Criticism of the idea of participatory economics, or parecon, from the perspective of a worker. Despite its theoreticians' grand plans, we resist work now and we would continue to do so under parecon, Steven argues. Michael Albert subsequently responds.
A worker's critique of parecon
Full communism… because Michael Albert can't monitor every worker all the time
Introduction
I have read a lot of discussions about parecon - a proposed economic model for a non-capitalist society. I have even taken part in one detailed debate here.
There is a lot of theoretical discussion about the nature of class, complimentary holism, some stuff about the Russian revolution, planning and so on. But I have never seen anything written about it from the point from the actual perspective of workers. And as members of the working class ourselves this should be the most important perspective from which we analyse things, so that's what I plan to do.
I have been meaning to write this article for a while and this recent discussion in our forums reminded me to actually get round to it.
Fair wages?
The four main planks of parecon are: 1
1. Workers and consumers self managed councils
2. Balanced job complexes
3. Remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor
4. Participatory planning
The most problematic of these, to communists or anarchists at least, is point 3: often summarised as "reward for effort and sacrifice". It is controversial because the central plank of the communist programme has long been the abolition of wage labour.2
So parecon does away with this, and instead of abolishing wage labour proposes a "fair" way of allocating wages. I totally disagree with this on political and logical grounds, and so this is the area I will examine.
This point has been argued on a theoretical level many times already, including in the debate I linked to above. So instead of criticising it on a political basis I will instead look at what that would mean from the perspective of workers in a parecon society. I will base my statements on how we respond to work as workers in the real world now.
So, what does rewarding effort and sacrifice mean? Basically "that if a person works longer or harder, or if a person undertakes tasks that are generally considered to be less desirable then they should be entitled to more reward."3
This raises a major problem, which pareconites seem to just brush over. Namely, this is how is effort and sacrifice measured?
This may seem like a minor point, however it is absolutely essential for the functioning of the system.
Parecon advocates attempt to address this by peer-effort ratings, everyone filling out a form of some kind on their workmates, rating how much effort people have put in despite their natural talents or disabilities.
However, this is an idea which has been devised from above, much like some kind of anti-capitalist management consultants. Their impact on the ground for workers, and workers' responses do not seem to have been considered.
Now if we look at capitalist society as it is, we see there is a central contradiction: employers want workers to carry out as much work as possible, for as little reward as possible. Workers on the other hand want to do as little as possible, for as much as possible. It is from this basic contradiction that class struggle arises.
If a new economic system retains wages, there will still be this fundamental contradiction. In the USSR, for example, instead of a mix of private and state employers in most countries, there was just one employer, the state. However the contradiction was the same.
So, what would I do if I was a worker under parecon? It would still be in my interests to perform as little work as possible and get as much money as possible. Although the way to get more would be to appear to be putting in more effort, and sacrificing more.
So some ways I would do this would be the way I and other workers do this now, and some of them would have to be altered to the new conditions.
Collective resistance
As for the peer rating of effort: even in my current workplace, which doesn't have a particularly high level of workers' solidarity, if management introduced such a scheme we would just get together and decide collectively to all rate each other as highly as possible. That way we would all gain.
And as for sacrifice, we could also collectively decide to do a minimal number of hours each day, and yet rate each other as having worked ten-hour days. (At several previous jobs colleagues and I have covered for each other by punching in for each other alternately, as I've written about here.)
Alternatively, if instead of peer rating there was some external assessor (which would seem to contradict the supposed egalitarianism of parecon), we would just put on a show whenever the assessor was there, as workers do currently when a foreman is about.4
Bear in mind that this is what occurs in workplaces in the UK today, where workers' solidarity has been broken up significantly. Parecon can only exist in a world where there has been a proletarian revolution, where workers have fought together on barricades and some will have died for each other. Especially under those sort of circumstances it would be unthinkable for people to go back to work and start spying and grassing on each other about people not pulling their weight or getting in late. Even now despite competitive workplaces and the risk of sacking (which presumably won't exist under parecon) workers often cover for each other and grasses are ostracised.
Additionally, if effort and sacrifice is what is rewarded, then if your team comes up with some new equipment or new processes which make the work easier, then you would have to do keep them secret, in order not to have your pay reduced. And of course this would be highly detrimental to society as a whole - as a rational economy would be based on trying to minimise the amount of work and effort which would have to be done.
Individual resistance
Apart from those sort of collective measures, other workers and I would also engage in individual ways of increasing our earnings and decreasing our workload.
Now, effort and sacrifice couldn't just be applied universally, as people have different abilities. Women who are pregnant, workers who might be smaller or weaker than others, people who have disabilities, or who are temporarily ill or injured might have to do putting more effort and time to have the same kind of output as other workers.
Not to mention that people have completely different sets of abilities anyway. Some may be quicker with numbers than others, for example, others may have quicker hands.
And aside from abilities, people have different preferences. For some working in an office all day would be unbearable, however for others manual labour would be much more onerous.
So if individuals' effort has to be assessed, it would have to be done so on the basis of their pre-existing abilities and preferences. Therefore I would just lie about mine. I would just say I had depression or whatever so even turning up for work in the first place would be a huge effort on my part, let alone actually doing anything when I'm there. And writing stuff up? I'm not very good at that, I'm dyslexic. And lifting? I'm very weak, and I have a bad back. Working long hours? I get migraines. Working indoors? I'm claustrophobic. Working outdoors? You guessed it, agoraphobic…
And of course this wouldn't just be me, these practices would be widespread. Far more widespread even than they are today, because under parecon there would not be the same sanctions as there are today, principally unemployment (or jail in the case of the more state capitalist economies like North Korea).
If anyone thinks I am over estimating this they would do well to read these accounts of how widespread shirking effectively destroyed East Germany and wore down the Soviet Union.
Conclusion
I believe the problems of parecon are shared by many politicos who have grand visions about the future who, like sci-fi nerds, like to imagine what a different world could look like.
2012 parecon convention
But like many politicos their mistake is rooted in their ideas being based on how better to manage capital. As communists we do not believe that capital can be managed in the interests of workers.5 Therefore our politics and our future vision of the world have to be based always in our everyday life and our experience as workers.
For if a revolution doesn't abolish "work" as a distinct activity separate from the rest of life, then workers will always fight against it. 6
And that being the case the only way to enforce effective labour discipline would be to recreate capitalism with its reserve army of unemployed workers and the threat of unemployment and destitution.
So in short if we want something workable our choice is one of full communism, or none at all.
- 1 According to Parecon Today by Michael Albert, the leading proponent of parecon.
- 2 Two major examples of this being the revolutionary union Industrial Workers of the World preamble which demands "the abolition of the wage system", and Karl Marx in Value, prices and profit stating: "take off your banners the reactionary slogan a fair days pay for a fair days work and instead inscribe upon your banner the revolutionary watchword; the abolition of the wages system".
- 3 The project for a participatory society's vision .
- 4 The picture, above, is a tongue-in-cheek clip from 1960s Italian film The working class goes to heaven, with Michael Albert's face crudely cut and pasted onto the body of the piece rate monitor.
- 5 I believe that reading the excellent Aufheben series What was USSR? is also essential reading, and has important parallels with parecon in this respect.
- 6 I won't go into detail about what this means as I think it is explained better in other detailed articles, like this one by the Anarchist Federation. But as evidence that it is not an unachievable pipedream I will quickly point out that many pre-capitalist societies did not have a word for "work", or in some which did it was the same word as "play". And just about every type of "work" currently done under capitalism, is also done by workers as leisure. For example, cleaning, caring for children, caring for the sick, playing music, making films, growing food, etc.
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Albert replies to Libcom criticisms
A response by Michael Albert to A workers' critique of parecon
Recently an essay criticizing participatory economics was brought to my attention, via IOPS. "A workers' critique of parecon" appears on the site libcom, at http://libcom.org/blog/workers-critique-parecon-11042012 I quote the piece extensively as I reply.
I should perhaps also note my motivation. While there is nothing in the essay that I and others haven't addressed often before, still, I wanted to respect the effort by addressing the author's comments directly. More, the concerns in the essay keep coming up, seemingly without reaction to each round of replies - so I can only reply yet again. Hopefully someone will put this essay on the libcom site, as well as its appearing here.
The author, Steven Johns is mostly concerned about parecon's remunerative norm - which, as he rightly notes, is that we should, in a good society, receive income in accord with how long we work, how hard we work, and the onerousness of the conditions under which we work, as long as we are doing socially valued labor.
Johns prefers, though it is never made very explicit, much less seriously explored in his piece, that we instead work to our ability, and receive to our need, leaving society no need to have remunerative norms other than personal preferences. My most recent round of addressing views like these - which were put forth considerably more extensively than here - can be found in another article: "Querying Young Chomsky," at http://www.zcommunications.org/querying-young-chomsky-by-michael-albert If concerns over parecon's remunerative norms and methods concern you, that might be a good additional "exchange" to view for further exploration, as the young Chomsky was a very strong advocate of the "from each, to each" position.
However, for here, as Johns accurately summarizes: "The four main planks of parecon are: Workers and consumers self managed councils, Balanced job complexes, Remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, and Participatory planning."
Johns adds that he finds the third of these "planks" - remunerating duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor - "most problematic," "because the central plank of the communist programme has long been the abolition of wage labour." I hope readers are already a bit alarmed at the formulation that a claim is "most problematic" because it conflicts with another claim that the critic takes as "central." Johns, however, usefully explains further: "parecon … instead of abolishing wage labour proposes a "fair" way of allocating wages."
Whether parecon is wise to do this, we address below. Interestingly, Johns puts the word "fair" in quotes, but never in the essay addresses whether the parecon norm strikes him as anything other than "fair," equitable, etc. That isn't the issue for Johns. The issue for him is instead his concern that having any way of allocating income at all, other than individual's personal preferences deciding how much they work, and what they get, is problematic.
First, Johns is saying, as best I can tell, that to have a fair - and I prefer the word equitable - way of allocating income is already, transparently (he offers no argument, only the statement) to preserve "wage labor." This may be horribly confused depending on Johns precise meaning.
Wage labor, sometimes called wage slavery, is a term most often meant to cover the employment and payment of workers by owners via a system of workers selling their ability to do work for some period of time to owners who in turn extract as much actual work as they can coerce from the workers' time they have bought control over, all for maximizing owners' profits. Okay, Johns says he rejects that. Well, parecon advocates too say, we reject that. Are parecon advocates missing something that means that, no, they really are trying to preserve "wage labor," meant this way? That seems to me to perhaps be what Johns is implying, and certainly something that others have at times asserted.
In fact, however, having a way of allocating income, and thus a guiding norm for income allocation, and a means of accomplishing that norm, whether implicit or explicit, is simply unavoidable. It will exist in every society and every economy that will ever exist because in all such societies people will get a share of the social output. Of course the norms and structures for arriving at how much claim on social product different people have, can be fair, worthy, and viable, or the norms and structures can be skewed to benefit some at the expense of others, or they can even be completely unworkable.
Parecon believes its norm and methods offer a fair, worthy, viable option. Johns' mistake, assuming he believes that parecon's norm means it is preserving "wage labor" as this term is used by critics of capitalism, is to think that the mere fact that people get income - wages - means the system has wage labor, or wage slavery, as it exists under capitalism, or even just waged labor that is exploitative and alienating, as in any class divided system.
In this Johns goes beyond merely being wrong. It is quite like if someone argued that if we have production, then we have capitalism. Or if we have decision making, then we have authoritarianism. Or if we have procreation, then we have sexism. This way of arguing is depressingly widespread, but it mistakes something that we must have but which can be done either equitably or not - in our case, income allocation - for something that is both inessential and also vile, in this case owners employing what are called wage laborers or wage slaves.
The only reply I can imagine from Johns that would reveal that he does not have this particular confusion would be for him to say, wait, I don't mean parecon preserves wage slavery. Nor do I mean parecon preserves wage labor meaning capitalist labor. Nor do I even mean it preserves wage labor meaning exploitative or alienated labor - all simply because it has an allocative norm and methods for income determination. That would be silly. I just mean that parecon preserves workers getting income that is related to their work, and that is what I reject.
Well, okay, if that is what Johns means, then he is right that parecon does include that. And he would also be right if he said that it is instead possible to propose that people to get income for reasons having literally no connection to what they do in the economy, for example, they could get what they need and provide in accord with their ability. For example, the "Querying Young Chomsky" essay responds to the young Chomsky arguing just that, and a full reply to his formulation is rendered.) But a desire to disconnect income from economic activity, if it is Johns' view, isn't viable, nor I think, is it even equitable. Nor is it argued consistently, by Johns, at any rate.
Johns says he wants to look at the allocation norm from the "perspective of workers in a parecon society." Okay, that is exactly how its authors approached developing parecon. Workers options, interests, motives, conditions, etc., were always highlighted. Johns then adds, however, that he "will base [his] statements on how [he and others] respond to work as workers in the real world now." This is worrisome, to put it mildly, depending on Johns' precise meaning.
For example, to examine "workers in the real world now," as compared to examine the "perspective of workers in a parecon society" seems quite compatible, regrettably, with the confusion I mentioned above. It suggests that we can look at how wage laborers under capitalism act, and we can then predict by transferring the behavior, how workers under parecon would act, because we take as a given that workers under parecon are wage laborers quite like those under capitalism. But of course this is not actually making a case at all about parecon but is instead, making a case about wage labor as we know it now, and simply stating it applies, as well, to parecon. In other words, if this is what Johns does, it is simply continuing a horribly flawed assertion that if a system has income based on some aspect of what we do in the economy, then that system has workers with interests, motives, and behaviors like those of workers operating in capitalism. Is this what Johns does? We will see below. But to prepare, because it is quite important to understand this way of arguing in general since it appears so often in discussions of future possibilities, let's say a bit more about the approach per se.
Suppose someone said they were going to look at the merits of a proposal for real and full democracy and evaluate it by looking at how people operate in dictatorships or even in contemporary contexts like the U.S., say, and by assuming they will act the same in the new system. Or suppose someone said they were going to look at a feminist proposal for arrangements between men, women, adults, and children, and evaluate it by how men respond to women, or even how women relate to men, pr adults and children, in the current patriarchal world, including assuming the behavior would persist unchanged. There is nothing necessarily wrong with paying attention to how people act now, unless, of course, this means that one is going to assume that contemporary behavior will persist even in changed institutional settings. It is hard to imagine a libertarian communist thinking such a thing, or evaluating in such a way - given that it would obliterate prospects for any positive claims and hopes at all.
Johns asks, "so, what does rewarding effort and sacrifice mean?" And he quotes parecon literature, "that if a person works longer or harder, or if a person undertakes tasks that are generally considered to be less desirable then they should be entitled to more reward." Indeed, supposing the work is socially valued, that is indeed what the norm means.
Johns continues, "This raises a major problem, which pareconites seem to just brush over. Namely, how is effort and sacrifice measured?"
Okay, this is fair enough to evaluate, of course, and if an evaluation looks closely at the morality and institutional structures and their implications for workers conditions and actions, it would step away from the more abstract tout court rejection mentioned above - but I don't understand why Johns says advocates of parecon "brush over" this. It is dealt with, explicitly, in every long presentation, and in many short ones too.
Briefly, duration is, time spent. There is nothing complex about measuring that. Intensity is most easily viewed/measured by workmates, again by looking, working with, etc., but output can certainly also be used as an indicator. Is Joe working like the rest of us, or is Joe taking extra long and frequent breaks and otherwise not exerting? Is Sally, working much harder. with agreement from people that it is okay to do so, taking up more than an average share of responsibility for output?
Whether the effort anyone puts in is socially valuable depends on it being in pursuit of outputs that are sought by society, on the one hand, and whether it is using assets effectively, on the other hand. I can't dig holes in my yard, even incredibly energetically, and even hour after hour, and even while someone is throwing stones at me making it very onerous, and claim any income for it. much less high income. No one wants the product, a hole in the ground. I also can't do some job where my abilities for the work are so limited that my doing it is a misuse of the resources, equipment, etc. - so that the time spent is not socially valued, again, but simply wasteful.
Onerousness, finally, is measured by workmates assessing job roles, again - but is actually not very important in a parecon, as compared to in capitalist economy, because a parecon also has what are called balanced job complexes, which means workers have comparably empowering overall situations, which tends to pretty much equalize onerousness, as well. But the bottom line is, who measures these things, who decides issues, who agendizes and acts regarding the workplace, is always the same, in a parecon - the workers self managing that workplace.
Johns says, "Parecon advocates attempt to address this by peer-effort ratings, everyone filling out a form of some kind on their workmates, rating how much effort people have put in despite their natural talents or disabilities."
Well, yes, parecon advocates offer this is one tortured possibility, in some presentations. In real life, however, we point out that there are many possibilities, including, as noted above, that we can see output, and if one claims to be working long and hard, but is generating very little, either the person is doing work they shouldn't be doing (because they are unable to do it well enough for their effort to be socially valuable) or they are lying or delusional about duration or intensity. Actually, though, the point of the "effort ratings" is that duration and intensity are actually quite easy to simply see, for the most part. A manager of huge numbers of folks can be pretty easily fooled, and workers being bossed around will reasonably want to do so. Workmates cannot be easily fooled, however, and in a parecon, in any case, overwhelmingly workers will not want to fool their workmates, in any case.
As but one example, suppose 100 of us work in a plant. It is part of parecon, has targets for production that fit the self managed participatory plan. We are all workers, there is no boss. Suppose the plan produces the output target as envisioned. The plant is then entitled to 100 times the average income in society. Now how is the income allotted among workers inside the plant? Well, if the plant workforce agreed to requests from 10 workers to work half time, say, and to some other workers to work double hard, or double time, or whatever - all to arrive at the planned output, then incomes would vary due to those differences. If not, incomes would be average for all. If you are convinced workers in a self managing plant would be trying to rip off one another, you might well feel that it could get pretty chaotic. But if not, then not. If the workers wanted to rip off the rest of society, they could all together claim to have worked way more than they did - or harder, which amounts to the same thing. The trouble is, in that case, why wasn't output higher? There is no extra income to disperse if the work did not generate socially valuable output.
Then Johns says, "however, this is an idea which has been devised from above, much like some kind of anti-capitalist management consultants. Their impact on the ground for workers, and workers' responses do not seem to have been considered."
This seems really odd to me. Parecon is the product of "anti capitalist management consultants"? It would be awfully hard to explain, in that case, how it is that parecon is arguably the only serious economic model out there that emphasizes eliminating the class division between managers - and other coordinator class members monopolizing empowering work - and workers who are left with only subordinate and disempowering work. Without going astray, this is what balanced job complexes, another aspect of parecon, are all about. It is hard to think of an economic proposal that anyone could offer that would be more contrary to "management consultant" mindset.
Is the impact on workers of this remunerative norm, in in the parecon institutional context, considered. Of course it is - that is the point. The impact is workers do not compete with one another, they have mutually shared interests, they get equitable conditions and claims on social output, they exist without having to repress or resist others with different interests, and so on.
When Johns says "workers responses don't seem to be considered," I suspect we are back to the basic confusion. In full descriptions of parecon, and in discussions and debates about it, talks, debates, presentations, videos, the responses of workers within parecon are not only considered, they are central. Indeed, in talks one technique is to have whole audiences imagine they are a workplace, and to then explore their inclinations and motives with different institutional choices. The whole point of parecon is conceiving institutions that give to parecon's workers roles and responsibilities that not only facilitate their solidarity with one another and self management, their equity and diversity, but that by their implications for workers interests and actions literally further these values. That is the heart of parecon. So why does Johns say workers responses are not considered? The only answer I can think of, is, (a) he hasn't actually looked at serious presentations of parecon, or (b) he assumes and believes it utterly obvious that workers in parecon will behave like workers do in capitalism so since parecon's advocates don't say that, we must not have looked at all.
Johns then says, "Now if we look at capitalist society as it is, we see there is a central contradiction: employers want workers to carry out as much work as possible, for as little reward as possible. Workers on the other hand want to do as little as possible, for as much as possible. It is from this basic contradiction that class struggle arises."
It is from this basic contradiction that many aspects of class struggle in capitalism, arise, yes.
Johns adds, "If a new economic system retains wages, there will still be this fundamental contradiction."
This, I hope by this time you will agree, is mere assertion, not argument, and is also seriously wrong.
By wages in this sentence what Johns has to mean is claims on social output. That is the real meaning of wages, per se. If I have more wages, I have more claim. If I have less wages, I have less claim. Now what norms are utilized to determine how much claim we each have is very very important, of course. If the norms pit one class against another, so that one does better if the other does worse, then, yes, there is an important contradiction which will affect "workers' responses." Of course. But what if that is not the case? What if there are no opposed classes, because there is classlessness? Then Johns having more claim on social output for reasons everyone agrees are just and fair, and I having less claim on social output also for reasons that we all agree are just and fair, does not have to mean there is a fundamental contradiction. We have to look to see. Is Johns getting more at my expense? Or at anyone's expense? Or is Johns getting his claims by the same standard that I am, a standard that we both agree is completely just. Well, parecon argues that if Johns has more claim because he agrees to work longer, or harder, or at worse conditions, and his workmates agree on the option, and if the product is socially beneficial, then that is just. And parecon argues if I get less income because I opt for more leisure, or more leisurely work, that too is just.
Johns says, "in the USSR, for example, instead of a mix of private and state employers in most countries, there was just one employer, the state. However the contradiction was the same."
This is quite simplistic but even if it were the whole story for these countries, it still wouldn't have the implication that Johns gives it. He is trying to say, look, here is a case of workers getting wages, and we know there was a class conflict as well, and - now the leap - the former must be the cause of the latter. Of course the state isn't an individual in the old USSR, any more than in the U.S. Regarding economics, it was instead a political vehicle that, regarding the economy, was overwhelmingly serving ruling class interests. In the U.S. that is a state serving capitalists. In the USSR, that was a state serving what I call the coordinator class - economic actors who had a monopoly on empowering work. Notice, also, that the norm in the USSR was to remunerate power, and the class division guaranteed the coordinator class had way more power than the working class. But the point is, you can't extrapolate workers' behaviors from a condition of class rule to a condition of classlessness.
Trying to give some credibility to the transfer of motives, Johns says, "So, what would I do if I was a worker under parecon?" This is fair enough to ask. But in Johns answer, the confusion, or obfuscation - and I will assume the former but I also have to admit I am beginning to wonder if it isn't the latter - is truly remarkable.
Johns talks very briefly about two grotesque systems - capitalism and coordinatorism - which parecon's advocates all reject and which parecon deals with at length as what is to be transcended, and he then asks, what would a worker do under parecon, clearly thinking his examples of workers resisting class rule in the U.S. and USSR also imply people's likely behavior in the absence of classes. Johns says, "it would still be in my interests to perform as little work as possible and get as much money as possible. Although the way to get more would be to appear to be putting in more effort, and sacrificing more."
There is an element of truth here. It is true, for example, that in a parecon, a cheat, who in a context of mutual aid and solidarity, and of equitable distribution, nonetheless wants more than the system would legitimately provide him or her, would have, as a route to getting the extra he or she desires, three paths. The person could work longer or harder. The person could steal the extra. Or the person could try to lie about putting in more time, or intensity, or working at worse conditions - than was the case.
What assuming the last will happen utterly ignores, however, is precisely to look at the situation of workers in parecon - not in class divided prior economies, and at the interests and preferences their situation generates. When self managing their own labor, when in just conditions, when having no ruling class above, about as few people will be inclined to try to rip off society much less their workmates as are now inclined to steal ice cream cones from children. Only the somewhat or seriously pathological would see this as a good path to extra income. Okay, I quite agree that its requiring a quite perverse personality doesn't rule out everyone from trying. But Johns also ignores just how hard it would be to cheat. Could you lie, successfully, to the person who works with you, about how long your worked, or how intensely - remembering that of course not only are your actions directly visible, but also your product? And more, even if you could convince people that you worked 60 hours a week, instead of the average of thirty, let's say - when you really didn't - if your labor generated only the thirty hours of output then you are either lying, or you are, in the job you are working at, only fifty percent as productive as the average - and you would need to get new work you could do more effectively because your work was so flawed half the time you spent doing it was not socially valuable. Maybe you can convince everyone that you lack size or speed, or whatever, due to some ailment - and maybe you can somehow get them to think you are at work the sixty hours when you really are not - and so on - and get them to okay your working so long. I hope you see how silly this gets. Even so, the gains would be incredibly modest, given what a jerk you have to be, not to mention how much you would risk being considered one, and then losing your gains, too.
Johns idea that individuals would be inclined to even try to cheat, in large numbers, in equitable, collectively self managed, classless settings, is horribly reactionary, honestly, regarding human dispositions. But, even if we set that aside, it is virtually impossible to pull off such fraud in anything more than very modest degree. In fact, even my other option for enriching myself unjustly, is very very hard to benefit from. Suppose I am a master thief - and I somehow steal lots of wealth. It would have to be objects, not money, at least in a developed parecon - because money isn't free floating - but whatever it was, where would I enjoy the fruits of my thefts? Legitimate income differentials in a parecon are due to working longer, harder, or at worse conditions in ways that generate socially valued outputs, consistent with one's workmates agendas, as well. It would be quite hard, over an extended period, to earn even twice the average income. Five times would be utterly impossible. A master thief would have to enjoy the great bounty of his or her scrupulous skills in his or her own basement, because in public such wealth would be a dead give away that one was, in fact, a master thief or cheat. My comments, here, by the way, and throughout this essay, have been made in more depth and with very graphic examples, and including dealing with more interesting variants, like, say, black market production, many many times. One wonders why a serious critic would ignore all that, acting as though the parecon proposals have no accompanying exploration of such issues.
Johns moves on to another possibility. He says, "even in my current workplace, which doesn't have a particularly high level of workers' solidarity, if management introduced such a scheme we would just get together and decide collectively to all rate each other as highly as possible. That way we would all gain."
Well, the confusion mentioned earlier is now absolutely in evidence. First, I would join them, if I worked there. But second, in a parecon, there is no separate management, nor owners, nor anyone else above the workforce. I would not only not join some anti social workmate who was trying to perpetrate fraud, I would try to break through the backward thinking of such a person, and, if I couldn't do that, well, I would argue against his or her excessive remuneration. But what if we all act together? What if the whole workforce tries to convince society we worked a whole lot more than we did, because we all together decide to conspire to get more income for the whole workforce in the plant that we can all share, even though we all agree that the amount we would get without cheating is equitable and treats us exactly like everyone else in the economy. We just want more, dammit and we are going to try to lie to get it. Well, it still would not work. Because the work that gets remunerated has to be socially desirable. If Johns and I worked in some kind of plant, and we along with all our workmates said we worked twice as hard and twice as long as average - either our plant has that much additional output - in that case four times as much - or we lied, or all that extra time and effort was worthless - not socially desirable, and not worthy of remuneration.
Johns says, revealing not only a pretty jaundiced view of working people - that parecon's workers would behave, and not just some of them, but essentially the whole workforce, as he says he would, and this even in an equitable economy, even with self management, even without class rule, etc. He says: "And as for sacrifice, we could also collectively decide to do a minimal number of hours each day, and yet rate each other as having worked ten-hour days." Even supposing whole workforces were eager to try and trick not bosses, not owners, not a domineering coordinator class, but other workers just like themselves, into giving them unfair allotments, again it just wouldn't work. The output, as noted above, denies the claim. We can't work 15 hours a week, as a group, and claim to have worked 30, because we don't have thirty hours output.
Johns says, "Parecon can only exist in a world where there has been a proletarian revolution, where workers have fought together on barricades and some will have died for each other."
In other words, parecon is contrary to the interests of elites who maintain current systems and can be won only in a likely long and certainly difficult struggle. Well, I agree, of course. As to what precisely it will take to win, and what path or paths will lead to implementing participatory economies, we just don't know, of course - but a long hard struggle, sure.
Johns adds that, "Especially under those sort of circumstances it would be unthinkable for people to go back to work and start spying and grassing on each other about people not pulling their weight or getting in late."
Seriously? After struggling for a new, equitable, self managing, classless economy, what Johns thinks is that in it, to implement equitable remuneration, means spying on one another, etc. Well, I admit that this is a point various parecon advocates do wonder about. To what extent, in a parecon, with equitable remuneration, would there be tight, or very loose accounting of duration, intensity, and onerousness, and how precisely would workers implement their arrangements? For the latter, however they choose. That is what self management means. For the former, however, I think, for example, that whatever roads lead to its implementation, in a parecon, at least after it has operated for a time, most folks will decide that fraud is a relatively small issue and the need for close attention to claims about duration and intensity is relatively slight, and even the number of levels of remuneration that ought to exist is quite low - as in, say, way over average (meaning perhaps 20% over), over average (meaning 10% over), average, under average (meaning 10% below), and way under average (meaning 20% below). Others might think the range of incomes folks should be entitled to earn should be wider and the precision of them more accurate. Different workplaces might opt for different arrangements. But the main point is, different workers, and different firms and industries, can opt, via self management, for different approaches in their own workplaces ways of measuring and allotting income for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor.
Johns quotes in his article, a part of one sentence from pareconish texts - that is it - and I have to say, I wonder how much more than that he has read. The issues that concern Johns are all addressed, literally all of them, all over the perecon literature. Maybe if he read a full discussion Johns would still have issues, fair enough, but at least his issues would then be issues with parecon itself - with its institutions and their implications - rather than with capitalism and centrally planned "socialism" transported as if they somehow apply as well to a completely different system - and at least they would move beyond an instant reaction, to real consideration.
Johns says, "Additionally, if effort and sacrifice is what is rewarded, then if your team comes up with some new equipment or new processes which make the work easier, then you would have to do keep them secret, in order not to have your pay reduced. And of course this would be highly detrimental to society as a whole - as a rational economy would be based on trying to minimize the amount of work and effort which would have to be done."
This kind of thinking pattern is totally warranted and reasonable to ask about - and of course we do, in our own presentations. What is not reasonable, I feel, is to take serious proposals, such as those for parecon, read a little bit, maybe in some description, maybe in what someone else says about it, and decide the proposals must be horrible because they are not what one has previously oneself advocated, lib com's central plank that is violated, remember, and then simply shoot away, not bothering to look at what the proposals actually have to say about the issues you are raising.
In fact, in parecon there is every interest, for every citizen, in developing technology that reduces the onerousness of labor and increases output per effort expended - other things such as environmental impact taken into account too, of course. The former, reducing onerousness of labor, improves the quality of balanced job complexes - and derivatively the quality of work, for everyone. The latter, increasing output per effort expended, either increases what every gets for an unchanged level of work in society, or reduces how much we all have to work to get the same as we are used to. And there are no adverse effects from innovations on people's incomes. Why? Because, over time, jobs alter and are balanced, innovations spreading since there are no copyrights, etc.
Could we imagine a case like Johns has in mind? In some plant some smart worker comes up with an innovation. It doesn't require investment and receipt of lots of new equipment - which would be visible in the plan. Instead, it is some very clever change, lets say, in how the work is actually done, which increases output per hour dramatically with no required purchase of new equipment. Our firm can now produce the amount the plan specified - what is socially beneficial, in half the time we could do it last year. We look around and say let's cheat. Everyone is on board. Let's tell society there has been no change, keep the insight for ourselves - so other firms in the same industry still function the old way and benefits are robbed from everyone in society.
Okay, now what? We go to work each day - let's say, for 8 hours, let's four days a week. We get done with our work, however, due to the clever change that we keep secret, each day in four hours. Whoops. If we close down the plant at noon, everyone sees, and there goes the fraud. If we all go home, same thing. So we literally have to stay in the workplace, but not work - working would leave us with too much output, and the innovation would be implemented everywhere. Okay, this is just one example, and even without having the most modest oversight, and even assuming anti social motivations from an entire workforce that enjoys a social setting that produces sociality, and yet, still, it is very hard to seriously benefit. Suppose Johns is right that people would do this - and their benefit would be that they spend four hours each day in the workplace playing cards. What would it take to prevent it. How about a job in the economy which is to research workplace effectivity…by visiting. Done. But truly, there is no point in us now trying to figure out every variant structure people in the future might opt for. Future workers will decide their own paths. There is point in our determining a set of core institutions that are workable, viable, and that would generate not anti social attitudes, like those Johns claims he would manifest, but solidarity and mutual aid; not domination and subordination, but self management; not class division and class rule, but classlessness.
Johns now goes back to individuals saying "apart from those sort of collective measures, other workers and I would also engage in individual ways of increasing our earnings and decreasing our workload." Indeed, under capitalism you might. The actual truth is, in the real world, however, there is less of this than there ought to be. I agree with Johns it not only makes sense, under capitalism, but it is morally warranted to act in ways that redistribute income from profits to wages. It doesn't happen enough, but I think for understandable reasons. Society says that to act that way is to cheat, to be fraudulent - and most people just don't want to be cheaters or frauds, even if the label is unwarranted. But in parecon, in any event, there are no profits. The social product goes entirely to the population, not disproportionately to an elite above the population. We all work average hours, at average intensity, at comparable jobs, and we all get an equal share - or we deviate from equal shares if some work longer, others less long, and so on, all happening within workplaces that are okay with it, and in ways that are socially desirable in terms of output.
Johns says - now taking up another point that is addressed over and over in pareconish presentations - that "effort and sacrifice couldn't just be applied universally, as people have different abilities. Women who are pregnant, workers who might be smaller or weaker than others, people who have disabilities, or who are temporarily ill or injured might have to do putting more effort and time to have the same kind of output as other workers."
The truth is, Johns either hasn't read, or has totally forgot what he did read, beyond the most cursory content about parecon. If I had to bet, I would bet that he read some other critic, maybe in libcom itself, but not, say the book Parecon. And this is being nice to Johns, honestly. Because if Johns did read the book, then this whole article is incredibly intellectually dishonest. Of course parecon recognizes such matters. The broad norm is, if you can't work, or can only work some, your income is average anyhow, and you medical needs are met freely, in any case, of course. Whoops. Johns might now say - oh, great, I have another way to cheat. I can make believe I am sick...
Johns adds, "Not to mention that people have completely different sets of abilities anyway. Some may be quicker with numbers than others, for example, others may have quicker hands."
And this is an observation he thinks we must have missed? Johns essay is about pareconish remuneration - my guess is that there is no presentation of pareconish remuneration that doesn't at the outset of the discussion, arrive at the norm of remunerating duration, intensity, and onerousness, precisely by taking into account these matters that he says parecon ignores. People are not remunerated for output, which is what market socialists would claim to favor, not least because the types of differences Johns points to would in that case mean people would have different output despite working the same duration and intensity. As to my liking some work conditions Johns might not like, and vice versa - that is not what parecon is talking about regarding onerousness. When we apply for jobs we all want ones that we like more, not less, given who we are. That is fine. If in a workplace there is some horrible task that pops up, then yes, it is pretty likely that the volunteers to do it will be those for whom it is personally less horrific. But parecon uses the social valuation, not the personal taste of the person doing the task as its measure. And yes, that does mean a masochist might benefit, supposing he or she wanted to take more income for something he or she enjoyed - but, of course, he or she might take less income for it, as a masochist, of course. And in a work place workers could account for such mattes, or not. In the economy as a whole, it is just so minimal an issue that it isn't part of the centrally defining matters of a classless economy. What makes something onerous in the centrally defining account is its attributes - it is unsafe, say, or it is horribly boring, or whatever. If Johns like something more than I do, that's fine, he should look for such options as his work. I might think being a doctor would be horrific - onerous beyond belief and Johns might love what it involves. But those who opt to be doctors for equitable remuneration will think quite differently than me. Will parecon have perfect valuations of the onerousness of all work. No. It is a social determination. Will there be fair valuations? Yes.
Johns says, "And aside from abilities, people have different preferences. For some working in an office all day would be unbearable, however for others manual labour would be much more onerous." So? Parecon, the book, gives every example, every case, that Johns offers, and many that are richer, I think. But what I think is most important about his essay is not even whether he is right or wrong about certain points, but, honestly, that he pays very nearly zero attention to what is said within presentations of parecon. This is what I mean by he has either not read any of the longer presentations, or he has read them and has no reason to reject what is said in them bearing on his concerns and so makes believe nothing is said. After all, parecon simply must be rejected because it violates what Johns thinks is a main plank of his viewpoint, and therefore must be wrong.
Then Johns says, "So if individuals' effort has to be assessed, it would have to be done so on the basis of their pre-existing abilities and preferences. Therefore I would just lie about mine. I would just say I had depression or whatever so even turning up for work in the first place would be a huge effort on my part, let alone actually doing anything when I'm there. And writing stuff up? I'm not very good at that, I'm dyslexic. And lifting? I'm very weak, and I have a bad back. Working long hours? I get migraines. Working indoors? I'm claustrophobic. Working outdoors? You guessed it, agoraphobic…"
What Johns is saying is that in a classless situation, with self management, he and everyone will prefer to be anti social brutes, trying to rip off everyone else by fraud, and happy to make believe their capacities are less than they really are - and will also easily get away with it. Fair enough. If everyone is inclined to treat their equals the way some - not most - now treat their bosses - then parecon would have the problem Johns raises. Not intractable, but real. Parecon would then have to create a context where it was very hard to get away with such nonsense. Take his example, if Johns is going to fool me, and he works with me, and he is indeed going tool all the others he works with too, then he will have to play the role of being permanently ill if that is his claim, or whatever else means he has less capacity than he really does have. But now notice something. When he works next to me, he has to display this diminished capacity - not greater capacity. So he has to work, for say, eight hours and have the output match the diminished capacity. He can't work for four hours, do it all, and go home. In short, he now accomplishes nothing by lying. He does not get higher income per hour than he would have by being honest. The rest of what Johns offered would actually merely mean he should not work inside, nor ever want to be inside in the vicinity of those he works with - or outside, as the case may be - and notice, again, he gains nothing by this silliness and loses a good part of his life - or, if he claims both, then he has to be suicidal, I guess, constantly bashed by his every locale. This is all quite ridiculous, honestly.
But the heart of the matter, again, is Johns sad and defeatist slight of hand - that typically is the exact opposite of the mindset of libertarian communists - which the libcom site represents, I believe. That is, the formulation that everyone will try to fuck over everyone else in a good society, merely because they get incomes - which is true in any society - even as they do in a rotten, classist, market system.
Johns says, "if anyone thinks I am over estimating this they would do well to read these accounts of how widespread shirking effectively destroyed East Germany and wore down the Soviet Union." Suppose that was true - which I think in fact it is a large exaggeration of this one factor - it is even in that case amazing to me that Johns doesn't realize, apparently, that what he is saying, which is that as bad as things are, anywhere, is what they must be, everywhere, always. If in the Soviet Union and the U.S. workers try to finagle greater income and less work to whatever degree they can get away with, than that will be true, too, in a parecon, and, I should think, in any system - or else, why in a parecon?
And here is the incredible punchline. Suppose we take Johns at face value. We assume he really feels all this after serious assessment, and that if he hasn't paid much attention to what he is critiquing it is only because he read someone who led him to believe there was no need, because it was so transparently dumb, or something like that. Libcom, and probably Johns, thinks that what we should really favor for remuneration in a good society is that each person should work the amount they choose to, and consume as much as they wish to. This is what the young Chomsky argued, as well. But there is a big difference. The young Chomsky had an optimistic view of workers' motives and inclinations. Johns has a pessimistic one. I reject this norm of from each to each because the assumption that people will try to be and especially that they will manage to be humane, caring, and equitable in their free and completely unmediated choices neglects to notice that they have no way of knowing what choices would in fact be humane, caring, and equitable, or instead, excessive, or unduly harsh on themselves. But Johns to be consistent, has to reject his remunerative norm on different grounds. He has to reject it because he believes people are out for themselves and worried, even in a classless economy with mutually agreed norms that apply to all, as long as there are claims on social output and work to be done, that someone might get more than they, or work less than they, so they need to cheat, or they just want to. Well, in his economy, the truth is, they don't even have to cheat. All they have to do is increase what they request and diminish the amount they work, which is what Johns repeatedly says they will try to do even against social norms, much less in accord with them, however they choose. John thinks people will be self seeking without limit against shared social norms, against their workmates, against the rest of society, and risking repercussions, in a parecon. But all of a sudden, he thinks that with just this new norm, people can take as much as they want and work as little as they want, people won't behave anti socially even though there is no cost to doing so, thereby obliterating his entire prior stance in a flash.
Johns says, "I believe the problems of parecon are shared by many politicos who have grand visions about the future who, like sci-fi nerds, like to imagine what a different world could look like." Well, what can I say? Johns makes no effort to take seriously a proposal for a different way to operate an economy. He ignores almost everything written about it. He ignores answers to the very points he raises, whole chapters, for example, in the book parecon, devoted to addressing his concerns. He thinks it is okay for him to favor, instead, what is in fact a ridiculously impossible norm, from each according to ability to each according to according to need, which not only requires that people want to be equitable and just, which when it suits him, he denies, but also that they magically know what behavior is in fact equitable and just - not to mention other difficulties, but it is not okay, indeed it is scifi nerdish, for someone to think seriously about a set of institutions - intentionally quite minimalist - which can actually establish conditions of equity, self management, classlessness, etc. I guess about all this, we can just agree to disagree.
Johns then says, "But like many politicos their mistake is rooted in their ideas being based on how better to manage capital."
What? Really? Advocates or parecon are just interests in "how better to manage capital"? Not in classlessness? Not in self management? Not in solidarity? This is a kind of scare tactic. Assert it, and the damage to what you don't like is done - it is branded soft on capital. There is no need for actual substance. In fact, parecon not only gets rid of private ownership, it gets rid of coordinator class versus working class distinctions too - there is neither capital to manage above workers, nor surpluses to manage above workers. There is, instead, the energy and talents and wisdom of working people to apply to get outputs that are desired and to share them among people in equitable ways.
Johns says, "if a revolution doesn't abolish `work' as a distinct activity separate from the rest of life, then workers will always fight against it."
I have no idea what Johns even thinks he means by this. I would be curious to find out. Work, which is producing socially valuable outputs, is not the same as my taking a bath, washing a floor, raising a child, playing a game, dancing, and so on. If all these latter activities are distinct things we can talk about, then so is work. And work, in context of talking about an economic vision for how to handle production, consumption, and allocation in a classless way while delivering self management, solidarity, diversity, and equity, is putting one's abilities to use to generate outputs that will benefit others in society, as one expects those others to do, as well, including to one's own benefit.
Johns then adds, "And that being the case the only way to enforce effective labour discipline would be to recreate capitalism with its reserve army of unemployed workers and the threat of unemployment and destitution."
It really is incredible that Johns thinks this constitutes serious analysis. Everything but what he favors must be capitalism in disguise. Somehow it seems that Johns thinks that if we simply say everyone can have anything they say they need, and can do any amount they say they want to do - suddenly everyone will not only behave wonderfully by internal inclination, but also will know quite well what actions constitute behaving wonderfully. While I think a great many more people than Johns believes when it suits him to dismiss parecon's equitable remuneration. would, in fact, want to behave sensibly and ethically, I also think - among other problems having to do with misallocation of resources, etc. - that with his preferred approach, no one would know what behaving wonderfully requires, not to mention society not being able to discern what directions investment should take, etc.
A far deeper and more serious discussion of Johns' concerns, and some that are related to his, appears in the essay noted at the outset, Querying Young Chomsky, but that is still only an essay. A look at a book might be more worthy of a critic.
Johns' punchline - "So in short if we want something workable our choice is one of full communism, or none at all." As above, I am also not sure what he means. If he means a good economy must have no remunerative norm - impossible - or must have his favored one - well, I guess we have to agree to disagree about that. If he means to have a classless economy we must have a classless economy - and that means we must not have institutions that generate class division and class rule - I agree.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Comments
It is unfortunate that Albert should be given this extended response in a separate thread as much of the criticism has continued on the other thread where the fundamental disagreement between communists and pareconists is explored.
This lenghy piece makes some valid criticism of aspects of steven's separate contribution but in fact the real differences lie with the arguments about the nature, practicality and desireability or otherwise of the individualised remuneration system proposed by pareconists (and the underlying assumptions behind their approach) rather than any issues about 'democratic control' where both pareconists and anarchists share a good deal of common ground (but also tendencies to fetishise democracy as such). Albert addresses some of this in his linked 'querying young chomsky' which unfortunately would need to be rolled up into any sensible further response to him.
pareconists get so much time spent on their views I suppose because of the link I previously mentioned with various past (and frankly either plain wrong or outdated) ideas about the nature of a transition to communism but of course pareconist are not interested in such a transition since they are fundamentally opposed to the whole communist project which they explicitly reject as 'utopian'.
Spikymike
...in fact the real differences lie with the arguments about the nature, practicality and desireability or otherwise of the individualised remuneration system proposed by pareconists (and the underlying assumptions behind their approach)...
Yeah, I agree that there is much being left unsaid, regarding 'underlying assumptions'.
But these are at the basis of both views, and it would be helpful to spell out some of the philosophical axioms of both Parecon and Libertarian Communism.
Of course, the initial stage, though, is to recognise that we all have 'assumptions' behind our political positions. My previous attempts to 'bring to the surface' these 'assumptions' have not proved to be very fruitful. Let's see if we can take forward this important task, and reveal what's often behind these debates.
I became aware and so replied - but I haven't gone through the array of comments, hoping to relate in a more complete manner. You indicate their are points that have been raised I haven't addressed. Okay, can someone generate a summary, or even complete collection of such points? If so, I will certainly try to reply. If not, I will try to go through the give and take under the original essay...but given all other responsibilities, I may fail at that...
Michael Albert
Briefly, duration is, time spent. There is nothing complex about measuring that. Intensity is most easily viewed/measured by workmates, again by looking, working with, etc., but output can certainly also be used as an indicator. Is Joe working like the rest of us, or is Joe taking extra long and frequent breaks and otherwise not exerting? Is Sally, working much harder. with agreement from people that it is okay to do so, taking up more than an average share of responsibility for output?
Michael, could you outline why you think 'intensity', 'output', 'exertion' and/or 'share of responsibility' should be 'measured'?
I mean 'measure' in the sense of 'the individual product of a worker', rather than 'measure' in the sense of a simple 'count of what's been collectively produced'.
Spikymike
It is unfortunate that Albert should be given this extended response in a separate thread as much of the criticism has continued on the other thread where the fundamental disagreement between communists and pareconists is explored.
Yeah I expected the response to the response to happen here, but it hasn't, bit late to change it back now though I think.
LBird
Michael Albert
Briefly, duration is, time spent. There is nothing complex about measuring that. Intensity is most easily viewed/measured by workmates, again by looking, working with, etc., but output can certainly also be used as an indicator. Is Joe working like the rest of us, or is Joe taking extra long and frequent breaks and otherwise not exerting? Is Sally, working much harder. with agreement from people that it is okay to do so, taking up more than an average share of responsibility for output?
Michael, could you outline why you think 'intensity', 'output', 'exertion' and/or 'share of responsibility' should be 'measured'?
I mean 'measure' in the sense of 'the individual product of a worker', rather than 'measure' in the sense of a simple 'count of what's been collectively produced'.
Your first question might be broken into two parts, 1) Why remunerate intensity/output/exertion (effort and sacrifice) rather than, say, output or property? and 2) Why measure it?
The short answer to why rewarding effort/sacrifice is desirable is because it's the only thing truly within our power to control, and thus remunerating people for how long and hard they work, and how difficult the work conditions are, is both just and provides effective incentives for work. Rewarding output isn't fair since you and I have very little control (almost zero) over how strong we are, how beautiful our voices are, how tall we are, etc., and so it's ineffective to reward for output since we can't become taller or force our voices to be more desirable to society, no matter how much reward we're offered, and our natural abilities and properties play a large role in the amount and quality of output we produce. Rewarding property is just ridiculous, and I'll assume we all agree on that, so no need to talk about it. On the other hand, it does make sense, and it is fair, to give people a bigger piece of the pie if they work harder, or longer, or at a shittier job. That much seems obvious.
As for "why measure", I assume that you were more concerned about the justification for "why reward effort/sacrifice" rather than another norm, and the answer to "why measure" seems so blatantly obvious that I won't say much on that. I'll just say that "measure" is perhaps a bit too precise a term... if you sit down with your workmates to decide if everybody's efforts deserve an "A" rating, or "A-", or "B+", etc., just for example, I really doubt anyone is going to pull out a log book and start needling their coworkers for working X hard on one day but Y hard on another day. Instead, maybe work hours would be recorded (and where that work was done, ie. in the blast furnace or in the office), but since you'd all be working together, everyone would be pretty well aware of how hard everyone else worked, so you'd probably just talk it out and agree on everybody's rough effort rating. I suspect, considering the level of congeniality and solidarity and equity that would be core features of any participatory society, that everybody would just kind of take the average income/credits/whatever, and workplace councils would really only adjust incomes for people who clearly worked more/less hours, or clearly in better/worse conditions, just to be fair.
Anyway, the long answer to both of those questions is best found in the book Parecon by Michael Albert. You can read the section relevant to remuneration here: http://books.zcommunications.org/books/pareconv/Chapter7.htm#_VPID_47
Hopefully that also kind of answered your second question about measuring individual product/output. But to be clear, remuneration in a participatory economy, as I understand it, would not measure "the individual product of a worker," as discussed above, although of course you would have to measure "what's been collectively produced" (as well as the inputs that went into those products), but mostly for purposes of allocation, ie. to know how much of each input/output was used/produced, whether outputs fill consumer/producer requests, what's needed for the next round of planning and production, etc.
I don't want to go too deep into it, and I'm sure Michael can answer all of this a lot better than I can, but I'd definitely suggest reading the book linked above. It would probably answer most of your questions.
Andre Guimond
On the other hand, it does make sense, and it is fair, to give people a bigger piece of the pie if they work harder, or longer, or at a shittier job. That much seems obvious.
'Hardness', 'length' and 'shittiness', in your scheme, have to be 'measured'.
Why? Because it...
Andre Guimond
...is both just and provides effective incentives for work
Why is it 'just' to reward an individual's ability to work long, hard and at a shitty job?
What is your 'measure' of 'justice'? Why should the unit of 'work' be the 'individual'? Why should work need 'incentives'?
It's not 'obvious' to a Communist.
I think that there are philosophical assumptions which have not yet been exposed behind both the Parecon and the Communist stances on these issues.
In the interests of linking the two discussion threads and in the light of Albert's requests to read their other material, I think ajj's blog mentioned on that thread provides some good responses to a number of these issues which communists have with parecon and it's underlying assumptions see:
http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/ search under 'parecon'
I have my own criticism of some of ajj's other spgb notions but he does a good job with this in my opinion.
I've now written a full response to Michael's reply here:
http://libcom.org/library/steven-johns-responds-michael-alberts-reply
Steven Johns responds to Michael Albert's reply
Steven Johns of libcom.org responds to parecon advocate Michael Albert's reply to Steven's libertarian communist critique of participatory economics.
I must admit this reply has taken me a while, as I didn't expect a response to my original article of only 1500 words to be so extensive (nearly 9000 words). And I've got a lot on my plate at the moment.
Not only that, but as we at libcom.org stressed in our previous debate with a parecon advocate, we don't think that debating the minutiae of a post-capitalist society is a particularly useful activity for those of us who oppose capitalism today.
Nonetheless I appreciate that Albert took the time to respond in such depth. However, I was quite disappointed that his response was based almost entirely on a complete misrepresentation of my views and my initial argument.
In addition to that, there are several areas where we have significant disagreements, which I will address in the order in which he discusses them.
Johns prefers, though it is never made very explicit, much less seriously explored in his piece, that we instead work to our ability, and receive to our need, leaving society no need to have remunerative norms other than personal preferences. My most recent round of addressing views like these - which were put forth considerably more extensively than here - can be found in another article: "Querying Young Chomsky," at http://www.zcommunications.org/querying-young-chomsky-by-michael-albert If concerns over parecon's remunerative norms and methods concern you, that might be a good additional "exchange" to view for further exploration, as the young Chomsky was a very strong advocate of the "from each, to each" position.
In this assertion, Albert is broadly correct. I do hold, like Chomsky outlines in this interview, that in a good society we will be able to contribute what we can, and receive what we need from society.
I disagree that the only "remunerative norm" will be personal preference, which is an assertion which to me comes off as a dismissive strawman. Of course personal preference will be a significant factor (as it is in capitalist society) but other factors such as availability/scarcity will also have an impact. Albert repeats this strawman multiple times through his article.
Fairness
Johns, however, usefully explains further: "parecon … instead of abolishing wage labour proposes a "fair" way of allocating wages."
Whether parecon is wise to do this, we address below. Interestingly, Johns puts the word "fair" in quotes, but never in the essay addresses whether the parecon norm strikes him as anything other than "fair," equitable, etc. That isn't the issue for Johns.
As I stated in my article, its intention wasn't to debate the ethics of parecon, but was to hypothesise about how workers would react in it. In our previous debate with parecon, we did discuss fairness. And if Albert is really interested, then I am happy to inform him that no I do not believe that this is "fair" (whatever "fair" means). Nor do I believe it is workable, for the reasons outlined in my previous article.
On the concept of "fairness" of wages in general: I think that Karl Marx made mistakes but something he was dead right on was his call to workers: "Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’"
On the "fairness" of remuneration for effort and sacrifice specifically, a quick personal example comes to mind. At the council where I work management for several years has been attempting to introduce performance related pay. A system which they claim will be "fairer" as it will better reward those who work harder. Now, my co-workers and I have successfully resisted its introduction so far as we believe it will be neither fair nor conducive to a productive working environment (management are now attempting to impose it once more using the crisis as an excuse, but that's another story).
I believe it is unfair as it will discriminate against the disabled, and people with different types of abilities. It will also most likely institutionally discriminate against women and workers from ethnic minorities. And it will harm the working environment as instead of cooperating we will be competing with one another to work harder and longer than each other. Which again will discriminate against disabled people and people with caring responsibilities -who are disproportionately female.
Some of these criticisms of performance related pay are equally relevant for parecon. So with parecon either it would discriminate against people with disabilities or caring responsibilities, or else it would be unworkable as people could just pretend to have disabilities (particularly invisible ones like anxiety, depression, etc) or different abilities.
Wage work
Next comes a key area of disagreement, where Michael Albert gets into all sorts of semantic manoeuvrings to try to claim that wages under parecon are not actually wages:
Wage labor, sometimes called wage slavery, is a term most often meant to cover the employment and payment of workers by owners via a system of workers selling their ability to do work for some period of time to owners who in turn extract as much actual work as they can coerce from the workers' time they have bought control over, all for maximizing owners' profits. Okay, Johns says he rejects that. Well, parecon advocates too say, we reject that.
I referred to wages as meaning remuneration for work performed which can be exchanged for a share of the social product.
Albert's definition of wage labour here is inadequate, from a revolutionary point of view. In the former Soviet Union and other state capitalist economies, enterprises do not have "owners" in the same way as more free market economies do. Nor do "owners" make "profits" in the same way. However, the workers are still wage slaves, people compelled to work for a share of the social product, and for survival. And the subjective experience of work is very similar in both types of economies. Certainly the response of workers, which is to resist work (whether by not trying their hardest, absenteeism, covert sabotage or open strikes) is the same in both.
In fact, however, having a way of allocating income, and thus a guiding norm for income allocation, and a means of accomplishing that norm, whether implicit or explicit, is simply unavoidable. It will exist in every society and every economy that will ever exist because in all such societies people will get a share of the social output.
In the former part of this assertion, Albert is completely incorrect. Of course in all societies people will get a share of the social output. However this is not the same thing as all members of the society having a monetary income. For the majority of the time humans have existed, money and therefore income did not even exist.
Parecon believes its norm and methods offer a fair, worthy, viable option. Johns' mistake, assuming he believes that parecon's norm means it is preserving "wage labor" as this term is used by critics of capitalism, is to think that the mere fact that people get income - wages - means the system has wage labor, or wage slavery, as it exists under capitalism, or even just waged labor that is exploitative and alienating, as in any class divided system.
In this Johns goes beyond merely being wrong. It is quite like if someone argued that if we have production, then we have capitalism. Or if we have decision making, then we have authoritarianism. Or if we have procreation, then we have sexism.
Here Albert reels off a string of complete non sequiturs to counter my point which I believe is based on reality. And certainly my subjective experience as a worker.
The point I'm making is nothing to do with someone making the ridiculous argument that if there is production there is capitalism. The point I am making is that if people are forced to work for wages in order to receive a share of the social product, then people will resist this imposition.
I believe I am backed up by empirical evidence here, as every society I'm aware of where there are wage workers -i.e. there are people working for a wage (to avoid Albert attempting any more semantic gymnastics to try to say that it won't apply to parecon) - workers have resisted work on an individual and collective basis. Whereas in moneyless societies where "work" as a separate sphere of life didn't exist, this did not occur (indeed it couldn't, as there were no workers, and there was no "work").
If Albert could point to any examples in the real world of groups of wage workers which did not resist work then of course I will take this into consideration.
The only reply I can imagine from Johns that would reveal that he does not have this particular confusion would be for him to say, wait, I don't mean parecon preserves wage slavery.
In response to this point, if you say that workers under parecon will have to work for wages, in order to get a share of the social product (and if we do not then like now we will either have to starve or scrape by like the unemployed do now on benefits) then I would say that yes from the perspective of wage workers ourselves, we will still be wage slaves.
[Johns says] I just mean that parecon preserves workers getting income that is related to their work, and that is what I reject.
Well, okay, if that is what Johns means, then he is right that parecon does include that. And he would also be right if he said that it is instead possible to propose that people to get income for reasons having literally no connection to what they do in the economy, for example, they could get what they need and provide in accord with their ability. For example, the "Querying Young Chomsky" essay responds to the young Chomsky arguing just that, and a full reply to his formulation is rendered.) But a desire to disconnect income from economic activity, if it is Johns' view, isn't viable, nor I think, is it even equitable. Nor is it argued consistently, by Johns, at any rate.
Some of this point I will get into later, although I would refer people to the interview with Chomsky linked to earlier for discussion of people receiving what they need from society.
A problem with Albert's points here is that he seems unable to break from bourgeois (i.e. capitalistic) concepts. Namely here I'm referring to his comment about disconnecting "income from economic activity". Not only am I saying that "income" should not exist, as money should be abolished, but the entire idea of "economic activity" as a distinct sphere of life separate from everything else I think is inherently capitalistic and should be done away with. As I said, I'll get into this in more detail later.
Johns says he wants to look at the allocation norm from the "perspective of workers in a parecon society." … Johns then adds, however, that he "will base [his] statements on how [he and others] respond to work as workers in the real world now." This is worrisome, to put it mildly, depending on Johns' precise meaning.
Albert then goes on in some detail about how he disagrees with this approach. Myself, I base my ideas on practical evidence in the real world.
So in order to have some idea of how wage workers under parecon will act, I can only go on how wage workers in other societies, such as workers for private capitalists (i.e. owners as Albert describes them) or in state capitalist societies act.
If Albert has counterexamples of societies of wage workers who don't want to work as little as possible for as much money as possible, i.e. who don't have the same fundamental economic interest as workers under capitalism, then I would be very happy to learn from them.
It suggests that we can look at how wage laborers under capitalism act, and we can then predict by transferring the behavior, how workers under parecon would act, because we take as a given that workers under parecon are wage laborers quite like those under capitalism… In other words, if this is what Johns does, it is simply continuing a horribly flawed assertion that if a system has income based on some aspect of what we do in the economy, then that system has workers with interests, motives, and behaviors like those of workers operating in capitalism…
There is nothing necessarily wrong with paying attention to how people act now, unless, of course, this means that one is going to assume that contemporary behavior will persist even in changed institutional settings. It is hard to imagine a libertarian communist thinking such a thing, or evaluating in such a way - given that it would obliterate prospects for any positive claims and hopes at all.
On this last point obviously completely disagree with Albert. Of course, as I am a libertarian communist it should be clear to Albert therefore that he is misrepresenting my views. As of course I do think that there is the possibility of positive change in the world.
Where Albert seems confused again is around the nature of work. We for the most part do not like work which we are compelled to do. For wage workers as a whole across the world, our interest is primarily in our wages, rather than in the work we happen to do (of course, a minority of people to work in an area which they enjoy, however it being work still strips a lot/all of this enjoyment from it).
If we remain wage workers where we are compelled to work to get by, then our interests as workers will still be in earning as much as possible to have as good a standard of living as possible, and in doing as little work as possible.
This does not mean that I do not think that it is possible to act differently, of course. But I believe the only way we will act significantly differently is if we abolish wage work.
As Chomsky points out, when working for ourselves in an un-alienated way we are happy to work hard. This is because it doesn't even feel like work.
At work I try to do as little as possible. But for myself each week I spend dozens of hours working hard on things which I enjoy, which are paid work for other people. For example, web design, editing, cooking, cleaning.
Similarly, when I was at school and I had to read things for school, I just wouldn't do it. I would just put it off and put it off. But for myself I read all the time, for fun.
As I said in my initial article, us humans are naturally inquisitive, creative and productive. But when we are forced to do things we also naturally resist them.
Most proletarians, like me, spend huge amounts of time every week carrying out activities which for some people are paid work, but for fun.
And in a better society, instead of prioritising profit, we can prioritise turning as much currently under its work as possible into fun activities, which we take part in because we enjoy them, or because we get a sense of community from collectively doing what we need to do.
All spying on each other, grassing on who isn't doing what, who is working harder than who and so who should no longer have their needs met is not conducive to this kind of collective effort.
Monitoring effort and sacrifice
Albert goes into some detail on how effort and sacrifice can be monitored under parecon, to determine how workers should be paid.
And to be honest the type of methods he suggests are the ones I criticised in my initial post:
Briefly, duration is, time spent. There is nothing complex about measuring that. Intensity is most easily viewed/measured by workmates, again by looking, working with, etc., but output can certainly also be used as an indicator. Is Joe working like the rest of us, or is Joe taking extra long and frequent breaks and otherwise not exerting? Is Sally, working much harder. with agreement from people that it is okay to do so, taking up more than an average share of responsibility for output?
Now, first of all, there is a problem here in terms of talking about "output". Many employers today talk about that kind of objective measure, however, many of us workers do not have any sort of tangible output to our work which can be measured. How do you measure the "output" of a nurse, or a doctor, or a bus driver, or an educator?
Pretty much all workers' organisations (which are overwhelmingly very conservative compared to "revolutionaries" like parecon advocates or libertarian communist), pushed by their membership oppose monitoring of outputs. For a few reasons, including that they are often meaningless (i.e. monitoring teachers by how well pupils perform mostly is to do with how well off the parents are rather than anything to do with how good the teachers are), they are hugely time-consuming, and most importantly that they make the working environment horrible.
We should (and do) fight against this type of monitoring even under capitalism, let alone in a supposedly free society.
And as for Joe or Sally, rather than spying on them all day seeing if they are taking too many smoke breaks, I would rather get on with my own tasks and trust that however they are acting they have their own reasons.
Often when people suffer bereavement, relationship breakdown or some other kind of problem at home it can mean their work performance is affected. I don't think that grassing on them so that their pay is cut, or alternatively making them tell everyone what may be their own private business so that we can take a vote on whether or not to cut their pay, is a practical response -let alone humane one.
And Albert has completely failed to respond to my point about how intensity/effort would be impossible to measure as you will not be able to tell between a hard-working average person and a gifted slacker. I mean before I became disabled I was able to type 80+ words a minute. Whereas many of my colleagues can only type about 40. If I was to be rewarded by my effort I would not let anyone know that I could type twice as fast as everyone else!
Onerousness, finally, is measured by workmates assessing job roles, again… the bottom line is, who measures these things, who decides issues, who agendizes and acts regarding the workplace, is always the same, in a parecon - the workers self managing that workplace.
Again, as I pointed out in my previous article, if this were introduced at my work we would just collectively vote to give each other the maximum ratings of onerousness for all of our jobs. Certainly, this would be the collectivist thing to do, and I would suspect someone suggesting otherwise would be socially ostracised like a snitch.
As but one example, suppose 100 of us work in a plant. It is part of parecon, has targets for production that fit the self managed participatory plan. We are all workers, there is no boss. Suppose the plan produces the output target as envisioned. The plant is then entitled to 100 times the average income in society. Now how is the income allotted among workers inside the plant? Well, if the plant workforce agreed to requests from 10 workers to work half time, say, and to some other workers to work double hard, or double time, or whatever - all to arrive at the planned output, then incomes would vary due to those differences. If not, incomes would be average for all. If you are convinced workers in a self managing plant would be trying to rip off one another, you might well feel that it could get pretty chaotic. But if not, then not. If the workers wanted to rip off the rest of society, they could all together claim to have worked way more than they did - or harder, which amounts to the same thing. The trouble is, in that case, why wasn't output higher? There is no extra income to disperse if the work did not generate socially valuable output.
As that this example, I must say I'm pretty shocked. This does sound very much like a Soviet style setup. I've already pointed out the problem with measuring "output". But even in this type of factory scenario where concrete outputs could be measured, there are huge numbers of problems.
What if there were problems with the equipment? Or with the component parts? Or with the local energy supply? It would be entirely unfair to cut the wages of everyone working at a factory if they were unable to meet targets due to circumstances out of their own control. And of course different production units could put the blame on each other for any delays. So how could you determine who was really to blame, and who should really have their pay cut?
For those people who doubt the seriousness of this problem, I would suggest reading the texts I linked to in my first article going into the chronic inefficiency of the Soviet Union. Where production for planning targets basically meant that quality dropped. And faulty equipment sabotaged the entire economy.
This seems really odd to me. Parecon is the product of "anti capitalist management consultants"? It would be awfully hard to explain, in that case, how it is that parecon is arguably the only serious economic model out there that emphasizes eliminating the class division between managers - and other coordinator class members monopolizing empowering work…
I'm not going to get into an extended debate about the ridiculous idea of the "coordinator class". But to explain my point about anti-capitalist management consultants I wasn't saying that management consultants now would advise people to have workplace democracy (although some do). The point I was making was that management consultants coming and have grand ideas about what measures can be put in place to improve employee performance - like the parecon idea of reward for effort and sacrifice - which are completely unworkable and even counter-productive in practice.
With the example of performance related pay I gave above, which used to be strongly recommended by many management consultants, it is on its way out in many places in the private sector as its focus on individual reward has been shown to have a negative effect on collective productivity and performance. Collective effort is by far the most important element of work in human society, and in production, as by working collectively we are able to achieve infinitely more than we can as atomised individuals.
Is the impact on workers of this remunerative norm, in in the parecon institutional context, considered. Of course it is - that is the point. The impact is workers do not compete with one another, they have mutually shared interests, they get equitable conditions and claims on social output, they exist without having to repress or resist others with different interests, and so on.
Michael Albert asserts here that workers under parecon will have mutually shared interests. However that is not the case. In a communist society where we receive what we need from society, it is in all of our interests to contribute to society because we enjoy being creative and productive, take part in onerous activity is in order to be socially accepted, and to contribute enough that we can all have what we need.
Under parecon individual workers will get more if they exert more effort, sacrifice more and work longer than other workers (or appear to do so). And if rewards are per enterprise as Albert outlines then it gives workers individual incentives to unfairly down rate their colleagues. Or for example say that work in another department is less onerous than in theirs, so they should be better rewarded. And if their department is bigger then they could vote this through.
The idea of having a collective, proletarian revolution, and then reverting to this type of individualistic or slightly collectivist piecework reward system -which is even more individualistic than many large capitalist or state capitalist employers today to me is completely unthinkable.
Johns says, revealing not only a pretty jaundiced view of working people - that parecon's workers would behave, and not just some of them, but essentially the whole workforce, as he says he would, and this even in an equitable economy, even with self management, even without class rule, etc.
This is perhaps the element of Albert's response which I am most offended by. And I find the point actually quite ironic.
At the centre of my politics is the idea that humans are naturally social, co-operative and productive. And do not need to be coerced into being productive by the threat of destitution or starvation. Advocates of parecon, however, do not accept this view of humans, and believe that we do need to be coerced into being productive by wages and the threat of being denied them if we do not work long hard enough.
That Albert is now claiming I have a "jaundiced" view of working people is hypocritical in the extreme. And furthermore I don't believe is valid (indeed, further down his article he even criticises me for holding the exact opposite view, see below). Far from lazy wage workers being anti-social, or workers resisting work being selfish in doing so I think is entirely laudable.
Self managed alienation and forced work is still alienation and forced work, and I think that collective resistance to alienated and enforced activity is a great thing to be encouraged.
Albert’s verbal attack on workers who would continue to resist sounds a lot like Soviet denunciations of workers who weren't doing their bit to build the glorious socialist society, now that they didn't have owners anymore.
Seriously? After struggling for a new, equitable, self managing, classless economy, what Johns thinks is that in it, to implement equitable remuneration, means spying on one another, etc. Well, I admit that this is a point various parecon advocates do wonder about.
I would like to point out Albert that this spying is exactly what he has advocated in his response to me.
To what extent, in a parecon, with equitable remuneration, would there be tight, or very loose accounting of duration, intensity, and onerousness, and how precisely would workers implement their arrangements? For the latter, however they choose. That is what self management means. For the former, however, I think, for example, that whatever roads lead to its implementation, in a parecon, at least after it has operated for a time, most folks will decide that fraud is a relatively small issue and the need for close attention to claims about duration and intensity is relatively slight, and even the number of levels of remuneration that ought to exist is quite low - as in, say, way over average (meaning perhaps 20% over), over average (meaning 10% over), average, under average (meaning 10% below), and way under average (meaning 20% below). Others might think the range of incomes folks should be entitled to earn should be wider and the precision of them more accurate. Different workplaces might opt for different arrangements. But the main point is, different workers, and different firms and industries, can opt, via self management, for different approaches in their own workplaces ways of measuring and allotting income for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor.
Now, this paragraph doesn't sound that bad. I think that Albert is right to say that in a rationally organised society, fraud would be a minor issue. If you say you are communist people often respond by saying "what would you do about freeloaders?". When actually under capitalism we have huge numbers of "freeloaders". Apart from people who don't work because they don't want to, and the tens of millions of people working in socially useless jobs (like the military, finance, insurance, etc) there are millions more people who want to be productive but are part of the mass of the unemployed.
However, I don't think this is an argument for parecon, but an argument for communism: for people to receive what they need from society.
Especially if Albert is saying that wages would be on a range of 80% of average-120% of average. If that is the case, then what is the point of reward for effort and sacrifice? If you earn doing zero hours worked per week only a tiny bit less than if you work 80 hours a week then why would you bother?
Of course, no one would want to do zero hours of productive activity in a week, because that would be far more onerous than carrying out a good few hours productive activity. But I believe this is evidence that keeping wages is unnecessary.
Other parecon advocates in the comments below my first article also stated that under parecon people would also be paid the average wage while not working, between jobs, or while studying.
And again I believe this demonstrates that all the work and potential problems with measuring and remunerating effort and sacrifice are unnecessary and counter-productive.
Johns says, "Additionally, if effort and sacrifice is what is rewarded, then if your team comes up with some new equipment or new processes which make the work easier, then you would have to do keep them secret, in order not to have your pay reduced. And of course this would be highly detrimental to society as a whole - as a rational economy would be based on trying to minimize the amount of work and effort which would have to be done."
In fact, in parecon there is every interest, for every citizen, in developing technology that reduces the onerousness of labor and increases output per effort expended… And there are no adverse effects from innovations on people's incomes. Why? Because, over time, jobs alter and are balanced, innovations spreading since there are no copyrights, etc.
This doesn't counteract my argument. There still would be the incentive for people to keep innovations secret, as it would enable them to increase their wages while decreasing the amount they had to work and the onerousness of their work.
Albert then goes into a hypothetical case study to try to demonstrate that this would be pointless, however his points are based on poor assumptions. Like saying that the workplace would have a fixed workforce every day. To me it sounds like this counteracts parecon's balanced job complexes. And that people would notice if the workplace was closed. But who's going to be aware of what workplaces are meant to be open when? And it implies that work under parecon will be very similar to how it is now in terms of there being specific workplaces open at specific times. Whereas in a rational economy we should have much more flexibility in terms of where we "work" and when.
Suppose Johns is right that people would do this - and their benefit would be that they spend four hours each day in the workplace playing cards. What would it take to prevent it. How about a job in the economy which is to research workplace effectivity…by visiting. Done.
Here we get to the crux of the problem I think. Albert is acknowledging that parecon would need paid spies to monitor workers. I've already gone into most of my issues with this.
But one point I would like to meet again is that this would be another pointless job which people would have to do, which would actually waste time which we could otherwise use constructively. Rather than me have an "jaundiced" view of working people, I don't think we need to be spied on and compelled. So in effect I guess I'm saying "no u".
And of course many of us who work now have to put up with occasional visits and inspections from outsiders or consultants. And we know how to fool them, I'm afraid. We can put on a show while they're about. So to this Michael could respond, well in that case instead of outside specialist "workplace effectivity (sic)" researchers (who sound a lot like they would be part of a "coordinator class" if you believe in such a thing [and probably look like the guy in the picture at the top of my first article, lol]) you could have people inside workplaces doing this -but then you have managers again. Or at best a Stasi style network of informants. But of course if parecon is open and transparent then these informants would have to be named publicly. And of course their role would set them against their colleagues, so to incentivise them to grass on their coworkers they would have to be rewarded in some way, presumably with additional pay. But then of course you have managers/coordinators again.
But truly, there is no point in us now trying to figure out every variant structure people in the future might opt for. Future workers will decide their own paths. There is point in our determining a set of core institutions that are workable, viable, and that would generate not anti social attitudes, like those Johns claims he would manifest, but solidarity and mutual aid; not domination and subordination, but self management; not class division and class rule, but classlessness.
This point is attempting to be insulting. And I'm sorry to disappoint Michael Albert, but I'm an extremely pro-social individual. Even at work I always go the extra mile to help out my colleagues.
But I repeat my assertion that resisting alienated, enforced labour is not anti-social in the slightest. In fact I think it's about the most pro-social thing you can do!
If bureaucrats in the Soviet Union hadn't paid themselves better than ordinary workers, and say rotated regularly as well, this wouldn't change anything significant about the nature of the Soviet Union. (The little bit of extra salary money spread out wouldn't have made any significant difference to the mass of workers. And the state bureaucrats didn't act the way they did because they were evil people, but because of the institutional roles they occupied and the pressures they came under as a result.) Workers there would still have been right to resist as they did.
Work versus productive activity
I'm feeling bad about having to repeat the same points again and again, especially as I was trying to keep this response brief. But the same strawmen keep cropping up again and again in Albert's response. So sorry to have to repeat this but in response to this:
But the heart of the matter, again, is Johns sad and defeatist slight of hand - that typically is the exact opposite of the mindset of libertarian communists - which the libcom site represents, I believe. That is, the formulation that everyone will try to fuck over everyone else in a good society, merely because they get incomes - which is true in any society - even as they do in a rotten, classist, market system.
As I have already pointed out, this is the exact opposite of my actual point of view. I emphatically do not believe that in a good society (especially one following a proletarian revolution, where collective solidarity would have to have become the most powerful force in society) people will try to fuck each other over.
I think where Albert is having trouble understanding what I'm saying is that I do not believe that parecon is a model of a good, free society, if it contains wages.
Johns says, "if anyone thinks I am over estimating this they would do well to read these accounts of how widespread shirking effectively destroyed East Germany and wore down the Soviet Union." Suppose that was true - which I think in fact it is a large exaggeration of this one factor - it is even in that case amazing to me that Johns doesn't realize, apparently, that what he is saying, which is that as bad as things are, anywhere, is what they must be, everywhere, always. If in the Soviet Union and the U.S. workers try to finagle greater income and less work to whatever degree they can get away with, than that will be true, too, in a parecon, and, I should think, in any system - or else, why in a parecon?
As I have said repeatedly, this tendency has proved correct for wage workers. But not in societies, such as "primitive" communist and some indigenous societies without wage work.
And here is the incredible punchline. Suppose we take Johns at face value. We assume he really feels all this after serious assessment, and that if he hasn't paid much attention to what he is critiquing it is only because he read someone who led him to believe there was no need, because it was so transparently dumb, or something like that. Libcom, and probably Johns, thinks that what we should really favor for remuneration in a good society is that each person should work the amount they choose to, and consume as much as they wish to. This is what the young Chomsky argued, as well. But there is a big difference. The young Chomsky had an optimistic view of workers' motives and inclinations. Johns has a pessimistic one.
This is completely incorrect. I have the same optimistic view as Chomsky.
Johns says, "if a revolution doesn't abolish `work' as a distinct activity separate from the rest of life, then workers will always fight against it."
I have no idea what Johns even thinks he means by this. I would be curious to find out. Work, which is producing socially valuable outputs, is not the same as my taking a bath, washing a floor, raising a child, playing a game, dancing, and so on. If all these latter activities are distinct things we can talk about, then so is work.
I am quite bemused as to why Albert doesn't understand this quite simple point. Albert I'm sure must be aware of the existence of societies where work didn't exist. And I'm sure he must be aware that for the majority of human existence "work" did not exist.
Albert's idea of what work is I think throws up more problems with parecon, including some quite worrying ones. He says quite definitively that washing a floor, raising a child, playing a game and dancing are not "work". And of course he's right in that they are not inherently "work". Many people do those things either for fun or through obligation. But under capitalism all of those things are also "work" which some people are paid wages to do, and these people as a result do not enjoy these activities to the same extent when they are counted as "leisure". And of course they resist them. Cleaners, nursery nurses, play workers and dancers all resist work individually and in many cases do so collectively with strikes to defend or improve their conditions -to either work less and earn more, or slow the rate at which they work more and earn less (sadly under austerity it is more often the latter).
I say worrying because I do find it concerning that the socially "useful" work Albert refers to throughout his response is primarily manufacturing work which historically is predominantly male, whereas the tasks he refers to which do not constitute "work" in his view: cleaning, childcare, etc are predominantly female-dominated and mostly grossly underpaid.
Cleaning, childcare and dance are all needed by society as much as factories.
In a decent society, there will be no distinction between work, play and leisure in this way. Indeed, keeping a distinction can be inherently discriminatory. See all the unpaid work throughout the world carried out by women which is totally unrewarded.
Tasks which need to be done which aren't enjoyable in any way at present, we can try to reorganise to make them as enjoyable and un-onerous as possible. But even now boring tasks like washing up we do anyway without problems as we know that our standard of living with clean dishes is better then without. And if we just expected everyone else to do it for us then we would be socially ostracised.
And of course what matters more than financial reward to everyone is social acceptance and community.
It really is incredible that Johns thinks this constitutes serious analysis. Everything but what he favors must be capitalism in disguise. Somehow it seems that Johns thinks that if we simply say everyone can have anything they say they need, and can do any amount they say they want to do - suddenly everyone will not only behave wonderfully by internal inclination, but also will know quite well what actions constitute behaving wonderfully.
Here Albert has tied himself in a bit of a knot. Having just accused me of having an unacceptably pessimistic view of human nature, he now dismissively implies that I have a naive faith that people will behave naturally "wonderfully". I would say that Albert should make up his mind of what he thinks my views are.
I do think that people are naturally cooperative and social (unless put under external pressure not to be so, as we are under capitalism). And as for knowing what actions specifically "constitute behaving wonderfully", this article has already gone on far too long and I've already said are not interested in the minutiae of a communist society, however I will just say that I don't think paying people according to how hard or long they work helps anyone determine what is a socially beneficial behaviour. And I don't think that Albert has demonstrated anywhere that this would be the case.
Conclusion
In summary, I contend that remuneration by effort and sacrifice: supposedly "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work" would be neither fair nor practical.
And especially if regardless of effort and sacrifice the proposed differences in remuneration were only 80% of the mean wage to 120% of the mean then the building in of complex structures of monitoring and accounting would be a waste of resources. And that's not to even mention the social costs of having people spying on each other.
If, like me, Michael Albert or anyone else does acknowledge that human beings are naturally creative and social, then they should realise that we do not need to be compelled to work as we are now. We don't need the wage system.
In a free society we wouldn't just sit around doing nothing until we starved. We could organise society on the basis of fulfilling human needs and desires in as joyful ways as possible. And we could decide exactly how to do this by ourselves, collectively, at the time.
- 1 Unfortunately it has come to my attention that this image has been lost on some non-UK resident readers. This video should explain.
Comments
I'm starting to think the points of contention are actually quite succinct, but at the same time intractable because they're incommensurable. It's not really anything to do with the fine points of organisational forms in a post-capitalist society (workers councils, consumer councils, iteration boards, fancy databases, pull production and so on).
The core of the disagreement seems to be basically ethical: what everyday social relations do we envision, informed by what values? As we said in the original debate, parecon's values seem highly influenced by capitalism: elevation of sacrifice and work ethic to fundamental principle, emphasis on 'fair pay', a worry about 'freeloaders' so strong as to structure the whole system against them.
I think this is related to the libcom argument that you can't talk about a future society in isolation from the struggles that create it. it isn't going to fall from the sky fully formed, but be the product of mass struggles which not only transform the world but the ways we relate to one another. Solidarity and mutual aid will become much more central factors in the absence of commodity relations or coercive authority. In a sense the anthropological literature on non-commercial societes is more informative here than speculations on democratising wages.
"In a sense the anthropological literature on non-commercial societes is more informative here than speculations on democratising wages."
Couldn't agree more, at least on the question of possibilities. Homo sapiens sapiens existed for around 190,000 years before homo economicus. While going back isn't all that appealing, it does point to possibilities for different ways forward.
Great article, especially as I stopped following all the long discussion after the first one. Well written, too.
Joseph, I think you're exactly right.
Kittenization, I agree with that as well. And of course going back isn't an option even if it were desirable (which it isn't).
Chilli, thanks for your comments, I wasn't sure how clear the article was as I pretty much rushed through it, and found it quite hard to get into order as there was just so much to respond to (who expects a response six times as long as their initial text?!) and so much repetition.
The rot started with the so-called agricultural revolution: the archaeological record shows that life expectancy went down, malnutrition increased, disease became more widespread, society became more stratified and hierarchically structured, kinship came to be understood in terms of patriarchy. This is not to say that what went before was wonderful. But you can analyse that change in society without falling into noble savage fallacies. Of course we can't 'go back', but it's worth avoiding the teleology implied in that phrase altogether, IMO.
Better to parse that (pre)historical 'break' more carefully. One big difficulty today in discarding the repressive & exploitative apparatus that facilitated agricultural life and urbanism is that it's so tightly entangled in the history of centralisation per se. Collective, non-hierarchical solidarity has no historical instance at a super-tribal level.
Marx was wrong (an understandable mistake for a disciple of Hegel's, no matter how much he thought he had moved beyond the latter) to assume that history tends towards centralisation; that was a historically contingent effect of the moment at which he was writing. 'Socialism in one country' is misguided not because it's insufficiently universal but because it operates on too *large* a geographical space. If we are to learn a lesson from the 20th C, it's that a revolution at the national scale is probably not a revolution at all but a coup. A radically emancipatory change in society, I believe, would require polities at a more human (i.e. much smaller) scale than the modern nation-state, if they are not to repeat the imperialist repression of the Russian and Chinese disasters.
(Since I'm relatively ignorant of libertarian communism, I'm not sure if this is obvious to you libcons or anathema; just throwing in my 2p.)
Somewhere above you asked for examples of wage-workers who did not do the least amount of work required for the greatest compensation they could extract. I don't know how one would quantify these variables, especially when looking at historical examples. However, my mind wandered toward a section early in The Fall of the House of Labor which discussed the short-lived compensation framework of steel workers in the late 19th century America. Laborers agreed among themselves how much they would charge per ton of product, and agreed upon how that compensation would be distributed among themselves. This system was undercut when owners began to give extra incentive to a hand-picked middle-management class who could ensure a quickened rate of production by hand-picking the hardest and longest working laborers. Morale broke down, and the system of collective bargaining was eventually dissolved. Production more than doubled, and soon there was more cheap steel than people knew what to do with.
So there were people who wanted to work less, and people who were willing to work more for extra wages. So you could say that the former group were under-performing, but you could also say that they were performing their work at a more sustainable rate under a democratically-controlled wage system. The system only broke down when owners overturned the system from the outside.
I guess what I'm saying is this: wage-laborers in a democratic workplace may not perform at their maximum capacity, but that doesn't mean they are trying to do as little as possible for as much compensation as possible. They worked at a pace that they felt was reasonable and sustainable, drawing whatever compensation their work allowed. I don't know much about this whole parecon thing, but I am more inclined to side with a system that allows democratic controls like the one in the 19th century steel industry and prohibits outside interference, than with a system that abolishes compensation for work performed.
For now. Once we have in place the kind of democratic framework that allows for sustainable production, then we can figure out whether or not we want to liberalize further.
Thanks.
Wages are a problem, using them as a carrot or a stick are an even greater problem.
Wages diminish the pleasure you have in doing things you love doing.
Let's give people what they need because it is what they need, and not because they 'deserve' it.
Let's do things because they need to be done, for fun, for the thanks and gratitude of those around us, and not for shekels.
'Deserving' is a dangerous concept : "If I, 'manager of a call center', earn more, it is because I deserve it. Ipso facto, those who earn less, deserve less, and those who earn nothing are worthless bums". (note the switch in value from what you do to what you are)
I think the fulfillment of our basic needs should not be contingent on the amount of work we do or not do : there should not be an ethical link between what we get and what we do - it should be a matter of course that each gets what they need, because only then can it be a matter of course that each does what they can.
I believe it is impossible to imagine the social relations that will develop through the struggle to birth a new society, at best we can see glimpses in what transpires between individuals as we struggle. For me the parecon wage system is just that a wage system ... the continuation of capital under a new name. I'm in this for the joy I feel when in those moments of struggle I feel truly free...I am hoping that if the struggle is successful I won't be seeing anything that harkens back to what I'm living thru now. I thought this was about reinventing life not reforming it.
Joseph Kay
I'm starting to think the points of contention are actually quite succinct, but at the same time intractable because they're incommensurable. It's not really anything to do with the fine points of organisational forms in a post-capitalist society (workers councils, consumer councils, iteration boards, fancy databases, pull production and so on).
The core of the disagreement seems to be basically ethical: ...
To be even more 'succinct', Joseph, I think that 'the core of the disagreement seems to be basically' philosophical, not 'ethical'.
Here is my summing-up of the debate from another thread, for those who haven't seen or followed it.
http://libcom.org/forums/organise/international-organization-participatory-society-06042012?page=6#comment-478463
LBird
The central philosophical issue here seems to be:
Are 'free riders' a natural or a social phenomenon?
The supporters of Parecon seem to suggest that 'free riders' will always be with us, to the extent that they will cause a social problem.
The supporters of Communism seem to believe that 'free riders' are produced by socialisation processes, and will be, at worst, a minor problem.
To nail my colours to the mast, I think that 'free riders' are a product of bourgeois socialisation, the notorious 'free individual', who need have no concern for 'society' and their comrades.
The 'free riders' that we clearly have with us now will be changed or removed during the process of revolution, and post-revolution they won't be produced.
If anyone thinks that 'free riders' will always be with us, that is a theory of 'human nature'.
And a 'well done' to Steven, for having the energy to wade through Albert's confusing and 'un-succinct' posts.
LBird
To be even more 'succinct', Joseph, I think that 'the core of the disagreement seems to be basically' philosophical, not 'ethical'.
LBird
The central philosophical issue here seems to be:
Are 'free riders' a natural or a social phenomenon?
The supporters of Parecon seem to suggest that 'free riders' will always be with us, to the extent that they will cause a social problem.
LBird, to be honest that's what I thought as well, which is why I was so surprised reading Albert's reply that he says that basically freeloaders wouldn't be a significant problem (as you would no more free than steal an ice cream from a child now).
That being the case, I see that as an argument for communism, not a tortuous system of monitoring and differential remuneration.
jwhite1979
my mind wandered toward a section early in The Fall of the House of Labor which discussed the short-lived compensation framework of steel workers in the late 19th century America.
Laborers agreed among themselves how much they would charge per ton of product, and agreed upon how that compensation would be distributed among themselves. This system was undercut when owners began to give extra incentive to a hand-picked middle-management class who could ensure a quickened rate of production by hand-picking the hardest and longest working laborers. Morale broke down, and the system of collective bargaining was eventually dissolved. Production more than doubled, and soon there was more cheap steel than people knew what to do with.
So there were people who wanted to work less, and people who were willing to work more for extra wages. So you could say that the former group were under-performing, but you could also say that they were performing their work at a more sustainable rate under a democratically-controlled wage system. The system only broke down when owners overturned the system from the outside.
that's an interesting post, thanks. But to be honest, I thought that this was an argument against parecon. As workers being given the "extra incentive" to work "hardest and longest" is exactly what parecon does. And what I'm against.
In your example, like workers today who try to fight for better conditions, what we do is build in safeguards to ensure that people aren't pitted against one another as workers. So we fight against performance related pay. And we fight against piecework. And we fight against people working too many hours being rewarded more - as that pushes everyone into working too much.
This is what workers do now, including ones that aren't even that militant. Ones which have been through a workers' revolution simply won't put up with these kind of practices being reintroduced. (Not without a violent state to compel them like in Russia at least)
Steven
LBird, to be honest that's what I thought as well, which is why I was so surprised reading Albert's reply that he says that basically freeloaders wouldn't be a significant problem (as you would no more 'free[ly]'... steal an ice cream from a child now) [my amendment].
Yeah, you're right, Steven.
This moral stance will be the basis of our Communist socialisation processes.
I suppose, in contrast, Parecon will be happy to compensate/remunerate the kid for their tears, eh?
Just 'measure' the 'amount of liquid' which streams down the kid's face, to get an 'objective measure' of their distress/compensation ratio, eh?
Bastards!
An interesting comment I thought on our Facebook about this:
Ilan Shalif
In libertarian communist society there will be differential "remuneration" according to efforts and toil... but the rewards will be in social esteem, respect and emotional needs - not in the economical means for survival.
As but one example, suppose 100 of us work in a plant. It is part of parecon, has targets for production that fit the self managed participatory plan. We are all workers, there is no boss. Suppose the plan produces the output target as envisioned. The plant is then entitled to 100 times the average income in society. Now how is the income allotted among workers inside the plant? Well, if the plant workforce agreed to requests from 10 workers to work half time, say, and to some other workers to work double hard, or double time, or whatever - all to arrive at the planned output, then incomes would vary due to those differences. If not, incomes would be average for all. If you are convinced workers in a self managing plant would be trying to rip off one another, you might well feel that it could get pretty chaotic. But if not, then not. If the workers wanted to rip off the rest of society, they could all together claim to have worked way more than they did - or harder, which amounts to the same thing. The trouble is, in that case, why wasn't output higher? There is no extra income to disperse if the work did not generate socially valuable output.
marx called and said you should go read him, mr fair trade surplus value lover.
Steven.
An interesting comment I thought on our Facebook about this:
Ilan ShalifIn libertarian communist society there will be differential "remuneration" according to efforts and toil... but the rewards will be in social esteem, respect and emotional needs - not in the economical means for survival.
In other words, qualitative, not quantitative, rewards.
As Einstein is reputed to have said:
'Not everything that is measureable is worth measuring, and not everything that is worth measuring is measureable'.
We can measure a child's tears, but we can't measure a child's hurt.
Will Parecon be able to measure the price of everything, but the value of nothing?
Steven,
You've the patience of a saint - and all that effort without any remuneration!
Now when you have got your wind back have a look at the related thread on 'Inclusive Democracy' and Takis Fotopoulos.
Perhaps LBird can offer some help as well?
I have a bit of an offtopic technical question - why do you guys (not just from the Libcom group; even Mark from PPS-UK) use the term "complimentary holism" when Google says it is "complementary holism"? (the term does not appear in this article but it does in the previous one). I am getting confused here, having read it for the 10th time...
Thanks for a fast reply.
I took a brief look at comments, above, after writing what follows in reply to Steven... hope this has some relevance for folks... I wish I had time for more, but I don't. And, honestly, the characterizations make it hard to engage, in any case -
Steven,
I think maybe we will have to disagree about many matters. You look at parecon, or actually, one aspect of it, and see spying and predict cheating and resisting and so on. I have indicated in what you took to be a very long reply, but what is very short once one has to address diverse issues - and as well in another article I noted - where I disagree. It didn't have any positive impact on you - and as much as you think I am mishearing or twisting or otherwise not taking seriously your words, I feel quite the same. So I will try to briefly address just a few points, and maybe we can both move on to more fruitful pursuits.
I don't think we are debating "minutiae" - and I certainly agree with you that doing so is not fruitful. But whether a worthy economy provides people income according to the maxim from each according to ability, to each according to need - or, according to that maxim when a person is unable to work, but, when they can work, according to the duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor they do - is not minutiae but rather, a first order concern - on a par with should we have private ownership of the means of production - or should we have markets, or should we have a corporate division of labor, and so on.
Our first disagreement, seems to be what the from each to each norm even means. It could mean, that I as a citizen work the amount I choose, at what I like, and I take from the social product the amount that I feel I need. Or, it might mean something more like, I as a citizen give of my energies doing work for the social good, in accord with an understanding of total social needs, and thus also of appropriate levels of work for each person, including doing socially valued work that suits me - and I receive back from the social product, an amount whose total value is just, in light of the total product .
The thing is, certainly the unadorned meaning and even the more nuanced one, leaves open if I don't decide what I need, and what is my level of work - or if I do decide it but only in light of social indicators - who else decides, or where do those indicators come from and why do I abide them. The parecon norm, answers those questions, so that, in fact, people can work justly and consume justly while the economy operates sensibly including investments, etc. The from each to each norm leaves out nearly everything that could yield such desirable outcomes.
Okay, your adding that I can't have beyond what scarcity allows, as you now do, is an addition - but what sets scarcity? Well. the amount we all work, mainly. And the total social product is enormous. It is way beyond my most unrestrained desires, so why can't I have my limits - everything that I would ideally want? Well, because it would be unjust, unfair, and take some from others, etc. But by what norm is it unfair? It is either up to me, or there is some social agreement that I must abide. Parecon indicates a social agreement that works and is just.
Abolition of the wages system means abolition of a system that is beyond my control and agreement, and which gives me my income by norms I don't respect and agree to. It is abolishing working for someone, or for some entity - that is other than me and my workmates - and which gives me wages, trying to keep them down and to force my work up. But getting rid of wage slavery of that sort is not abolishing that we still of course receive a share from the social product, which simply is the case, and always will be.
When you say that in a capitalist firm workers reject performance related pay - well, I would too. But in a firm that workers self manage, in an economy that they self manage, your observations doesn't extrapolate to evidence that workers would reject being able to choose to work more or less in order to have a larger or smaller share of the social product.
If you think otherwise, I suggest that even now, without experience of a liberated classless economy, you ask some workers, in a good economy, if the average income for the average duration of work is some amount - that we all agree is just - would you like to have the option to choose to work longer so as to have some more income, or to choose to work shorter (enjoying more leisure) at the cost of receiving less income? Or, you could ask, do you think you should just be able to work longer, or less long, as you decide, and to also take more or less income, as you decide, including working less and taking more. Even if we ignore that from each to each is socially unviable for many reasons, I think you will find workers' views of fairness, and I would be so bold as to say even your own views of fairness, correspond to parecon and not to from each to each. Ask them to imagine a thousand people and them all together being on an island, alone, and conducting their lives - and see if they think each should just work whatever amount he or she wants, and take as much as he or she claims to need and what their response would be to the person who is taking a ton and working not at all - though just as healthy as they are?
As far as people with disabilities being discriminated against - Steven, I have to assume you haven't read parecon at any length. Performance in parecon isn't according to output - you most certainly don't get more because you happen to be more productive, whether for reasons of inborn traits, or what you happen to produce, or the equipment you happen to have, etc. You get more for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, and only that - unless you are unable to work. If you can't do a job well, working at it is unlikely to be socially valuable. And, if you can't work, or must work less, etc., then - as is true even in many current economies, you of course get a full share. And we don't compete for more work. First off, doing lots more work, to get extra income, is not something most people will desire. But if they did, then the average duration of work would be higher, in the whole economy, because people want more stuff even at the cost of less leisure. There is no competition because we can all just do more, if we really want to work more and have a larger social product to consume from. Most will instead prefer leisure, I suspect, beyond a certain income level, to having more income. Indeed, many will prefer less work and income than average. Income, again, is claim on the social output.
Steven when you say: "So with parecon either it would discriminate against people with disabilities or caring responsibilities, or else it would be unworkable as people could just pretend to have disabilities (particularly invisible ones like anxiety, depression, etc) or different abilities." I just have to scratch my head. First, pulling off such scams is actually not so simple. To claim to be disabled, one must act disabled. Most would not want to make believe they cannot work, are unable to walk, can't see, or whatever, in order to get an income without working. But second, your for some reason think people will, willy nilly, try for some unfair extra income, even at the expense of others like themselves, or try for some unfair diminution of workload, again even at the expense of others like themselves, not to mention they will carry off the scams, is extremely odd to me. But, if in your view so many will do this in parecon, why in hell's bells won't they just take more stuff, and give less effort, in a system that says that is perfectly okay? And while you believe people ought to do it in conditions of being exploited, why does that cause you to think they should, or would, do it, in conditions they self manage?
I think about the points above, and the rest too, honestly, that perhaps we can just agree to disagree. I certainly am not even a little convinced by your extrapolations from now to the future.
You take issue, for example, with my saying that when you use the term wage labor pejoratively - I would call it wage slavery - it has no bearing on parecon, because parecon ends wage slavery - though it retains, of course, people getting incomes, which is getting a share of the total social output. This is not semantics - it is the case. In a from each to each economy - supposing such an economy could exist for long - while people would not be wage slaves they would still get wages, meaning, a share of the social output.
You are right to reject, in my view, old style socialist economies - which were in fact, in my view, coordinator economies, with a ruling class that wasn't owners of capital - but was those who monopolized empowering work. That is why parecon, for example, has balanced job complexes.
Now I have to agree with you, Steven, we do have semantics issues galore.
You quote me:
In fact, however, having a way of allocating income, and thus a guiding norm for income allocation, and a means of accomplishing that norm, whether implicit or explicit, is simply unavoidable. It will exist in every society and every economy that will ever exist because in all such societies people will get a share of the social output.
You reply: "In the former part of this assertion, Albert is completely incorrect. Of course in all societies people will get a share of the social output. However this is not the same thing as all members of the society having a monetary income. For the majority of the time humans have existed, money and therefore income did not even exist."
I don't see anything about money in my quote - though I do think it is not the point. And not having money does not mean people got no income, unless you define income as money and money as income. Income means a claim on the social product. Money can be vehicle of that claim - but is not the only possible such vehicle. The idea that people get a share of the social product - you agree with. The idea that society has a way of allocating those shares, you say is completely incorrect because in some societies there was not what you call money. This is hard for me to fathom, I admit. Parecon's way of allocating social product is the norm that people able to work get income according to duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor (for those who can work) and need (for those who can't). Your norm is from each according to ability (with no indication what that means for hours, intensity, or anything else, other than, presumably, either I state my ability and act on it as I choose, or someone or something else else decides what I have to do) and to each according to need (with no indication what that means for the amount I can take from the total social output other than I simply decide, or someone or something else does). Both approaches have a means of allocating social product - to say otherwise eludes me. Parecon's is fully enunciated. From each to each, isn't, unless it literally means, I take what I want and do what I choose.
Steven, you say, the point you are making "is that if people are forced to work for wages in order to receive a share of the social product, then people will resist this imposition."
And, to a degree, I agree. If people are forced by some higher separate authority that operates beyond their control and involvement, and without their acceptance, to do anything - they will, if able, resist what is demanded. Sure - though it happens less than we might both hope. But what if people collectively agree on a norm and procedures? Then what? Suppose you work in a firm in the future. The worker's council, since everyone works interactively with others, has to decide a shared schedule, otherwise there is no way for anyone to work effectively. Suppose everyone deliberates and settles that the schedule is that the plant is open and operating from noon to 5 each day, at least for your team's work shift. Do you resist this imposition that you can't choose, instead, to waltz in at 2 and leave at 4, or at 7? I don't think so. But in capitalism, and in soviet style coordinatorism, I happen to think you would be perfectly justified in resisting this and every other rule. The difference is you being part of a self managing body, and you being imposed upon by a ruling class above.
You somehow seem to think that you are eliminating wages, income, even work and workers - by having a very vague norm that actually says, if one gets careful about it, almost nothing. So we disagree.
You say: "If Albert could point to any examples in the real world of groups of wage workers which did not resist work then of course I will take this into consideration." Here I assume you mean people doing work and getting a share of social product for it, which is claims on social product. Well, sadly, the truth is that even almost all workers in oppressive systems rarely resist - but I won't claim that as evidence since we both know that is not a sign that they like their plight. But I suspect the number of workers who function in coops and other self managed or at least largely democratic workplaces, still way short of pareconish, and especially if they do not have a coordinator/worker hierarchy, who resist their labors on grounds of not liking that they are remunerated for it, is pretty much zero.
Steven, you say, if "workers under parecon will have to work for wages, in order to get a share of the social product (and if we do not then like now we will either have to starve or scrape by like the unemployed do now on benefits) then I would say that yes from the perspective of wage workers ourselves, we will still be wage slaves."
I read that and I try to understand what you have in mind. A first reaction is why will people reject what they collectively, in a self managed economy, agree to? Everyone is doing it, and in your view, everyone is a wage slave - no over lords, just other slaves. Strange formulation. A second reaction is that since we are talking about people who are able to work, to me what you write says, if I am able to work, then in any economy that you, Steven, would say lacks wage slavery, it must be true that I do not have to work to get my full income (much less whatever I say I need). In other words, for you to be satisfied that wage slavery is gone, I must be able to say, I am not going to work this week, this month, this year, this decade - even though I could - and I want the same income as if I did work as hard as the hardest worker in society. I want, and get, everything I want. If that is what you are saying, we can simply agree to disagree. If it isn't what you are saying, then I apologize, but I do not see what your words mean.
Steven says, "A problem with Albert's points here is that he seems unable to break from bourgeois (i.e. capitalistic) concepts. Namely here I'm referring to his comment about disconnecting "income from economic activity". Not only am I saying that "income" should not exist, as money should be abolished, but the entire idea of "economic activity" as a distinct sphere of life separate from everything else I think is inherently capitalistic and should be done away with. As I said, I'll get into this in more detail later."
My gosh. I guess we really could stop here. Saying income doesn't exist doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Nor does giving it some other name. Or having a different norm determining it. Saying that work doesn't exist…etc. Economics isn't separate, but nor it it the same as everything else. It is entwined, but with its own attributes.
Steven, you say, "in order to have some idea of how wage workers under parecon will act, I can only go on how wage workers in other societies, such as workers for private capitalists (i.e. owners as Albert describes them) or in state capitalist societies act."
Suppose I said, to understand how workers will act in Steven's from each to each economy, I will look at how they act now, in capitalist firms, doing work, and consuming. I think you, Steven, would say, hold on - that is nonsense. In capitalist firms there is remuneration for power and property; comparing that and what I favor is apples and oranges. You can't extrapolate from resistance to wages based on power and property in the form of people working to rules, or slacking off, or feigning illness, or stealing, and so on - to people abusing the norm from each to each… And Steven, you would be right. Just as I am right that the extrapolation from wage slaves to parecon's self managing workforces is also apples and oranges.
Steven, you say: "If Albert has counterexamples of societies of wage workers who don't want to work as little as possible for as much money as possible, i.e. who don't have the same fundamental economic interest as workers under capitalism, then I would be very happy to learn from them."
You may think, I am not sure, that the reason workers want less work and more income is simply to be ornery. I think not. I think it is because they benefit from more income, because they can enjoy the social product they can get for it, and they also benefit from less (alienated, bossed) work, and even, at some point, from less self managed work. This is true in any economy, you suggest, and I agree. It is why in parecon we eliminate alienated, bossed, work. And it is why we nonetheless retain a norm for equity. Because even without alienated bossed work - that is, without class rule - it is still the case that beyond a point, people will prefer more leisure to more work, and by and large, people will also prefer more income up to a very high level, if it is their's just for the taking, and, for that matter, to an extent, even if they have to contribute effort to have it. It will be true, in other words, even if the norm is from each, to each, that I may wish to work less than the social average, and, if there is no reason not to want more than the social average, that I will want more.
I think I am repeating - I will stand by the earlier reply, and the longer and I think deeper discussion of Chomsky's views, as well. Remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor is both socially viable, and morally sound. In context of classless self management, it allows workers and consumers to easily behave justly, and it also conveys the information needed if investments and production generally are to be properly aligned to what actually benefits people.
The rest of your points start to get a bit nasty, such as paid spies, etc. - not to mention the graphics - and I would just as soon not get into that type exchange. The substance, in any event, is addressed in the earlier pieces, the reply to you and commentary on Chomsky's anarchism, not to mention in the full works on parecon, if you want to explore cases, applications, etc. If people care, they will take a look, or I hope so, at any rate. I could go through each paragraph you write, again, but it really does seem it is not getting us anywhere…and it will certainly spiral larger and larger.
I did ask earlier, one thing, and I still wonder about it. Have you even read the book, Parecon: Life After Capitalism? You address one element, taken separate from all the rest - when they really only work all together - and you raise point after point that is dealt with, without rejecting what is said in the parts so dealing. It seems like, perhaps you haven't read that book, or any other, on the topic. If so, might I guess you give it a whirl?
"A problem with Albert's points here is that he seems unable to break from bourgeois (i.e. capitalistic) concepts."
I find very much the same and by coincidence have posted an article on my blog about Parecon so apologies for taking th liberty of re-posting here.
When faced with the communist proposition that "The free distribution of goods means the appropriation of goods by individuals according to their self-determined needs." A supporter of Parecon, throws cold water over the idea "So this means anything goes, a person gets whatever they want, no conditions. that does not describe any kind of feasible social arrangement."
He uses a few arguments to bolster this view.
In capitalism and Parecon workers are paid to work and this the incentive or coercion that makes them go to work. We wouldnt be paid in anarcho communism so according to it we will all tend to disregard the needs of others apart from those in our immediate vicinity because well we are all basically lazy who don't care for anyone but ourselves and our kith and kin. Therefore a moneyless economy is a non-starter.
"your [moneyless] system will also encourage anti-social individualism. that's because a system encourages the development of traits if those traits enable people to win. if a person completely disregards social costs of production and leaving some items for others, that person may simply make it a point to be the first when new stuff comes in, and may take 10 shirts instead of 2 and so on. their greediness enables them to win in the sense that they end up with more stuff."
Or when he writes:
"if people can request whatever they like, if we were to then aggregate the total requests, it is extremely likely this would be more than we have the capacity to produce...especially given a desire to shorten the workday. and what is the incentive for people to work on farms or behind sewing machines? their livelihood doesn't depend on it."Challenging the views that people cannot control our consumption, that abundance is not achievable and unpleasant work will have no volunteers since there is no longer any monetary incentive tying (chaining) them to it.
But, in addition, to the above that he explains that without prices those social opportunity costs cannot be ascertained by people except in a numeric scale as in prices which fulfil that.:
"even if people want to be socially responsible, they can't be if they don't know the social opportunity costs of the things that have been produced. "laziness" or "greed" may continue to exist in the attitudes of people raised up in capitalism for some time but that isn't the only problem...and that problem would tend to diminish if the economy is organized on a self-managing and solidaristic basis. but how are people to know what is fair or reasonable for them to take?"Nevertheless, to his credit and to a certain extent contracting himself, he actually agrees that in the social context people will be equally contributing.
"... in an egalitarian, worker run system I think there would be...and should be...an assumption of everyone who is able contributing insofar as they are able to do so, and, in that sense, putting in a similar effort."And to discourage free-loaders, workers will be policed and sanctions imposed
"I think workers will work out some system for dealing with this. Workers are likely to resent those who are perceived as goofing off and not putting in a level of effort they are capable of and is expected of them by workmates. But there are various ways they might deal with this. They might penalize, reduce their consumption entitlement, censure...and ultimately kick them out of the production organization if the problem persists."
"...i think everyone should be given the same credit per hour of work. of course someone may be slacking off, not pulling their weight. but their coworkers will know this if this is happening. and they'll resent it. they can warn someone, penalize them in some way...or fire them"Kropotkin recommended a similar approach, "Friend, we should like to work with you; but as you are often absent from your post, and you do your work negligently, we must part. Go and find other comrades who will put up with your indifference!" yet he declined to throw out the baby with the bath-water arguing that those who maintain against the case for voluntary labour that compulsion is necessary are little better that those critic who declared "without the whip the Negro won't work" or "free from their master's supervision the serf will leve their fields uncultivated."
Parecon promoters create a complicated and complex of checks and balances since its proponents are unwilling or unable to accept that if given the right economic framework, then, in fact, humans can consciously co-operate, work and consume collectively. Parecon lack confidence that either there are sufficient resources on the planet to provide for all, or that human beings can work voluntarily to organise production and distribution of wealth without chaos, and consume wealth responsibly without some form of rationing. To have a system that allows wages to be dispensed on the basis of work carried out, allows money to circulate, and restricts access to wealth ( food or housing) unless you have sufficient money to purchase something, doesn't seem to be too far from capitalism in terms of its outward appearance and retains major elements of the market system.
Parecon appears to be about building a massive and wasteful and socially unproductive administration for policing all the wage levels, labour outputs, prices etc.
Anarchism/world socialism is not about creating ever greater bureaucratic structures, but the opposite - it will be about removing the barriers capitalism has developed which prohibit access to wealth, and at a stroke create an economic environment without individual (ie monetary or, in Parecon language, consumer credit accumulation) incentives. It is deeply and profoundly conservative, ideas that are derived from the theories of Von Mises and the Economic Calculation Argument. In denying free-access socialism/anarcho-communism Parecon adherents remain fixated to the lazy person, greedy individual critique of human behaviour and simply repeat conventional bourgeois wisdom about peoples' selfishness.Michael Albert can be read explaining "...I think you believe, instead, that there is a capacity for humanity to generate as much nice and fulfilling goods and services as anyone could possibly desire to have, plus as much leisure as anyone could want, and so on. Well, is that really your view? If so, okay, we can agree to disagree. And, honestly, I can't imagine discussing it - further - because for me it is so utterly ridiculous, honestly.... Suppose everyone would like - if the cost was zero - their own large mansion, on the ocean, with wonderful fantastic food every day, with magnificent recording and listening equipment, with a nice big boat, with their own private tennis courts, or basketball, or golf, or whatever....a great home movie system, a wonderful violin, magnificent clothes, and so on and so forth, and, also, while they like creative work a lot, they would like a whole lot of time to enjoy their bountiful home and holdings - so they want to work only twenty hours a week and of course not do anything other than what interests them. What you seem to be saying is that you think that is possible... or, even if all that were possible, no one would want it. Both are false..."
"...if something is of no cost, and I want it, sure, I will take it, to enjoy it, why not...""...Tell everyone that they can have a free house, a really nice car, or two, whatever equipment the like for sports or hobbies, whatever TVs they would enjoy and other tools of daily life, whatever food they want nightly, etc. etc. because it is all free, no problem for them to take what they want. And see what happens....no one will be able to conduct themselves responsibly..."
"... since they can have product, from the available social product, regardless. So sloth is rewarded. Likewise greed..."It appears that Parecon projects on to socialism the insatiable consumerism of capitalism, paying no heed to the changes in social outlook that would occur when people's needs are met and people feel secure, when the world is no longer based upon dog-eat-dog that in distrust, where the ostenatious accumulation of material goods cannot validate an individual's personal worth or their status since access is unrestricted. Goods and services made freely available for individuals to take without requiring these individuals to offer something in direct exchange creates a sense of mutual obligations and the realisation of universal interdependency arising from this would change people’s perceptions and influence their behaviour in such a society.
Society does require a rational, long-term attitude towards conserving resources yet present day society imposes intolerable conditions on the actual producers (speed-up, pain, stress, boredom, long hours, night work, shiftwork, accidents). Socialism, because it will calculate directly it kind, will be able to take these other, more important, factors than production time into account. This will naturally lead to different, in many cases quite different, productive methods being adopted than now under capitalism. If the health, comfort and enjoyment of those who actually manipulate the materials, or who supervise the machines which do this, to transform them into useful objects is to be paramount, certain methods are going to be ruled out altogether. The fast moving production lines associated with the manufacture of cars would be stopped for ever ; night work would be reduced to the strict minimum; particularly dangerous or unhealthy jobs would be automated (or completely abandoned). Work can, in fact must, become enjoyable. But to the extent that work becomes enjoyable, measurement by minimum average working time would be completely meaningless, since people would not be seeking to minimize or rush such work.
And let us not forget that the establishment of socialism through the struggles of a mass socialist movement it is reasonable to suppose that the desire for socialism on such a large scale, and the pre-requisite conscious understanding of what it entails and involves, will influence the way people behaved in socialism and towards each other. So why would most people want to undermine the new society they had just helped to create?
It can also be seen a third objection is raised to a moneyless society by Parecon.
"...if all goods and services are free, there is no way whatsoever for the economy to know what the real preferences of people are for product. you won't have an effective economy. even if regions or communities decide to provide certain things for free, they will still need info on the relative costs and benefits of providing those things if they are to be able to discuss and make a collective rational decision about what quantity and mix of goods and services to provide thru free social provision. and to know what the social costs are you have to be able to measure costs on a common numeric scale, that is, you need prices for social accounting."And elsewhere:
"if all goods and services are free, there is no way whatsoever for the economy to know what the real preferences of people are for product."Of course there is. Its a called a self regulating system of stock control. It already exists and operates alongside the price mechanism (anarcho-communism will simply dispense with the latter and keep the former). How does it work? You go to a store and take a good. Other people take the good as well. What happens? The stock on the shelf declines. Someone comes along and monitors the rate at which stock levels fall (these days its all done automatically). This triggers an order for fresh stock from the suppliers. The suppliers too might find they are running low of particular input to manufacture the good in question. So this too triggers orders for more stock of the input in question. And so on and so forth. Right down the productiion chain. The economy knows exactly what the real preferences of people are! These preferences are indicated by the rate of take up or depletion of stock. Stocks which are are not depleting very rapidly suggest that people dont have a particularly strong prefernece for them. Conversely , stock which are depleting rapidly suggest a strong preference is being expressed. All this information is instantly picked up and acted upon in a completely self regulating manner by the anarcho communist economy. Their problem is that they are not looking at anarcho-communism in terms of a feedback mechanism and are fixated deciding what to produce first and then setting about to organise production according. This is wrong.
Parecon claim that without the guidance of prices socialism would sink into inefficiency. According to the argument whatever one decides to do has an "opportunity cost", that is, to do something else which one thereby forgoes. Whereas Parecon relies on monetary accounting, socialism relies on calculation-in-kind. There is no general unit of accounting involved in this process such as money or labour hours or energy units. In fact, every conceivable kind of economic system has to rely on calculation in kind, including capitalism. Without it, the physical organisation of production (e.g. maintaining inventories) would be literally impossible. This is one reason why socialism holds a decisive productive advantage over Parecon because of the elimination for the need to tie up vast quantities of resources and labour implicated in a system of monetary/pricing accounting. In socialism calculations will be done directly in physical quantities of real things, in use-values, without any general unit of calculation. Needs will be communicated to productive units as requests for specific useful things, while productive units will communicate their requirements to their suppliers as requests for other useful things.
Such non-monetary calculation of course already happens, on the technical level, under capitalism and as proposed by Parecon. Once the choice of productive method has been made, according to expected profitability as revealed by monetary calculation, then the real calculations in kind of what is needed to produce a specific good commence so much raw materials, so much energy, so much labour. In socialism this choice too will be made in real terms, in terms of the real advantages and disadvantages of alternative methods and in terms of, on the one hand, the utility of some good or some project in a particular circumstance at a particular time and, on the other hand, of the real “costs” in the same circumstances and at the same time of the required materials, energy and productive effort.
On the one side would be recorded the resources (materials, energy, equipment, labour) used up in production and on the other side the amount of the good produced, together with any by-products. As already stated this, of course, is done under capitalism but it is doubled by an exchange value calculation: the exchange value of the resources used up is recorded as the cost of production while the exchange value of the output is recorded as sales receipts. If the latter is greater than the former, then a profit has been made; if it is less, then a loss is recorded. Such profit-and-loss accounting has no place in socialism and would, once again, be quite meaningless. For Parecon costing it all remains an inherent imperative.Albert discloses "When I tell them that this means they have not only jettisoned prices, income, etc., but they have done away with all possibility of sensible allocation because they have no way to decide between options based on valuations ... ", they simply ignore it."
That of course as we have seen is simply not accurate or the truth. Anarcho-communists have put forward alternative means, whether they are practical or not may be questioned but it has never been ignored.
Other articles about Parecon and Michel Albert can be found on my blog here
having the picture at the beginning is very useful as i think it will act as a summary about parecon until i read the full exchanges in 2014
You get more for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, and only that - unless you are unable to work.
BRING THEM TO THE COURTS OF JUDGEMENT, WHERE WE SHALL DECIDE WHETHER THEY ARE WORTHY OF OUR LARGESSE OR JUST A BUNCH OF FILTHY BENEFIT CHEATS - HARD-WORKING PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE WHAT IS YOUR VERDICT?
Money, slavery and warfare are intimately interlinked. One of the first uses of money was to pay mercenaries, who, when victorious, brought back slaves, who were put to work digging for gold, which was used to pay mercenaries, and so on.
Of course, today we have outgrown such barbarity as paying for mercenaries, and we wouldn't use money so basely in a socialist world. Or would we?
What would happen to those who would be shunned and expelled for lack of work ethics? Could they find a job elsewhere? would they get a living allowance, or just drop out of the 'income distribution system'? Wouldn't that open the door wide open for a two class society, the ones who are in parecon, and those who are out?
Money is such a strange thing. Join a poker game and see what money can do to you : from deep depression to wild greed. Or maybe people wouldn't gamble in a parecon society, but I doubt it. Both gambling and divination are older than money. It's how we deal with chance.
Mr. Albert, you should read 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' by B.Traven.
ParEcon is Dictatorship of the Academician. Revolution must come from below. Not from overprivileged whites like Albert. In one response I heard him say there should be a specialized security force i.e. police. ParEcon is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
I think its best to just ignore Albert and the ParEcon people. The majority of the IOPS members seem to be privileged white liberals who don't understand the difference between social democracy and anarcho-commusism.
Well I don't normally just post quips but in this case I can't resist suggesting that we just let the 'pareconists' and the 'inclusive democracy' lot fight it out and then bury the bloody entrails once and for all.
Perhaps Mr. Albert could answer this question that has been bugging me about Parecon: what, in actual day-to-day life, is the difference between the "income" Parecon advocates and the wage we are paid at our jobs today. I don't mean in the sense that it is "democratic" or not, but that the point of being paid is to manage consumption. That is, I can only acquire what I have the funds for.
This means that I am not really in control of how I use my time, since I'm constantly having to worry about paying my bills, getting food, etc., even in Parecon's supposedly post-capitalist society. I can't just say "hey, its a beautiful day outside, I think I'm gonna go to the beach", or "I would rather write a book for the next 6 months than work". How is this any different in Parecon than in modern capitalism?
LBird
Steven.
An interesting comment I thought on our Facebook about this:
Ilan ShalifIn libertarian communist society there will be differential "remuneration" according to efforts and toil... but the rewards will be in social esteem, respect and emotional needs - not in the economical means for survival.
In other words, qualitative, not quantitative, rewards.
As Einstein is reputed to have said:
'Not everything that is measureable is worth measuring, and not everything that is worth measuring is measureable'.
We can measure a child's tears, but we can't measure a child's hurt.
Will Parecon be able to measure the price of everything, but the value of nothing?
:) Fucking well put.
I will respond Albert more fully in the next couple of days, but I just wanted to point out this significant error in logic (and maths):
Michael Albert
And we don't compete for more work. … Most will instead prefer leisure, I suspect, beyond a certain income level, to having more income. Indeed, many will prefer less work and income than average. Income, again, is claim on the social output.
I think that Albert will find that half of people will end up doing less work and having less income than average. Because that's what an average is!
This Michael Gove-esque maths fail is part of the reason why Albert believes that it won't make people compete against each other whereas of course in reality it will because of the logic of the system, which worryingly its leading theoretician and proponent doesn't seem to understand.
Steven.
I think that Albert will find that half of people will end up doing less work and having less income than average. Because that's what an average is!
Actually you're wrong, that's what the median is. And since the minimum work you can do is none, but there won't really be a maximum, with libertarian stakhanovites pushing up the average - so there will presumably be more people working less than the average.
Not that it matters.
Well average could be mean, mode, median... I suspect Albert means mean and Steven's assuming a normal distribution.
ajjohnstone
"A problem with Albert's points here is that he seems unable to break from bourgeois (i.e. capitalistic) concepts."
I find very much the same and by coincidence have posted an article on my blog about Parecon so apologies for taking th liberty of re-posting here.
When faced with the communist proposition that "The free distribution of goods means the appropriation of goods by individuals according to their self-determined needs." A supporter of Parecon, throws cold water over the idea "So this means anything goes, a person gets whatever they want, no conditions. that does not describe any kind of feasible social arrangement."
He uses a few arguments to bolster this view.
In capitalism and Parecon workers are paid to work and this the incentive or coercion that makes them go to work. We wouldnt be paid in anarcho communism so according to it we will all tend to disregard the needs of others apart from those in our immediate vicinity because well we are all basically lazy who don't care for anyone but ourselves and our kith and kin. Therefore a moneyless economy is a non-starter.
"your [moneyless] system will also encourage anti-social individualism. that's because a system encourages the development of traits if those traits enable people to win. if a person completely disregards social costs of production and leaving some items for others, that person may simply make it a point to be the first when new stuff comes in, and may take 10 shirts instead of 2 and so on. their greediness enables them to win in the sense that they end up with more stuff."
Or when he writes:
"if people can request whatever they like, if we were to then aggregate the total requests, it is extremely likely this would be more than we have the capacity to produce...especially given a desire to shorten the workday. and what is the incentive for people to work on farms or behind sewing machines? their livelihood doesn't depend on it."Challenging the views that people cannot control our consumption, that abundance is not achievable and unpleasant work will have no volunteers since there is no longer any monetary incentive tying (chaining) them to it.
But, in addition, to the above that he explains that without prices those social opportunity costs cannot be ascertained by people except in a numeric scale as in prices which fulfil that.:
"even if people want to be socially responsible, they can't be if they don't know the social opportunity costs of the things that have been produced. "laziness" or "greed" may continue to exist in the attitudes of people raised up in capitalism for some time but that isn't the only problem...and that problem would tend to diminish if the economy is organized on a self-managing and solidaristic basis. but how are people to know what is fair or reasonable for them to take?"Nevertheless, to his credit and to a certain extent contracting himself, he actually agrees that in the social context people will be equally contributing.
"... in an egalitarian, worker run system I think there would be...and should be...an assumption of everyone who is able contributing insofar as they are able to do so, and, in that sense, putting in a similar effort."And to discourage free-loaders, workers will be policed and sanctions imposed
"I think workers will work out some system for dealing with this. Workers are likely to resent those who are perceived as goofing off and not putting in a level of effort they are capable of and is expected of them by workmates. But there are various ways they might deal with this. They might penalize, reduce their consumption entitlement, censure...and ultimately kick them out of the production organization if the problem persists."
"...i think everyone should be given the same credit per hour of work. of course someone may be slacking off, not pulling their weight. but their coworkers will know this if this is happening. and they'll resent it. they can warn someone, penalize them in some way...or fire them"Kropotkin recommended a similar approach, "Friend, we should like to work with you; but as you are often absent from your post, and you do your work negligently, we must part. Go and find other comrades who will put up with your indifference!" yet he declined to throw out the baby with the bath-water arguing that those who maintain against the case for voluntary labour that compulsion is necessary are little better that those critic who declared "without the whip the Negro won't work" or "free from their master's supervision the serf will leve their fields uncultivated."
Parecon promoters create a complicated and complex of checks and balances since its proponents are unwilling or unable to accept that if given the right economic framework, then, in fact, humans can consciously co-operate, work and consume collectively. Parecon lack confidence that either there are sufficient resources on the planet to provide for all, or that human beings can work voluntarily to organise production and distribution of wealth without chaos, and consume wealth responsibly without some form of rationing. To have a system that allows wages to be dispensed on the basis of work carried out, allows money to circulate, and restricts access to wealth ( food or housing) unless you have sufficient money to purchase something, doesn't seem to be too far from capitalism in terms of its outward appearance and retains major elements of the market system.
Parecon appears to be about building a massive and wasteful and socially unproductive administration for policing all the wage levels, labour outputs, prices etc.
Anarchism/world socialism is not about creating ever greater bureaucratic structures, but the opposite - it will be about removing the barriers capitalism has developed which prohibit access to wealth, and at a stroke create an economic environment without individual (ie monetary or, in Parecon language, consumer credit accumulation) incentives. It is deeply and profoundly conservative, ideas that are derived from the theories of Von Mises and the Economic Calculation Argument. In denying free-access socialism/anarcho-communism Parecon adherents remain fixated to the lazy person, greedy individual critique of human behaviour and simply repeat conventional bourgeois wisdom about peoples' selfishness.Michael Albert can be read explaining "...I think you believe, instead, that there is a capacity for humanity to generate as much nice and fulfilling goods and services as anyone could possibly desire to have, plus as much leisure as anyone could want, and so on. Well, is that really your view? If so, okay, we can agree to disagree. And, honestly, I can't imagine discussing it - further - because for me it is so utterly ridiculous, honestly.... Suppose everyone would like - if the cost was zero - their own large mansion, on the ocean, with wonderful fantastic food every day, with magnificent recording and listening equipment, with a nice big boat, with their own private tennis courts, or basketball, or golf, or whatever....a great home movie system, a wonderful violin, magnificent clothes, and so on and so forth, and, also, while they like creative work a lot, they would like a whole lot of time to enjoy their bountiful home and holdings - so they want to work only twenty hours a week and of course not do anything other than what interests them. What you seem to be saying is that you think that is possible... or, even if all that were possible, no one would want it. Both are false..."
"...if something is of no cost, and I want it, sure, I will take it, to enjoy it, why not...""...Tell everyone that they can have a free house, a really nice car, or two, whatever equipment the like for sports or hobbies, whatever TVs they would enjoy and other tools of daily life, whatever food they want nightly, etc. etc. because it is all free, no problem for them to take what they want. And see what happens....no one will be able to conduct themselves responsibly..."
"... since they can have product, from the available social product, regardless. So sloth is rewarded. Likewise greed..."It appears that Parecon projects on to socialism the insatiable consumerism of capitalism, paying no heed to the changes in social outlook that would occur when people's needs are met and people feel secure, when the world is no longer based upon dog-eat-dog that in distrust, where the ostenatious accumulation of material goods cannot validate an individual's personal worth or their status since access is unrestricted. Goods and services made freely available for individuals to take without requiring these individuals to offer something in direct exchange creates a sense of mutual obligations and the realisation of universal interdependency arising from this would change people’s perceptions and influence their behaviour in such a society.
Society does require a rational, long-term attitude towards conserving resources yet present day society imposes intolerable conditions on the actual producers (speed-up, pain, stress, boredom, long hours, night work, shiftwork, accidents). Socialism, because it will calculate directly it kind, will be able to take these other, more important, factors than production time into account. This will naturally lead to different, in many cases quite different, productive methods being adopted than now under capitalism. If the health, comfort and enjoyment of those who actually manipulate the materials, or who supervise the machines which do this, to transform them into useful objects is to be paramount, certain methods are going to be ruled out altogether. The fast moving production lines associated with the manufacture of cars would be stopped for ever ; night work would be reduced to the strict minimum; particularly dangerous or unhealthy jobs would be automated (or completely abandoned). Work can, in fact must, become enjoyable. But to the extent that work becomes enjoyable, measurement by minimum average working time would be completely meaningless, since people would not be seeking to minimize or rush such work.
And let us not forget that the establishment of socialism through the struggles of a mass socialist movement it is reasonable to suppose that the desire for socialism on such a large scale, and the pre-requisite conscious understanding of what it entails and involves, will influence the way people behaved in socialism and towards each other. So why would most people want to undermine the new society they had just helped to create?
It can also be seen a third objection is raised to a moneyless society by Parecon.
"...if all goods and services are free, there is no way whatsoever for the economy to know what the real preferences of people are for product. you won't have an effective economy. even if regions or communities decide to provide certain things for free, they will still need info on the relative costs and benefits of providing those things if they are to be able to discuss and make a collective rational decision about what quantity and mix of goods and services to provide thru free social provision. and to know what the social costs are you have to be able to measure costs on a common numeric scale, that is, you need prices for social accounting."And elsewhere:
"if all goods and services are free, there is no way whatsoever for the economy to know what the real preferences of people are for product."Of course there is. Its a called a self regulating system of stock control. It already exists and operates alongside the price mechanism (anarcho-communism will simply dispense with the latter and keep the former). How does it work? You go to a store and take a good. Other people take the good as well. What happens? The stock on the shelf declines. Someone comes along and monitors the rate at which stock levels fall (these days its all done automatically). This triggers an order for fresh stock from the suppliers. The suppliers too might find they are running low of particular input to manufacture the good in question. So this too triggers orders for more stock of the input in question. And so on and so forth. Right down the productiion chain. The economy knows exactly what the real preferences of people are! These preferences are indicated by the rate of take up or depletion of stock. Stocks which are are not depleting very rapidly suggest that people dont have a particularly strong prefernece for them. Conversely , stock which are depleting rapidly suggest a strong preference is being expressed. All this information is instantly picked up and acted upon in a completely self regulating manner by the anarcho communist economy. Their problem is that they are not looking at anarcho-communism in terms of a feedback mechanism and are fixated deciding what to produce first and then setting about to organise production according. This is wrong.
Parecon claim that without the guidance of prices socialism would sink into inefficiency. According to the argument whatever one decides to do has an "opportunity cost", that is, to do something else which one thereby forgoes. Whereas Parecon relies on monetary accounting, socialism relies on calculation-in-kind. There is no general unit of accounting involved in this process such as money or labour hours or energy units. In fact, every conceivable kind of economic system has to rely on calculation in kind, including capitalism. Without it, the physical organisation of production (e.g. maintaining inventories) would be literally impossible. This is one reason why socialism holds a decisive productive advantage over Parecon because of the elimination for the need to tie up vast quantities of resources and labour implicated in a system of monetary/pricing accounting. In socialism calculations will be done directly in physical quantities of real things, in use-values, without any general unit of calculation. Needs will be communicated to productive units as requests for specific useful things, while productive units will communicate their requirements to their suppliers as requests for other useful things.
Such non-monetary calculation of course already happens, on the technical level, under capitalism and as proposed by Parecon. Once the choice of productive method has been made, according to expected profitability as revealed by monetary calculation, then the real calculations in kind of what is needed to produce a specific good commence so much raw materials, so much energy, so much labour. In socialism this choice too will be made in real terms, in terms of the real advantages and disadvantages of alternative methods and in terms of, on the one hand, the utility of some good or some project in a particular circumstance at a particular time and, on the other hand, of the real “costs” in the same circumstances and at the same time of the required materials, energy and productive effort.
On the one side would be recorded the resources (materials, energy, equipment, labour) used up in production and on the other side the amount of the good produced, together with any by-products. As already stated this, of course, is done under capitalism but it is doubled by an exchange value calculation: the exchange value of the resources used up is recorded as the cost of production while the exchange value of the output is recorded as sales receipts. If the latter is greater than the former, then a profit has been made; if it is less, then a loss is recorded. Such profit-and-loss accounting has no place in socialism and would, once again, be quite meaningless. For Parecon costing it all remains an inherent imperative.Albert discloses "When I tell them that this means they have not only jettisoned prices, income, etc., but they have done away with all possibility of sensible allocation because they have no way to decide between options based on valuations ... ", they simply ignore it."
That of course as we have seen is simply not accurate or the truth. Anarcho-communists have put forward alternative means, whether they are practical or not may be questioned but it has never been ignored.
Other articles about Parecon and Michel Albert can be found on my blog here
Yeah, there seems to be a strong undercurrent of Rand, Von Mises, and Hayek in Albert's thought which he tries to obscure by dressing it up in left wing rhetoric.
tastybrain
Yeah, there seems to be a strong undercurrent of Rand, Von Mises, and Hayek in Albert's thought which he tries to obscure by dressing it up in left wing rhetoric.
The land, natural resources, the means of production being owned by everyone in society. Production for use and not profit. Replacing markets with a direct democratic participatory planning process between direct democratic workers/community councils. Workers self management in industries with no capitalists or bureaucrats. Yeah, sure. That sounds exactly like Rand, Von Mises, and Hayek. :wall:
Uncontrollable
tastybrain
Yeah, there seems to be a strong undercurrent of Rand, Von Mises, and Hayek in Albert's thought which he tries to obscure by dressing it up in left wing rhetoric.
The land, natural resources, the means of production being owned by everyone in society. Production for use and not profit. Replacing markets with a direct democratic participatory planning process between direct democratic workers/community councils. Workers self management in industries with no capitalists or bureaucrats. Yeah, sure. That sounds exactly like Rand, Von Mises, and Hayek. :wall:
I haven't had time to respond fully to Alberts second response yet. But on this quickly: uncontrollable, you will see that the issue which I and other communists have is not with those things you mention, it's with the continuation of wage labour, albeit with supposedly "fair" wages. It is in this area that logic is constrained within capitalist boundaries.
Steven.
Uncontrollable
tastybrain
Yeah, there seems to be a strong undercurrent of Rand, Von Mises, and Hayek in Albert's thought which he tries to obscure by dressing it up in left wing rhetoric.
The land, natural resources, the means of production being owned by everyone in society. Production for use and not profit. Replacing markets with a direct democratic participatory planning process between direct democratic workers/community councils. Workers self management in industries with no capitalists or bureaucrats. Yeah, sure. That sounds exactly like Rand, Von Mises, and Hayek. :wall:
I haven't had time to respond fully to Alberts second response yet. But on this quickly: uncontrollable, you will see that the issue which I and other communists have is not with those things you mention, it's with the continuation of wage labour, albeit with supposedly "fair" wages. It is in this area that logic is constrained within capitalist boundaries.
And a wage in parecon comes from the society which is organized in direct democratic workers/community councils (me, you, and everyone else) not capitalists or bureaucrats in a state. It's an agreement that says you are going to use OUR natural resources and OUR means of production to do stuff that other people like, want or need and not waste our natural resources and means of production.
Having a budget in parecon doesn't mean there's a market. It just means you're going along with the plan that you helped come up with by participating in direct democratic workers/community councils and the direct democratic participatory planning process between them.
John says, "if a revolution doesn't abolish `work' as a distinct activity separate from the rest of life, then workers will always fight against it."
I love most of my work. Work/leisure is a false and ugly dichotomy. That comment about dance and child-raising and cleaning just about said it all about parecon for me (though I haven't read the book, and from this introduction am unlikely to.) Childcare is just about the most 'socially productive' work in the world. It inevitably involves both dancing and floor cleaning, the former joyful, the latter also necessary. Now I have hardly ever worked in a field that didn't involve a balance of both. That balance can't be achieved by incentivism, be it remunerative or social. It seems to me it is a matter of judgement on a far more subtle and experiential basis, that can only be made in a free paradigm. The parecon model as described seems a recipe for normative behaviour modification. 'Workload' and all that is a ridiculous idea - we all work hard for what we value intrinsically. Sometimes we need time to think about how to work better rather than harder, and we achieve more beneficial results by having the scope to do this, rather than following a shallower 'effort curve' ethic, even if presented as 'social productivity'. What can 'income' possibly have to do with 'value'? If I need to take some time to write poetry, I fucking well will,
whether I get paid for it or not. It is part of my 'work' in a broad sense. I also don't expect anyone else to clean up my mess, and freely contibute toto maintain similar essential services in the community.
Would any intelligent self-organised collective decide that everyone has to work from 12 to 5, every working day, no matter what? This would be pretty stupid, wouldn't it? When we have children to care for, some degree of flexibility is necessary. And who is to decide what is intense and what is onerous? 'How are people to know what is fair or reasonable for them to take?' I know that I can labour long hours and get little done, and work short intense bursts and make marvellous things. I'll judge what to do and when, and I don't see why we can't all have that scope, given education through life and supportive communities. I would struggle hard for this. I wouldn't give a toss for parecon.
Hi there all-- I'm new here... I have been aware of parecon since 1993 when I had Hahnel as an econ prof and he made us read his and Albert's texts alongside our regular econ textbook. Also let me admit that I didn't read the entirety of every statement made in this debate... maybe 40% or so, I didn't measure (word count, for example).
I think what gets lost in this debate is the simple fact that in a capitalist economy, capital is rewarded far far more greatly than labor. Labor under capitalism is exploited by whomever has enough capital to build a factory, buy extracted resources from the earth, buy labor, put the three together and profit. And of course, speculators don't even need to do any of that-- they profit from pure speculation-- their capital makes them more capital. The capitalist class hold a full monopoly over the means of production and reap a far far disproportionate share of society's products.
What Albert is trying to do is address this by only rewarding labor-power.
Now, what I value most in life is my time. I have a ton of personal interests that I like to pursue for their own sake. But I would be willing to contribute some of my time to the manufacturing of products because I benefit from those products. Looking around my room right now-- I am benefiting from electricity, a lamp w a light bulb in it, furniture, my bass and bass amp, a computer, a refrigerator, etc. Because I am reaping the benefits of these products, I don't think it is too much to ask that I participate in making them. I actually think it would be an opportunity to learn more about the things I use-- I would be less alienated from them because I would have to understand them from the inside out, understand their ecological costs by seeing how much/what kind of materials go into them etc. The process of creating these things would become a part of my job-- and I don't see why creativity and learning would be seen as unfree.... And if the job requires intensive training or in-depth knowledge or major physical exertion, and if I am still willing to do that work, whereas someone else may not have that inclination, then that other person could search until s/he finds something that s/he is willing to contribute her time to, and at a pace/level of intensity with which s/he is comfortable.
Also I think that people who work together deciding their own schedules is totally compatible with anarchist principles. I mean jesus-- even capitalist bosses give you sick days and such-- obviously the schedule isn't some kind of oppressive obligation that would force you to go to work even if your daughter is home sick.... Each person would get to decide how much time they want to spend working, vs. how much time they want to spend doing other things. When I'm really into something, I could work on it for hours, because i'm into it. If I'm not into it, I'm not into it....
As for remuneration, my question for Stephen is this. I will refer to a children's story I had when I was little, called "Pig 'I Will' and Pig 'I Won't." The characters (obviously) were two little pigs. Pig "I Will" liked to help around the house. He always volunteered to sweep, take out the trash, help cook the meals etc..... Pig "I Won't" never offered to do anything, never helped around the house, never bothered with the meals. And no he wasn't disabled. How would you handle this discrepancy... ???
Not exactly a hypothetical, almost everyone I know has flatshared before now and I'm yet to find an example where people measured their rent against the amount of cleaning done, probably because it would almost immediately end up with everyone wanting to kill each other. But amazingly enough, flatshares still operate across Britain. How do you explain THAT discrepancy?
And MoE.
1. Don't live with pigs.
2. Children's stories like that are precisely part of the socialising of childrem to fit into a capitalist value system.
Parecon may not be identical to the capitalist exploitation of wage labour but it would not involve a complete break with the capitalist value system either, assuming it was a practical option anyway rather than an abstract model dreamed up by Albert.
I know it takes valuable time without any financial reward but do read some of the other 60%.
Spikymike
abstract model dreamed up by Albert.
Syndicalistcat
the only part of parecon that is actually new was participatory planning. even there, tho, it wasn't entirely new because the guild socialists in UK back in the early 20th century came up with the idea of negotiated coordination between community assemblies on the one hand and worker councils.
the part about eliminating the taylorist/fordist division of labor was discussed by Kropotkin, who calls it "integration of labor". this was revived by New Left Marxists in the '70s...partly out of reflecting on worker resistance to lousy jobs & speed up in those years. Albert & Hahnel were part of those discussions back then.
the part about self-managing work obviously was developed originally by radical worker militants & organic intellectuals of the class. same with worker councils, neighborhood assemblies, etc.
and the part about remuneration for work effort also has a long history. Marx advocated a form of this in Critique of the Gotha Program and Bakunin advocated something similar. Within the Spanish labor movement in the early 1900s Ricardo Mella advocated this.
Uncontrollable
tastybrain
Yeah, there seems to be a strong undercurrent of Rand, Von Mises, and Hayek in Albert's thought which he tries to obscure by dressing it up in left wing rhetoric.
The land, natural resources, the means of production being owned by everyone in society. Production for use and not profit. Replacing markets with a direct democratic participatory planning process between direct democratic workers/community councils. Workers self management in industries with no capitalists or bureaucrats. Yeah, sure. That sounds exactly like Rand, Von Mises, and Hayek. :wall:
As I understand it there is remuneration under parecon for onerous work in the form of "increased income"...that is a labor market, however rudimentary. The bureaucracy is democratized and everyone can behave like everyone else's boss. The similarity to Rand et al is in the obsession with "moochers" and the laziness of the masses, and the need for incentives.
tastybrain
The similarity to Rand et al is in the obsession with "moochers" and the laziness of the masses, and the need for incentives.
I don't think anyone who promotes the participatory economic model has an obsession with moochers and incentives or even remotely believes in the "laziness of the masses", whatever that means.
OK Uncontrollable my last comment was a bit lazy and reflected some exasperation with late posts that seem to ignore the many previous contested points made in the discussion so far.
So perhaps based on your quote from Syndicalistcat this would be more my view as I have previously expressed it on these threads:
'..an abstract model based on a remix of old ideas from the past including some good and some plainly out of date or unworkable....'
Putting it in Marxist terms, I think the parecon model would be good to have in place as the way of running things during the revolutionary period, or the proletarian dictatorship. With the issues of money and remuneration, parecon is obviously concerned with a society that still deals with scarcity; however, in a communist society, there needs to be post-scarcity, which means, in part, revolutionizing the means of production, which is certainly what parecon would do. I don't think these ideas have to be in conflict with each other, and I think rather than Albert having undercurrents of "Von Hayek, Mises" etc., there are actually strong currents of councillism here.
If we go back to how Marx addresses the proletarian dictatorship, there are two things I think we should note: a.) during this period, it would -- and should -- be a period of "from each according to ability, to each according to contribution" and b.) the DotP would be a process that would take a few generations to complete.
If we can (as I do...I flippingly call myself a "Marxist-Pareconist") think of parecon in terms of a model of the DotP, then things like money, and how influenced the model is by capitalism, are less problematic, considering what he said in the Critique of the Gotha Programme:
"What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another."
Given this context, Albert's idea wouldn't be that far removed from Marx's.
I'm also pretty surprised to see the attacks on "work" by a Marxist (but if the OP is not a Marxist, I apologize) since he says himself that work should be, in the end, "life's prime want."
All that aside, under this argument I am only proposing a parecon way of organizing as a way for the proletariat to express themselves and ultimately maintain a dictatorship over the bourgeoisie, and as a means toward communism. Since one of the keystones of communism is post-scarcity, a parecon society with this sort of reading should also be in a state of revolution toward that goal and never just settle in the scarcity stage of social relations.
Comments
Great! Confused about this
Great!
Confused about this however:
Would like to see it, tho :lol:
What's the problem? It's the
What's the problem? It's the picture at the top of the article. Is it not showing for you?
Yes, just figured that out!
Yes, just figured that out! Thanks Steven. Really good article again. You been getting those emails I've been sending to you?
Reminds me of Chomsky's
Reminds me of Chomsky's criticism of Parecon (remember he's Albert's friend)Basically that Parecon treats work in much the same way capitalism does and as it's not a "free" society presumes people won't enjoy work. Good article.
I think this is very good,
I think this is very good, and forms a good counter to all those self-defined anti-capitalists or communists, mainly not explicitly adhering to parecon, who think that some form of remuneration will be necessary post capitalism.
One question I do have, though, and maybe this would be answered by reading the AF pamphlet you link to, for example, is if shirking is such a widespread phenomenon can we be sure that a system without some form of compulsion will allow us to maintain industrial society to anything like the same degree of complexity and production that we have today? There will surely still be a lot of tasks that need accomplishing which are definitely not fun and which didn't really exist in pre-capitalist society.
Excellent post. This is more
Excellent post. This is more or less what I have been thinking but haven't quite put into words. Thank you.
@4h240zju If i were in a
@4h240zju
If i were in a Parecon i'd expect to be renumerated heavily for reading that.
Alasdair wrote: One question
Alasdair
the problem is when you introduce systems with compulsion. Then people resist.
When people are doing activities they want to do, they work hard, like looking after their kids, cleaning the house, writing their novel, inventing something etc, or even doing their work if they enjoy it and it is something which is socially useful, or they can have a good time with their colleagues working together. Having an atmosphere where you are all expected to spy on each other and grass on each other is not conducive to an enjoyable team working environment.
Especially if you think about how much less "work" (as in onerous activity) we would have to engage in, compared to now. And our only incentive would be to reduce work time, effort and sacrifice - not increase it like under parecon.
Steven. wrote: N.b. this
Steven.
Love the pics. They really make me want to listen to what you have to say. To me it's you who sounds like some kind of hippie new age revolutionary theory nerd with a collection of fifty sided dice, not the parecon people. Heeey maaan, like we gotta abolish work dude! Give me a break.
Steven.
Devised from above? How? From where exactly? The decisions are made by the workers themselves not bureaucrats or capitalists. Every workplace could have equal wages with slight variations based on duration etc. It's you and the people you work with who decide this in democratic workers councils. No one above you. If you wanted to work a little longer than others in your workplace this decision will be made by you and the people you work with because this decision will affect others in your workplace.
Steven.
And if I was an anti-social prick in your communist vision it would be in my best interest to work as little as possible and take as much as I can from the communal trough. Apparently other humans will be putting in the work to create this stuff and I can just take it without working myself. Either way it seems it will take a social revolution and people thinking differently, behaving and treating people differently with the ideas of solidarity, cooperation, mutual aid. etc.
Pretty god blog Steven. The
Pretty god blog Steven. The convention image.
made me think though. I mean the people adhering to parecon clearly enjoy and find comfort in the technocratic aspects of the scheme. Discussing anarchism and communism with people often hit a dead end when they are unable to accept the "We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things" and the uncertainty or just lack of theoretical speculation along certain lines that this sort-of prevents.
It's just that some personalities find comfort in certain ways of thinking. I'd say for instance that the pure marxists on this site appear to have a slightly different personality and way of thinking than the anarchists. In a depressing way politics seems influenced by personality.
Since parecon is reasonably close to communism a more cooperative and friendly approach seems more fruitful. I have no personal interest in it but can see that people otherwise skeptical to communism could accept parecon.
I'm not really for these gateway drugs to communism but they seem like people who share a similar view.
The blog is fair enough but the treatment on the other thread seemed a bit harsh at times.
(No subject)
[youtube]IXwqaSAKsUE[/youtube]
Cooked wrote: The blog is
Cooked
well, in this thread, it is the parecon guy above who has started being rude.
I think you may have something on the personality front…
Uncontrollable
FYI, they are joke.
make your mind up, it's hippie or theory nerd, not both. Don't get the 50 sided die though, care to explain?
As for "abolishing work" it seems like you don't understand the concept of work as a distinct sphere of life separate from other types of productive activity, which is a distinct feature of certain types of societies, including a capitalist one.
the idea of parecon has not been come up with by the working class in struggle, it has been come up with largely by professional activists. Did you not know that?
well according to parecon texts/books/websites, etc, the wages are determined by effort and sacrifice. So if you are saying that is not the case please provide references.
yes, and I don't think that spying on people, monitoring your colleagues working hours and how hard they are working is in the spirit of "solidarity and cooperation". Quite the opposite in fact.
In a communist society, "work" wouldn't exist as a separate sphere of life. And if your needs were met there would be no point taking more than you needed, especially if there were no money with which you could sell a surplus.
And if you haven't noticed people don't like to be forced to do things. If someone isn't pulling their weight with regard to helping with essential tasks then the collective can first try to help them by seeing what the problem is (some societies treat "laziness" like mental illness, giving someone the opportunity to recover before reintegrating) and if necessary exert social pressure on them to do a share. Rather than introducing wages which reward deceptiveness and lying.
Your "antisocial prick" comment probably unintentionally sounds quite Stalinist, as that's the kind of attitude Soviet commissars had to shirkers who were refusing to work adequately hard "for the revolution".
We should have a different attitude to people than Stalinists. Human beings are naturally productive, innovative, playful and creative. This is beaten out of us by school and wage labour. We should try to encourage these attributes, not treat people like lazy "antisocial pricks" who have to be forced to work for the common good.
Alasdair wrote: One question
Alasdair
Why on earth would any "anarchist" or "communist" want to maintain industrial society to anything like the same degree of complexity and production that we have today?
Peter wrote: Alasdair
Peter
Yup. We need some industry but a HUGE portion of it is completely unnecessary and harmful. As Duave says (roughly), "we will need to close down at least half the factories." And I think that's actually being conservative.
Because industrial society
Because industrial society offers a far higher standard or living than anything that's come come before it.
The problem isn't air conditioning, running water, railroads, or skateboards, but the alienation and exploitation inherent to a capitalist mode of production.
Upped!
"FYI It's a joke." No shit.
"FYI It's a joke."
No shit. It just comes off as being assholish. I wouldn't waste time analyzing my asshole comment I didn't put much thought into it.
"the idea of parecon has not been come up with by the working class in struggle"
Really? The idea of democratic workers/community councils didn't come about in the minds of workers in struggle? Or that everyone should share in the work equally?
"And if needs were met there would be no point taking more than you needed"
Who or what determines what I need or beyond basic needs what I want? And how much should I take so I know what's responsible?
Quote: Who or what determines
supply and demand and money it seems... whatever happened to "from each according to ability, to each according to need"?
Khawaga wrote: Quote: Who or
Khawaga
There will be demand (like certain kinds of foods) and supply (hopefully) in "full communism". People won't work according to their abilities in parecon? Or have their needs met? Why?
Steven. wrote: yes, and I
Steven.
I don't think people working in a workplace doing exactly what they want to be doing (why would they be there if thats not what they want to be doing) with others as equals in democratic workers councils have to be "spying on each other" or constantly monitoring each others every move.
And in parecon there's some authority somewhere forcing you to work doing something you don't want to be doing? "Work" to be done in parecon is determined by democratic means in workers councils and community councils.
And this can happen in parecon too. But I guess now people in the collective have noticed someone not pulling their weight and so I guess everyone must be "spying" and monitoring everyones every move in your vision of "full communism" also?
I agree.
No, what it sounds like to me people in parecon would work in democratic workplaces and participate in democratic workers/consumers councils as equals with balanced job complexes sharing in the empowering work and shit work. There's no state, bureaucrats or capitalists whipping workers into submission.
Uncontrollable
Uncontrollable
there's quite a big difference between, say noticing someone not turn up at all for their annual shift in the sewage plant or whatever to monitoring how hard our working and how long they work for every day then rating them based on that to determine how much they get to eat!
You're confusing "wage
You're confusing "wage labour" (selling your labour) and the "wages system" (receiving a wage).
I would have imagined that
I would have imagined that the fact that workers would just agree to give each other top scores might lead to everyone having a limited amount of points they can divide up amongst their colleagues. Not that I think this would work in practice either. It's naive to think the scores would reflect people's effort and sacrifice more than they would reflect their popularity, or influence, or other social dynamics. Altogether parecon seems to miss the human side of economics.
I want to both agree with and
I want to both agree with and dispute some points made in "Collective Resistance"
Perhaps I am a technocrat for saying this, but fairly determining compensation seems to be possible in strong cultures of meritocracy. I think its kind of two-faced to build these cultures underneath a profit-taking management structure, but Joel on Software writes about their internal company methods here ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html ) and I always felt that these methods could be adapted to egalitarian societies. The article is also fairly explicit in noting that measuring how people contribute is variable and so these are to be seen as rough abstract estimates.
More to the point, such methods don't discourage the sharing of work-method improvements. In fact, the dude who tells me how to halve my workload is going to get some serious kudos from me.
You are absolutely right though to mention this. If you fuck up these measures then you discourage sharing of innovation which will fuck us all over long term.
All this being said, the more elegant solution is to just have people do the work that is necessary and have free consumption wherever possible. There are going to have to be other hacks to make that work that are lame (like there might have to be an upper limit set on consumption), but I think they are in general going to be less onerous and lead to more solidarity rather than less which is an important factor in the maintenance in an egalitarian society.
Quote: "the idea of parecon
the only part of parecon that is actually new was participatory planning. even there, tho, it wasn't entirely new because the guild socialists in UK back in the early 20th century came up with the idea of negotiated coordination between community assemblies on the one hand and worker councils.
the part about eliminating the taylorist/fordist division of labor was discussed by Kropotkin, who calls it "integration of labor". this was revived by New Left Marxists in the '70s...partly out of reflecting on worker resistance to lousy jobs & speed up in those years. Albert & Hahnel were part of those discussions back then.
the part about self-managing work obviously was developed originally by radical worker militants & organic intellectuals of the class. same with worker councils, neighborhood assemblies, etc.
and the part about remuneration for work effort also has a long history. Marx advocated a form of this in Critique of the Gotha Program and Bakunin advocated something similar. Within the Spanish labor movement in the early 1900s Ricardo Mella advocated this.
Quote: there's quite a big
the bit about effort ratings isn't an essential part of the participatory economics model. remuneration for work effort & sacrifice can be interpreted as equal rate of remuneration per hour worked. that's because the proposal is to "balance" jobs in terms of doing the hard physical labor, distributing this around so you don't have some people doing just the cushy, conceptual work. if jobs are balanced for how harsh they are, the work load, then the rate of remuneration should be equal, if remuneration is for required effort & sacrifice.
of course if someone is slacking off or having a hard time doing their job, their coworkers will know this, and then they will want to respond to this in some way. the person may be ill or have major stresses elsewhere in their life and coworkers will give them slack. if the person is actually just fucking off, not working, it will be resented by coworkers, and they may censure them, pressure them in various ways. Ultimately if this doesn't work, they would have the right to fire that person.
Remuneration for work effort is not the only way in which people gain access to a share of the social product within the participatory economics model. Children for example are given allotments independent of their parents' remuneration. People between jobs or unable to work are given the social average remuneration, same as someone working. Also, people who are old enough we no longer require them to work. Also, people studying are remunerated for that. Also, the community or region may have developed systems of free social provision, such as health care, education, public transit, other things. In principle there are no limits to this within the participatory economics model. It depends on what the community assemblies & regional federations decide to do. It's likely this would vary from region to region based on the particular culture or the social movement that brought about the revolution.
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tastybrain wrote: Peter
tastybrain
I read an estimate once (think it was form a journal might be wrong) that only 5% of current work is sufficient to provide housing, food and energy. That's still a tiny amount of work when spread out even if that's wildly underestimated.Say it's 20% not 5%.That's only 0.2% of peoples current "working" time (which would be reduced) devoted to essential tasks if the work was divided equally (which it probably wouldn't be).
The rest could be directed to personal/community/social work or time in syndaclised work places where, everyone being in control of both their labour/produce of their labour, produce could be exchanged with other workplaces/communities and surpluses available to all. That's what i've always understood communism with any level of industrial production to look like.Somewhere between Williams Morris's utopian Communism in "News from Nowhere" and Anarchist Spain. With a marginal role for some mutualism/exchange chucked in (controversial i know) Anyway.............
I somehow doubt that we could
I somehow doubt that we could provide food, housing, and energy for 5% of our current work, and given people will almost certainly still want laptops and mobile phones and to be able to get medical treatment and get on trains or in cars to visit friends and get out of the city and so on (I know I'll want those things), I don't see how we can reduce work that much really. Obviously things like finance and advertising and a lot of bureaucracy and so on can be got rid of, but I'd be surprised at a 50% reduction in our work.
But whatever the figures turn out to be, based on what sort of precise society we want and what technology we have and so on, my point was less about the total amount of work that needed done and more that there will be some dangerous and unpleasant work left, mining for example, or maintaining sewage works. Things that any kind of industrial society will need, and I worry about people wanting to do if they don't have to.
Oh yeah i agree.Think 10-20%
Oh yeah i agree.Think 10-20% is more likely. I've always thought if there's work a society wants and no one wants to do it should be shared in some manner. I don't know to what extent that would be the case though, maybe not as much as we think. Another option would be some sort of special reward for doing unwanted work but i think that's a dangerous road to go down.Also as the "goals" of society will be different technological advances could be used to reduce working time rather than increase production, or at least the balance between the two could change.
Quote: People between jobs or
That seems quite problematic, though. I think it sort of speaks to Steven's initial point: if I'm still receiving wages/remuneration, what's to stop me from being between jobs forever? Will there be a limit of the time I can be between jobs? Will I lose my average remuneration? Who makes that decision and what happens to me once my supply of remuneration is cut off?
Now, this isn't to say that the freeloader problem won't occur in other models of a communised society, but with the retention of exchange and remuneration based on effort, that incentive is that much stronger and the possibilities for dealing with it are that much more likely to be coercive.
Chilli Sauce
Chilli Sauce
If people "between jobs" get the average remuneration, then some people working (many people working actually) must be getting *less* than those who aren't working. Which surely completely undermines the idea of incentivising work? Unless I'm missing something.
JimJams wrote: Oh yeah i
JimJams
Yeah, with different goals I hope we could use technology to reduce work quite a lot, but that might take some time to develop and implement. And I agree entirely that unpopular work should be shared as much as possible. None of these issues makes me think a wage-labour-less society is impossible - it's still what I want to see - I just worry about the practicalities sometimes, and it's something people have questioned me on recently and to which I've not had a great answer.
Alasdair wrote: JimJams
Alasdair
I know what you mean. When people ask me questions like that they always seem disappointed that I can't give absolute answers. But i think if you try to map out exactly what will happen in any "free" society you're forced to fall into coercive traps like PARECON. A lot of people don't feel coerced to work today, even if they're in a job they don't particularly love, but can't imagine anyone else wanting to work if they weren't coerced.It's a bit of double standards really.
I've always liked the example of the three day week. During the miners strike industrial production only fell 6%:
UK: The ‘three-day week’, 1974
"For the first two months of 1974, the Conservative government under Edward
Heath imposed a three-day week to save energy during a time of soaring
inflation, high energy prices, and industrial action by the National Union of
Mineworkers. Commercial users of electricity (with exemptions for essential
services) were limited to three consecutive days’ use with no overtime. Some
people went on working by candlelight but altogether 1.5 million joined the dole
queues. The miners launched an all-out strike on 9 February. A general election
was held at the end of February and Heath lost his majority. Labour’s Harold
Wilson became Prime Minister, a deal was struck with the miners which finished
the strike, and the three-day week was officially ended on 8 March 1974.6 When
the crisis ended, analysts found that industrial production had dropped by only 6
per cent. Improved productivity, combined with a drop in absenteeism, had made
up the difference in lost production from the shorter hours.7 More than 1.5 million
people registered as unemployed as a result of the three-day working week.8"
Albeit that wouldn't have affected every industry and many would have been able to continue working.Still it's impressive. That's taking from a NEF report on shorter working hours "21 hours". They want that to be the average working week in modern market (although steady state) economies. achieved by greater distribution of wealth/less consumption.
http://www.neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/21_Hours.pdf
Interestingly a lot of the problems in transition wouldn't be as much of a problem under a communist system which would be a lot less consumer focussed. Also i think a communist society would be steady steady state so something close to 21 hours should be achievable especially with technological increases, intentionally falling production rates and little unemployment. But that's for only what is paid work today.
One other thing. The report
One other thing. The report points out that the average working week between all people of working age is actually 19.6 hours at the moment. So with work shared more equally we would be able to keep current rates of production (which i'm not sure anyone wants) at roughly current levels.
"The British Time Use Surveys offer a detailed portrait of how people in Britain
allocate their time over the 24 hours in a day, averaged out over a seven-day
week. They include men and women of ‘working age’, which means 16–64 for
males and 16–59 for females. A table summarising the main activities in which
people engage, and for how long, is set out in the Appendix.
The survey covers everyone within the ‘working age’ band – employed,
unemployed and those described as ‘economically inactive’, which means they
are not employed or looking for a job. On average, they spend 19.6 hours a
week in paid work – 24.5 hours for men and 15.4 hours for women. So these
averages are close to our suggestion for a ‘normal’ working week."
Right.Time for me to go to sleep.Again.
Alasdair wrote: Chilli Sauce
Alasdair
Yeah, while syndicalist cat's make parecon sound less oppressive in terms of forced labour, that makes it even less likely to actually work!
Alasdair, you pose an interesting question (what proportion of current workers actually socially useful?) But I feel it is probably better off in a new thread rather than derailing this one. I have quite a lot of comments on it but don't want to derail this.
In terms of people still having to do tasks in a free society which aren't particularly enjoyable in themselves, I had some more comments.
Basically nowadays, in a capitalist society, what dominates the organisation of work processes is cutting costs and improving productivity. Basically pushing us to work as fast as possible and get the job done.
Without the profit motive, this incentive would no longer exist. We could decide on what our priorities were, which would probably be making tasks which had to be performed as enjoyable as possible. So we could reorganise some work processes to be like games or play. It might mean that it slowed the work down but that wouldn't matter anymore.
Under parecon the exact opposite incentive would exist - workers would be incentivised to make work as un-enjoyable and onerous as possible, in order to maximise earnings.
Steven. wrote: Parecon
Steven.
There's a distinction repeatedly emphasised by Hahnel/Albert, between the essential features of parecon which constitute the model, and various examples and ideas given of how this might happen. The latter, such as peer-effort ratings, are not necessary features of parecon, but a mere suggestion of how effort/sacrifice might be chosen to be approximated by worker councils. At the end of the day, workers councils decide how to determine this – this is by no means ‘devised from above’.
Steven.
Parecon envisions the means of production as held in common, remunerative shares as not apportioned in terms of bargaining power but on the fair basis of effort/sacrifice (tempered by distribution for need), and self-management, solidarity and equity as present. Having a norm for determining remunerative shares is not the same as wage slavery. If you nevertheless maintain under such conditions that workers will (despite the fact this is near impossible) do as little labour for the most remuneration, then this sits more than uneasily against your vision wherein persons can do zero labour and take as much as they want.
Steven.
I think this misses an important point – labour has to be socially necessary. That is, workplaces under parecon have to produce ouputs commensurate with inputs (labour, technical assets, time expended etc.), otherwise all their labour won't be judged as socially necessary – remuneration won’t just increase if everyone in a workplace gives each other maximum ratings, the remunerative share allocated to the workplace would reflect the disparity in inputs/outputs. Socially unnecessary labour (e.g. doing nothing) is not rewarded, so workplaces pay a price when they under-perform.
Steven.
Effort/sacrifice takes differing abilities/talents into account, hence why it is chosen as the preferred remunerative norm over individual productive output. For example, the suggestion of judging effort/sacrifice by duration of work and peer-ratings doesn’t acknowledge abilities/talents as relevant. A brief reading of parecon would grant anyone this knowledge. Also, those who can’t work or who are hindered will receive need-based remuneration to fill the gap, which would be in accord with atleast the average remuneration, and any above to accommodate any special hardship.
fletcheroo wrote: Steven.
fletcheroo
actually there are various ways communism could deal with people doing no work at all, just no one has said "this is how it will be"
But paracon is based on a system of coercing people to work through requiring the to aquire consumption credits to live, so its obvious that people will be better of if they can get more for less effort, communism has a different dynamic.
fletcheroo
so pay is actual based on production, just not individual production, piece work at the workplace level.
fletcheroo
Except it doesn't because there is no way to really know how much effort anyone but yourself has put into something
Steven. wrote: Without the
Steven.
And who is making a profit in the parecon proposal? It's a non-profit economy with production for use.
With workers self-management of workplaces people working would want to make work as unenjoyable and onerous as possible? I don't get it. It kind of sounds like conservatives who tell me that workers self-management is impossible.
Why? In a democratic worker self managed workplace would I want to make the work as unenjoyable and onerous as possible? To fuck myself over?
Chilli Sauce wrote: what's to
Chilli Sauce
Steven.
Chili - Steven answered that question for you. What Steven said above is exactly why people wouldn't want to be between jobs forever.
I can see why syndicalistcat
I can see why syndicalistcat likes parecon as it sort of reflects the kind of trade unionist arguments about why certain types of work and worker deserve more or less wages based on skill, effort, clean/dirty, intensity, usefulness etc etc even though none of this counts for much in negotiations in the real world of capitalism.
I mean parecon comes over as a kind of trade unionist wet dream and a communist nightmare!
As syndicalistcat mentions here and I said on the other related thread, these ideas do have at least a tenuous connection with 'old labour movement' notions of a transition to communism and some syndicalists along with other leftists still want to hang on to these, at best, outdated ideas.
Let the dead bury the dead!
Uncontrollable wrote: Chilli
Uncontrollable
I think you've misunderstood Steven's argument. He's arguing that humanity's inherent creativity and productively is undermined when mediated through wages and remuneration.
The point is that under capitalism--despite human beings being productive, innovative, playful, and creative--we avoid and rebel against work because it's alienating and exploitative. One of the main ways way we experience that is through wages. The consumptions points offered by parecon means that production will still be mediated as a relationship between things instead of integrating production as part of the social process (in other words, by destroying the very idea of work as separate sphere of life) as advocated by communists.
Response by Michael
Response by Michael Albert
http://www.iopsociety.org/blog/replying-to-libcom
noscman1 wrote: Response by
noscman1
less than 10% into that and he's completely misrepresenting the criticism.
radicalgraffiti
radicalgraffiti
I was just reading it and thinking that. Then I noticed how long the article was, so I've not got time to finish reading it now, I'll have to have a look at it properly later.
I appreciate Michael putting in the time to respond, however.
Chilli Sauce
Chilli Sauce
And I would think if people in a participatory economy are in control of their lives and the idea of "jobs" and "work" will be determined by the people themselves freely and democratically the idea of "work" will be radically different much the same way Marx is getting at in that quote. And everyone in your camp always say "work" will get done just the idea of it will change.
Michael Albert wrote: Work,
Michael Albert
This where he's lost me. When "raising a child" I would imagine that involves giving the child a bath, washing floors so the child has somewhere hygienic to crawl over, playing games and dancing with the child. If I was being remunerated to do those "activities", then it would surely constitute "work, which is producing socially valuable outputs"
The state employs armies of workers to look after orphaned children and remunerates them for their efforts...and what a mess it all ends up. Most parents look after their children for no remuneration and do a better job to the "remunerated workers" (though Philip Larkin would disagree). I would imagine that, under full communism, the raising of children will be a radically different to the way it is carried out now. Out of curiosity, in paracon, would there be remunerated "social workers" to look after the children of workers who "volunteer" to do "work, which is producing socially valuable outputs"?
I do not understand how
I do not understand how Stephen finds that Parecon could never work because people would cheat the system they themselves agreed on because the norms are supposedly hard to check but at the same time advocates a system that has zero checks and expects people not to cheat at that one. Guess if you can just make up stuff about how people would act in one or the other system its really easy to criticize.
If you imagine only anti social pricks and master actor/fraudsters in Parecon and perfectly social people not looking out for themselves in your own system then i suppose the critique could make sense. However normally one does not start critiques on a basis of a fantasy.
@Awesomedude It is a common
@Awesomedude
It is a common misunderstanding of Parecon being exhibited when you ask this question. It highlights that the questioner does not know what Michael Albert proposes. Albert says that worker and consumer councils will decide what is socially useful work and what is not. It is perfectly possible, even likely, that worker and consumer councils would like to disperse renumeration for raising children (in fact even under the brutal capitalist system this is done up to a point). It is possible but in my opinion quite unlikely that the councils would decide to renumerate someone for taking a bath. The point is, if you look at the quote from Albert you have to understand that is his opinion and that he would not in any way shape or form decide any of this. So the question "would in Parecon ..." should be worded "would I ...".
Banelion
Banelion
Does Michael Albert know what he's proposing?
Banelion
No, from the passage I quoted from his reply (below), Michael Albert is quite specific about activities that don't constitute "work, which is producing socially valuable outputs".
Michael Albert
From the above it's clear that your Guru distinguishes activities which "produce socially valuable outputs" from those that don't. I simply demonstrated that all the activities he describes as "distinct things we can talk about" do in fact constitute activities, which produce "socially valuable outputs" in particular circumstances. In attempting to define work as a distinct sphere of human activity, (Michael Albert's) parecon seeks to repackage the fundamental problems of the "wages system" with a pragmatic programme. This is nothing new though. The workers movement has always had "revolutionary" pragmatic tendencies, parecon is simply the latest incarnation...the left wing of capitalist reformism.
Firstly. Yes he is specific
Firstly. Yes he is specific in naming things that do not constitute socially valuable outputs. But it is his opinion. Decisions would still be done within the councils regardless of what Michael or anyone else said or did. Not that hard to understand.
Secondly. Not only "my Guru", but EVERYONE distinguishes activities that "produce socially valuable outputs" from those that do not. This is nothing new. If you think the activities Michael listed are indeed socially valuable then your relevant council can always decide to renumerate them. I think raising children should be renumerated for example, but going to a dance should not be. If the council thinks its stupid for people to earn a living by cleaning their own kitchen or playing chess with their neighbour, though they might not want to renumerate that particular part. Up to the council.
Thirdly. The silly part in these debates is the total focus on wages. "Wage" is just a word. It means people get something for whatever they do. If you use the From each according to ability to each according to need principle it means the same thing, people get something for whatever they are doing. People would get a part of the social product no matter what in whatever system you might imagine. The fact that the amount is decided according to some formula the participants themselves agree on hardly makes this wage slavery.
As for the "left wing of capitalist reformism". Under parecon there would be no capitalists, no state, no managerial class, no capital, no market, no surplus. It is rather laughable to call that capitalism. Seriously.
Personally, I do not think it
Personally, I do not think it is silly to debate the function of "wages"/"prices"/"money", quite the contrary.
In my opinion, a new social "system" that hopefully will replace capitalism, is necessarily to be seen in connection with a new consciousness, a new understanding of work/human activities. The new way of production, as well as the distribution of wealth, is connected to other moral principles and social norms.
In the history of mankind there have been communities (and there still are) that do without wages or some sort of remuneration of socially valuable outputs.
I think people are perfectly capable of creating a community that functions upon the principles of sharing the wealth and voluntary participation in the economy.
Of course the amount of capitalist shitheads that indeed are unwilling and not yet capable of sharing and working voluntarily suggest that there still is a lot of work to do in order to bring about this social change, but I keep going with my NOT remunerated activism to inspire this revolution.
I think that the insistence on the use of "money/wages/..." in a future society simply takes hold of capitalist thinking.
Btw, I do not think "wage" is simply a word.
I very much agree Vaga.
I very much agree Vaga. Wages, prices and money should indeed be debated, very much so. However that is not what is being done either in the original article or in the comments.
What was done was basically say "Aha, Albert proposes some way of measuring it, therefore it is wage slavery!" This is not an argument or a debate. This is flinging mud.
For the other thing, it is a matter of concepts. When you say there have been and are communities that do not have any kind of renumeration of socially valuable outputs i completely disagree.
Renumeration simply means an individual gets something from society that they did not produce. This will happen in any society. If this does not happen then it is not a society at all.
Similarly socially valued product simply means society gets something from an individual that they did not produce. Both are part of social interaction that will always happen without fail.
I also agree that people are perfectly capable of creating a community that shares the wealth and does work voluntarily. I don't see however how using a measuring system in any way precludes it. I would posit there would be some criterion for receiving the social product in EVERY system. For example if in Communism some (rare) antisocial person declared he "needs" a 20 bedroom home with 4 olympic size pools around it while his "ability" to work was 1 hour a month i am pretty sure there would be some reaction from the rest of the society. If the society would just give him the mansion and the pools because after all he said he "needs" them, then i would argue there is something wrong with the society because it allows one person to exploit the labor of many. However if there was some reaction in the society that would prevent one person to "need" more than is rationally sensible then that means that there is already some criterion for renumeration. It also means that "according to need" really means "according to need your society agrees on".
So the difference between for example communism and parecon is not that one has some criteria while the other does not, it is that you (maybe not you, i dont know enough about you) accept the criteria of communism so much you do not even see them, while you possibly do not like the criteria of Parecon. Point is, both have criteria, so debate the criteria and do not pretend one does not have any. No one in the original critique or the entire comment thread has evaluated the criteria, they just declared "criteria? ewwww". How would knowing your social input corrupt you? Why would not knowing it work better? If you do not know how big your social input is how do you know what is fair to take from the social product? Is it even desirable that people take fair shares or is it not? If the people themselves decide what is fair how does that oppress them? If people misjudge how much their fair share is and take too little is that good? If people misjudge how much their fair share is and take too much is that good?
You see what i am trying to come at. There is a price paid by society for not knowing how much gets done and how much gets consumed. Even if i were an angel and i wanted to do my fair share or even more than that, how would i know what my fair share is? But to know it one needs to have some tool to evaluate it. As long as "money" and "wages" are the tool that does that and does not serve another, antisocial, function then that is fine by me. Now maybe they do have some inherent antisocial function, but certainly no one in these comments or the original post made an argument about THAT. Declarations have been made but they are not arguments.
Intrigued to see how rich the
Intrigued to see how rich the discussion has become here on libcom, while the albert response on Znet has only one (rather fawning) comment.
work is a big word. You could classify into paid and unpaid, but clearly these categories have very wide overlaps. People spend lot's of their free time doing things they love to do (or have to do), but these very same things other people get payed to do, and they tend to dislike the things they do for money.
Gardening, cooking, childcare : some people do these for free and for fun, for others it's hard labour.
My old neighbor never went to factory on a monday, because he was still drunk, in fact, most of them only showed up on tuesday, and they were all ready to go home before the whistle went. And then I've got a couple of cousins who spent all their free time and money on repairing and setting up vintage motorbikes. One of them has worked 30 years cleaning chemicals out of containers for a pittance.
Are people who get payed for what they like to do cheating?
One thing is clear across the paid/unpaid divide : unpaid work is for love, for fun, for need. Unpaid work is done with high motivation, attention and care. Being paid changes the relationship : the token of exchange makes it impersonal, abstract. The use of money as reward has strange and dirty effects.
I work on the trains, keep myself motivated with the thought that I am helping people get to their destinations. We get bonuses on the number of tickets sold, so quite a few of my colleagues are chasing maximum sales. The tricky part is this: they cannot let anyone go without paying, they lose sight of our primary functions, which are safety and information, and they become generous with fines. The system of fines in itself is problematic : if you can't pay, we'll charge 60€, if you can, it is only 12,50. Exactly those people who are already in financial trouble are hit the hardest.
A friend has a twelve-year-old whom he doesn't want to get caught up in talent shows, so she gave the kid a guitar and told him he'd get a fiver every time he practiced an hour. After a week she said she couldn't afford paying that much every day, and pretty soon, the guitar was purely decorative.
If money has to motivate us to do the things we have to do, we are not doing them right. I love helping people, but I will not answer queries on train matters after hours : See how wrong that goes? I'm perfectly willing to help total strangers while I work, but I hate it when my friends ask me which train to take...
There is much to like in Parecon. I like the principle of having a say in matters inasmuch they involve you. But I am very skeptical of money or wages or whatever name we give the token we use to exchange value. I think a truly communist society would not have money, and we would do things for love, for fun and for need, and not for money.
There are a lot of local 'currencies' springing up around the globe. Quite a few are based on 'hours of work'. I like the simplicity of this : an hours' work is worth an hours' work, whatever that work may be. An economy based on this system would be much more egalitarian than what we have now : there is a limit to how much you can work, and that will even out income disparity somewhat. But what happens to those who are incapable of doing something useful? Can we agree that one hours' cleaning the gutter is worth an hour of open heart surgery? How does 'stuff' get paid for in an economy based on 'time spent working' tokens?
It would seem simpler to dispense with money and accounting altogether, teach ourselves to do the things we have to do for love, fun and need, but I'm afraid that only works in reasonably small and reasonably self-sustaining communities. A railway can be self-administered, but it must be administered.
Parecon, communist anarchism, libertarian communism,... we all leave questions unanswered.
The article was brought to my
The article was brought to my attention, recently, via email. I posted a reply on ZNet, a site I work at - and figured I should also make it available here. If people are interested, I am happy to try to engage, seriously, rather than, say, via a cartoon image - or someone else standing in for me... since my name does pop up a lot...
I don't know how to submit the piece I wrote, in reply, here, as an article. So I will just place it below. Could someone here, put it here as an article, please. If that happens, and you let me know, I can visit periodically and answers queries or deal with objections - to the extent I can - that appear appended to the article. That way, the users of this site can continue exchanging with one another, in this thread - but for those who would like to deal with what I offer in reply - it could go in the thread under that reply. I apologize for asking this treatment, but it would be hard for me to catch everything meant for me, and not intrude on what isn't meant for me, otherwise...
Here then, is the reply I wrote to the original essay...
admin - moved the response to http://libcom.org/library/libcom-author-rejects-parecon-remuneration-quick-edit as requested
radicalgraffiti
radicalgraffiti
Firstly, I envision labour won’t be a pre-condition to the access to the means of life; a supply of democratically decided unconditional lots meeting people’s basic needs seems minimally necessary.
Secondly, to state folly in parecon owing to the fact “people will be better off if they can get more for less effort”, then stating (without substantiation) that communism uniquely averts this pitfall owing to a ‘different’ dynamic, seems to A) restate the initial position B) begs the question, what is this dynamic and how is it captured in communism and not parecon?
How is it not “obvious that people will be better off if they can get more for less effort” within communism?
This seems like the transferring of the logic of capitalist alienation to a completely antithetical environment – when common ownership of the means of production, classlessness, self-management, and remuneration on a fair basis are instituted, and equity and solidarity present, will people really rail against remunerative lots to the point of abusing the very system which they self-manage?
radicalgraffiti
Remuneration is distributed in accord with effort/sacrifice – the point here was, when a workplaces output isn’t commensurate (using averages) with its inputs (including effort ratings and work duration), then either some of the labour performed was socially unnecessary or of a low intensity. As a result, the remunerative share allocated to that workplace will reflect this disparity, and not enlarge in accord with the hypothetically falsified ratings/measurements.
radicalgraffiti
Well I think there are suitable means for approximating effort/sacrifice (of course no measure is perfect), and that workplace experimentation would obviously contribute to revealing the most desirable means of doing such. Though I think the (unaddressed) suggestion of duration of work and some kind of peer-rating system is one plausible way of measuring effort/sacrifice
Michael, thanks for your
Michael, thanks for your response. I read it today, and will respond to it when I get a chance in the next few days. I need to write more important article first however
I would also like to thank
I would also like to thank for the elaborate response. It clarified many questions that had arisen with my admittedly superficial study of parecon's ideas.
I've moved the response to
I've moved the response to http://libcom.org/library/libcom-author-rejects-parecon-remuneration-quick-edit
For a full discussion of
For a full discussion of Chomsky's views, and as best I can discern, those of advocates of from each according to ability to each according to need - for remuneration - there is an essay on ZNet - Querying the Young Chomsky. It is also linked from my reply to Johns, that appears on this site.
That some form of
That some form of remuneration will be necessary is like that some form of production will be necessary, or of nurturing young - remuneration refers to the norms by which it is determined how much claim on social output each member of society has - as well as what they contribute to it by their work in the economy. The anarchist desire, from each, to each - is a remunerative norm.
Your question is legitimate - but there is no need to think of it as shirking. If I am perfectly warranted to do less work and enjoy more income - than why should I not do so, if I so desire. It is not shirking, if it is allowed. In the from each to each maxim, it is allowed. There are other problems than you mention. It is impossible to know what is fair and just - with that maxim, also to know where desires are greater and where they are less, so that investments can be oriented. For more, see the reply essay, I guess... or, for those serious about the issues and interested in parecon, a full presentation...
What is compulsory, I wonder,
What is compulsory, I wonder, about saying that one's income depends on - if one is able - how long, hard, and under what conditions one works? Suppose you have a job - you applied for it and got it. The job has lots of people working together - each affecting the ability of the rest to work by their presence, at least some parts of the day. Those parts of the day, you have to be there, to be contributing, for others to be able to work, etc. Do you see it as introducing compulsion that for this job, to do it, you must be present during certain hours.
In an institution of any kind - from family to workplace to electorate and all others - there are responsibilities if you are to be part of that institution. Is that, in your view, introducing compulsion?
That is what parecon has...
The reason our incentive is to reduce not work time, necessarily - but onerous work, and dismpowering work, is because these are burdens to people better done without. Thus, I might prefer to spend time as you say, with kids, at the beach, writing a book, or whatever else I like - then doing some onerous or disempowering work. Parecon handles these justly, a fair share for each - but, still, we want less... Thus we do it not for intrinsic benefit, but to contribute - but how much should we rightfully contribute? We don't know what is fair - unless we have a norm, and a means to implement it. The from each to each is one such choice - but it is not viable, and, in any event, does help people actually know what is responsible and what isn't. See the full reply, please, and the essay about chomsky's views - and, I guess is that isn't clarifying, maybe a full length presentation...
Wy would you say parecon
Wy would you say parecon advocates clearly find comfort in technocratic aspects of the scheme - what does that even mean? What are the technocratic aspects, I wonder. And who takes comfort in them?
"the real movement which abolishes the present state of things" - says, to me, just about nothing. A movement seeking feudalism, would seek that...so would one that favors back to the earth self reliance with a world wide population of a million remaining people, and so on. Or both, more or less, since in fact they would not abolish everything, merely a ton of things...
Let's suppose politics is influenced by personality in many, and if you like, even every case. Still, the responsible thing to do in addressing some political proposal, or vision, would not be to talk about the personality of its adherents, but the substance of its features...right?
When you talk of "Communism" what do you mean? What is it? What are the key institutions of the economy, or polity, or kinship, or culture, say?
Parecon is not a "gateway drug" nor a stage toward "communism" unless you indicate what "Communism" is, other than a word that puts off about 95% of the people on planet, I suspect...
Of course when someone isn't
Of course when someone isn't pulling there weight co workers can look into it - what else would happen in parecon. As is usually the case, I suspect the difference between you and parecon is minimal, and in practice perhaps zero - EXCEPT - parecon, even with its very few structures, takes seriously not just saying people will do x, but being sure that people's roles and their broad situations and circumstances, facilitate their doing x, promote it, etc.
In parecon a workers income depends, as you say, on duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor. It is workmates who by their collective choices, impact and regulate all these matters - and the economy overall, as well, that provides the income.
Now take the norm - from each, to each. Suppose the average number of hours - which I don't even know, people in fact work each week, is 30. I am fine and healthy, but I like lots of other things more than I like my work, so I decide I am going to work 10. (Let's ignore that this imposes on my workmates and assume they just throw up their hands and say, okay, sure.) I also want stuff - so where the average per capita value available is x, I want three times x. Now work 10 and take 3x - according to the norm, I am behaving quite correctly. No need for anyone to even know, much less comment.
Collective judgements are compulsory - individuals doing what they think is fine and desirable for themselves, in the absence of knowing what others are doing and why, and with zero say for anyone else in their choices, are fine. This is the moral difference, I guess, if you will. The economic difference is a matter of incentives, on the one hand, and information to be able to make sound choices of all kinds, on the other hand.
Check out the other essays, for more, please...
If you said, why would want
If you said, why would want to maintain wage slavery, or the violation of natural surroundings, or the massive production of means of violence and control, and so on - I would concur.
But anyone might feel it is better for humanity to have industrial workplaces able to produce things that benefit people way more, or even just more, than any ills they bring in tow. It pollutes to create medicine, clothes, housing, but of course that debit is far outweighed by benefits, I assume you agree - especially if one restructures the ways of doing the producing, and allocating, so they are just, fair, consistent with classlessness, and so on.
Well the same goes for violins, computers, means of transport, ball fields, and on and on...
The issue isn't alienating grotesque polluting places of work - producing needless and pointless items - but ecologically conscious self managed places of work producing socially beneficial output.
To be able to discern what is, in fact, socially beneficial - wanted - even in light of the costs of production, etc. is precisely why an economy needs means of valuation.
Well, I have no idea - and,
Well, I have no idea - and, in truth, I also know we need a great many more, or other, rather - replacing the ones making tanks and whatnot - but now making things that will enrich and enhance life experiences. The issue is simply not one of principle. One isn't against or for industry or workplaces - unless one mistakenly says industry means wage slavery and ecological violation of the worst sorts, always... and even then. Actually.
(a) Industry doesn't mean that. That is why one gets rid of the old - old social relations - and creates new structures. (b) In any event, since there is no such thing as no pollution, and no such thing, I suspect, as balanced work that doesn't have untoward aspects - what matters is only producing that which, by its later consumption, does more good, than its production involves costs...
A huge portion now is unnecessary and harmful - not just military, production, but, for example, that associated with much packaging, nearly all advertising, redundant goods, goods far better handled collectively, and so on. Markets make a grotesque mess, indeed. But we also need new production that isn't occurring - way more medical output, for example - more diverse food, more worthy dwellings, more items that people can enjoy, and so on.
People will choose how much they want, and thus how much work must be done, etc. Not for us to say...that is self management in the future...
Michael Albert wrote: That
Michael Albert
no thats not so, remuneration is some thing given in exchange for work, it is not equivalent to distribution. it seems you are expanding the meaning so as to defend a specific instance.
Michael Albert
not so, if you take this "from each acording ta ability, to eacha cording to need" it is clear that each member of such a society is expected to contribut as they are able , it doesn't mean they can do nothing ane the rest of society must provide them what ever they want. i cant be certain if people to lazy to do anything would ever be a big problem for such a society, but the way it is phrased then if it did that society could chose not to provide for them.
Michael Albert
theres nothing to stop people keeping track of what is used and what isn't, and i assume people will say what they want.
i don't find videos vary useful to understanding things they take a long time to watch compared with reading the same information
and can you quote what you
and can you quote what you are replying to, not doing so make it imposable to follow.
First, the merits of an idea
First, the merits of an idea don't depend on its authorship. If henry kissenger happened to come up with some idea - it would not be wrong because he was a vile war criminal - but if it was wrong. If someone you most admire comes up with an idea, it is not right because the person is wonderful, but only if it is right.
Second, of course parecon emerged from the history of left struggle. This kind of comment utterly befuddles me. Not only is it obvious, but even if you want to say parecon was offered by myself and hahnel, because were first to put it in a complete package, in writing, say...still, if you look at even our personal trajectory (which is actually beside the point, but I guess this person cares for some reason) it is, precisely, one of evaluating past experiences, and those we went through...
The query about who decides what I need, or want - same thing, really - and how do I know what is responsible to take (assuming I even wish to be responsible, which will mostly, but not always, be true), and what might add, how much I should work...is very pertinent for those advocating from each, to each. It has been my experience the almost all such folks wind up wanting the outcome of people's personal choices (they have to be saying each individual makes these determination themselves, unless they want to answer the question, including with means...) to be virtually exactly what the outcome would be were the same people all operating with balanced job complexes, equitable remuneration (pareconish) and with participatory planning. They want the result, but reject collectively agreed, self managing means of being sure they can arise...
I t provides one answer to
I t provides one answer to the question - but it is an unworkable and even incoherent answer, no matter how nice the sentiment lying behind it is. And, indeed, to implement the underlying sentiment - that is what parecon does...
I might say, those in libcom, or who call themselves communists, don't actually have a monopoly on knowledge of and familiarity with from each to each, and more...
My own political roots are not only in the New Left of decades back, but in various writers I learned from at an early age, and still admire - including, perhaps at the top of the list, not only chomsky, say, but anton pannekoek, kropotkin, bakunin, and so on...
I trace the roots of balanced job complexes to bakunin...councilst structure to all of them...and the underlying aims of participatory planning to the rejection of central planning and markets in this heritage...all the time.
People on libcom, and advocates of parecon - and parsec as well - have the same roots, by an large, the same "mentors" over history. We pareconists think we fulfill the desires of libcom-ers, so to speak, and anarchists, not simply with values and aspirations, but with a limited list of institutions that can actually fulfill them. The rejectionism of some, toward this, usually with any serious attention - strikes us as very odd indeed....but we keep trying.
In parecon, in a workplace,
In parecon, in a workplace, it is the workers who decide how they will determine allotments of income. In your workplace, your workforce, may decide that everyone will get an equal share of the amount allotted for the workforce by the plan. In that case, if I choose to work half time, and you work double time, and most work full time - whatever that it - we all get the same income. OR we might decide to have some levels of pay, say - way over - meaning, perhaps 20% above average, over (meaning perhaps 10% above, average, under (10% below), way under (20% below). OR maybe they want a finer gradation. I, personally, like the middle formula, roughly, and in my choosing where to work, would look for something like that, among my preferences. I think Robin would prefer finer gradations, so he will want to work with workers who agree about that.
since work has to be socially valued to be remunerated, the workplace as a whole - its n workers - get the average social per capita income to allot, for each worker - if the plant is working, overall, average. Now, internally, If I take more, there is less for you - it ought to be warranted - and it is a social determination. But, the more we know and trust each other, the simpler that determination is likely to be...
Please take a look at the longer reply, the essay about chomsky's views, and ideally a full presentation...for more complete formulations....
Parecon is actually conceived
Parecon is actually conceived precisely on the basis of the human side of economics - I urge you to take a look at what it actually says...and its underlying logic...
IF institutions create contexts in which people will sensibly behave as you say - then they will. But with other contexts, throughout society, behavior will be quite different because different makes sense to all...
The idea that people will be as anti social and grossly individualist as now, or miss substance like now, with new institutions - is not only a reason to do nothing - the one that someone like Thatcher argues - but also makes a shambles of from each to each... Luckily it is false.
Please don't take this wrong
Please don't take this wrong - but, honestly, people here are discussing a serious proposal for an alternative to both capitalism and what has typically gone under the name socialism - without seriously looking at what it actually says. They are also doing it, honestly, winging it - basically. Economics is not rocket science - but it does take at least some effort to discern the multiple implications of things - not just one implication and run with it.
IFF from each to each would yield just and fair outcomes, IFF it would allow society to know what is preferred more and what is preferred less and so orient its investment patterns in accord, IFF it would produce along with items solidarity rather than insularity, mutual aid rather than separation - and so on - THEN, I agree, it would eliminate need for at least some dimensions of planning and communications and so on - but none of these IFFs are true, and the deviations are not minor but fundamental...
People here want a result - I guess because, honestly, forebears said they wanted it, etc. I am not sure, otherwise, why... That is, not that you want classlessness. equity, people controlling their own lives, and so on. That I of course get. You, like me, want those things because you value them, etc. But people here also want "fro each, to each" This is not the same. It is a means, not an end. It is something to want, if it would work, really well, as a means. Trouble is, it won't. If people want it because they think it is a fundamental plank of their belief system and aspirations - they will not even look into this matter. But if people want it as means to equity, to desirable social outputs and allocation, to classlessness, and so on. then you will look into the implications - and also, by contrast, seriously consider other proposals also seeking classlessness, etc., but claiming to have attributes missing from - from each to each - and essential.
I was told by email it would be good if I would come to this set of comments and enter my reactions - I honestly don't see why. Longer, more carefully developed formulations are available all over the place. It seems to me, looking at that stuff, taking it seriously, would be far more productive for people wanting to have an informed attitude to parecon, than that I should offer these snippets...but, I will persist.
I apologize that I skipped
I apologize that I skipped over the second page of discussion - which I see above - I did so for two reasons. First, I have to move on to other tasks... Second, I think my replying to everything anyone says is way too much... me over and over - no point - and also, redundant, etc. etc. I wish, however, I had seen it first, as I do think it is more developed and advanced, I guess one might say, than the page I did address...
The reply article to the original piece is on znet, and here. If people read that, and have questions or concerns that they want to put to me, in particular, and pose them, attaching them to it...I will try to take a look. I admit, if someone were to collect those into a single document, I could address the points more efficiently for all concerned, I suspect. But, there are other people here offering views, on both sides, and, honestly, I have dealt with all these issues many many times, in different venues, largely available on znet... for those interested - not to mention the book parecon, say...
I am glad to see all the discussion and also that the sarcasm and personally degrading comments are quite minimal barely present at all - it is a admirable attribute of this system, it seems.
fletcheroo
fletcheroo
paracon seekes to implement a system where poeple are only working for the money, where as communims seeks a system where people do work only because it needs doing, the first encorages people to keep work and inervatiosn to them selves, to look like your working hard while doing nothing. the second to share the work with as many as posible, and reduce the effert involved, there is little incentive to pretend to work harder then you are, you wount get any more for that.
fletcheroo
remuneration can't be distrauted according to effort/sacrifice if the amount avalable to distrabute amungst the workers of a workplace is determainded by the productity of that workplace. Unless you belive that the productivity of the work place is determined by the total effort/sacrifice of the workers, something that seems kind of improbable, people can work exstreamly hard and not preduce a lot, or produce loads with vary little effort.
fletcheroo
the surgesion about peer rating was adressed in steaves article. i'd also add that such a system would encorage the hording of work if susesfuly implemnented, so that people would have to share there shares with fewer people.
Wow, that was long… I've now
Wow, that was long… I've now written a full response to Michael's reply here:
http://libcom.org/library/steven-johns-responds-michael-alberts-reply
Just to clarify that I
Just to clarify that I haven't read all the comments on this original article yet, just the first 40 or so. Or else I wouldn't have been able to finish the reply to the article
Uncontrollable wrote: "And if
Uncontrollable
Don't expect a well thought out answer to that one... Johns has basically written a quite foolish critique of the very alternative he supports. Which, as a libertarian communist, and pareconist, I find deeply puzzling.
I tend to be less diplomatic than Albert in his reply below, and suggest Johns has read parecon and yet purposefully sought to bring up the most basic canards for another re-heating, and from a very reactionary place... He, of course, and unsurprisingly repeats this in his second reply. All very damaging for concrete alternatives for classlessness
http://www.zcommunications.org/libcom-author-rejects-parecon-remuneration-by-michael-albert
To the admins: This is surely
To the admins:
This is surely another case for reinstituting the 'automatic links' to related discussions when so much more has been said in criticism of the parecon model and strategy on other recent threads and blogs, whereas the tail end of this has ended up with tiresome repetitive comments from MA which few, other than RG, have the will to keep responding to.
Can we just not put these 'pareconists' in an isolation cell with the 'inclusive democracy' lot and let them fight it out to exaustion!
'more like this' is now at
'more like this' is now at the top, under the tags and above the quote with the green quote mark.
not on firefox its not
not on firefox its not
Reads like the daily news and
Reads like the daily news and I cant believe anyone would even consider giving up your rights freedoms paid for by BLOOD for stamps & vouchers & very hollow promises let alone work for someone else for the barest minimum and except non-tranferable credits that can be withheld at their whim...to buy only what is provided with NO CHOICES in the matter. You are a complete fool if you are for anything but what we have in place now. Why do you think people flock to the America and risk eveything, its because of these systems of persecution! You cant have any freedom and expect to live under this system. It will not function without threat of imprisoment or withdraw of food and necessities to force you to work. I would ask nicely the first time...do not tread on me! You want more of something then go earn it, its not free and never will be. Patrck Henry has is covered! GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH
Why isn't your nick "Knows
Why isn't your nick "Knows Nothing"?
Alasdair wrote: One question
Alasdair
Another question to ask is, if the only way we can maintain an industrial society is through some form of compulsion, is it worth it? Wouldn't we rather be free in a non-industrial society than live with industry but only by virtue of some of us being forced to do work?
Not advocating primitivism here, just saying that if those are our two only option, the ethically stronger position is to resisist compulsion anyway.
Michael Albert
Michael Albert
Nobody is saying remunerative norms are bad per se. But there is a difference between general norms in society on what is fair and isn't, and measuring hard work and sacrifice and having a detailed remunerative scheme based on that measurement. The difference being that the former doesn't need to be formalized and legislated in order to have an effect
and the latter is epistemologically impossible.
Michael Albert
Because tyranny of small decisions. There is a difference between what is socially desirable and what is accepted by isolated individuals; this is for instance why people keep buying things that are bad for the environment despite there being a social desire to care for it.
And if your logic is basically "if it is socially accepted, it's OK", why isn't "the anarchist desire, from each, to each" OK? I mean we manage to clearly show your way has problems that our way solves, so why insist on this specific remuneration scheme stuff when you are clearly OK with whatever the social norm for remuneration is (even if it is clearly wasteful)?
Bump, as this whole debate is
Bump, as this whole debate is now available in handy PDF, epub and mobi formats.
I agree with the majority of
I agree with the majority of this critique. However, I find much of it impractical and disengaged from my current situation and work conditions. The article is too deep in theory and not engaged enough in practice. Believe me, I hate my reality and I'd love a post work society, but for now, I have to work to survive. I work in a cooperative and Internal to our workplace there is stratification between workers who hold more desirable positions and those who do more of the arduous, non-rewarding grunt work. Yet, we are all paid the same.
In my mind as an anarchist, this is something like a layer of exploitation. When collective members are paid the same (or there is no wages) and there are people who do not put in the same effort / get to do more desirable work, they are exploiting the collective members who have worse working conditions. Or it could be said that they do get paid more per desirability/arduousness of their specific tasks.
A pareconist modle of distributing labor could easily fix some of the structural issues in my workplace, and I intend to implement it in the future. In my mind, ideas like balanced job complexes are the best way to distribute work equitably to date. Without a parecon structure being in place, my coworkers cling to their more-desirable work and are constantly shifting shitty labor in our shop toward the less skilled workers, who are usually the new people.
Again, I agree with wagework being awful, but I think many aspects parecon need to be implemented in a post-work society or else there will be people with better jobs doing easier/more-desirable work while many folks will be stuck at a lower rung in the workplace, even in a communist economy where there are no wages. It almost seems like to get rid of work we need to get rid of inequitable distribution of labor in places of production because inequitability is what defines work.
Quote: post-work society or
I really can't understand what you are describing would be either post-work or communism if a division of labour is still so rigid. What you have then is A soviet union style society.
I agree with the critique
I agree with the critique here of the well-meaning but misguided participatory economics program, and with the general tenor of most of the comments here - even other more radical proposals such as that of Marx according to Peter Hudis' often excellent "Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism" - that value production and therefore capitalism are replaced by concrete rather than abstract labor, so that one would work an hour and regardless of one's productivity, ability, etc. would have the right to an hour of the general social product in exchange is essentially keeping a sort of wage system.
We need to totally separate income or subsistence and work. I don't think work can be abolished anytime soon, but it can be dramatically reduced even now (as many here point out by no longer doing the "shit jobs" as David Graeber calls them, or the socially and ecologically destructive kinds of work that we shouldn't be doing, all the pointless and needless stuff etc.), and can be continually reduced as a standard while at the same time people would be ever freer timewise to pursue activities, including activities that might now be defined as forms of work that they wanted to do.
I think we need to take that risk - that most people will want to do something and that if they are and feel that they are part of a community, one that they govern directly, one whose subsistence - even at high technological levels where desired - is largely the product of that community, one whose surroundings are directly under their collective control (my own preference, as my "Cosmopolis" proposal posted elsewhere on this site suggests, is the self-governed city, with self-governed cooperatives taking care of the various work tasks and with all the local resources and workplace owned collectively by the residents of the town or city) that people will do the things that are needed and will also discover other things they want to do with enthusiasm once freed of the tyranny of capitalist work and of the wage system as a whip.
I don't think money can be abolished overnight (I am willing to proven wrong, but that is my guess) but can be made into a mere local direct transfer every month or whatever to everyone from birth, without work requirements, to use as the like to meet their needs, with some universal accounting for "trade" between areas. There are likely other models that would work as well, but the key point, that we make subsistence into something that is universally available, realizable and guaranteed, and work into activity freely entered into and done as part of a community and to realize one's own humanity, means that no alternative to capitalism that keeps us working in exchange for subsistence is going to be our solution.