> ...A similar sense of utopian unreality pervades much of Michael Albert’s
> recent book Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Although because we are
> dealing not with TV entertainment but with social theory, a genre where
> the moral and intellectual stakes are measurably higher, I found this
> utopianism more frustrating than pleasurable. Parecon provides a
> blueprint for a post-capitalist economy organized around popular
> participation in all aspects of economic activity: consumption, work,
> allocation. The goal is to replace the capitalist vices of competition,
> hierarchy, and possessive individualism with the more humane virtues of
> solidarity, diversity, and equality. Computers figure prominently in this
> scenario, too. It is with their help that society is rendered transparent
> and thus amenable to participatory steering and control. If Star Trek
> asks us to fantasize about a world beyond work, Parecon asks us to
> fantasize about a society completely aware of itself and thus beyond
> politics. Accessing data from across all sectors of the economy, the
> citizens of a parecon (Albert’s shorthand for a participatory economy)
> collectively participate in planning everything: the outputs of the firms
> they work for, the allocation of goods, and communal and personal
> consumption levels. In one exemplary passage, Albert asks us to imagine
> Tariq, who, accessing his housing cooperative’s computer, goes about
> planning his consumption for the year.
"To develop a personal consumption plan, Tariq consults...estimates of indicative prices, assessments for collective consumption for members of his neighborhood, and average personal consumption estimates, and settles on a ‘borrower/loaner’ status. To simplify, similar products of comparable quality are grouped together so Tariq needs to express preferences for socks, but not for colors or types of socks; for soda, books, and bicycles, but not for flavors, titles, or styles of each. Statistical studies enable facilitation boards to break down total requests for generic types of records, soda, or bicycles."
As I read this and similar passages, I kept coming back to my Star Trek question: But who makes all those computers? Other questions quickly followed: What happens when they break down? When did Tariq and his compatriots become so self-possessed and self-aware that they could accurately forecast their desires and how best to fulfill them one whole year in advance? And more to the point, what happens in the face of significant disagreement about the economic priorities and values of such society? Negotiating such conflict is part of the function of the public realm, but Albert makes no allowance either for the possibility of disagreement, its persistence, or the necessity of managing it through political action. Instead he places an incredible amount of weight on the clarificatory power of social transparency and the solidarity generating potential of participation. From their computers, individuals will be able to see across the vast expanse of society and into the depths of their own inner lives. Armed with this knowledge, they seem automatically to understand what their tasks are, what their needs should be, and how they should fulfill their obligations to the rest of society. In the end, we are asked to imagine a world in which people have escaped the necessity of conflict, both personal and political. Individuals no longer have to face either their own potentially conflicting desires or each other’s potentially divergent visions of what society’s guiding values should be. This avoidance of conflict defines the limits of Parecon as both a model for economic justice and a practical guide for radical change.