On June 26 and 27, the political representatives of the world’s greatest thieves and murderers gathered in Toronto. They held their ‘G2o Summit’ in a billion dollar armed camp financed with public money stolen from vital social programs. They threw out some meaningless platitudes and drew up a plan around their real agenda – solving the crisis of their bankrupt system by imposing austerity and poverty on people throughout the world. With the Harper Government hosting the event and standing on the right wing edge of the discussions, plans were drawn up to halve public deficits by 2013. They will not, however, take the money back from the banks and corporations they bailed out. Instead they will gut public services, destroy social infrastructure and launch a war on poor and working people.

Across the world, people under attack and in struggle saw that the Toronto Summit was challenged and that the massive array of police security protecting it failed to silence that challenge. On the 24th, Indigenous people and their allies took to the streets. On the 25th, OCAP along with many community organizations and joined by thousands, came out to fight for justice for communities. We faced police intimidation and attack without backing down and, after marching through the streets, put up a tent city in Allan Gardens that was held throughout the night in solidarity with the homeless and all those being displaced and forced from their homelands here and abroad.

On the 26th, tens of thousands took to the streets and thousands of them would not accept a route well away from the security fence that the trade union/NGO leaders had negotiated with the cops ahead of time. At Queen and Spadina, a confrontation began that continued all through that and the next day. It was marked by firmness and courage on the part of those taking to the streets and by brutal police attack. The largest mass arrest in the history of Canada unfolded. Basic civil liberties were effectively eliminated. The over one thousand who were arrested faced inhuman conditions and despicable treatment in the now-infamous Eastern Ave Detention Centre. People were taken by the cops without the slightest legal justification. But still people filled the streets and defied the G20 enforcers.

By Monday, the sheer scale of the abuses was beginning to cause disquiet in high places. More seriously, it was clear that the violent intimidation was failing miserably. Thousands came to police headquarters that evening to challenge the police state conditions being created in Toronto. They faced a subdued array of cops. Harper’s plan for an austerity meeting complemented by a show of force that would deter opposition had utterly failed.

The cops did not even wait for the events of the 26th to begin their crackdown. A series of raids on homes and buildings offering accommodation to protesters began the night before. People’s doors were broken down, some were carried away in the middle of the night or early morning in unmarked vans, some even at gun-point, with little knowledge of what was happening to them. Our comrades from Quebec were particularly targeted with extreme anti-Quebecois violence. Many vocal and respected community organizers, our friends and allies, were targeted and are still detained.

We are now building legal support and political solidarity with those facing serious charges and attempts to detain them for trial. Antiquated and reactionary ‘conspiracy’ charges are being used by the Crown. It should go without saying that our movement will spare no effort to ensure those facing legal persecution are given all possible support, that they are set free and the politically motivated charges laid against them are dropped. OCAP wishes to show our solidarity with all G20 defendants and we demand their immediate release. This is an attempt to criminalize, silence and intimidate our movements, and we will fight against it.

At the same time as we fight and win this legal battle, we must set our sites for the resistance that emerged around the G20 to grow. We can and must build strong social movements in the fight against the austerity agenda that the G20 devised. This agenda is the real conspiracy that must to be defeated.

As they work to cut vital social programs, attack public sector workers, expand the security apparatus at home and abroad, attempt to criminalize and brutalize poor communities, migrants, people of colour and First Nations communities, we will mobilize to fight back. The International Monetary Fund has called for twenty years of austerity. The elements of that agenda will be decreed by governments and backed up by lines of cops. We have shown in Toronto, as people around the world have already demonstrated, that our resistance can be stronger than their austerity. We will defeat their agenda and create a society where the exploiters and their thugs go on trial while we build a world based on solidarity and equality.

[Statement from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP)]

There is evidence the police infiltrated “Black Bloc” and should have known their plans. Howard Morton is a criminal lawyer and a member of the Law Union of Ontario

Click on image to view online PDF.

For printer-friendly PDF, please click here. Feel free to print and distribute to your heart’s content.

From June 25-27, Canada will host the G8 and G20 Summits. These events present a unique opportunity for Canadians from all walks of life to make their voices heard. It is a moment for Canadians to join collectively, with people across the globe, to tell the Canadian government and world leaders that in these troubled times: people deserve better!

Some of the key issues labour wants addressed are:

Global Economic and Financial Crisis

In September 2008, the global economy crashed and while the banks are on the road to recovery, working people continue to bear the heaviest burden of the down turn. Unemployment is soaring, pension funds are evaporating and workers are suffering huge cuts in personal income.

Canada’s politicians may be claiming a period of recovery but for the majority of countries worldwide, the situation is still dire. In the North and South, millions of people have lost their savings, their livelihoods and their homes, and women, youth and migrant workers are particularly vulnerable.

Development and Poverty

In 2000, all 192 United Nations member states pledged to meet eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015. These goals assign targets to reduce poverty and hunger; provide universal primary education; promote gender equality; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and create a global partnership for development.

The crisis is fast extinguishing hope of achieving the Millennium Development Goals and nationally agreed development objectives, especially in low-income countries, where the International Labour Organization estimates that 100 million men and women have fallen into absolute poverty in the last year.

In Muskoka, the G8 priority must be to set a path, through the accountability framework, towards addressing the gap between stated commitments and necessary actions to put the MDGs back on track. With just five years remaining until the MDG target date of 2015, the summit will mark a critical moment for G8 governments to take stock of progress and make an all-out effort to address the most glaring gaps and shortfalls in reaching their targets.

Climate Change

The immediate impacts of climate change will target the poorest and most vulnerable people. It will certainly also have effects on employment. Measures taken to combat climate change, in particular those aiming at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while crucial, will require important transformations in the world of work, and generate opportunities and challenges for workers and trade unions.

Trade unions are committed to call on all governments, in priority, those in developed countries and major economies in the developing world, to firmly commit to emission reductions.

Women take the lead

Women will gather at the Sir John A MacDonald statue on the south part of the Queens Park lawn, to give voice to the impact of G8 and G20 decisions on women. Take the lead for maternal health with full reproductive rights, for an end to women’s poverty, for women’s equality at home and globally!

People First!
We Deserve Better!

This family friendly event is for all supporters. Invite all your friends to come to the rally and march this summer.

The march will begin at Queen’s Park and head south on University Avenue to as far as permitted, then heads west to Spadina Avenue, then heads north to College Street, then heads east back to Queen’s Park.

Read at the opening ceremony of the fifth CrimethInc. convergence, July 26, 2006

At last summer’s CrimethInc. convergence in Indiana, there was at least one federal infiltrator present disguised as a human being. She insinuated herself into a circle of friends and used their trust to frame them with conspiracy charges after buying them bomb-making supplies and renting them a wiretapped cabin [1]. We can only assume that we are similarly infiltrated this summer. I would like to address the following to our infiltrator or infiltrators: Some of the most beautiful, compassionate, socially conscious young people in North America have traveled across the country to gather here. They have come to meet like-minded friends, to exchange skills for caring for themselves and their communities, to build a struggle for justice and freedom, to fall in love and make a world conducive to falling in love. But not you. You have come, cynically, to hunt like a wolf in sheep’s clothing for young people you can entrap and ensnare. Where others see comrades, you see quarry. We are here to create; you, to destroy.

You may tell yourself that you are here to keep an eye on antisocial elements – but who is the deceitful one, lying to everyone, disguising malice as common cause? You may tell yourself that you are here to protect others from violence – but you are the only one who has come expressly to do harm. Your employers, the FBI, have a history of murder and injustice stretching back long before the notorious COINTELPRO assault on the Black Panthers. They spied on Martin Luther King. When Earth First! Activist Judi Bari was bombed, either by right wing terrorists or government agents, the FBI refused to investigate and instead tried – and failed – to frame her for bombing herself.

Anarchists, not the FBI, are the ones who oppose violence in this society. In the past twenty years of anarchist activity, the only injuries have been minor ones in cases of self-defense, in contrast to the laughter and mayhem the US government perpetrates indiscriminately across the globe. If you really hope to protect others from violence, why aren’t you working at a rape crisis center? Do you really think anarchists pose a greater threat to people than rapists do? Or is it the threat to hierarchy, not people, that concerns you?

You may tell yourself you are nobly serving your country – but there are nobler causes to serve. Your masters want power for themselves at any expense, while we struggle for respect and coexistence among all living things. You may tell yourself that you are here to do good – but you are the one on salary; we do what we do for free, for our consciences, not for a paycheck. Essentially, you are a prostitute [2]; and should you have sex with your targets in order to entrap them, as other infiltrators have done, that will come as no surprise. Imagine the conscience of a person who sleeps with others not out of love or desire, not just in return for money, but in order to ruin their lives!

You must be ashamed of yourself. Think how many people in the world would be disgusted with you, if they knew what you were doing. Anyway, the gulf between us is too broad to be crossed now. The most we can ask is that you do your job badly, like a worker at McDonalds who must feed his family even though he knows his employers are destroying the rainforest, the health of their customers, and the future of all species. If one shred of humanity remains within you after a lifetime of brainwashing, please – do your job badly.

As for the rest of you, who are not infiltrators or informants – if you disapprove of paid agents coming here to endanger you and your friends, don’t do the same thing for free. Don’t speak of your involvement in illegal activities, don’t speculate as to others’ involvement – and above all, should you ever find yourself in an interrogation chamber, with the ones who really hate our freedom attempting to terrorize you into helping them frame your friends, don’t cooperate, don’t sell out everything you believe for them.

Our freedom, our safety, are under our control, not theirs. Freedom is not a matter of how many fences are around us, but of abiding by our consciences in any situation. Safety is not the condition of being temporarily outside the grasp of our enemies, but of being able to trust ourselves never to deliver others into harm’s way, never to become something we despise.

The FBI, which exists to protect the interests of the most powerful, selfish, and destructive men in the world today, hopes to intimidate us out of our struggle for a better world. But we are here because we feel that the lives waiting for us in their society are unlivable, because we see that the injustices that create the foundation of their power are unacceptable, because we know that the pollution and destruction of their economy are unsustainable. There is no future for us except through change – so attacks on our freedom can only mobilize us to struggle more urgently.

Even if there are one hundred federal infiltrators here and only two human beings, those two human beings can be more powerful than the entire apparatus of the state. Find each other and do something beautiful.
Thank you.

1) Please see www.supporteric.org for more info on this tragic case, involving anarchist activist Eric McDavid, who had at the time of writing been held in solitary confinement for over a year.

2) Not meant as a slight against honest sex workers.

Hamilton Anarchist Book Fair, June 5, 2010 — Join us for the Third Annual Hamilton Anarchist Book Fair, presented by Common Cause. Special guests include Peter Gelderloos, author of How Nonviolence Protects The State, and Gord Hill, author of 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance.

Admission is free. Child care available. Runs from 10am to 4pm at Westdale High School, 700 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario.

By Darius Mirshahi

As young people, we already know we’re fucked. We’ve been robbed of a future by our elders who consumed it. The last few generations have taken every resource imaginable and extracted it at an ever-increasing rate. Blind to the world around them they planned our obsolescance like the products they designed for the dump. Now everything is unbalanced and we’re coming to a tipping point. We already see the consequences everywhere. Depression economics, ecological catastrophes, violent and oppressive social relations. Their poisons have logically spread beyond our rivers and land into our bodies and minds. It’s in the air we breathe, its broadcasted on the airwaves, it’s all pervasive, and always present. They dug us into a coffin and we must escape it. This will be no small task. It demands the radical re-organization of humanity and a total re-evaluation of our relationship with our ecological support systems.

What we know is this: There’s no future on this path and we’re speeding to the finish line. These are desparate times, the very survival of life on this planet, including our own, lies in the balance of the decisions we make now. Everything will flow from here.

The damage is done, the climate is not only changing, it has changed. We already live in an ecological catastrophe. But this only means that we must fight harder to save the small pockets of vibrant ecosystems that still exist. There are fools among us that still wish to pillage what little remains and it’s up to us to stop them. We cannot count on governments to do this work for us either. They have never worked for us, and have always paved the way for corporate exploitation of the earth’s resources. Politicians are bought and paid for by those who fund their campaigns. Clear-cutters, mining companies, and developers own the Canadian economy and by extension our politicians, who gladly rubber-stamp their ecocidal projects. The most important thing we can do now is directly confront the forces of industrial expansion by intervening as individuals and communities of resistance. We must create conflict with these forces every time they attempt to replace a forest with new suburban sprawl, every time they attempt to rob our mother and turn her into commodities, and every time they attempt to expand the roads and highways to facilitate larger distribution of their products.

But even this is not enough, we must dismantle the system of industrial capitalism not merely contain it. We need to reverse the process not just stall its expansion.

We need to develop sustainable alternatives to everything  we have come to take for granted in our culture. We need to realize our way of life is incompatible with life itself. We need to decontaminate our soil water and air, because even if we drastically decreased emissions we would still be breathing in toxins and living on a toxic planet. We need to dismantle the power grid, stop all mass production of energy and transition into more resilient community-controlled autonomous energy production. We need to abolish patent-laws that protect intellectual property and liberate the knowledge of sustainable alternatives. Corporations have been keeping us dependent on their inefficient and dirty technologies for decades through copyright laws.

We need to challenge the forces of social control that exist to keep us passively marching towards the nightmare they are steadily building for us on this planet. We need to reject their products, and make their entire industrial system collapse before there is a total ecological collapse and mass extinction. Species extinction is currently accelerating on this planet due to our culture of consumerism and the economic domination of this planet. The oceans have massive dead zones, most rivers have become undrinkable from dams and industrial runoff, and we live in concrete jungles, saturated in smog, where we slave away to meet our basic needs.

Another way of life is possible and necessary. We can radically change this world for the better, all we need to do is start acting on our desires and putting our ideas into practice. We can start liberating our lives, communities, and bioregions from the tyranny of the market. We can challenge the authority of governments and reclaim local autonomy. We can defend the ecosystems that are still intact while re-wilding areas that have been devastated. We can tear up parking lots, detoxify soil, and create community gardens. We can occupy and take over the existing infrastructure and run it collectively while reconnecting it to our environment by collecting rainwater, building rooftop gardens, and ripping out lawns to allow diverse plant and animal life to flourish.

We can start in the here and now. We do not need to wait for action from the powers that be. We must take action and be the power for change ourselves. The fate of the world is in our hands. We can either create resilient communities capable of surviving the collapse and defending and regenerating our ecosystems, or we can continue down the suicidal path of industrial expansion and consumer culture. It’s time to get off the fence and stand up against those who have sold out the future.

By Alric Malgraith

Philosopher Thomas Hobbes described pre-civilized life, what he called “the natural condition of man” as “nasty, brutish and short” and thus Man needs an all powerful government to suppress his natural savagery. (Hobbes 1651) This description of hunter-gatherer cultures was widely accepted in Enlightenment thinking. Only Jean-Jacques Rousseau disagreed and argued in favour of an uncivilized life, philosophically. (Rousseau 1754) Rousseau’s thinking was dismissed as romantic and “noble savage” mythology. Perhaps Rousseau was romanticizing, but through modern ethnographic and archaeological studies it can be determined that hunter-gatherers have better lives than so-called civilized people. Hunter-gatherers have more leisure time, a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and a stronger sense of community than those living in industrialized societies.

Philosopher Derrick Jensen gives an appropriate definition of Civilization in a practical sense. Civilization is “a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts – that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities.” He proceeds to define a city as “people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.” (Jensen 2006) These definitions will be considered when the term “civilization” is used throughout this essay and the term “uncivilized” or “primitive” should not be taken as a term of offense or denigration.

The Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins reported in his book on Stone Age economics that hunter-gatherers on average spend three to five hours per day dedicated to food production. In this small amount of labour time per day, plus the occasional time spent building and maintaining tools and shelter they are able to provide all the things that subsistence requires. This is far less labour time than is required by industrialized people who often work eight hours per day or 35-40 hours per week. (Sahlins 1972) This leaves hunter-gatherers ample time for social, familial, artistic and other playful pursuits. One need only read the accounts of civilized people who have lived among uncivilized people to understand how leisurely their lifestyle was. Caribbean expert Carl Sauer gave the follow description of the lifestyle of the Arawak people, a pre-Columbian Caribbean culture; “The tropical idyll accounts of Columbus and Peter Martyr was largely true. The people suffered no want. They took care of their plantings, were dexterous at fishing and were bold canoeists and swimmers. They designed attractive houses and kept them clean. They found aesthetic expression in woodworking. They had leisure to enjoy diversion in ball games, dances and music.” (quoted in Jensen 2004) Similar descriptions of primitive cultures can be found from Africa to the Americas to the South Pacific.

Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond has called agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” In his paper of the same name he claims that social and sexual inequality, despotism and most diseases have their origins in the advent of agriculture. He further reports that Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert spend only twelve to nineteen hours per week obtaining food. Hadza nomads from Tanzania spend fourteen hours or less every week foraging for food. Diamond quotes a Bushman who, when asked why he hadn’t adopted agriculture like some neighbouring tribes, responded, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” (Diamond 1987)

Central to their success from pre-historic times to the present is primitive cultures’ dedication to sharing. Hunter-gatherers have a much more egalitarian distribution of wealth than agricultural societies. This is important in that it ensures fairness and that everyone receives equal compensation for their contributions to the band or tribe. In uncivilized cultures “the importance of giving gifts and sharing is reinforced throughout life until it becomes deeply embedded within a person’s personality. Because the failure to share among many hunter-gatherers results in ill feeling because one party fails to obtain food or gifts, but also because the failure to share sends a strong symbolic message to those left out of the division.” (Kelly 1995) It was this concentration on solidarity, cooperation and sharing that led to the communitarian and close-knit tribes that developed out of small Paleolithic bands. This mutual respect in hunter-gatherer tribes explains their strong sense of community and lack of alienation.

Anarcho-primitivist philosopher and re-interpreter of the Frankfurt School’s “critical theory”, John Zerzan defines alienation as being “estranged from our own experiences, dislodged from a natural mode of being.” (Zerzan 2002) Nothing such as this is experienced among primitive cultures. Zerzan argues that this is because hunter-gatherers do not have their personal relationships mediated by technology. He believes that the full range of communication and understanding developed among hunter-gatherers through directly experiencing each others’ opinions, personalities and ideas is why tribal peoples rarely have feelings of isolation, hopelessness or exclusion. (Zerzan 2002) It is through an excess of cultural images and technological mediation that we dehumanize each other, neglect each others’ emotional needs and suffer a general breakdown in societies. In adopting civilization we lose the generally friendly communal bonds based on mutual aid that hunter-gatherers have, at least within their own tribe.

Detractors of these viewpoints will claim that these ideas are a type of positivist or reverse racism and are no more than noble savage mythology. This is a fallacy. The historical revision of how we view hunter-gatherers in not groundless ideology, but a worldview backed up by almost 40 years of new ethnographic and archaeological data which throws into question old progressivist ideas. Others will point to violence among some tribal peoples as well as the ritualized violence of the Aztecs and headhunting groups as evidence against pre-civilized peacefulness and equality. This is also easily refutable considering that the Aztecs were clearly civilized. None of the headhunting groups were true hunter-gatherers either. The ritualized domestic violence among the Yanomano of South America, as reported (and exaggerated) by Napoleon Chagnon (1968) can be explained by the authoritarian power relations and sexual divisions that developed due to their use of “slash and burn” horticulture. Domestication and control breeds domestication and control.

The vast amount of archaeological data that has been collected and vast amount of ethnographic research conducted on hunter-gatherer cultures seems more and more to support the “romantic” idea that primitive people live with a close bond to nature and each other, that they are not destitute and backward. In fact we should instead be reconsidering the merits of civilization and questioning the civilized way of life. Perhaps the question is not “Why did humans take so long to invent agriculture?”, but “Why did humans invent agriculture at all?”

It is common in our mass-media to read and to hear commentators talk about the number of social problems that face us today, such as global warming, destruction of Earth’s environment, unemployment, crime, violence, poverty, hunger, and the population explosion. Yet, how often do we hear of workable plans for alleviating many of these social problems? It is relatively simple for people to criticize society, however it’s much more difficult to identify and implement plans to resolve the problems.

The Venus Project is a veritable blue-print for the genesis of a new world civilization, one that is based on human concern and environmental reclamation.

The plans for The Venus Project offer society a broader spectrum of choices based on the scientific possibilities directed toward a new era of peace and sustainability for all. Through the implementation of a resource-based economy, and a multitude of innovative and environmentally friendly technologies directly applied to the social system, The Venus Project proposals will dramatically reduce crime, poverty, hunger, homelessness, and many other pressing problems that are common throughout the world today.

One of the cornerstones of the organization’s findings is the fact that many of the dysfunctional behaviors of today’s society stem directly from the dehumanizing environment of a monetary system. In addition, automation has resulted in the technological replacement of human labor by machines and eventually most people will not have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services turned out.

The Venus Project proposes a social system in which automation and technology would be intelligently integrated into an overall social design where the primary function would be to maximize the quality of life rather than profits. This project also introduces a set of workable and practical values.

This is in perfect accord with the spiritual aspects and ideals found in most religions throughout the world. What sets The Venus Project apart, however, is that it proposes to translate these ideals into a working reality.

To test its designs and proposals The Venus Project is working towards putting its ideals into practice by the construction of an experimental research city. Blueprints for most of the initial technologies and buildings have begun. Fund-raising efforts are currently under way to help support the construction of this first experimental city. This new experimental research city would be devoted to working towards the aims and goals of The Venus Project, which are:

1. Realizing the declaration of the world’s resources as being the common heritage of all people.

2. Transcending the artificial boundaries that currently and arbitrarily separate people.

3. Replacing money-based nationalistic economies with a resource-based world economy.

4. Assisting in stabilizing the world’s population through education and voluntary birth control.

5. Reclaiming and restoring the natural environment to the best of our ability.

6. Redesigning cities, transportation systems, agricultural industries, and industrial plants so that they are energy efficient, clean, and able to conveniently serve the needs of all people.

7. Gradually outgrowing corporate entities and governments, (local, national, or supra- national) as means of social management.

8. Sharing and applying new technologies for the benefit of all nations.

9. Developing and using clean renewable energy sources.

10. Manufacturing the highest quality products for the benefit of the world’s people.

11. Requiring environmental impact studies prior to construction of any mega projects.

12. Encouraging the widest range of creativity and incentive toward constructive endeavour.

13. Outgrowing nationalism, bigotry, and prejudice through education.

14. Eliminating elitism, technical or otherwise.

15. Arriving at methodologies by careful research rather than random opinions.

16. Enhancing communication in schools so that our language is relevant to the physical conditions of the world.

17. Providing not only the necessities of life, but also offering challenges that stimulate the mind while emphasizing individuality rather than uniformity.

18. Finally, preparing people intellectually and emotionally for the changes and challenges that lie ahead.

[http://www.thevenusproject.com]

By Chris Spannos

Where did parecon come from? What is its history?

Participatory economics, or parecon, came mainly from the cumulative struggles of diverse populations trying to win liberation from capitalism. Parecon owes, in particular, to the anarchist and the libertarian socialist heritage, to the most recent experiences of the New Left of the Sixties, but also to every historical uprising and project aimed at eliminating class rule from the beginning to the present. It has learned from successes and from failures.

I once heard about a strike, billed as the first, by Egyptian peasants against a Pharaoh who moved from requiring six days labor on the pyramid a week, to requiring seven days, and from providing food to providing nothing. I think parecon harks back all the way to that uprising. I think it owes to every essay, speech, and book, and to every activist project and movement that has tried to shed light on the meaning or practice of classlessness.

Parecon meaning classlessness most broadly was born when revolutionaries of various camps began imagining and seeking a classless economy. Kropotkin, Rocker, Bakunin, Pannekoek. That’s what parecon is, a classless economy. It is not capitalism but it is also not an economy ruled by roughly a fifth of the population that monopolizes empowering conditions. In parecon a few participants don’t dominate the remaining participants.

Parecon itself, the model, came into being more recently, however, with a particular conception of defining institutions, when Robin Hahnel and I thought through our reactions to various schools of anti capitalist activism, and set out our views in a book titled Looking Forward, about sixteen years ago. Since then parecon has been repeatedly refined, partly in its conception, but mostly in how to communicate about it.

What are the central institutional features of parecon which, if they were absent, then an economy wouldn’t be a parecon anymore? And beyond the features essential to being a parecon, what range of variety and choice is there in any specific participatory economy?

The central features of the model called parecon are workers and consumers self managed councils, balanced job complexes, remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, and participatory planning.

I think these institutional features are to the parecon model what private ownership, corporate divisions of labor, remuneration for property, power, and output, and market allocation are to capitalism. You can’t have a classless economy without these defining features.

But just as capitalism comes in many shapes, often dramatically different from one instance to the next, and just as this diversity of capitalisms is not due solely to countries having different populations, resources, levels of technology, or differences in other parts of social life, but also owes to countless variations in the implementation of key economic features and in the implementation of endless second, third, and fourth order economic features as well - the same will hold for actual participatory economies.

Thus, different instances of participatory economy will differ in the details of how labor is measured, how jobs are balanced, how councils meet and make decisions, how participatory planning is carried out, and, beyond that, in all manner of less central attributes within and between workplaces and communities.

It is a debilitating mistake to get caught up in seeking an inflexible, unvarying blueprint. Parecon is not inflexible or unvarying. It no more specifies the details of all future parecons than any broad description of capitalism’s defining features tell us everything about the U.S., Sweden, Chile, and South Africa. The model shows central defining features, no more, no less.

You say balanced job complexes are also central to classlessness, and that classlessness can’t do without them. How do you arrive at that claim?

We want classlessness and by definition of what classes are, that means that we can’t have our economic institutions giving some producers more power which they use to accumulate excessive wealth, better conditions, and so on.

We know that if we let people own means of production and determine its use they will dominate outcomes and accumulate extreme wealth. Parecon, seeking classlessness, excludes that. That much is straightforward.

But it also turns out that if some people do only rote and tedious, obedient labor, while other people do only work that involves empowering conditions, the former traditional workers, will be dominated by the latter group who I call the coordinator class. The logic of seeking balanced job complexes stems from this observation.

With balanced job complexes, we honor expertise, of course, but each worker does a mix of tasks - not solely rote or solely empowering - so that everyone is comparably and sufficiently prepared by their economic position to participate in self managing councils. We have to have balanced job complexes, in which we all have a mix of tasks of comparable empowerment impact, to avoid a division of labor that separates a coordinator class above from a working class below.

What difference can parecon make now? Is this vision just for the future, or can it matter in the present, and if so, how?

I am baffled when people say vision has no implications. To me it is like saying to someone looking for their terminal at the airport, hey, where you want to go has no relevance, just tell me how you are feeling about where you are, that is enough to decide your terminal. You see the problem. You can’t have good activist strategy, good organizational structure, good policies in the movement, or good policies regarding the broader society, unless you know what you are trying to attain. Without vision, you can make your strategy fit your current means and assets. You can make it oppose what you dislike. But you can’t orient it to arrive at a preferred destination. How many times must people suffer the disasters of directionless activism before we elevate having a destination to priority importance?

[www.zcommunications.org/parecon-today-by-michael-albert]