Awhile back there was a discusion on LBO-TALK about parecon. Since then I've finished two articles about parecon which I thought some people on this list might be interested in. These articles appear in the recent issue of the journal "Communist Voice". They are based on a study of a number of a number of Albert and Hahnel's writings, and also take account of the experience of attempts to build small alternative institutions along the lines of parecon. Since these are long articles, I give only an excerpt below, along with the URLs for their complete text, and a list of the subheads from these articles.
Joseph Green
Communist Voice website: www.communistvoice.org
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About Michael Albert's new book 'Parecon: life after capitalism': Can participatory economics tame marketplace relations? ( full text at www.communistvoice.org/32cPareconOverall.html ) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt from the introduction:
Parecon is, according to Albert, "basically an anarchistic economic vision that eliminates fixed hierarchy and delivers selfmanagement". (1) But Albert believes that other anarchist economic visions don't seriously provide for the necessary connection between different economic units, and thus don't provide economic efficiency. Albert believes that parecon solves the ills of anarchism, and molds economic efficiency with adherence to human values. We shall see whether this is in fact so, or whether Albert mainly adds bureaucracy to the anarchist vision without overcoming its reliance on the market.
.......
My objection to Albert is not that he opposes marketsocialism, Stalinism, and localism, but that, in the end, it turns out that he hasn't really got beyond them. For all his rhetoric about opposing the idea that "there is no sensible alternative", parecon simply dresses up old solutions with new verbiage. He thinks that humanity will never be able to do away with money, markets, and financialstyle calculations. Nor does he understand the distinction between a transitional economy in progress towards that goal, and an oppressive Stalinist system. So he is forced to rely on a patchwork of ideas from the very systems that he wants to oppose.
* From marketsocialism, Albert borrows the idea of pricing things at their true value, their "social cost". He believes that planning consists in large part of pricing things accurately, thus supposedly purging the economy of the distortions introduced by corporate capitalism. He takes over from the marketsocialists, as well as from the bourgeois economists and corporate apologists, the belief that money, and buying and selling are eternal. In essence, parecon does not seek to overcome the law of value, but to purify it.
* From Stalinist economics Albert takes some basic methods of economic calculation. Albert also falls into the proStalinist style of theorizing when he regards "indicative prices" and "participatory prices" as different from prices, "accounting money" as different from money, keeping financial balances in a central computer system as different from banking, and "cost benefit ratios" as different from profit rates. Marxist communism recognizes that money and financial planning can't be eliminated immediately after the capitalists are dispossessed, and that there is an extended transition period during which the working class gains more and more ability to run the economy, thus preparing to eventually dispense altogether with commodity production and marketplace methods. But much of Trotskyist and Stalinist economics denies that the use of money and profit accounting in the state sector, after the revolution, are marketplace methods. They theorize that the categories of commodity production lose their class character, and only superficially resemble the categories used in capitalist economies. This allows them to claim that the state sector has gone beyond capitalism, even when the working class has lost control of the state and the economy as a whole.
* From anarchist localism, Albert borrows his rhetoric about hierarchy, his belief that centralism is always antidemocratic, and his vision of society as a fusion of local collectives connected through the exchange of goods.
Thus, Albert doesn't just take some secondary features from marketsocialism, Stalinism, and anarchist localism. He embraces some of the key fallacies of these trends.
.Subheads: Parecon as it would like to be Equity and solidarity Diversity Ecological balance Selfmanagement Hierarchy Government The reign of the law of value Parecon and the alternative institutions of today
-------------------------------------------------------------- An anarchist society that wallows in regulation: The structure of a parecon society ( full text at www.communistvoice.org/32cPareconStructure.html ) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subheads: Not autonomy, but participation Workers' councils Consumption councils Government councils Hierarchy, but no "fixed hierarchy" Unions Ownership A planned economy Markets Accounting money and the central bank The law of social value The balanced job complex Computers Relations between different parecon economies Parecon in practice