political economy of parecon - HELP!!

again, same fallacy i noted before. the working class are not subordinate to the professional/managerial and capitalist classes because of inherent personal ineptitude. Before the 19th century the immediate producers were skilled artisans or farmers. They possessed the technology of their industry in their heads. Capitalism uses the bargaining power of relative monopolization of means of production -- force in other words -- to strip that skill from the working class over time. That was what the fight over taylorism in the early 20th century was all about, and the capitalists' victory and their system's continued existence has meant that taylorism became common, universal practice.

Another of the typical fallacies of right-wing apologetics is the fantasyland notion of contracts as being between equals. That is not the typical situation. The typical contract is a lone worker agreeing to take a job for a company that embodies multi-millions in assets.

so oppression is something you don't worry about. the oppressed may think differently. it's about power. and our aim is to build up a working class movement with sufficient scope and strength it can take away the power of the elite classes. don't care whether you like it or not.

Quite right. They do it on purpose. In actuality, they love it like a dog loves fetching a stick for its master.

You’re reading rather more into that than it deserves. Entertain us by citing where parties being “equal” was implied.

Ha ha. What I like is irrelevant, so good idea. One problem for PARECON is that psychological predilections which inform a notion of “oppression” also prevent organisations from taking action to thrive. If PARECON is capable of more than expressing moral indignation, we’re waiting for a demonstration. Having said that, seeing as it can only count on “the oppressed”, one shouldn’t be optimistic. Indignation is about all they can expect to muster.

You can gloat if you like. Proves nothing. Just part of the bloated sense of entitlement of the elite classes, who imagine the working class like subordination

Dream on. It's more a matter of not presently seeing an alternative on the horizon of possibility. the task of organizers is to help push out those horizons of possibility, something that happens through a higher level of struggle and organization.

the role of the vision of a society based on self-managment is to help inspire and help in understanding the nature of the existing system as a system based on "might makes right."

Ha ha. We already understand it's based on "might makes right". Few mind. As a matter of interest though, what does make a thing right? (And don't for the love of Jesus suggest the extent of its suffering).

Human nature is the basis of ethical principles. Humans have a need and capacity for self-management, to develop their abilities to do this, to control their work and lives. Denial of this is what oppression is. Oppression and liberty are opposites.

An earned income is an income based on actual work effort, as measured by things like how long one works, how intensively, under what risks and stresses. This is the measure of social contribution to the creation of benefit for others because this is what one can control. One isn't responsible for one's genetic endowment, luck, or the successes of one's forebears.

When someone gains an unearned income due to power over others, that is exploitation.

Ideal justice consists in the absence of exploitation or oppression. Struggles for justice are struggles against exploitation and domination/oppression, to be able to control one's life.

that's the summation sign. take a look at:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/HSE_Summation_Sign

Actually, they were set by the central planning authority to approximate those prices set by bargaining power in a market. Abolishing the market worked out nicely for them, eh?

They certainly wouldn't. Not only is it unecessary and ridiculously ponderous (it would need to be renegotiated everytime there was a personel change), but an agreggated average of subjective 'empowerment scores' has anything to do with how much credit should be given to someone for doing things in which only their individual subjective considerations really matter. I have co-workers that love to cook or mop floors. Others don't mind paperwork. We split things up on the basis of what needs to be done at the specific time and constantly renegotiate things on the basis of a culture of mutual respect...something you can't emulate with procedures which, in fact, could very well lead people to play against one another in a calculating matter instead of engaging in the sort of geniunely respectful human interaction that can happen in workplaces, even under capitalism)

The 'balanced job complexes' are pretty stupid all-around...it reeks of academic arrogance from people who have never set foot in a real workplace. Real jobs can't be split into clear-cut groups of tasks like this. Just as in capitalist work-places, if everyone did only what their job description/job complex set out for them to do, everything would grind to a halt (there's a form of industrial action that involves doing this...either good-work or work-to-rule, I can't remember). Again, in the real world, stuff gets done by whoever is available picking up whatever slack appears whenever it needs to be done. To A&H I have only to say, "get a job, hippies"!

I would debate the claim that the worst aspects of parecon are just 'practical suggestions' since they seem to focus on them as the central mechanisms of the system when they explain/defend parecon but you do raise a good point at the begining of the paragraph and I agree with out.

Ever hear of 'market research' or 'R&D'? Markets win again!!!

I disagree. Now A n' H may be arguing that if you look at large-scale consumption patterns from previous years and base coming years' projections on them, things would work out. This is probably true assuming the sample group is large enough to be statistically significant (statistical analysis jargon). The assertion that this would work on an individual basis, however, is patently absurd. As individuals we age and change to a large extent. I don't think any of us could honestly say that we consume in the same way year after year after year or that we can predict in advance how these things will happen. The transition from buying baseball cards to condoms isn't something I could have planned in advance (an extreme example but I think you see my point). I feel that this bit is a rather large oversight on your part. But, perhaps you could clarify...does parecon try to account for each individual's consumption for the coming year or does it do this on a mass-scale using statistical analysis including demographic projections (hmmm...seems like our aging population will need more adult diapers this year even though they refuse to admit it to themselves).

Yeah, ok, I'm responding from page 2...sue me, my prole-ass was at work for a 100-hour shift and I hadn't been able to keep up. I'll try to catch up with things.

And not to be a whiner, but it seems like nobody cares to address my points at all...which makes me a sad panda.

Markets win again!!!

...market research?

MARKET RESEARCH...statistical analysis is an amazing thing.

So we centralize all of the planning that firms would do anyway under market socialism...and make it an impossibly massive undertaking instead of using proven statistical analysis techniques? Wonderful! I thought you were trying to stop the ascendence of a coordinator class...why put all of these bastards in one place and let them plan the entire economy instead of allowing individual firms to allocate consumer/market research however they see fit and have a better mechanism for holding those folks accountable for meeting actual demand trends?

Excellent point!!!

What if I don't want some asshole number-cruncher to know every single thing I consume? What if I want to engage in production and exchange outside of the socially sanctioned, bullshit parecon system?

In the Yugoslav case, we aren't dealing with 'formal self-management...worker owners who got in at the ground floor could hire wage-labor, creating a 'red bourgiousie'. With regard to Mondragon it appears to me that the less-skilled workers stood to gain from allowing skilled workers to earn more...so you should fault the working people's lack of strict, dogmatic commitment to equality along with their desire to earn more at the expense of forwarding social change. Oh well. Also, it is important to point out that both experiments, for all their faults, succeeded in many important respects.

I agree, I agree...but what about day 1 question? I'm not at all interested in implimenting a system that would fail just because it is theoretically right or just! (oh wait, you actually proposed market socialism to start out with...)

Sounds like a fantastic incentive for workers to fund training programs, etc. Mondragon did this, of course, but had a less democratic structure than I would advocate (even in the begining) and didn't operate in the context of a social and cultural revolution in how society and production are organized. We have to remember, also, that the inegalitarian direction of MCC as resulted in some cooperatives withdrawing and reorganizing along stricter cooperative principles. In an 'Economic Democracy' plan like Schweikhart proposes, we could expect to see democratic investment policy to be geared toward heading off this sort of thing if the polity saw this as important (and, I ask you, what if they don't?). Under mutualism we can expect that the more restrictive land-use rules/customs wouldn't allow for the sort of financial-manager elite that MCC became dependant on. Yugoslavia, again, isn't really an example of self-management as we discuss it.

So...cartelization? A bad thing when the capitalists do it...a good thing when the workers do it. I agree actually. I also think that the market mechanism would provide incentives for this sort of thing. The important thing is that workplace democracy/self-management were universally guaranteed.

...ok, I'm through page 3.

That's basically how I see market socialism or mutualism as working in practice.

That's basically how I see market socialism or mutualism as working in practice...except for perhaps the minimum income thing.

Well...the minimum income thing is pretty central to Schweikhart's model so my phrasing was awkward (he also talks about government make-work which could similarly be applied to a federation of communes). I meant to say that in mutualism there wouldn't be a minimum income but rather universal access to the means o' production. Still, I don't know of any mutualist thinkers who didn't believe in society's obligation to support those who can't live 'by the sweat of their brow'...this would perhaps be a good question for Kevin Carson. I wonder if he'd be keen on visiting libcom to weigh in, though I imagine he's busy considering the amount he writes (his evolving 'anarchist theory of organizational behavior' is turning out pretty nicely).

Mutualists don't venerate private ownership, but rather private 'possession' (the right to use and occupancy) which is mediated through geographically-oriented democratic institions which reflect and enforce the norms and regulations associated with land-use in the given region...up to and including levying scarcity-taxes for the use of land (and possibly preexisting productive property) that can't be freely available to all in equal amounts. So, in effect, the commune and/or federation of communes 'owns' the land but the workers retain rights to the product of their labor. This is why I call it 'joint worker/community ownership'.

As far as Guillaume's example goes, what happens if the Roman printers decide to disassociate from the Italian printers? Sure, our shared assumption is that the workers would freely, of their own self-interest (material gain and collective security) federate with workers in their industry and/or the region. But what if they choose not to? Who 'owns' the factories and machines in the respective areas? This is the sort of contingency that makes me lean toward mutualism and market socialism even while I see them as effectively operating in much the same way.

well Antieverything shows here again his/her love of capitalism. Market research is part of the way corporations look for opportunistic ways to gain profit. It's not empowering to consumers. Something that Anti seems to overlook.

Another example of how Anti has no understanding whatever of capitalism. Capitalism has an inherent tendency to break down work and find simple tasks that can be assigned to a lower paid unskilled worker to do over and over again. Look at the history of how this has developed the hierarchical, fragmented division of labor characteristic of corporate capitalism.

When capitalism first emerged, it had to accept the pre-capitaliist aritsanal method of production. It took for granted a situation where, for centuries, artisans and farmers possesed the technology of a craft in their heads, they know how to do everything from initial conception to physical production of product.

The logic of capitalism leads to what happened begining in the late 19th century. With the emergence of the big corporation, the firms had sufficient resources to analyse work into its component tasks and completely redesign work, with the conceptual and design and decision-making tasks concentrated increasingly into a hierarchy of professionals and managers. The engineering profession largely dates its begining from the late 19th century. Earlier inventions in the industrial revotlution like the use of steam engines were the work of skilled mechanics. But with the rise of the big corporation came taylorism, the separation of conceptual and design and decision-making into a hierarchy. the result was a huge growth in the new coordinator class. for example in 1903 Ford Motor co's engineers & managers were less than 3% of the employes but by 1917 they were nerely 14%.

The effect of this is to increase the degree of control over what workers do, as work as handed to people as pre-defined chunks that they are to do over and over, with the conceputal tasks and decision-making discretion removed as much as possible.

The liberation of the working class from this system could only happen if the coordinator class power is eliminated, and the professional/managerial hierarchy dissolved. This can only happen by systematically redesigning jobs so that the conceptual, design and decision making work is back in the hands of those who do the physical work.

But Anti is against this. As I said, the reality is that Anti is effectively pro-capitalist.

Nice straw man! Way to take one snippet of the pages I've written in this thread and then not really address the point I was making at all...but at least you acknowleged something I wrote, I'm flattered.

Actually I'm completely in favor of this. It is important to keep in mind that Taylorism isn't the result of of 'natural' market forces (something rather foreign to capitalism, after all) but a development of class warfare on the part of the bosses. Adding layers of management is hardly efficient...the newly deskilled workers can be paid less but the layers of management greatly increase labor costs. Instead, the purpose of Taylorism was and still is (where it isn't being rejected by capitalists as inefficient) to make workers more expendable in order to break working-class industrial organization. The bosses have proven quite willing to sacrifice efficiency to this end. The coordinator class makes sense only in this role and without centralized, top-down rule by bosses it serves no purpose and only gets in the way.

Of course, dealing with the legacy of capitalism and its impact on the development of the means o' production is something we need to take seriously. The century or so that the productive process has developed in the context of these increasing layers of managers and experts will likely, in many cases, make carrying on production from where socialist society picks up rather difficult...the coordinators are in many ways entrenched into the technologies and techniques that the workers class must take over. Still, I don't see how parecon offers anything exceptional with regard to how we can deal with this. Rather, and this is one of my main criticisms of it, it offers a model that assumes the issue can be cleared up from day one. Not only is this, theoretically, an appalling oversight but, practically, a tragic mistake.

The sort of self-managed firms I have repeatedly advocated would have every incentive to dismantle these inefficient layers of management, not only to fight for emancipation from coordinatorism but also to increase efficiency in the context of the market. They also have the leeway to deal with these problems with whatever methods and timeframe are necessary or feasible in their specific situations.

Next time, please take my ideas a bit more seriously. I understand that there's a lot of shit to wade through, however, so I'm not upset or anything!

Anti:

The sort of self-managed firms I have repeatedly advocated would have every incentive to dismantle these inefficient layers of management, not only to fight for emancipation from coordinatorism but also to increase efficiency in the context of the market. They also have the leeway to deal with these problems with whatever methods and timeframe are necessary or feasible in their specific situations.

Speaking of strawman arguments, participatory economics doesn't assume that the problem can be solved in a day. It is the traditional view that the only problem is to change ownership and create a form scheme of industrial self-management that assumes that the problem can be solved in day. Participatory economics assumes there is also the problem of the powe of the coordinator class, and that this is a more difficult problem to solve, as you point out.

you are mistaken that this is not rooted in the market. All you have to do is look at the evolution of the Mondragon cooperatives or of market self-management in Yugoslavia.

Within a market economy, those who have advantages can use them opportunistically to gain. Since they win by doing so, it encourages them to do so. People who have inherited from capitalist society a sense of entitlement, credentials, expertise derived from positions in management, engineering etc. will be entirely at an advantage in the labor market. Where a minority possess scarce and important skills, they'll be able to force competing collectives, whose survival depends on how well they do in the market, to give them special privileges of all kinds.

A market is a system of allocation of social benefit based on bargaining power. Individuals or collectives that possess advantages can and will use them oportunistically to gain a greater than average share of the social product. As some collectives succeed others will be drive out of business. They will also have the power to influence what the rules are, such as rules about not hiring people as wage slaves. A marketized system will atomize the working class into competing groups, unable to defend themselves from these dynamics.

You assume, in keeping with mainstream capitalist economists, that markets generate efficiency. This is not the case. They allocate by bargaining power. This will not in fact generate efficient outcomes.

Once again, Yugoslavia was an issue of an inequality in voting-rights within the firm...not so much of expert knowledge or skills. This example has little to do with the discussion, as I've said before--although, even with the 'red bourgiousie' I seem to remember reading that ordinary workers experienced a considerable increase in living standards.

The Mondragon example, once again, has a lot to do with the growing prominance of investment operations, socially responsible or otherwise, in upholding the firm's bottom line and, thus, the living standards of ordinary workers. It also points to an inability to produce sufficient numbers of certain types of highly in-demand workers in house, combined with the inability to keep them from going to higher-paying positions in more traditionally capitalist firms. The first issue wouldn't even be an option under market socialism...as to mutualism, that's a more involved discussion but I doubt it would be possible, at least to the same degree...also, in both systems, capital-use restrictions could easily limit inequalities within firms if a polity found it to be necessary, and an educational system with more equal access could also mitigate these issues. As to the second issue, I feel it is much less an issue in competition between cooperatives than with a capitalist firm and a cooperative. Regardless, genuinely self-managed firms have every incentive to check the bargaining power of specialized workers through in-house education and the reorganization of production. In a revolutionary culture, I would hope that workers would see this as an important priority.

Give me a break. Efficiency refers to decreasing input costs in order to achieve the same or greater output. Every firm in a market system strives to do this...it isn't like they can only do it through cost-shifting and screwing over consumers. They can, and constantly do, revolutionize productive methods in pursuit of this goal, often producing more and better goods and services. Of course, the peculiar way efficiency is measured under capitalism can lead to inefficient outcomes (taylorism is case in point) but this has less to do with 'the market' than with the power relations between bosses and workers. A firm may operate at optimal efficiency without the bosses from an abstract economic perspective but under capitalism it is better (for the bosses who get to calculate efficiency on their own terms) to operate inefficiently than to allow the expropriators to get expropriated.

Anyhow, once again you failed to engage with what I actually wrote, instead choosing to rehash the same arguments you've been making for the last 5 pages. I've heard you, I've responded...you apparently haven't read what I wrote, however.

I can't believe I'm reading this sort of thing on a "libertarian communist" forum. As various supporters of the money-prices-wages-profits system slug it out as to the best way to run it.
What is the "value of capital stocks"? How is it measured if different from today under capitalism?
And how is is to be "maintained" if not by those using it putting their labour into it?
And, presumably, a "capital assets" tax can only be levied if the "value of capital assets" is not just maintained, but increased, ie if those using it produce a surplus value. In other words, that instead of being exploited by capitalists they should engage in self-exploitation.
If you lot ever succeed in implementing your "parecon" blueprint or "mutualism" or whatever other re-arrangement of the money system is on offer (which I doubt) I'm sure there'll be others beside myself agitating to overthrow it and replace it by communism where there'll be no need for money or calculation in money or quasi-money.

A case of moral indignation. The fact that non libertarian communists aren’t banned and non-communist material not removed from the site is a clear indication of the collectivist incapacity for turning thought into action.

Of course not all anarchists have been socialists or communists. The trouble with the non-socialist and non-communist anarchists is that they conform to the "Marxist" criticism that anarchism is an extreme form of bourgeois liberalism. Which I'm afraid is the case, as is being illustrated by this thread. Personally, I'm just as opposed to non-communist anarchists as I am to other, open supporters of the market system. I don't feel anything in common with them. Of course I'm prepared to discuss with them, as with anyone else.

In reply to capricorn: I'm not an individualist, but a libertarian socialist. Moreover, what is "communism"? According to Reznick and Wolf, two Marxist economists, in their book "Class Theory and History", a "communist mode of production" is one where the producers of the surplus appropriate it. Under that definition, a participatory economy would be a form of communism. The means of production are owned in common by everyone. The surplus over consumption of workers goes into means of production and social goods, including the goods and services provided for everyone at social expense, such as education, health care, and so on. Since there is no elite class over the workers who control the surplus, and it is controlled by the producers and their families, it is "appropriated" by the workforce and their families.

In reply to Anti:

Markets in fact are not efficent. Let's consider what efficiency is. It is about getting the maximum human benefit from the minimum of human costs. But there are both costs and benefits that can't be measured in market formed prices. That's because of the pervasive externalities in a market system. in human terms, investment in wind power would be more efficient than investment in coal fired power plants. But utilities that burn coal don't have to pay for all the down wind human costs of their burning of coal. They don't have to pay for all the human costs to coal miners, or the communities where the mines are located, such as a bleak and destroyed landscape and polluted rivers.

Markets are also can't measure benefit or want-satisfaction provided but only strength of purchasing power. But if A and B differ greatly in income, the willingness to spend a given amount of money on something doesn't indicate the same level of desire for the good or service in question. Markets would be a one person, one vote system of allocation only if everyone's rate of compensation were the same.

One of the problems with Schweickart's scheme is that he attributes the grow or die imperative of capitalism solely to the desire for private wealth accumulation. But this is not the case. It is driven by a system of competing firms. They must expand their capital to gain greater resources for the competitive war with their rivals.

Schweickart's system, however, allows means of production to be bought on a market. This means that individuals could accumulate some money and acquire means of production of their own. so people can in fact start their own private businesses in his scheme. To prevent this from rebuilding capitalism, Schweickart has to rely on the state.

One way in which the social investment process would be completely circumvented would be for firms to not pay their surplus as distributed income to worker-members but to reinvest in means of production to enhance their power in the market. In fact market competition would tend to force them to do just this. Groups could also lend their savings to others -- and we could see how a private banking system could emerge from this. Firms losing out in the competitive war might band together in a politial alliance to get the capital tax reduced, to enable them to keep their profits and expand further. Profits are a weapon in a competitive war. Thus any social control over means of production diminishes.

Sam, there are of course Marxists and Marxists, 57 varieties of them probably. But i can see why you have chosen Resnick and Wolff. They put forward virtually the same theory as you but call it "communism" and talk about "communist" markets, "communist" value, surplus value, price and profit. I can imagine old man Marx turning in his grave. But of course what communism is doesn't depend on how Marx may or may not have defined it, if only because the idea existed before Marx. Logically, communism must mean a communist society ,i.e where all the social means of production are owned in common by all the members of society. Under this circumstance what is produced also belongs in common, and the problem is not to sell it to the members of society (since buying and selling is essentially an exchange of ownership titles, but with communism what is produced is already commonly owned and how can you sell to yourself something you already own?) but how to share it out, how to distribute it or make it available. Various methods are imaginable but, given that we can now produce enough, even plenty, for all, I'd favour providing basic services (housing, heating, electricity, water, health care, transport, telephone, internet, etc) free and letting people take food, clothes, etc free from the common stores or distribution centres without having to hand over money or consumption vouchers or whatever. This is a question of organising a supply system to respond to likely demand, as shown by what people actually use and take. I don't see the need for a complicated accounting system such as proposed by the Pareconers (and by Resnick and Wolff). Of course records would have to be kept but in physical quantities of actual materials needed and used, not with some general unit of "value" which seeks to reduce differences of quality to a mere difference of some quantity.
"From each according to ability, to each according to needs". Why not?I suppose you call yourself a socialist rather than a communist because you favour "from each according to their ability, to each according to their work" but this is what is supposed to happen under capitalism (but doesn't) and is based on a dubious distinction (stemming from Lenin I think) between socialism and communism which, logically and historically, ought to mean the same thing.

I'm not Sam. and remuneration for work effort is not the "supposed" principle of remuneration under mainstream capitalist economic theory. The supposed principle of remunderation is that each "factor owner" is to receive the marginal productivity of their "factor". But this is defined in terms of market value of the product, not work effort. And in any case the theory is false. Workers' wages do not automatically rise with their productivity. The actual way that remuneration is determined is by power, based on various structural advantages that augment bargaining power or disadvantages that diminish it.

From the fact that the means of production are owned in common by everyone, it does not follow that all the products should be owned in common by everyone. That would be a violation of self-management. Self-management means you control the decisions that affect you, and in cooperation with others in regard to decisions that affect some social collectivity your are a part of. But how you take your share of the social product in private consumption goods and what you do with your private consumption goods is no one else's business (unless you use them somehow to harm others). By the logic of your position, the community would own your clothes. Even if shirts are given away, that's a change in ownership.

Allowing a new gaggle of parasites to live off our labor furthers our freedom how?

have you read Reznick and Wolf? They're Marxists, not advocates of participatory economics.

Sindycat, of course I've read Resnick and Wolff, otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned them for fear of being caught bluffing. But you should re-read the book and you'll see that the similarity between their analysis and yours. They declare (page 38) that the market is not necessarily incompatible with "communism". They speak (page 60) of "communist" wages, surplus value. prices, profits and commodities. This is because, like you, they define an exploiting class by who controls the surplus produced by the immediate producers and so attempt to argue that, if this surplus is controlled by them as for instance in a producers' cooperative or (according to them) the old collective farms in the USSR there is no exploitation even if the surplus has to be sold on a market to be realised, in fact even if the whole product has to be sold for them to get the wherewithal to pay themselves wages. This is not real communism but so-called "market socialism".
As to your other point:

this is a bit of a hoary old objection to communism, isn't it? Technically, everything that is produced in communism will be owned in common as soon as it is produced, but will then be made available for people to take and use. As soon as someone takes a shirt or a toothbrush from the common store it will be theirs to use. In fact, I think that with communism the whole concept of property (a legal concept in the end) will be replaced by that of use. A complete transformation of values such as your scheme ignores. You seem to want to take people as they are supposed to be now (lazy and so needing a material incentive to work and greedy and so needing to have their consumption restricted) and construct a "fair" system on that basis. Because these are the assumptions of bourgeois economists you end with a sanitized (and boring) version of what exists today. Your trouble is that you are not "utopian" enough!

I never said I agreed with Reznick and Wolf. In fact I don't agree with how they analyze class and many other things. They're Marxists, I'm not. I've argued repeteadly against markets. If R & W find markets to be acceptable, then i disagree with them. I'm not a "market socialist."

I don't "define an exploiting class by who controls the surplus produced by the immediate producers." I said that's how they define it. But, as I said, I'm not a Marxist and don't agree with their Marxist theory of exploitation. For one thing, R & W advocate a classicl Marxist two-class view of capitalism, which follows from the labor theory of value. I do not accept that theory. I would define exploitation as receipt of an unearned income in virtue of power over others. Now, class or labor exploition occurs when there is a class or classes that dominate the working class and receive an unearned income in virtue of this. An income is unearned if it's not based on work effort in social production. The high salaries of the coordinator class -- managers and top professionals -- occurs due to the relative power they have and is out of proportion to their effort in social production and is thus a participation in exploitation. Now you'll notice that in defining exploitation here I made no use of the concept of a "surplus."

In regard to your blather about personal possessions, I'd point out that a right of use is a property right. That's what a property system is, a package of enforceable rights to use something.

You're simply mistaken when you say i assume people as they are now. People as they are now will not overthrow capitalism. This presupposes the development of a different sort of consciousness within the working class majority, an increase in their level of solidarity, organization and self-confidence. The values that people will develop and exhibit in practice depend on the social structures or framework in which they act and live. Because a participatory economy isn't a market economy, but is highly egalitarian, it encourages the development of solidarity and willingness to work for the social benefit.

Your "everything for free" scheme, which will in fact never be created, would simply encourage individualism and greed. That's because aggressive antisocial behavior would win in that framework. They'd take more things from the stores for example.

There’s a well rehearsed reason and a new one to try. The well rehearsed one starts with the fact that “ability” and “needs” only have meaning as socially mediated criteria. In that context, distribution is already performed according to these principles, but with a different value-system to the one communists would ideally prefer. It’s an empty position that attempts to sell us what we’ve already got.

The new one puts “From each…” parallel to the Benthamite “The greatest good to the greatest number” as ideological golden rules. The goals are fallacious, because they attempt to maximise for two variables at the same time. Von Neumann and Morgenstern proved that this was impossible for economic systems in 1947.

Our values are perfectly adequate. You think laziness and greed will end the species? On the contrary, its all that keeps it going.