Doug wrote:
"Speaking of which, Michael Albert is standing by to join the list for a discussion of parecon. I'd like to do that but I thought I'd ask - how much interest is there here?"
Very much interest as long as somebody defines parecon for me.
On the article itself, I almost feel I can dismiss it out of hand. This theory of a techno-managerial "class" is just wrong. Any worker can (and many workers do) serve the owning class above and beyond making them profits. Any worker can serve the cultural and social aims of the bosses. The significance of the techno-managerial group is that they have skills which capitalists need for their own work (such as finance and law) or that they are "keystone" workers, meaning they are a small number of workers with crucial technical skills, thus forcing capitalists not to push them too hard. Furthermore, culturally, the capitalist cult of "meritocracy" demands that capitalists associate themselves with those whom the society admires.
I think the premise of the article is completely unsupported by the evidence. Communist countries produced plenty of highly skilled people relative to countries at a comparable level of development and spreading those skills around did absolutely nothing to make the Soviet Union et al more democratic. The reason is quite simply control of the means of production/capital. The Party had it and nobody else did. That made them the ruling class. The question for parecon is what will justify someone's sitting at the table when it comes time to make decisions about the means of production. In capitalism it's money. In Soviet-style statism it's rank in the military-industrial elite. In socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, parecon or whatever you want to call it, it has to be something different.
peace,
boddi