.
In that case, even with a sincerely motivated commitment to self management, the coordinator class, by virtue of the work they do, would enter each decision discussion having set the agenda for it, owning the information relevant to debate, possessing the habits of communication necessary to conduct the discussion, and possessing the confidence and energy to fully participate. Workers, in contrast, having been exhausted by the disempowering work they are left to do, would come to decision discussions lacking the qualities needed to participate. Coordinators would determine outcomes and in turn see themselves as superior. In time they would decide to remunerate themselves more. They would streamline decision-making by excluding those below. They would orient economic decisions in their own ruling interests. In short, the corporate division of labor would trump nice intentions, bringing back all the old rot.
One class that exists above workers is owners, as we all know. By having a deed to property capitalist owners dispose over means of production, including hiring and firing wage slaves. But what this pareconish view highlights is that even having eliminated private ownership of productive property, and thus even with no more capitalists, classlessness is not necessarily attained.
Another group, also defined by its position in the economy, can still wield virtually complete power and aggrandize itself above workers. To avoid this coordinator class rule by about 20 percent of the workforce over the other 80 percent we must replace the familiar corporate division of labor with a new approach that parecon calls balanced job complexes.
Each of us works at some job doing some collection of tasks. If the economy employs a corporate division of labor, about 20 percent of us will do a job that is largely empowering and very likely possesses greater than average quality of life impact. 80 percent of us will be left with jobs that are largely disempowering and very likely possess lower than average quality of life impact. The former coordinator class will be empowered and become the economy’s ruling class. The latter working class will remain disempowered and subordinate.
In a participatory economy, in contrast, we combine tasks into jobs so that for each participant the overall quality of life and empowerment effect of his or her job is like the overall quality of life and empowerment effect of every other person’s job. Everyone has an average balanced job complex. We don’t have managers and assemblers, editors and secretaries, surgeons and nurses. The functions these actors now fulfill persist in a parecon, of course. Managing, assembling, editing, note taking, operating, care taking, and cleaning all still exist, but the labor to accomplish them is divided up differently.
Some people do surgery while most don’t, like now. The change is that those who do surgery also clean bed pans, sweep floors, or assist with other hospital functions. The total empowerment and pleasure the surgeon’s overall job affords is altered by remixing the surgeon’s tasks. The surgeon now has a balanced job complex conveying the same total empowerment and probably also roughly the same quality of life index as the newly balanced job of the person who previously only cleaned up.
We remove the domination of what I call the coordinator class over all other workers not by eliminating empowering tasks, or by everyone doing the same things, both of which scenarios are not only irrational but impossible. Nor do we do it by merely extolling rote work as important, which is possible to do and is even familiar historically, but which is structurally nearly vacuous. Instead, we eliminate coordinator class rule by distributing empowering and rote work so that all economic actors are able to participate in self managed decision making without advantage or disadvantage due to their economic roles. There remains no separate coordinator class just as their remains no separate owning class.
Finally, fourth, what if our new economy has workplaces and communities that all commit have workers and consumers councils, that all establish self managed decision making procedures, that all adopt balanced job complexes, and that all remunerate for effort and sacrifice, but, in addition, our new economy utilizes central planning or markets for economic allocation? Would such a combination of defining economic features constitute a worthy vision?
With central planning, the central planners would be distinguished by the conceptual and design character of their labor in turn typically justified by their academic or other credentials, doled put parsimoniously. They would also seek to have agents in each workplace with whom they could interact and who would be responsible for enforcing the central plan, which means people who held similar credentials to the central planners and who were vested with similar rights.
The intrinsic dynamics of central planning are down goes instructions up comes information about the possibility of fulfilling them. Down goes altered instructions up comes more information. Down goes final instructions up comes obedience. This command structure is authoritarian and its class implications are to resurrect the coordinator/worker distinction in each workplace and in the whole economy which in turn sets up the conditions and means for violating equitable remuneration and self management in all matters. Even cursory analysis of central planning predicts that it would undo our other innovations, even if those other innovations were initially in place and sincerely desired, as does a look at central planning’s history, and for these reasons central planning must be rejected as unfit for desirable allocation.
Markets are similar in their unworthiness, and the case is even more important because markets currently have so much more support around the world and even on the left. I hate to do the ills of markets the injustice of a summary, but offering more about markets in a short essay like this would be an injustice too, misleadingly implying comprehensiveness that couldn’t be present without much more attention given. In sum, markets misprice everything due to taking account only of buyers and sellers but not others affected by transactions. Markets create a rat race environment that breeds anti sociality thereby obliterating solidarity. In market exchanges “nice guys finish last.” Markets make violating the environment not only highly likely due to not properly accounting for environmental effects, but essentially inevitable, as sellers are forced to seek means to raise profits and ensure market share in a context where avoiding the costs of ecological damage rears up as one very effective path to that end. Inside workplaces markets require vicious cost cutting to generate sufficient surpluses to avoid being out competed, which in turn requires a sector of the workforce who decides the cost cutting policies, and that sector, to do a good job cutting costs, needs to be immune to the pains induced by the cutting as well as schooled in making such decisions aggressively despite the human suffering the decisions impose.
All these failings lead to the coordinator class being reinvigorated. But if we reject markets for all these reasons and more, what can we incorporate to replace markets, as well as central planning, as an allocation component of participatory economics? The answer that parecon offers is participatory planning, a method of workers and consumers councils collectively and cooperatively negotiating inputs and outputs in accord with true and full social costs and benefits and in accord with each actor having self managing say.
Space forbids a full presentation of the structures, logic, and motivations of participatory planning, and many such descriptions exist online and in books in any case. The bottom line claim for participatory economics, however, is that combining workers and consumers councils, self managed decision making, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and also a cooperative, collective, council based negotiation of inputs and outputs throughout the economy not only attains classlessness, but also propels solidarity, diversity, and equity. More, participatory planning apportions to each worker and consumer about each economic decision self managing influence.
In sum, Parecon doesn’t reduce productivity but instead provides adequate and proper incentives to work. It doesn’t bias toward longer hours but allows free choice of work versus leisure. It doesn’t pursue what is most profitable for an anointed few regardless of impact on workers, on the ecology, and even on consumers writ large, but orients output toward what is truly beneficial in light of full social and environmental costs and benefits.
Parecon doesn’t waste human talents by having people now doing surgery, or composing music, or otherwise engaging in difficult and skilled labor also do offsetting less empowering labor as well, but by this requirement instead surfaces a gargantuan reservoir of previously untapped talents throughout the populace while apportioning both fulfilling and onerous and especially empowering and rote labor not only justly, but in accord with true and full self management and classlessness.
Parecon doesn’t assume sociable much less divine citizens but instead creates an institutional context in which to get ahead in their economic engagements even people who grow up entirely self seeking and anti-social must be concerned for the general social good and the well being of others. That is the self serving mindset – as well as the neighbor serving and society serving mindset, parecon’s institutions sustain.
For these reasons and many more parecon’s advocates think attaining parecon is one part of what it will mean to win, and therefore hope to fill out their broad understanding of economic goals with comparably defined goals for polity, culture, and kinship, thereby answering compellingly and inspiringly the question “what do you want,” and thereby putting to rest the widespread despair-mongering fear that there is no better alternative.” Such accomplishments can help set us on the road not only to hypothetically answering the question “what would it mean to win,” but to actually winning, and then seeing what it would mean with our own eyes.
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16 Comments
I know if I am engaged in struggle (as I am) I would prefer winning. Capitalism gives us the notion of “winners” and “losers” as judgmental ways to categorize human beings, which we would want to abandon.
Holloway’s notion of autonomy and “creating the new within the shell of the old” has proved not to be viable, in my opinion, except in cases where people have been willing to use violence (or threat of) to defend it, ie Zapatistas, Rojava. The Bolivarians took state power and institutions, while creating new ones, as did Syriza and hopefully Podemos. Maybe it withers away someday, but if it is democratic, of, by and for the people, it is a radical improvement over the staus quo.
Capitalism will eliminate itself in about fifteen years.
The same need to go to the lowest cost labor markets by manufacturers that is required in the competitive capitalist world will drive them to go to automation/robotics to replace the far more inefficient human workers.
No manufacturer with human workers will be able to compete with an all automated manufacturer.
Artificial/machine intelligence will achieve the 1000 petaflop human brain capabilities by the early 2020s and this is as sure as the sun comes up in the morning.
That automation is well underway and a cursory run through the huge amounts of information on this available on the web will show this to be happening now but with dumb machines and fairly advanced programs.
In less than ten years the unemployment rate will be close to unmanageable within capitalism and the oligarchic governments ability to mitigate the effects of wide-scale unemployment .
I would doubt that the capitalists, for whom profit is everything, will stop automating just to keep people employed and eating.
Their aim is to minimize costs in order to increase profits.
Its an addiction they are and will be unable to break even as they drive themselves off the cliff in their limousine.
Sorry to hit you with this again Michael .
I think we agree on the destination of our journey towards a new age of humanity but disagree on the route we’ll be taking to get there .
Don’t know if we agree on destination, but yes, we have to disagree about the route.
Ed, I am curious how this is a reaction or reply to the essay? There is winning and losing – sadly – in the realm of social change. And it has zero to do with “counting our money.” Institutions are collections of roles that people fill without having to start from scratch every day. They exist, they will keep existing – their absence would be horrific. However, they can be structured around positive values, agreed. That is the point. If you define power as our ability to and actual effort to do for each other – then of course winning would entail increasing that while reducing the forces obstructing that.
My guess is we agree quite a lot…though maybe we disagree about what is a useful way to express it that can actually convey what we intend… Sorry if I am wrong about that.
My reaction is to the language you used to describe that which we do agree about “quite a lot.” Humans are so socialized into a hierarchical society that we find it exceedingly difficult to find adequate language to describe or even imagine a horizontally structured world – which is what I think you are talking about in this essay. Language is a big part of how humans “think.” Words not only define our mental frameworks but also how we think. Marina Sitrin talks quite a bit about how we must invent words and language to describe the new world we are building, i.e. horizontalidad, autogestion, politica afectiva. Take for instance the word “win.” It is one of the most important words to the hierarchy, particularly here in the U.S. There are winners and losers, those above and those below.
Part of this process of invention is redefining how certain words such as “power” are used but more importantly expressed. The power to do, rather than the power to take. “Parecon” is one of those new words, that also expresses a fundamentally different social relationship, not just a different way to organize economic activity. You may disagree, but I see parecon as primarily a governing process, a new way to make decisions about how we organize economic activity.
My reply, is an expression of solidarity with the difficulties in finding the language to describe the new world we are building. It is also about how important words are, if we don’t call things by their right name, it becomes so much more difficult to get at the truth they describe. But the words we use are also about the fundamental difference between them and us. As Vaclav Havel said when he took power, “Those who have for many years engaged in a violent and bloody vengefulness against their opponents are now afraid of us. They should rest easy. We are not like them.”
I agree with a what of the things you say about language, Ed.
There are different ways to “take” power. The Venezuelan Bolivarian revolution has taken the power it has through the ballot box, and made considerable positive changes to many people’s lives, including encouraging local horizontal community structures.
Pinochet took power through a violent coup.
From these two examples, and many others, it is hard to see how one cannot act or resist action through institutions – those of bourgeois democratic structures in one case and the military in the other case.
You said, “Parecon” is one of those new words, that also expresses a fundamentally different social relationship, not just a different way to organize economic activity.”
I think one, “economic activity” is inextricably linked with the other, “social relations.” We currently suffer the social relations of capital, or what passes for such. Our lives are dominated by, in fact produced by, the need to be productive, earning and consumer entities in the economic and social system that is described as capitalism. It is currently the only game in town, though we can try to move to its margins by becoming a member of a commune or such.
Your Havel quote, by the way, has a certain subversive irony to it. Havel spoke directly to the US Congress and told them what a good job they were doing when US backed death squads were committing the worst possible atrocities in Central America. Havel was part of an East European dissident elite who tended to look away when the West was being bloody and vengeful.
Holloway’s brilliant double entendre “taking power” refers not just to taking over the state, but the power that the state, and capitalist economy, use to take the commonly created wealth. In that regard, the alternative to taking power is to collectively create our own power for self-rule (autonomy) and economy based on cooperation, sharing and mutual aid.
My problem with institutions is that they are all hierarchically structured to maintain hierarchical social relationships. Maybe if I could imagine horizontally structured “institutions” I would feel differently. Actually, I probably just need to think about Zapatista and Rojava institutions such that are, but again the old word fails to describe what is happening there.
I absolutely agree with you regarding economic activity, but feel that in many areas – such as food economics – the margins are moving to us. The alternative horizontal economy is happening a lot faster than most people realize.
Regarding Havel, I understand the profound contradictions in his life, both personal and as president. He was after all the man who oversaw the transition of Czechoslovakia from state socialism to capitalism. I threw in that quote because i had just finished reading an interesting article in the March Atlantic: “The Hero Europe Needed” by Michael Ignatieff.
Every good intention or idea can be taken too far, or confused, or masked by poor use of words, I agree with you about that.
But, foregoing the use of the word win – honestly, just doesn’t make sense to me. And perhaps the most regrettable thing, in some sense, about grossly oppressive society, is that those who wish to change it do indeed confront a situation where is isn’t only how you play the game that matters. Winning, that is, creating that new society, in a maintainable way, matters. Just because a word in some contexts has a pernicious implication – social winners and losers, for example, as you point out – doesn’t mean the word itself needs to be jettisoned completely, nor does it mean that sometimes even if we wish it wasn’t applicable, it is.
A second point that we may differ about is that often words are created – or brought into use – needlessly, especially by leftists, more to separate the user from everyone else – as somehow smarter, or whatever – rather than because they really will save a whole lot of time. There are countless examples., some of which, you mention, I believe.
I use some words or phrases differently, or that are new – participatory economics, balanced job complexes, participatory planning, self management – and actually, at the moment I can’t think of any others. But each refers to something which you can’t convey with current usage short of a paragraph, say. So they are convenient – the label something worth highlighting which, without the word or phrase, has no label. I agree with you that that is a fine thing to do. Replacing simple words with bigger ones, however, or using words that really have no clear meaning, are not fine things to do, at least in my view.
Michael, there seems to be some tension between your last two paragraphs of the above, needlessly creating words and trying to convey something that goes beyond current usage. Again, i’m firmly with Sitrin that our current hierarchical linguistics is inadequate to describe what is going in place like Argentina, Spain, Greece, Chiapas and Rojava.
I would also add that words having “clear” meaning is a slippery slope. So much of a word’s meaning depends on context and more importantly their connotative baggage, quite apart from their formal definitions. Your use of the word “win” is a good example. I do understand the way you used it, and agree with that usage. Forgoing it is unnecessary, so please forgive an old philosophy major for playing the devil’s advocate. My point, is that there would not be winners and losers in the new world that I imagine, nor would there be us and them. That is why I threw in the Havel quote, our way forward is fundamentally different from what has gone before. And a new language to describe it is not needless but indispensable..
Well, I think we just have to agree to disagree. I am sure the view you offer is well meaning, I assume so anyhow, but in practice it leads to a proliferation of terms that rarely add anything much, often confuse, and certainly make people who don’t know what the new terms mean either fake it, or take time to do what should be unnecessary. This abounds in academia, most ridiculously in post modernism studies, etc.
I have to tell you, I also don’t much like people playing devil’s advocate, unless they say so in advance. If you don’t think something, why waste people’s time asking for replies to it.
And in any future there will be people who win a game of chess, and who lose it, and so on, even in the best imaginable world. Now we might successfully decouple winning any contest or competition or game or whatever and losing it from gaining material or social advantage, or from losing same – but that is a different matter.
I think this exchange is an example, honestly. There is an essay presenting lots of ideas about social arrangements. And the discussion is about the word win or lose…
I guess there are two kinds of people, those that think life is a game and those that do not. Just as there are those that use words clearly and correctly and those that do not.
why would you say such a thing? In one sense it is a triumphs. But not in any useful sense there is probably no one who thinks life is a game.
Put differently, if one says chess is a game it does not imply that one thinks that life is a game. Thus one can feel that some things are games, and some thing’s are not. Sometimes saying that winning is important makes sense, other times it doesn’t. I doubt you’ll u disagree. Take the recent election in Greece. I would say it was very important that syriza win. If you that the word win is ill chosen, then we disagree.
Mainly though, this article has a whole lot of content, and I have to say it is hard for me to understand how the discussion we could be having about it could center on the use of some words…
Michael, I’m sorry that my comments have so touched a nerve. I’m also frustrated by the direction this discussion has taken. Obviously, I have not taken my comments as seriously as you, no offense was intended. And, please do not ever feel that my comments are “asking” for a reply. As a writer who clearly takes pride in what they write, the words we choose do make a difference. If anything this discussion has touched on that. I’m going to re-read your piece and see if I can better appreciate the “whole lot of content” in it. Thanks for all the good work you do!
No problem Ed. The sore spot for me is views, however will meant, that lead to proliferating terminology.
What would it mean if there was no winning? Or losing? What would happen is we just stopped keeping score, i.e. counting our money? What would it mean if there weren’t institutions but a society organized and structured around human relationships of equality, solidarity, mutual aid and autonomy? What if power, was our collective action to together do for each other rather than some patriarchal order? What if we could change the world without taking power?
I have written about competition in the past, and you may find it interesting. About its virtues and debits and whether it is possible to retain the former while jettisoning the latter.
To say, in any case, imagine there is no winning or losing – may mean to you, in your usage, simply there is no one above and no one below in some ladder of benefits – but to everyone else it means if you and I play chess, it never is resolved. And so on, the word was a meaning, and the meaning at times applies. If you redefine it but no one else does, there is no point. And if everyone redefines it, say everyone means by winning dominating others and by losing being dominated by others, then you just have to have a new word, that means what winning meant earlier.
To say we should not count money – meaning, by implication, if by the words you mean what people would hear them to mean – that we should not have any way to know the real social and ecological cost of things, and what is a fair share, and what we ought to invest in, or diminish, takes a reasonable observation about not being greedy say, if that is your meaning, or mercantile and instrumentalist, if that is your meaning, to a completely unreasonable extreme. We should not have a way to assess value and use the information.
To say there should be no institutions – is utterly without reference, or, well, absurd – where again, the difference is whether you are using the word as others do, or in some manner you impose. I assume your underlying sentiment is, look around, see those institutions, they are bad. Okay, I agree. But then you seem to conclude, okay, let’s not have any institutions.
Okay, look around, see all that sexual interaction – eeek, lots is bad. Let’s dump it. Look around, see those hospitals and schools, horrible – let’s not have any. Hell, look around, see all the designing and writing and so on – horrible. Let’s dump all that. Look around, numbers, eeek, they so often tally for the dominators, let’s dump numbers. Water, eeek, people drown, get tortured, let’s not have any.
The real issue is typically bad uses, or connotations, in a bad social context – that one has to figure how to replace and what with.
Now the big issue, I suspect. An institution is a set of roles that people create and accept and then responsibly abide. They do so to partake of the benefits that their collective engagement allows. This can of course be done in ways that elevate a few above – way above – others, among many others bad features that may be included. A society organized toward good features nonetheless means a society in which there are abiding social relationships – roles – which in turn constitute institutions – but whose use generates desired and desirable outcomes..
I have to say, what I find ironic, Ed, is that it is often the case that people who will take a long essay and get moved to respond due to not liking the use of some common words that virtually the whole population understands, then greatly confuse other words in ways that lead to very strange pronouncements, either unclear or literally absurd. There is often a scholasticism to it, that perhaps explains it but that doesn’t make it good.