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February 9, 2003
A new prescription
Michael Albert defines a new economic order to replace the capitalism and globalization thrust of the present system
The British Victorian liberal thinker, John Stuart Mill, (1806-1873), tells us that we...
“are not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels which form the existing type of social life are the most desirable lot of human beings.”
The American social critic Noam Chomsky says he... “would like to believe that people have an instinct for freedom, that they really want to control their own affairs. They don’t want to be pushed around, ordered, oppressed, etc., and they want a chance to do things that make sense like constructive work in a way that they control, or maybe control together with others.”
If “trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading” are not the “most desirable lot” for humanity, what is? If humanity should not aspire to an elite minority joyfully dancing atop a suffocating mountainous majority, what should we aspire for? If the instinct to not be “pushed around, ordered, oppressed” and to do “constructive work in a way that (we) control” deserves exploring, where should we begin?
The United States has about three per cent of the world’s population yet does nearly half the world’s consuming. Within the US about two per cent of the population owns 60 per cent of the wealth. Other developed nations are similarly unequal. Less developed countries suffer broadly the same internal distribution, though there the richest are less wealthy and the poorest are more destitute.
Indignity, disempowerment, and hunger accompany capitalism worldwide. No one sensibly denies this, yet even among those who despise capitalism, most fear that suffering would increase without it. While some certainly find capitalism odious, few celebrate an alternative and those who do generally favour “market socialism”, “centrally planned socialism”, or “green bioregionalism”. In contrast, this book rejects capitalism but also the typically favoured alternatives.
Parecon and globalization
Anti-corporate globalization activists favour sympathetic and mutually beneficial global ties to advance equity, solidarity, diversity, and self-management. Globalize equity not poverty. Globalize solidarity not greed. Globalize diversity not conformity. Globalize democracy not subordination. Globalize sustainability not rapaciousness. Two questions arise.
* Why do these aspirations cause anti-corporate globalization activists to be critical of corporate globalization?
* What new institutions do anti-corporate globalization activists propose to do a better job than those that now exist?
Rejecting capitalist globalization
Current international market trading overwhelmingly benefits those who enter exchanges already possessing the most assets. When trade occurs between a US multinational and a local entity in Mexico, Nigeria, or Thailand, the trade doesn’t provide greater benefit to the weaker party that has fewer assets, nor are the benefits divided equally. Rather, benefits go disproportionately to the stronger traders who thereby increase their relative dominance.
Opportunist rhetoric aside, capitalist globalization’s flow of resources, assets, outputs, cash, capital, and harmful by-products primarily further empowers the already powerful and further enriches the already rich at the expense of the weak and poor. The result is that at the turn of the twenty-first century of the 100 largest economies in the world, almost exactly half are not countries but are private, profit-seeking corporations.
Similarly, market competition for resources, revenues, and audience is nearly always a zero-sum game. Each actor advances at the expense of others so that capitalist globalization promotes a self-interested “me-first” logic that generates hostility and destroys solidarity between actors. This dynamic occurs from individuals through industries and states. Collectively beneficial public and social goods like parks, health-care, education, and social infrastructure are downplayed while individually enjoyed private goods are prioritized. Businesses and nations augment their own profits and simultaneously impose harsh losses on weak constituencies. Humanity’s well-being doesn’t guide the process but is instead sacrificed on behalf of private profit. Against capitalist globalization solidarity fights a rearguard battle even to exist, much less to predominate.
Moreover, cultural communities’ values disperse only as widely as their megaphones permit, and worse, are frequently drowned out by communities with larger megaphones impinging on them. Thus capitalist globalization swamps quality with quantity. It creates cultural homogenization not cultural diversity. Not only do McDonalds and Starbucks proliferate, so do Hollywood images and Madison Avenue styles. The indigenous and non-commercial suffer. Diversity declines....
In sum, capitalist globalization produces poverty, ill health shortened life spans, reduced quality of life, and ecological collapse. Anti-globalization activists, who might more usefully be called internationalist activists, oppose capitalist globalization precisely because it so aggressively violates the equity, diversity, solidarity, self-management, and ecological balance essential to a better world.
Summarizing participatory economics
Capitalism revolves around private ownership of the means of production, market allocation, and corporate divisions of labour. It remunerates property, power, and, to a limited extent, contribution to output, resulting in huge differences in wealth and income. Class divisions arise from differences in property ownership and differential access to empowered versus subservient work. Class divisions induce huge differences in decision-making influence and quality of life. Buyers and sellers fleece one another and the public anti-social investment, toxic individualism, and ecological decay.
To transcend capitalism, parecon-oriented anti-globalization activists would offer an institutional vision derived from the same values we listed earlier for shaping alternative global aims equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, and ecological balance.
Such activists would urge that each workplace be owned in equal part by all citizens so that ownership conveys no special rights or income advantages. Bill Gates wouldn’t own a massive proportion of the means by which software is produced. We all would own it equally, so that ownership would have no bearing on the distribution of income, wealth, or power. In this way the ills of garnering wealth through profits would disappear.
Parecon and visionary practice
In today’s world large movements espousing similar aspirations worldwide struggle to better the lives of disenfranchised and abused populations around the globe. Some undertakings pressure elites to beneficially alter existing institutions. Other efforts seek to create new institutions to “live the future in the present.” Some efforts are “small and local”. Some encompass whole geographic regions. If we look at a selection of visionary practices, we can see many features which have led to the reasoning presented in this book. Parecon doesn’t float in space, that is, but arises from the aspirations and the insights of a huge range of activist efforts. Here are a few examples.
Historically almost every instance of working people and consumers even briefly attaining greater control over their own conditions has incorporated both in locales and in workplaces, institutions of direct organization and democracy. These have been called councils or assemblies, and given other names as well. Their common feature, however, has been providing a direct vehicle for people to develop, refine, express and implement personal and collective agendas...
Throughout the history of struggle against injustice there has also been great attention to matters of equity and specifically to the idea that people ought to enjoy life possibilities in a fair and appropriate manner. We should be able to earn a bit more or less by our choices, of course, but not for unworthy reasons.... But what about instances from the present? Is Parecon connected to current exploratory and innovative economic efforts?
Consider collective workplace experiments around the world including coops, workers-owned plants, and collective workplaces. Workers gain control over their factories, perhaps buying them rather than having capitalists close them down entirely, or perhaps originating new enterprises of their own from scratch. The newly in charge workers attempt to incorporate democracy. They try to redefine the division of labour. They seek narrower income differentials. But the market environment in which they operate makes all this horribly difficult.
On a grander scale, consider the movement for what is called “solidarity economics” that has advocates in many parts of South America (and particularly Brazil), Europe, and elsewhere. Its defining idea is that economic relations should foster solidarity among participants rather than causing participants to operate against one another’s interests. Not only should economic life not divide and oppose people, it should not even be neutral on this score but should generate mutuality and empathy. Advocates of solidarity economics thus pursue ideas of local workers’ control and of allocative exchange with this norm in mind.
Parecon takes their insight that institutions should propel values we hold dear and extends it in additional directions. We want a solidarity economy in the same sense as its advocates do. But we also want a diversity economy, an equity economy, and a self-managing economy. Indeed we want one economy that fulfils all these aspirations simultaneously. Parecon thus arises from, respects, and seeks to provide additional dimensions to solidarity economics.
Or consider the efforts in Porto Alegre and other Brazilian cities and in Kerala and other regions of India to incorporate elements of participatory democracy into budget decisions for cities and regions. Indeed, in Brazil this project is named “participative budgeting” and the idea is to establish means of local direct organization via which citizens can impact decisions about collective investments regarding government services such as parks, education, public transport, and health care. Parecon’s participatory planning has the same aspirations and impetus, but writ larger, encompassing not only public goods but all goods, and facilitating not only proportionate participation by consumers, but also by workers.
Indeed, for all the examples noted above and many more as well, advocates of participatory economics could be expected, once organized in sufficiently large movements, to pursue similar struggles — the only difference being the way pareconists would explain their actions as being part of a process leading to a whole new economy they would advocate, and perhaps how they would try to create new infrastructure and consciousness by not only fostering the immediate aims, but by also empowering participants to win still more gains in a trajectory leading all the way from capitalism to parecon. Pareconist workers’ control efforts would seek to attain allocation gains as well, plus new divisions of labour.
Pareconist attempts to institute “participatory budgets” would seek as well to address norms of remuneration and job allocation and to engender participation not only in communities regarding public goods, but also in workplaces regarding all goods. Pareconist union and workers councils would seek to affect not only conditions and circumstances of members’ jobs, but also the worthiness of undertaken projects, and would likewise try to link with consumer movements and spread the efforts to government sectors and consumer behaviour....
And what about the newest and certainly very promising World Social Forum? Here is a remarkable amalgamation of movements, constituencies, activists, and projects from all over the globe linked by an open and experimental attitude, a commitment to participation, feelings of mutual respect, and attention to diversity and democracy, all celebrating the sentiment that “another world is possible”. In 2002, at its second incarnation, roughly 50,000 participants began to enunciate features that that better world might have. The most widely shared sentiments were rejection of markets and support for self-management, rejection of vast differentials in income and support for equity, rejection of homogenizing commercialism and support for diversity, rejection of imperial arrogance and support for solidarity, and rejection of ecological devastation and support for sustainability....
Participatory economics provides a new economic logic including new institutions with new guiding norms and implications. But parecon is also a direct and natural outgrowth of hundreds of years of struggle for economic justice as well as contemporary efforts with their accumulated wisdom and lessons. What parecon can contribute to this heritage and to today’s activism will be revealed, one way or the other, in the coming years.
Excerpted with permission from
Parecon: life after capitalism
By Michael Albert
Verso, 6 Meard Street, London.
Website: www.versobooks.com
ISBN 1-85894-540-1
302pp. Price not listed
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