This article was first published (in Greek) in the
Athens Left weekly newspaper PRIN (5/8/2004)
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:
FIRST,
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”!
SECONDLY,
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!
THIRDLY,
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.