The
International Journal of INCLUSIVE
DEMOCRACY, vol.1, no.4 (July 2005)
PARECON: Has the hour arrived for a WSF model?*
TAKIS FOTOPOULOS
Michael Albert, who is expected shortly in Greece in the
context of his world tour to promote the model for a
post-capitalist economy under the name “PARticipatory
ECONomics”, is a leading cadre of the World Social Forum (WSF)
and a close associate of Noam Chomsky. He is also the
founder of
ΖNet,
i.e. the electronic empire which mainly promotes the views
of the international reformist Left. The model, which has
been designed by Albert (together with Hahnel) over the
course of the last ten years, is now suggested that it could
be utilised to put flesh on the bones of the abstract WSF
vision for “an alternative world (which) is possible”. In
this context, a massive promotion campaign to promote the
book under the same title has been launched through the use
of Znet’s list of hundreds of thousands of subscribers and
the backing of the ex anti capitalist and now reformist
Left—like the New Left Review which published his
book. However, although it has become more urgent than ever
before to consider the concrete forms that a post capitalist
society could take, following the collapse of “actually
existing socialism” and the huge doubts that this historic
event casted over the very possibility to organise a
post-capitalist society, I will briefly try to show that
Parecon is, in effect, more disorientating than
thought-provoking for the following fundamental reasons:
irst, Parecon attempts to mix
incompatible proposals together, in an obvious effort to
engineer a consensual ideological soup, similar to the one
which characterises the WSF proclamations. Although Albert
does not hesitate to state that his model comprises
socialist or direct democratic values while characterising
it as an «anarchistic economic vision», in reality, Parecon
does not belong to any of the historical traditions of the
Left and, in my view, is simply a (supposedly pluralistic)
mixture which aims, exactly like the WSF, to satisfy every
taste.
Thus, despite the fact that Parecon talks about workers’
councils, it cannot be classified in the socialist tradition
since these councils do not constitute the exclusive source
of power, as in socialist models, but they simply share
power with consumers’ councils, whereas the respective
powers of each type of council are not even clearly
delineated. Similarly, the communist principle “from each
according to his/her ability to each according to his/her
need” is bypassed (Parecon characterises the problem as a
matter of compassion to be sorted out through the free
provision of some social services like health and a minimum
income) in favour of the supposedly more “advanced”
principle of
remuneration for effort and sacrifice!
Likewise, the critical issues of the transition strategy and
revolution are also bypassed, while WSF’s reformist
anti-globalisation strategy is adopted. And, of course,
Parecon does not belong to the Marxist tradition since it
talks about a “vision” and does not possess any historical
analysis of the present society, it does not share the
Marxist definition of classes and so on.
Also, Parecon cannot be classified as belonging to the
libertarian or the autonomous-democratic tradition, since
the main collective decision-making bodies in it are clearly
defined within the economic sphere. Thus, the concept of
citizen is totally absent and is replaced by the concepts of
the worker and the consumer—thereby introducing into the
proposed post-capitalist society the economic dualism of
modern man that capitalist society established and, at the
same time, adopting the present division of society into
economic and political spheres! No wonder that Parecon ends
up with a distortion of the concept of direct democracy (as
I have attempted to show elsewhere – see Chomsky’s
capitalism, Albert’s post capitalism and Inclusive Democracy,
Athens, Gordios 2004) which, however, it invokes. It is
clear that Albert (as well as Habermas, Bobio and other
supporters of the “civil society” approach), sees direct
democracy not as a regime but simply as a procedure, which
in fact is readily replaced by its opposite, i.e.
representation, whenever direct democracy is not compatible
with Parecon’s prescriptions! It is not, therefore,
surprising that the inexistence of citizen in this model
eventually leads to “interested parties’ assemblies” of a
kind, rather than to direct-democracy assemblies. This is
particularly the case if one takes into account that Parecon
adopts an “instrumentalist” conception of politics,
according to which people have a say in decisions only in
proportion to the degree to which the outcomes affect them,
in other words, they take part in the decision-taking
process not as an end in itself but as a means to an end.
This is of course similar to the present society’s
conception of politics in which one engages in political
action simply to promote one’s welfare and not in accordance
with the principles intrinsic to political life, such as
freedom, equality, justice, solidarity, courage and
excellence. In this context, it is not surprising that
Parecon implies a particularly bureaucratic structure, which
aptly was characterised by John Crump,
a libertarian academic in Anarchist Studies, as
“participatory bureaucracy”!
ECONDLY, in contrast, for
example, to the Marxist proposals for a socialist society,
or Castoriadis’ autonomy project, or that of Inclusive
Democracy, Parecon is not a fully-fledged political project
with its own historical analysis of present reality but
simply a narrow economic model for an alternative economy—a
model which does not hesitate to use the theoretical and
methodological tools of orthodox economics, presumably with
the aim of enjoying the esteem of orthodox economists.
This could go a long way to explaining the fact that
although this model was developed more than a decade ago, it
refers only to economic institutions and is silent on the
political and broadly social institutions associated with
it, on the flimsy excuse that «models for such institutions
still await development». It is therefore fair to assume
that the model’s deafening silence on the crucial issues
that historically have divided the Left (e.g. the
existence/role of the state, the form that social ownership
of the means of production will take etc) is deliberate. It
is obvious that Albert’s ambition is to create a consensus
around his model that would band together everyone from
supporters of statist socialism to anarchists and adherents
of the new social movements (Greens, feminists et al).
Sadly, this effort seems to be welcomed by the post-modern
faction of the antisystemic Left, from anarchists of the
American-Institute-of-Anarchist-Studies variety to post
Marxists, who seem to have no qualms about adopting
post-modern ideological soups like that of Parecon!
HIRDLY, Parecon is not backed
by any political, historical or philosophical analysis which
would attempt to justify it but simply relies on the
author’s rejection of certain elements of the present
system, as well as the values he drew from “the aspirations
and the insights of a huge range of activist efforts”. In
other words, Parecon does not justify the need for a
post-capitalist society on the basis of, for instance, a
dialectics of History (as dialectical materialism does), or
a dialectics of Nature (as Social Ecology’s dialectical
naturalism does), or, perhaps, an axiomatic choice between
the autonomy and heteronomy traditions (as the autonomy
project and
—with some significant deviations— the
Inclusive Democracy project do). However, a serious proposal
on the form of a future post-capitalist society cannot just
be the object of some intellectual’s vision and the moral
values he draws from social struggles. Such a proposal, if
it is to be credible, must constitute a fully-fledged
political project, which, integrated into one of the
historical traditions of the Left, draws the organisational
principles of the future society from a systematic analysis
of present society and the trends within it. From this point
of view, the antisystemic Left does not need to adopt
supposedly pluralistic visions which could only serve as
significant contributors to the present postmodernist
ideological soup, and perhaps to the WSF as ideological
models of the “alternative world which is possible” that it
preaches.