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November 20, 2005
Parecon
You can read Michael Albert's book, Parecon, online. Although you probably won't when you see the subtitle is Life After Capitalism. Just ignore this blog entry.
Albert's book discusses his vision of a participatory economic system, parecon. Parecon relies on planning, rather than markets, to drive production and allocation. But not central planning. A parecon has every participant involved directly and iteratively in requesting, allocating, producing, and planning. Albert starts from the premises Hahnel reaches in ABCs of Political Economy about what we want from the economy, applying the principles to arrive at parecon. He further compares parecon to market, centrally planned, market socialist, and bioregionalist economies to demonstrate how parecon better fits the principles from which he went forth. Of course if you don't agree on the principles, you'll reach a different conclusion, but the principles themselves are fairly well defended in this book.
Albert then explains parecon for the non-economist covering ownership, councils, job complexes, remuneration, and allocation, also providing a hypothetical parecon to give body to the abstractions. This vision, like an external specification in software, doesn't describe everything. Indeed, since participation is the the core of the system, participants are not expected to follow the vision exactly, but instead to adapt it to their circumstances and preferences. So long as an implementation fits the vision (external specification), it's still a parecon. Another way of looking at it is to say there are lots of different recipes for pizza.
Finally Albert rebuts criticisms of parecon that he's encountered, addressing questions about productivity and efficiency, but also about whether parecon would be too invasive, too inflexible, out of touch with basic human nature, or somehow generally impossible to implement.
The very last point addresses my own criticism. Albert's proposing a significantly different economy from the ones we have today. In software, you'd say some of the backwards incompatibilities are going to put the brakes on widespread deployment. For example, from the chapter on ownership in a parecon:
In short, we simply remove ownership of the means of production as an economic consideration. Property in the form of means of production becomes a non-thing.
Not that the rest of parecon wouldn't, but getting to the point where means of production are not owned would probably be hard to achieve in practice. Not because it would in fact be hard to switch, but that people who stand to lose their existing privileges of ownership would likely resort to force to return to the former circumstances, and the people who own the means of production have overwhelmingly more force to apply.
At least coming up with a realistic implementation would be interesting work. I wonder how it's been prototyped.
Posted by Mark at November 20, 2005 06:33 PM
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