Participatory Economics. An Interview With Michael Albert
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Michael Albert – Photo: nl.wikipedia.org
Louis Bourgeois ~ In preparing for this interview, I’ve read various descriptions of your economic theory of Participatory Economics. It is a rather complicated theory, and I was hoping you could describe the theory for the average reader.
Michael Albert ~ Economics affects stuff – combining and refining inputs into outputs, distributing them among all members of society, and then consuming them. Economic production, allocation, and consumption affect people via directly changing their fulfillment, consciousness, social relations, etc.
Participatory economics, or parecon for short, treats all actors equitably and meets needs and develops potentials as its guiding theme. It fosters solidarity and diversity via its implications for interests and behaviors. It conveys self-managing decision making power to all in their economic lives. To attain these goals parecon delivers classlessness since you can’t have self-management and solidarity, for example, if you have a class takes the lion’s share of social product and power, violating equity and all the other aims as well.
To accomplish equity, solidarity, diversity, and self-management means that parecon must reject current defining economic relations such as having private owners of productive assets, using corporate divisions of labor, remunerating for power, property, or product, having top down decision making, and using markets for allocation, because these institutions by their intrinsic requirements viciously violate the sought aims.
Parecon instead proposes having no ownership of productive assets, workers and consumers self-managing councils, a division of labor that conveys to all workers a fair share of empowering tasks and responsibilities via what parecon calls balanced job complexes, remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, and finally, for allocation, participatory planning, which is workers and consumers councils cooperatively negotiating inputs and outputs.
In other words, parecon isn’t a blueprint of all features and even their details, but instead just a minimal list of a few very central features which a new economy must have – albeit with many more detailed variations – and conversely a few that it must reject, if it is to be classless, honor diversity, foster solidarity, and convey self-managing power. Of course we could go into more detail about each broad aim, and about why some institutions must be rejected for violating those aims, and about the institutions claimed able to fulfill those aims, but this has been done in many places already.
You’ve been instrumental in establishing the independent political press in America, having created from the ground up such presses as Z Magazine and South End Press. How has the independent political press changed over the years?
That is a hard question because I don’t think there was ever much of a definition of independent press. In other words back in the mid to late seventies, and even earlier, there were independent presses – meaning not owned by large corporations and thus not directly controlled in their content by those large outfits, and thus independent – of diverse kinds. Some were unapologetic profit seeking entities with very little other than the good will of an owner or two to distinguish them from mainstream outfits. Their independence was a matter of policy and was subject to being eliminated by a single boss – and in most cases that is precisely what eventually happened, to ensure greater profits. There were other independent outfits that were nonprofit, but otherwise not so different in structure and internal dynamics from more typical mainstream media. They were better than the privately owned examples, on average, but also limited, in my view, both as models and editorially. All those involved in such media were affected by their position in a typical corporate hierarchy and the implications of that for their values, thoughts, and behaviors, and particularly their ability to address many class issues, were and remain deadly. Then, back then, there were also far more collective operations, finding ways to avoid internal class hierarchies, and to ward off, as well, sexist and racist structures – thus achieving for their content a far greater level of independence from the pressures of existing institutions – as well as themselves being a model for a better way to do things.
Well the same picture exists now. There are what are called independent media operations that are freer of impositions from existing relations, and others that are less free of those impositions, or even totally subject to them. While instances of all these types might label themselves independent, what follows for me is that we should have something more in mind than liking a few essays online or in print when we label their source organization alternative and point at it as an example of what we seek. To earn that label, a media project should not only have independent and inquiring editorial policies that meet real needs, it should also have internal organization and structure consistent with – rather than constantly impeding and finally obliterating – such values. Indeed, its structure should not only serve its functions, but also be a model that others can emulate. An alternative media institution should be part of the process of planting the seeds of the future in the present, meaning it should reject classist, racist, and sexist structures and opt, instead, whenever it can and to the degree it can, for classless, feminist, and intercommunalist’s policies and structures.
Has Socialism, as the word is commonly understood in the Western world, become more of a reality in the 21st century, or less?
As the word socialism is most widely understood, institutionally it means that the government owns everything and decides everything for workplaces that are very nearly indistinguishable internally from those we now have, plus using central planning or retaining markets for allocation.
The word socialism also, however, has a values meaning – and that is very different. People should have a say over their lives, get a fair share of the social product, enjoy worthy work conditions. The trouble is, the institutional view, if implemented or even just seriously influencing thought and actions, trumps the second values view and even makes the values unattainable. So the first view has to be replaced, meaning, advocates of socialist values need to be in favor of institutions that can actually deliver the values they espouse, rather than institutions that will obliterate those values.
Indeed, I think applying the label socialism to systems that combine public ownership, remuneration for output and power, corporate divisions of labor, top down decision making, and markets or central planning for allocation, is the real error. These systems do get rid of the basis for capitalists to even exist, much less to rule, but, in the capitalist’s place they elevate what I call a coordinator class – the set of employees who do overwhelmingly empowering work, thus lawyers, doctors, engineers, administrators, etc. – into a dominant position above workers who are in turn left with rote, repetitive, obedient labor like before. Instead of calling such systems socialist, therefore, I call them coordinatorists.
So that’s where parecon enters. Parecon’s claim is precisely that it delivers an economy that meets the most advanced and enlightened socialist and anarchist desires for economic life – their values that economics be classless, equitable, diverse, solidaritous, and self-managing, serving people real needs and potentials, and attending to environmental effects and needs as well. Thus, socialists and anarchists could adopt parecon as the economic part of their overall social vision – and perhaps they might even call that overall vision participatory socialism.
The Socialism I’m most attracted to is the Huey Long program of the re-distribution of wealth. In brief, the program calls for taxation of the very rich only (no taxation from the lower classes). And for a wealth ceiling, no one, say, could have more than five million dollars because the more money you have the more you are taxed to the point that the more money you accrue, the more you would be taxed until you could be in possession of only a certain amount of wealth. The program also guarantees every American family a house, a job, a car, and health care, etc. Your thoughts on this program?
First, that isn’t socialism either in my sense, or in the old sense. It is, instead, capitalism with a very, very, powerful working class (the features you are offering would not exist otherwise) which imposes on owners serious limits on their wealth. Such a change would be excellent, of course, in improving the distribution of wealth – and power to, to a degree – but perhaps even harder to win and certainly to maintain than participatory economics as a whole, yet delivering so much less. That is, this type innovation would spark as much resistance as owners could possibly mount, yet it would not eliminate owning, and, as stated it would not change decision making relations, the division of labor, the basis of remuneration, and so on, all of which would keep pushing, by their intrinsic logic, for a return to old ways. As such, it might even be harder to sustain support for the program you suggest – as people want dignity and influence, not merely a greater share of output, and might not retain their commitment to just the latter. But it would be a temporary gain, if won, in any case. Markets and old divisions of labor, not to mention old property relations, would constantly push against these impositions on owners, and unless working people went much further, taking economic power as well as more of the economy’s output, I think it is unlikely they would hold on to the gains forever.
In the real world we inhabit, I think it is far more likely that the path forward will include a sequence of changes regarding income and wealth, yes, but simultaneously also regarding other features of economic life, as well – all together leading to a working class able to not only impose on those above, a good but partial gain, but able to eliminate the basis for being above or below.
I’m curious to hear you talk about your involvement in the documentary on Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent.
That was quite a time ago. The filmmakers visited, shot me and Lydia who also does Z, etc., for a time, and later included some of it. We later also helped provide some visibility via our web operations, selling the video, etc. But that was about it. More, interesting, perhaps, Mark Achbar, mainly responsible for the film, later did another film, this time on class, the economy, etc. He filmed me for about an hour, maybe a bit more, saying that he wanted a component of the film to be a discussion that offers a systemic alternative to capitalism regarding each of its key features. I thought the interview went quite well, he said it did, too, and the camera guys seemingly loved it. However, when the film appeared not only wasn’t I in it, but there was essentially nothing offering a systemic vision for an alternative at all. I thought that was very much too bad – but the more interesting thing to think about after the fact is why, so often, efforts to write about, video about, speak about, even perform about, the economy – or any other part of society – spend so much time on what is wrong, which people mainly know, honestly, and so little time on what we would prefer for the future, instead, and how to get it.
It seems once again that capitalism in America and around the world is on trial. That is, world-wide it doesn’t seem to be working all that well. It seems to happen a lot throughout history that capitalism doesn’t work very well. If you were in charge, would you rid the world of capitalism, or, FDR like, attempt to modify it or re-invent it?
It never has worked well. We notice how bad it is during times when it is in danger, or when the wealthy are getting hurt, too. Then their media covers it, and we all call it a crisis. But capitalism is always a crisis for those at the bottom, hungry, denied dignity, denied any say.
That said, I don’t think someone in charge just willy nilly changes everything, and that can work. I imagine you agree. What I think you are getting at is, therefore, what do I want – and I want capitalism in the dust bin of history, in the rogues gallery of horrendous systems we transcended as a way to become liberated. So for me the goal isn’t to modify capitalism. And the goal isn’t to reinvent capitalism. The goal is to replace capitalism, root and branch, with something better – and what I propose as the better alternative is the system called participatory economics.
Such a change depends on a very widespread understanding of the aims and equally wide participation in seeking those aims. We have growing anger, growing disillusion and dissent, already, but we don’t yet have movements that are growing and all of whose participants are well versed proponents of and fighters for a new system. And, indeed, on the way to having such a wide and deep base of informed and militant support for change, much more modest gains then a whole new economy, strung together in a trajectory of changes improving people’s lives, will play a key role. So, those changes will modify capitalism – they will reform it – but the thing is, for me, that they do so in a way always leading to desires for more changes, deeper changes, and popular organization able to fight for, and win, more and deeper changes, all on the road to a new economy and society.
Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfare for the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.
Louis Bourgeois is the Executive Director of the Mississippi non-profit arts coalition, VOX PRESS, and is the Director of the Mississippi Prison Writes Institute, a literacy agency that serves incarcerated writers and artists. He is primarily a poet, but he has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry, and interviews in over 300 magazines and journals and is the author of the National Book Award nominated, The Gar Diaries, and the award-winning collection of poems, OLGA.He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English and was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in Creative Writing. He is the Executive Director of VOX PRESS, as well as the Program Director for the Mississippi Prison Writes Initiative.
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