MICHAEL ALBERT: Participatory economics proposes a small set of
institutions that define the heart of a new type of economy. These
institutions are conceived to further various values: self-management,
solidarity, diversity, ecological sanity. The idea is that as you carry
out economic activities - in other words, as you produce and you allocate
and consume - you simultaneously accomplish not only those functions, but
by virtue of what the institutions require of us as we operate, you also
advance those values. The basic institutions that are meant to accomplish this are few.
There are worker and consumer self-managing councils; where
self-management means that people should have a say in decisions
proportionate to the degree they are affected by them. There is
equitable remuneration - referring to the share we get in the economy in
the form of income, our claim on the social product. Under participatory
economy these are in proportion to how long we work, how hard we work,
and the onerousness of the conditions under which we work. There is also
what’s called balanced job complexes, which is a way of organizing the
tasks that we do, so that our work lives, our economic activity and
production, has a comparably empowering effect on us all. Finally, there
is an allocative system to apportion work, labor and effort - the goods
and services we produce - that isn’t a market or central planning but is
something we call participatory planning. So in a nutshell, that’s
participatory economics: (
http://zcomm.org/category/topic/parecon/).
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Even though I disagree with many aspects of Michael’s
model, what I like about it is its rigor and clarity. Parecon is a very
tough-minded economic vision and model and it sets a standard for us to
look at. One place to start (with my own work) is that - given the specific
historical conditions we face in the United States - I’m primarily
interested in the question of how we begin to move in the direction of a
model that realizes the kinds of values that Michael just laid out
though is different in structure. I am interested in the political
economy of institutional power relationships in transition. The question
is one of “reconstructive” communities as a cultural, as well as a
political fact: how geographic communities are structured to move in the
direction of the next vision, along with the question of how a larger
system - given the power and cultural relationships - can move towards
managing the connections between the developing communities. There are
many, many hard questions here - including, obviously, ones related to
ecological sustainability and climate change. I’ve called the model for what this might plausibly look like in
practice “the pluralist commonwealth”: commonwealth because it seeks
transitionally to restructure political reality by democratizing the
ownership of wealth, pluralist because it embraces a variety of
institutional approaches towards that end. The model includes some
planning, a great deal of decommodification, and partial use of markets
in certain areas. It adheres to the principle of subsidiarity, meaning
we decentralize as far as possible to the local level where direct
democracy is truly possible, but we are also not afraid to look towards
institutional forms like regional or national public ownership when the
problems are best solved at those scales … more broadly, it’s a community-centered vision, starting with the
questions “How does the community I live in begin to restructure? What
are the next steps that could move us towards a larger egalitarian,
democratic, and ecologically sustainable culture?” As we move towards
the pluralist commonwealth, economic interventions that stabilize
communities - for instance by localizing the flows of goods and services,
or by promoting worker ownership - not only have immediate practical
benefits, but provide the necessary preconditions for the growth and
development of a renewed culture of sustainable democracy that can serve
as the basis for still further transformations at larger scales. But
the model is designed to make maximal use of actual on-the-ground forms
of democratized ownership - the millions of employee-owners, the thousands
of community development corporations and cooperatives that already
exist in the US serve as a key starting point. Importantly, the focus is on transitional forms, not on ultimate
theoretical final states. A full description of the model, its elements,
and many of the challenges that come up in connection with the approach
is available at:
www.pluralistcommonwealth.org
On Experimentation and Possibility
MICHAEL ALBERT: I appreciate in Gar’s work the emphasis on being
attentive to what is possible now. We don’t go out in the streets trying
to do things that can’t be done. In the context in which we find
ourselves seeking ideal relations now, as if they can be had over night,
doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think where we may have a difference, is on the importance not only
of addressing what’s possible now, but also whether or not this leads
where we want to go - which to me means that we have to have some
understanding of where we’re trying to go. So for instance, Gar
mentioned that his understanding of the future would include some
markets. Well, if we mean the same thing by “markets” (people use the
term in all sorts of conflicting ways), then I would probably disagree. Markets are a form of allocation that I don’t think a good classless
self-managing society can have, and have it be consistent with those
kinds of values. Now that doesn’t mean that you can just say: no markets
tomorrow. That’s the part I agree with Gar about.
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Here’s how I think about it. We need to remember the
importance of learning and experimentation - you can’t really know what’s
going to happen. For instance, if you take control of a workplace, there
are a lot of different ways in which a workplace can be controlled. And
since nobody knows enough about what all the effects are going to be at
large scale, with really significant social change, I think we should
try to do some of this piecemeal. I think that Michael’s projection is utopian in the best sense of
that term; I don’t see that as a negative. It’s where we might be when
we get to where we want to be. But I think, both as a historian and as
an economist, that the problem is quite different from that: how, in the
specific historical condition of the United States today, do we move
towards a more egalitarian society, one that transforms the ownership of
capital, one that builds and nurtures community and that is
ecologically sustainable? Lay three or four decades on the table: how do
we move towards these larger goals? So I’m much more interested in an evolving and reconstructive
approach that reconstructs community, changes power relationships, and
also moves towards some kind of planning. Not just allocative planning,
but, in a society of 300 million, large-scale geographic planning to
stabilize communities. I come from Racine, WI, a city of about 100,000.
The rug was pulled out from under the economy there: industries moved
out, all driven by the capitalist relationships dominant in the
marketplace. What would be ways to stabilize economies, stabilizing the
health of communities so that we can build constructive kinship and
other relationships of democratic participation in them?
MICHAEL ALBERT: I agree we need to experiment - but I would say, for
instance, we have been doing this for, conservatively, a couple hundred
years, and some things we
have learned. We may not know all the
different options various kinds of workplaces will adopt, from country
to country, from locale to locale, etc. But we do know that some very
few things
need to occur if people in those workplaces are going to be free to decide what they want. What participatory economics is saying about economic life and what
participatory society is saying more generally about the other realms in
life is that there are a few institutional choices that really aren’t
particularly optional. We can’t have private ownership of the means of
productions and vast corporations and make believe that we’re going to
have self-management for everybody. In the political sphere, you can’t
have a dictatorship and make believe that you’re going to have public
participation, freedom, and self-management and justice. Those
institutions are contradictory. So participatory economics doesn’t say that all workplaces will look
alike. It does say, however, that we need to apportion work in such a
way that 20% don’t dominate 80%. That should be a truism, basically.
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Let me clarify several different points in agreement
and disagreement. I don’t disagree in principle with Michael: finding
ways to organize work in which people are not locked into power
relationships of the kind he’s talking about, is very important. Having
said that, it’s not easily done, and it’s complicated. For example, I was just out at Isthmus Engineering in Wisconsin, a worker-owned company that was in Michael Moore’s
Capitalism: A Love Story.
It is a real high-tech, very advanced scale, robotic building
worker-owned cooperative and nobody in their right mind in that place
wants to be the power player. You’d think somebody would want to take
control of the damn thing. Not at all. No one wants to be in charge. So
what do they do? What they do is hire a manager who wants to do that,
subject to the recall of the workers themselves. And they regularly
recall them, when they don’t like what they’re doing. So how people
actually in the practice of the workplace want to allocate different
roles becomes extremely complex.
What Must Be Done?
GAR
ALPEROVITZ: I don’t claim to have a sophisticated view of how
transitions might take place in the specific conditions facing other
countries, but I do think a lot about the United States. Here, we need
to develop community-wide structures of democratic ownership, we need to
work out cooperative development, we need to work out participatory
management, we need new ecological strategies developed at the local
city, state, regional level. We need to go forward in nationalizing
several large corporations: I think that’s possible, we nationalized
General Motors, we nationalized several of the big banks, de facto, we
nationalized Chrysler, we nationalized AIG. I think there will be more
crises, and at some point rather than being bailed out by the
government, the public may keep the corporations it has to rescue. We’re talking about democratizing the ownership of wealth, or
socializing in some form. I think that needs to be a pre-condition in
any of the systems we’re talking about. The model that I call the
pluralist commonwealth incorporates a variety of these strategies, not
simply worker ownership - though I do put a great deal of emphasis on
worker-ownership and workplace democracy. But that’s only one form of
democratizing ownership. There are also, for instance, city-wide models.
In Colorado, we just had the takeover (“municipalizing”) of the
electrical utility. That’s city-wide, geographic ownership of the means
of production, it’s democratic ownership. There are 2,000 public
utilities which could become the basis of a whole municipal scheme or
strategy. Several hundred cities own hospitals. A number of the states
already are moving toward ownership of state banks; many already own
chunks of other businesses. Most people are simply unaware of these
developments, or of models like this where we already can see expanding
public ownership through municipal and state ownership. These are
geographic ownership structures, that point for larger scale entities
towards regional or national forms of public ownership. The Pluralist Commonwealth model aims at steadily beginning to
develop the institutional substructure necessary for future larger
changes, but also that begins at the level of an ordinary community
re-orienting itself. I think the appropriate near term trajectory of
change we’re working with is 30 years, that’s a timeframe that’s
reasonable for developing participation to the degree possible,
ecological sustainability, reconstruction of community, laying
groundwork for a reconstruction of a non-growth system over time. Beyond
that timeframe other things may be possible …
MICHAEL ALBERT: You mention nationalizing, and it could be a good
thing or a bad thing. It can be a good thing if it’s moving us in a good
direction and a bad thing if it’s moving us in a bad direction. That
seems pretty obvious. But if we look at it over time, we have lots and
lots of instances that are not good, that don’t move us in a positive
direction. What characterizes positive direction? What characterizes it is more
and more people having a more and more appropriate level of say over
their own lives. What characterizes it is more and more people getting a
fairer and fairer share of a social product and getting a fairer set of
burdens they have to fulfill to be a part of society. If we can agree
about that, we can make demands. Right now in the present, we can demand
changes in the minimum wage, changes in the wage structure in a
particular firm, we can demand new budget items in our national or local
budget. But to do these things and much more in a way that moves us
forward, our approaches now have to create an infrastructure that will
stay with us and aid us rather than be corrupted and hurt us in the
future. And they will have to develop more and more movement, and more
and more activism because people are liking them. There’s a resistance, it seems to me, about saying something about
what we want, as if doing so would cause us to trample real and
desirable options. If we say we don’t want a division of labor that
would put 20% above 80%, somehow that’s going to cause a problem. If it
doesn’t cause a problem to agree on that, and agree that it ought to be
part of what we are seeking, let’s just say it and move on. If we say
that we don’t want people to own the means of production and who get
their income in the form of profit, if we don’t want that because that
makes class division, crushes solidarity, demolishes dignity, and
creates skewed income distribution, then we should just say it. That
isn’t going too far. It’s not extrapolating so far into the future or
into details that it somehow restricts us. On the contrary, it can help
orient us. We have to think about how to make demands and how to build
structures that are part of the trajectory of change that takes us where
we want to go. But that means we need to know something about where we
want to go, as well as where we are at and what’s possible right now.
GAR ALPEROVITZ: For 40 years, my argument has been that democratizing
ownership of wealth has been the key to egalitarian society and the
goals of egalitarian society. That’s what I’ve been writing about,
that’s what I’ve been experimenting with, that’s what I’ve been
developing, and that’s what the vision of pluralist commonwealth is all
about. But you start at the local level, both at the workplace,
community and other institutions and you reconstruct the egalitarian
democratized structure as well as participatory structure. That is where
the learning takes place. You learn to do it in one community and it
may be possible to spread to another community if you have achieved
anything of significance. And as this happens, we learn more how to move
towards the vision that is much larger than just the community level.
That’s the whole strategy of what we’re doing in the current phase of
development. Beyond this, if the work is done well, further things may
be possible. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an absence of fear that bad dynamics
are going to emerge. For instance, worker-owned co-ops, on their own,
floating in the market, tend to replicate the behavior of worker-owned
capitalists in some circumstances. They sometimes develop positive
participatory schemes, sometimes not. But we know from the studies of
worker-owned plywood companies in the US, they can tend to develop
conservative attitudes, not socialist attitudes. So there’s a whole
question about the role of worker-owned companies, and even though I’m
an advocate of further democratization of the workplace, we also need to
be building larger structures. This is what’s happening, for instance, in cities like Cleveland: the
notion is a community-wide ownership structure that encompasses
partially independent worker-owned companies. And these businesses are
partly supported by the purchasing power of non-profit institutions like
universities and hospitals that depend on lots of public money, and
this arrangement then begins to give stability to the whole geographic
community, articulating a vision and politics that builds for the entire
community. It’s a mixed model that is being tested. My argument is that the planning model can be managed partly by
economic participatory economic planning, partly by market, but
critically, when you get to the point where you can do that kind of
planning, the model becomes less and less significant because it’s
constrained and encompassed in a larger framework. I think the question
that most critics of your model, Michael, have raised is important: the
notion of each person laying down what he or she plans to buy or needs
against a production schedule, that is, what they’ll actually
contribute, becomes an extremely difficult path to envision as
realistic. Somebody pointed out recently in an article in Jacobin that
if you look at just the kitchen goods for sale on Amazon, there are
millions of items. Now that’s not the society we want, obviously, but it
points to the magnitude of the issue: the planning problem becomes
extremely difficult if you don’t use some forms of market to adjudicate
purchases and production. I think we need to move experimentally with planning and markets, as
well as with community development forms that don’t include either one.
I’m very interested in how we democratize and socialize, at different
levels, the ownership of productive wealth. And then moving steadily
from models we learned from up from community to region to nation,
always following the principle of subsidiarity: keeping it as low as
possible.
MICHAEL ALBERT: You mention that markets will corrupt a worker
cooperative because it’ll create a context in which - and I agree with
you - there’s a tremendous incentive to essentially, maximize, not just
profits for owners, but surplus among that workforce. And so you begin
to see the same kinds of behavior, say colluding, not cleaning up the
environment, speed ups exploiting workers who are weaker, and so on and
so forth. Okay, agreed. The solution you bring up is that we can have
some community-wide participation that puts restraints upon the way
those pressures and incentives play out. Well, I don’t disagree with
that as part of an answer. That’s certainly plausible. But another way you can try to proceed is by understanding that the
problem is the impact of the market. Or understanding, that a corporate
division that divides the work classes into two classes of labor, one
above and one below, corrupts what you’re doing. If we understand these
two sources of corruption or subversion of our aims, then we can talk
about them, and we can build a movement where the people who are
participating are aware that over the long haul, we have to solve the
problem of the division of labor and the problem of allocation, because
if we don’t, the old corporate and market structures will corrupt what
we’re doing. It’s certainly true that if you have millions of goods, and you ask,
can Joe look at all those millions of goods, evaluate them, and ask how
much of each he wants - that’s absurd. Joe can’t do it, and he’s also not
remotely interested in doing it. But even now, of course, neither Joe
nor you nor I evaluate all possible options, but we still find options
that suit us. So in a participatory economy, the consumer and the
producer basically have to indicate their desires for different
categories of clothing or food or housing, or various kinds of luxury
goods or enjoyable goods. That doesn’t mean you have to itemize down to
the color or the size. Many things are statistically totally
determinable once you have the overall inclinations of people. In Venezuela right now, there are diverse experiments going on,
trying to experiment locally with alternatives that move towards a more
egalitarian society, in which wealth and power are democratized - they’re
trying to do at least elements of what we’re talking about. And in these
experiments, two things come up pretty often, not just as long-term
issues, but as immediate short-term issues: the division of labor in the
workplace, and the impact markets in corrupting possibilities. So for instance, in the countryside they have consumer co-ops, that
is to say, communities which are trying to find a way to determine their
overall consumption and trying to share it among the various members of
the commune in a fair way. And then nearby, there are producer communes
that are producing, for instance, the agricultural goods that the
neighbors are going to consume. So what they have begun to do is to
negotiate allocation. Instead of having a market determine how this
transaction between the people who are farming and the people who are
eating in the countryside will occur, they meet together and negotiate
cooperatively what they think is just and fair and right. That’s
potentially a beginning for participatory planning. You mentioned the case of workers in the factory that didn’t want to
be the ones particularly running the show, so they would go out and hire
a manager. I understand that. It’s a perfectly understandable dynamic
and even predictable. What happened in Yugoslavia is instructive: they
made a revolution, got rid of the capitalists, instituted market
socialism, and initially had workplaces where everybody was treating
everyone equally, everyone calling everybody comrade and so on. But over
time, because of what you described earlier, the competitive pressure
of markets, these Yugoslav workplaces have to cut costs, make alienated
decisions, to pollute, and on and on. If they previously met together in
councils and decided they wanted things like daycare, air-conditioning
for everybody, and clean air in the workplace and wanted to clean up for
the community and so on. Then, nonetheless, under the pressure of
competition, they had to start going back on those decisions. And
because most people didn’t want anything to do with going back on those
decisions, and certainly didn’t want to be the ones to make such
degrading choices, they went out and hired managers and got them from
business schools from capitalist countries to a large extent. This wasn’t a healthy process, and this is what we’re talking about
when we talk about changing the division of labor in the workplace so
that everyone’s doing their fair share of empowering and disempowering
work. It doesn’t mean that management pe se disappears. It means that
managing, and conceptualizing and organizing and doing agendas, and all
sorts of various empowering tasks, as well as the rote tasks, are
handled in a way which doesn’t elevate some people to dominating others.
On the ground
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Just to clarify: In the model I mentioned - the one
that featured in Michael Moore’s movie - the workers didn’t want to
“manage;” they wanted control - which is to say the manager
(administrator) if he was not responsive to their needs and desires.
Let’s again return to what’s happening on the ground - all but ignored by
the mainstream press. What’s interesting is that a truly massive process
is underway that I have not seen happen in my entire adult life,
particularly with regard to the ownership of capital and the development
of co-ops, and worker-owned companies, and land trusts, and community
owned structures and municipalization strategies. Though the public
press does not cover this, it is, in fact, explosive. In my experience
most activists and radical theorists are also unaware of the range of
activity (our website
community-wealth.org
is one useful resource for coverage of these developments). As people
learn more and more about the development of this pattern of
democratization, they are also teaching each other principles that can
be applied at higher levels as we move forward. As I said earlier, given
the challenges facing the dominant system there are certain to be
opportunities again with the big banks - more crises - and as people learn
different principles over time, getting to national and regional scale
of democratization is possible. I believe a parallel process is also
likely over time in connection with health care: As the system falters
and fails, moving towards democratization is likely. California passed
single-payer twice, but this was vetoed by Schwarzenegger. Vermont is
likely to establish it this year. And beyond single-payer is likely to
be a still more democratized system in a sector now nearly 20 percent of
the economy. The most interesting developments that are going on, in my
experience, are those that build and anchor workplaces in communities.
In Cleveland - and an increasing number of other cities in the United
States - what you have is a quasi-public entity, that is, a hospital or
university that has a lot of public money in it, providing support by
purchasing goods and services from worker owned companies linked
together as is part of a geographic community-wide structure, with part
of the surplus feeding back into the community to create new businesses.
So it’s not just about the workers, but as a matter of structure and
principle, it’s a vision that builds a community - or commune - and that’s
happening experimentally in many parts of the country. Interestingly, in Argentina, if you look at the recuperated factories
and other businesses, many of them now are actually moving towards the
model I just suggested, with places like the municipality (for instance
Buenos Aires) purchasing from them as a way to stabilize their market
and to socialize their procurement for public use, schools and
hospitals, for instance. That structure of using a larger public
institution - in this case, city government - to sustain and nurture
different patterns of cooperative production stabilizes the market. This
is where I think the exciting action is if we want to think about
possibilities of moving toward a larger systemic vision. And as I said
earlier, we could come back to the question of whether that eventually
ends up using markets in some cases, or cooperative parecon styles in
some areas, or public planning in other areas. I think it’s an open
question.
MICHAEL ALBERT: I don’t disagree that there are many experiments, and
in those experiments, people learn principles and those principles can
be applied more broadly. There can be instances, although I’m not sure
there’s much of this in the US that’s of any merit, of governments
helping local experiments to stabilizing their operations, but I don’t
think this is going to happen at a significant scale anytime soon unless
movements force it. And I don’t disagree that in Venezuela and, to an
extent, in Argentina, the government has indeed helped experiments
become more and more participatory, more and more moving toward
self-management, and that is exciting. I was very much excited by the
taking of the firms in Argentina. I am excited in the United States, by
the development of co-ops, and the extent to which people in the co-ops
really do want something new, and more generally by the simple fact of
the changing consciousness in the United States which is very much
drifting away from faith in capitalism.
GAR ALPEROVITZ: On that latter point, that’s exactly where you and I agree entirely!
MICHAEL ALBERT: But where we seem to disagree is around participatory
planning. Most people don’t criticize Parecon because of its notion of
what is equitable, or its notion of self-management, or its notion that
we should have solidarity; they criticize it for being too complex. The
claim is that at some point the participatory planning process simply
burdens people in a manner that people won’t accept, or shouldn’t have
to accept, and that we should try to do it in a more efficient way, for
instance, through markets. My problem with this objection is twofold. First, it very quickly
comes to the conclusion that it’s too complex, there are too many steps
or too many people involved in the planning process - all of which there
are answers for, which, however, are generally ignored by the critic.
And second, it goes back to markets as a solution. The problem with
markets isn’t necessarily their complexity (although some of the ones
that exist today are so complex that nobody knows remotely what they’re
all about!). The problem with markets is not that they demand too much
of us. The problem is that they turn us into egomaniacs. They destroy
the ecology. They produce class difference and gargantuan income
differentials, much poverty and some plenty. So I will grant you that it may be the possibility that when we
experiment with it, and when we learn more about it, participatory
planning will require some very clever refinements so as to reduce the
amount of time and complexity that’s involved with that part of our
lives. But to say that we can’t go through this process of
experimentation and refinement, and that therefore we have to fall back
on markets, is analogous, to me, to somebody saying that democracy puts
complex demands on the voters, and therefore it would be much easier to
have a dictator decide. Actually, it’s even worse, because you could
imagine a dictator who is reasonably humane but markets are structurally
incapable of delivering humane outcomes. In such an approach one is
literally trading a fear of complexity, for a certainty of cataclysm.
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Michael, we just discussed two specific models in
which worker-ownership is combined with one or another form of public
planning, and a third where this is partially true. In Cleveland and in
Buenos Aires the use of public purchasing partially stabilizes the
market for worker-cooperatives. In Venezuela co-ops themselves provide
support for each other (while in practice they also receive public
support, i.e. another form of planning in the real world). The critical
point here - for a transitional strategy - is to understand the complexity
of these processes and at the same time attempt to foster further
movement, practically, towards a more evolved model without jumping
steps and creating chaos in the learning and development process.
On values
MICHAEL ALBERT: Gar, you’re involved in what I think are incredibly
important and valuable experiments trying to do things in new ways.
Wouldn’t it be advantageous when working with people who are setting up
co-ops to help them understand that they don’t want to replicate the old
division of labor which will corrupt their values and aspirations - that
they should want to organize their work in a new way that has everyone
participating and empowered? Wouldn’t it be advantageous to help them
understand how market pressures will conspire to corrupt their
creativity? And wouldn’t it be desirable to help them see that there are
ways to avoid those ills?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: On participatory planning within the firm or within
the community question, on restructuring jobs and the culture of
work - with rotation and open-book management and so forth - that sort of
thing is already being developed in many parts of the country,
experimentally, and I certainly agree that that is the direction to go. Caveat, what you find is that in many situations is that many people
don’t want to do these things! The reality of the world we live in is
that people sometimes aren’t interested in many circumstances; no matter
how much young radicals yell at them, that isn’t what they want to do
right now. So you have to work with the reality, and it’s particularly
important because what we often find is that people who care about these
issues, actually don’t want to deal with what poor black people who are
interested in co-ops or what working class people who are actually
trying to develop worker-owned firms actually think and feel. We need to
learn to listen to what the people need and want, and not try to impose
on them a whole schema that they may not. This is historically
difficult stuff: how do we balance the project of raising consciousness,
advancing a vision of utopia, with the real and honest engagement in
real-world experiments. And more may be possible than we think. As I said earlier, there has
been a change in consciousness that makes this one of the most
interesting periods of American history, maybe the most interesting.
There’s a loss of belief in the corporate system, there’s a recognition
that something is fundamentally wrong, there’s a discussion beginning
around socialism amongst younger people, who recent polls show react
slightly more favorable to that formerly taboo word than to
“capitalism”. So there’s an openness to discussing things, and also to
questioning the traditional state socialist model as the only
alternative on the table. So there’s an opening to a whole different
vision of where to go forward. I think that’s where we are in the
question, so let’s not blow it; let’s see what we can develop over time.
MICHAEL ALBERT: We agree that there’s a giant opening. We agree that
we don’t want to blow it. We agree that it’s certainly the case that
lots of times people don’t want to change their circumstances
dramatically in a direction which doesn’t seem worthwhile, or which even
seems like it might even be some kind of con game. Again using the Venezuelan example, it’s frequently the case that at
workplaces down there’s an effort to introduce workers management or
workers self-management that the workers themselves resist, not because
they resist the idea of self-management per se, but because they think
it’s a scam to get them to work harder, without them really having any
more power than they do now. So I agree with you, of course, one doesn’t
impose something, but one does have to discuss it if you’re ever going
to get there. And that means discussing in a way that moves in the
direction that we want to go to: which means talking about changing the
division of labor and about the problems with markets and a real
alternative. I could be completely wrong about this, but I think that markets as
an institution, even without private ownership, are vile. They’re not
just vile; they’re one of the worst creations of humanity in its entire
history. They warp human development, warp personality, misprice
virtually everything. They skew the direction of development to have
little to nothing to do with the human well-being of most of the
population. They violate the ecology. They produce class division. We
know that central planning is also a horror. It’s a horror when it’s
imposed on a workplace like in General Motors, which is essentially
planned internally, and it’s a horror when it’s imposed on the whole
society. It seems to me that saying these things should be no more
controversial than saying we don’t want dictatorship or we don’t want
private ownership. No one would say that the fact that we need to
experiment, to learn, to listen, implies that we ought to hold in
reserve or even jettison our understanding that private ownership and
dictatorship are disastrous. Now, I agree with you, it is a big deal to articulate what the
participatory alternative is. But the discussion shouldn’t be that any
participatory alternative is too complex or demanding so we have to fall
back to markets. There is no falling back to markets. Falling back to
markets is like falling back to dictatorship. There has to be, instead, a constructive suggestion of an alternative
way of doing allocation. This idea of the possibility of stabilizing
experiments through government policy could be a positive thing, but
could also of course be an incredibly destructive thing. To the extent
that we can force the government to utilize some of its gargantuan
resources to benefit experiments that really would enhance the
well-being of the population, that’s terrific. But you’ll have to force
it because the government is in the hands of the rich and powerful.
That’s part of the process; we don’t want to do it in a way that
elevates the government as being our savior and dissolves movements. We
want to do it in a way that builds movements and builds continuing
pressure. You talk about all these various experiments and I agree. I think
setting up a co-op is good. Setting up a co-op with self-management is
better. Setting up a co-op with self-management and with balanced job
complexes is even better. Setting one up like that, and that’s in a
position to negotiate with its consumers is terrific. And if they can
get aid from public funds to stabilize and ensure survival, great. But I
don’t think that is the road all by itself to a better society: we also
have to have massive movements which are making demands both in
specific institutions, say like General Motors, and also in society as a
whole.
GAR ALPEROVITZ: That goes without saying, Michael, I totally agree
with that! That’s what I’ve saying and writing about for years. But once
you get away from the abstract that we’re talking about, these
principles, if you actually get your hands dirty and start talking to
different groups other than the gang of young people who we find easily
these ideas accessible very quickly, it’s a different game. How do we
reach ordinary Americans in my hometown of Racine, WI where the problems
are just extreme? How do we begin to understand them, and where they
are coming from, and actually work with them in a way that works? That
requires both understanding of the principles, but also being willing to
test different ideas with them: patience and humility.
Alternatives
MICHAEL ALBERT: I was in Argentina in a room with about 50 people
that were there from different occupied factories and I’d been asked to
come and speak. We started around the room and the first person who
spoke described their situations and concerns, and by the time we got to
the 7th person, and this really happened, a lot of people in
the room were crying. This person spoke and put it very eloquently and
said: I never thought I could possibly ever be saying anything like
this - he, too, was tearing up. He said that we took over the workplace,
the owners and the upper management were gone, because they didn’t want
to be a part of a workplace that they thought was going to fail. And we
took it over and made it work. But now he had to say, I’m afraid
Margaret Thatcher was right, there is no alternative. This is why they
were crying. He said: we took it over, we were so excited, we made our wages
equal. We instituted democracy. We had a workers’ council. We made our
decisions democratically, and after a period of time, all the old crap
came back. All the old alienation came back, and now it just feels the
way it used to feel. And they were all saying it, person after person
was saying it. I talked to a woman in one of those workplaces who had
been working in a glass factory, in front of an open furnace all day
long. Then they take over the factory and they go around the room and
ask who wants to do the finances and keep the books, and nobody would do
it, and she volunteered to do it. She’s just a worker, the same as
everybody else in the place, she hasn’t gone to school or anything. I
asked her “what was the hardest thing to learn?” She wouldn’t tell me. So I asked again and she didn’t want to tell me. “Was it to do the
financial books?” No. “Was it to operate the computer?” No. “Was it to
do accounting?” No. What was it? I was at a loss. She says “Well, first I
had to learn to read.” And four months later, she is doing the accounting and the
bookkeeping for this glass firm which is now functioning at a surplus,
whereas the capitalists have been running it into the ground and losing
money. But the downside was that she, as the accountant, was becoming a
member of a class of people in that factory, about 20%, who were highly
empowered and who appeared far more pivotal to the functioning of the
factory. And who, over time, were bringing back the old alienation, even
though she was just a wonderful person. So I tried to describe the idea of balanced job complexes. When they
took over, and the manager who was doing the accounting left, somebody
volunteered because not many people wanted to do it. And I said: well,
pretty soon what happened is that you had one-fifth of your workforce
doing work that’s really empowering, and after a while they’re
governing, and after a while they’re paying themselves more because they
think that they deserve more, and the rest of the people aren’t even at
the meeting where this gets decided. And they agreed with this; it helped them see that there was a reason
for this: it wasn’t human nature. Thatcher wasn’t right. It wasn’t
inevitable. They could’ve done things a little bit differently and could
have had significantly better results. But one told me: we did a lot of
that, and we still had problems. We were trying to reapportion tasks
and so on, and it still went bad. So then we talked about the market and
the pressure that it put on them to compete, and the way that pressure
slowly but surely re-introduced the old division of labor. So my
experience is somewhat different from yours: I find that it’s easy to
talk to working people about, say, balanced job complexes - I have more
trouble talking to perhaps half the young radicals nowadays, and much
more trouble talking to left academics. With the latter, it’s almost
impossible!
GAR ALPEROVITZ: I don’t think there’s a difference in the value
structure here. We may have some different experiences. I think there
are some places where people will in fact pick up on those themes and
try to develop rotations and accept the inefficiencies that they will
experience in the short run. But all of this takes a lot of energy and a
lot of time, and some people just don’t want to do it. In some places,
people will. And I think the question of experience, given the stage of
history of the real world, where we are really at, will help us
understand how to what extent we can push these developments in
different areas. I regard this as a question of testing the real world.
Not whether or not these principles about planning and markets are
correct in the abstract: these questions are testable, and we should
test them wherever we can. But I am cautious about imposing or trying to
impose a vision on people who don’t want to hear the vision. The
critical thing is whether or not the communities in which we are engaged
wish to do an experiment with and test the models that intellectuals,
and radicals, the left, and theorists, and so on come in with. And the
answer is, in many cases, no. And for reasons that are good reasons, for
instance, in some places, they are frightened to death that it will
blow up the current structure of work and they’ll lose their jobs.
People will understand what you’re talking about, but they are going to
find the solutions, the mix of principles and problems that works for
them, in their situation. And that mix is by no means obvious: by no
means is theory a reliable guide to the way this comes out in the real
world. So for instance at Isthmus: they understand the dynamics of power
and management, but they don’t want to share those responsibilities:
for them, the solution is to recognize that those are positions that
nobody wants to do, and you hire someone to do them that you can control
democratically or even fire, if you don’t like what they are doing. The
values you’re talking about, I don’t disagree with at all. What we’re
talking about is where we are in this stage of history with specific
communities, all with different skills, levels of support, income, and
training and all ultimately exposed to the markets whether they like it
or not. This is the reality where we need to move and advance these
different ideas. And to do so effectively, it seems to me to be a matter
of testing as we go, on the one hand - and projecting a larger possible
longer-term vision, on the other. I suspect that to the degree we
actually keep testing and developing in the real world, there is likely
to be convergence on several levels between many of the Parecon and the
Pluralist Commonwealth models.
What do you think? Leave a comment below.
