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]
