How can we create an economy which gives room for diversity without being capitalist, and that is social without being centrally planned? Participatory economics offers an alternative based on common ownership and decision making. Is this an unrealistic anarchic utopia or a viable alternative to capitalism and current forms of socialism?
David Marty, fighting for participatory economics. Photo credit: fotogjengen.samfundet.no.At the plenary session “The world’s economic future”, David Marty initiated his speech by stating that often it is easier to say what you are against, than what you are for. Most of us have given up on centrally planned socialist economies, even though we like the idea of equality and fairness. Also, we identify the exploitative and unequal characteristic of how capitalism works. Social democracies might be considered a middle course, but also this system has weaknesses and may not be suitable for all countries. Might participatory economics (parecon) represent an alternative?
Parecon for dummies
The intention of parecon can be summed up as “designed to promote self-management, solidarity, diversity, and equity”. David Marty described how the workplace would look like in a system of parecon. A central point is to get rid of the system in which some people get interesting and empowering jobs, whereas others do work that is just physically and mentally exhausting. All work tasks would be given a grade depending on how empowering it is, and everyone is given both empowering and non-empowering tasks. A professor would not only teach and do research, she would also clean her office. Altogether, everyone should end up with the same mean score of level of empowerment.
Also, hierarchy should be avoided as far as possible, both at work and in the rest of the society. Decisions are made through a voting system where everyone has a say, but the system is proportionate, based on the degree to which people will be affected by the outcome of each choice. Sometimes, some form of hierarchy may be necessary, but there will be a rotation on the task of being in charge.
Since everyone will have different kinds of work tasks, salary should be about the same for any hour of labour. So what determines the amount of money people earn, is how many hours they work, or using the parecon term; their effort.
Plenty of questions
By now, any reader with the smallest ability of critical thinking will have a lot of questions. How are we supposed to agree upon how empowering tasks are? Will that not vary from person to person, depending on personal interest and abilities? And what about education? Will it not be a waste of time to take higher education for several years, if you end up spending parts of your time swiping floors anyway? And will everyone have to take higher education, to be able to do the more “empowering tasks” they are assigned? These are just some of the questions one might ask, after only a tiny share of the system has been described.
If you think the workplace system is crazy, consider what parecon suggests for resource allocation and pricing. For each year, everyone will write a list of what they would like to consume in the coming twelve months. Prices are set based on this record of demand, and also based on the environmental and human cost of productions. An item which both degrades the environment to a great extent and takes a lot of human effort will be expensive.
From ridicule to revolution?
Although it is clearly well-intended, there are so many things to question about participatory economics that it would be easy to dismiss it immediately. But has it not happened more than once in history that ideas have been labelled crazy, to later become the greatest and most revolutionary inventions the world has seen? And even if the system is not fully developed into something that can be put into practice today, we can certainly continue developing it, like the Vancouver Participatory Economic Collective (http://vanparecon.resist.ca/index.html) does. As long as the current systems do not create the kind of world we want, should we not strive to come up with better solutions?
18 February 2013
