>> We also have delegated authority. There will be chairpeople
>> of committees, there will be heads of work teams. There will be heads of
>> departments and divisions who have authority to order those "under
>> them." If I am the head of a work team and you do not obey my order in a
>> work situation, I can put you on report and recommend you be dismissed.
>> But what there will not be are some people who are always the order
>> givers and others who are always the order takers in every work site in
>> a workplace. Each person will experience both being in authority and
>> being under another's authority in different situations and at different
>> times.
>
>My sense is that this confuses the power-hierarchies of late capitalism --
>the fact that we all work in workteams of various kinds -- with the rule
>of capital itself. Even the biggest bosses are "under the gun" in the
>sense of having to show profit growth, increased market share and the
>like; Bill Gates is not an order-giver in that sense, in fact Microsoft
>has to listen very carefully to what its corporate customers want, and try
>to build solutions.
In a capitalist system the owners can do whatever they want with their property, and they get to give orders to the workers they hire. This relationship is permanent. I don't know if Gates has a controlling interest in Microsoft, but if he did he doesn't have to listen to his customers. He does if he wants to make money, but he could run the company into the ground if he really wanted to, and nobody could stop him.
ParEcon really is different since it socializes productive capital - resources are under community control - and it balances job complexes so that there is no permanent order giver/order taker relationship. Nobody could unilaterally control the kind of resources that Gates does today.
In addition, in ParEcon the entire workplace would have input into how to best build solutions for Microsoft's customers, as opposed to always having Gates make these decisions. To my mind these would be real gains.
>ParEcon seems to be essentially a moralistic critique
>of the system from the standpoint of the engineers, scientists and
>technicians who design and redesign systems all the time; that could
>work for things like Linux, where you had a whole Unix community of
>free-spirited hackers and GNU's freeware to build on, but reorganizing
>an entire mode of production is an altogether different kettle of fish.
I don't understand this objection. Albert and Hahnel are fairly explicit about the fact that engineers, scientists, technicians, managers, etc., what they call the coordinator class, should also be eliminated. As for reorganizing an entire mode of production, if you don't do that you are essentially maintaining the status quo (which is fine, I suppose, if that's what you favor). But if you want to eliminate class divisions and organize a society around the principles they laid out (solidarity, equality, etc.), then you have no choice but to drastically reorganize production relations.
>> Hopefully I have explained that this is inaccurate. The members of the
>> iteration facilitation board wield no power because they do nothing
>> until the plan has already been essentially hammered out and agreed to.
>> Most emphatically, they do not pose alternative plans that people choose
>> from. They are there for an efficient mop up operation at the very end
>> when the social iterative mechanism has already settled on the
>> alternative people want. If anyone feared them, their role could be
>> eliminated entirely.
>
>But who does that actual hammering? How do those iterations (a
>mathematical term, and one would doesn't do justice to the confused,
>protoplasmic messiness of politics or of daily life) really work? The
>assumption seems to be, producers will produce and consumers will consume,
>and we'll all know what we're worth in the end. But there's no way on
>Earth I personally could've foreseen than I would buy an Obsidian 3D video
>card (and a glorious thing it is) this year; how does that feed back
>into the system? How *do* we regulate the global economy -- the card was
>manufactured in Taiwan; if those people don't have councils, can the
>system really work? Hahnel's examples are suggestive: he mentions
>Cuba, Kerala and the Sandinistas, i.e. areas which aren't industrialized
>and need to delink from the world economy in order to grow, just as any
>successful industrializer has done, including the US (e.g. those 19th
>century tariffs). But what about northern Italy, southern Germany, and the
>industrial districts of Japan? These regions exhibit some really amazing
>forms of public cooperation and networking solutions to the
>problem of development; but they also have powerful trade unions, strong
>Left parties, and welfare states or powerful developmental states. As
>Brecht put it, so many reports, so many questions...
My understanding of ParEcons proposed iterative method for determining prices goes something like this: consumers have a budget, and they write down what they want for the next period. Producers will do the same (propose output levels). These initial requests/plans are then compared and prices for each commodity are determined. This could conceivably be done in a completely mechanical fashion (i.e., a computer could do it - presumably the algorithm for arriving at the resulting prices would be subject to popular approval).
The facilitation board is really only needed to ensure final convergence of the iterative process to a practical plan. That is, without outside interference, you might get oscillation between two plans which exhibit excess demand and excess supply, for example.
Granted, this assumes that people will do their best to predict what they will consume in the coming period - if people willfully sabotage the system it will fall apart. That aside, ParEcon also allows for some slack in the planning process - that is, predicted supply is required to be greater than expected demand so that changes can be more easily accomodated. As to your point about impulse buying (the Obsidian 3D video card), this can be fairly easily accounted for on a community, or national level. While individual consumption may vary over fairly large ranges from year to year, national consumption will not vary nearly as drastically. This would be partly accounted for by the built in slack, but you could also simply allow a miscellaneous consumption catagory for each consumer and, based on demand from the previous period, try to match consumption for certain items with predicted demand for the next period.
I'm admittedly fudging this issue a bit. I can't give you a more solid answer. I'm sure mistakes will be made, in the sense than demand will go unsatisfied in some cases, and predictions will prove incorrect. But this problem is also faced in our economy. If you hadn't had the urge to buy your Obsidian 3D video card, it would still be on the shelf. Perhaps the company would have gone under from lack of sales. This happens all the time. However, these signals feed back into the system, which corrects itself. The same would be true of ParEcon. Mistakes would be made in matching production with consumption at various stages, but feedback would bring the system back towards equilibrium. Next year you probably would put the video card on your consumption list, etc.
As for interactions with non-ParEcon economies, I don't know. It's a good question. I'll let someone else handle that one (that is, assuming anyone else is interested).
Brett