> Centrally planned coordinatorism and parecon have virtually nothing in
common...
That does not answer the question posed by my example: centrally planned or not, how do you deal with people who use their jobs and the resources they control by virtue of holding these jobs to go on personal power trips - or subvert them for a personal gain, just like today's executives do?
>
> With all due respect, I think you should lose that appreciation given
that the capacity is
> utilized not to generate desirable outputs, but profit.
I think it is both - and that is an essential feature of capitalist (or any other _existing_ as opposed to proposed economic system) which you seem to miss. Virtually no system, no matter how oppressive, merely fleeces people without providing anything in return. Most of them provide something - stability, security, basic needs, fulfillment of wants etc. which legitimate the surplus that the leadership extracts for these "services." And capitalism provides quite a lot in that respect, comparing to other known alternatives. This is precisely what makes any existing system, but especially capitalism, so attractive to most people - it gives them what they think they need and want, and that is what really matters to them. They do not particularly care that someone somewhere is making a profit.
>
> Saying something is too utopian -- or too anything -- is an assertion.
It could be true. But I
> can't reply unless you give me some reason why you think it is so.
What I meant by that is that utopianism is something assumed apriori rather than derived from empirical observations. Specifically, your argument seem to assume that in a new economy built on parecon blueprints people will behave differently than under the existing alienated system. Otherwise, what would be the guarantee that the new economy would not be hijacked to someone's personal benefit, just as the market system or the planned economy have been?
If, otoh, one takes an empirical approach and observe how people behave in different social and institutional settings (some of them more egalitarian and less oppressive than other), one usually discovers that how people actually behave and what motivates their behavior is very much different from what theoretical models and institutional logic suggests.
To use an example on which we both can probably agree. Milton Friedman argues that the market system would eliminate all racial discrimination in employment, because people who discriminate would be forced to pay a higher price for labor, and the logic of self interest would force them to abandon that practice. That is all fine if we assume that utility maximization is the only motivation that human actors have. However, a more realistic picture is that people usually do not mind paying higher prices for their preferences and prejudices (evidence of that is abundant in the retail industry). So with that behavioral model in mind, Friedman's argument can easily be put on his head by claiming that market efficiency will reinforce racial discrimination because it will provide more income to the employers/owners to pay for their prejudices and preferences, no matter how irrational.
You can easily see that the same logic can be applied to any theoretical model that posits, in one way or another, that the institutional order it proposes will produce a motivational/behavioral system that is assumed or required by that order. I simply find it too unrealistic - as I firmly believe that people use and misuse institutions to meet their however illusory, whimsical, situation-induced and otherwise irrational wants and need. Or as our guru Doug Henwood succinctly put it - there will always be bad guys. And it is very likely that there will be enough of them or they will have enough skill and determination to hijack any institutional system - now matter how beautifully designed.
This is, of course, not to say that social structure does not affect individual thinking and behavior. Au contraire, being determines consciousness, as they used to say. Structures do matter, but consciousness is determined to a much, much greater extent by micro-structures than by the macro- ones, and that the micro-structures are not always in line with the macro-ones.
I would thus prefer a much smaller task of implementing safeguards against abuses into the existing system (just like social democrats did it in Sweden, for example), than a more ambitious system of scrapping the existing system altogether and building a new one. I think that the latter is way too much work and there is no guarantee that, when the dust settles, we will get anything much better from what can attain under the good and tried social democracy (whose track records has been proved).
Wojtek