[lbo-talk] Parecon Discussion...

[Chuck0]

I've read a few things about Parecon over the years, including half of 
that book that keeps getting borrowed from me by Robin Hahnel's 
anarchist students at AU. Parecon always seemed like an interesting 
gedankenexperiment in thinking about alternative economics to me, but 
I've been turned off by the efforts to turn it into a systematic 
political philoshopy and strategy for social change. I think that 
Michael Albert has outlined some interesting ideas about participatory 
economics, which are the most useful in radicalizing average people into 
understanding that there are workable alternatives to capitalism. I 
really liked the examples in that book about how to do things like run 
an airport cooperatively. I see Parecon as a possible model that people 
could use in a non-capitalist society, but I really see anarchism as 
being the systematic approach that best incorporates participatory 
economics in a bigger struggle for social change.

Another problem I have with Parecon has to do with its totalizing 
aesthetic program of economics. Beware of theories which look nice on 
paper and be even more wary of people who want to put pretty theories in 
practice on a societal scale. Let me reference the discussion we had on 
this list several years ago on Scott's book "Seeing Like a State." In 
that book, Scott dissects aesthetically-oriented economic schemes that 
have been implemented on a national scale, such as state-run communism 
in the Soviet Union. I've always thought that Parecon could be a 
practical program in *some* communities "after the revolution," but it 
pays to be skeptical about any economic program which is universalized 
despite widely differing local conditions.

On a more immediate level, it would be interesting to see how the ideas 
of Parecon could be applied by radical organizations in a capitalist 
society. Are any co-ops using the Parecon model?

Chuck0