Why should anyone have more money than anyone else?

[153den]

Ya I believe if someone work 12 hrs he or she should have a bigger piece of pie then the one who only work 8 hrs.Unfortunately it is not always the case.
ps..."An excavator or d9 dozer are worth maybe 100 or 125 dollars an hour so how can a person be worth thousands of dollars an hrs?

[Searcher08]

What might be a good name for that bottom left quadrant?

One thing I noticed is that the 'conservatives' I respect have and act on their social conscience and the progressives I most respect embody the values of personal autonomy and liberty.
Tools like this can help people find commonality. Double Plus Good.


Why money... at all?

When, at the end of the street, we found ourselves in a large town square, I was
surprised to see no boutiques or the like. Instead, there was a covered market
where ‘stalls’ displayed all manner of goods that the heart, or palate, might desire.
There were fish, among which I recognised tuna, mackerel, bonitoes and rays;
there was meat of many varieties as well as an incredible assortment of
vegetables. Most predominant however, were the flowers that seemed to fill the
area. It was clear these people delighted in flowers, which were either worn in the
hair or carried in the hands of everyone. The ‘shoppers’ helped themselves to
what they wanted, giving nothing in exchange - neither money nor anything
which might substitute. My curiosity drew our group into the heart of the
marketplace, right through the bodies of the people - an experience that I found
most interesting.
All my questions were answered as they occurred to me: ‘they use no money as
everything belongs to the community. No one cheats - communal life is perfectly
harmonious. With the passing of time, they have been taught to obey well-established and well-studied laws that suit them very well’.

LETS go down the road from me, in Kingston
http://www.kutlets.org.uk/

The marvellous Catherine Austin Fitts recommended this documentary - the effects of coming into vast amounts of unearned income seem to be pretty devastating - GREAT vid
Born Rich by Jamie Johnson (from the Johnson and Johnson family)

[wordspeak2]

I'm a communist. Let's get rid of money and celebrate life. Life has intrinsic value and beauty; money is the ultimate destroyer of that.

Undead makes a good point, and in communist societies we do see that- some people working much harder than others- so there's a case to be made. Still, if resources were put towards shamanism and spiritual evolution I think money would quickly become obsolete, and the work would get done.

Nothing rots our souls more than money, even when we don't have a lot of it, and printed money is the quintessential transporter of evil.

If we are going to use a standard currency I think it should be cannabis. There's something with intrinsic value, unlike the paper dollar.

[Saurian Tail]

I'm a communist. Let's get rid of money and celebrate life. Life has intrinsic value and beauty; money is the ultimate destroyer of that.

That's beautiful. I bet if you looked into the Political Compass you would find that you are not a Communist, but that way of being that has no proper definition. As far as I know, Communism as a political system has never been friendly to cannabis use!

[undead]

If we are going to use a standard currency I think it should be cannabis. There's something with intrinsic value, unlike the paper dollar.

Agreed. In fact, if it were completely legal and normalized, I think it would become the standard currency very quickly. For many people it already is.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

It'd only be useful to me as a trade good (for vodka). But that'd be okay. It'd just be like money is now, I suppose.

Of course, nobody would ever hoard cannabis, manipulate the supply to benefit themselves, or want more than their fair share of it.

[wordspeak2]

I loved the documentary- thank, searcher08.
Best lines:

"When I'm reading a book I'm thinking about pussy. As soon as I'm done with the pussy I'm thinking about a book."

"Getting sued for the first time is a serious rite of passage for a rich kid."

And, of course, the naive viewer is wondering- most of these kids seem perfectly nice, especially the narrator... maybe there's some hope they'll use their money for good someday. Until you get this line:

"What would you do if you immediately had access to all the money?"
"Give it all to the homeless. No, I'm kidding. hahaha!" (everyone laughs, including interviewer)

[Sounder]

Money and objects are like ego in that they are not ‘bad’ in themselves, but they become ‘bad’ when they dominate the psyche.

In reference to comments made recently by undead and Nordic; we are here, in this world, to ‘grow our souls’. This involves converting ideas into actions that can benefit ones immediate surrounding, and maybe more extended spheres if one is lucky or skillful. I may have taken in more from those Dr. Bronner soap labels than I care to admit, but I do find that work is good for value creation, learning and growing my soul.

While reading the following note that the author is fighting for the Green forces, while the ‘lazy’ types are fighting with the NTC.

http://alfatah69.wordpress.com/2011/10/ ... 8-10-2011/
alfatah69 | 09/10/2011

The young uneducated Libyans want alcohol, fast cars, easy women & free speech. What I mean by uneducated although educated well enough they believe that the country (Government owes them, to give them a directors seat, millions of dinars without to work for it like every body else! I had my own business in Tripoli, at one point i needed more employees so i advertised at a local newspaper, i had about 10 applications & i interviewed every single one of them ages from 23 till 38. The result was that the 8 out of 10 wanted to be managers even though they did not have the qualifications for it! The two who had the qualifications which i hired on a trial basis the first one was never punctual & when he did come for work he was always going out a coffee or something anyway to make a long story short i asked him if he really wanted to work or not? his answer was no not really i get a compensation salary from the government why should i tire myself, now his a rebel! The second one was fantastic at his work always polite & at the same time strict with other employees, most of my employees love the guy & they admire him! One day i asked him why most men/women of his age do not want to work (this was before the war) he answered to me politely, u have to understand when your only worry is how to get married & have children while everything else is taken care off by the government why should they bother to work? They don’t have to pay income tax, electricity, water, land line, everybody has his own house so that means no rent, health care is free, education is free & the ones who do not work the get paid by the government would you work? he laughed & then said it seems to me you wanted more from life than what the government offered you! I nodded yes! & he said so do i! that’s why I am working I want to save up money to make my own business one day! So you see boredom brings problems as all the youngsters had it easy in their lives! True we did not have freedom of speech but we where compensated with everything else while in Europe you have to work twice as hard to achieve what we have!

[barracuda]

If there was some kind of idealized monetary system that was fair and equitable, and everyone had a fair shot at doing whatever kind of work they wanted, some people might just want to work more or less than others. So that is one reason - if a person wants to work more than what is considered their fair share, it seems fair that they would be compensated appropriately. As long as they are not taking away from others by doing the extra work, why not?

Example:

Farmer A decides to plant an extra field, while farmer B decides to pursue a musical hobby in his spare time. Farmer A reaps a larger harvest, and sells it to the community at a fair price. Farmer B performs on weekends and makes a little extra, but not as much as farmer A makes for his extra time spent in the fields. Is there anything wrong with this situation?

I'd like to examine your example here at face value, with the understanding that, as a baseline, Farmer A and Farmer B are equally talented at what they aspire to accomplish - for the sake of argument.

Realistically, at least as the agricultural industry exists in the US, a vast surplus of food is produced by a tiny slice of the population - less than 1% of the citizens. There are almost certainly far many more individuals who would like to work as farmers than there are jobs for those people. As a result, entire generations of farmers whose families worked the land for ages were forced to abandon their rural communities and move into grinding factory labor in an urbanized setting. That demographic has, of course changed again with the advent of globalization, and now those same families are generally working in meaningless service-type industries. This situation has accelerated the twisting of our society throughout the industrial "revolution" into the present state of extreme alienation. So in a sense, the extra work performed by Farmer A is actually detrimental to his neighbors and to society as a whole.

Farmer B, on the other hand, is finding that the worth/value of his music is viewed by the marketplace as having less intrinsic value than the extra time spent in the fields by Farmer A. Why is this the case? Is there something about the extra time spent by one or the other that is in some sense more valuable to our society?

1.3 billion tons of food, about one third of the global food production, are lost or wasted annually. When viewed in this light, it can be seen that Farmer A is simply producing cmpletely wasted extra product and introducing it into the marketplace. If his particular crop is actually purchased and consumed rather than wasted, it almost certainly is balanced somewhere in the system against the wasted produce of another farmer.

I would put it to you that producing food which will be discarded is highly detrimental to the world, and that Farmer A ought to be discouraged from this activity unless he can demonstrate that his extra effort does not result in the loss of generational traditions by his neighbors who would like to farm, or the pollution and waste that accompanies overproduction.

Taste aside, music, on the other hand, cannot be over-produced. It cannot be shown to have ever systematically destroyed families, alienated society, or damaged the environment. It is not wasteful. The fact that Farmer B is making some money performing in his "extra time" (whatever that means - there's a huge number of assumptions contained in that phrase) proves that his music is appreciated by some people in his community, and should be encouraged by greater reward than the effort of Farmer A, who is actually actively fucking shit up.

Is it wrong to WANT to have a lot of stuff - I'm including money in the definition of stuff? And to want it for it's own sake, not necessarily to the detriment of others, though that seems unavoidable in a finite world? 'Cos I like stuff.

"Liking stuff" is a natural and intrinsic state of mind, and collecting for it's own sake or for the sake of attracting a mate can be found as an activity throughout the animal kingdom. However, the persistent aquisition of treasures and trifles that makes up consumerist society is a problem which is fundamentally tied to the OP question. I like stuff too, much of it the detritus of counter-productive activities of capitalist manufacture - things like old cars, for example, or tobacco ephemera. But I realise that at the extreme of this facination lies abhorrent behavior with regards to the state of the world as it exists: e.g., collecting Ferraris and Rolls Royces with profits made on the backs of Indonesian slave labor, or building a billion dollar home in the middle of one of the poorest cities on earth. There must exist a balance, or a new mindset must be created in which aquisitiveness and wealth display is not the paradigm for mate attraction or status. This may not be possible, for overcoming it could require a change in hominid biology. Everyone should be on common economic footing, yes, but then shouldn't everyone have equally attractive mates? How do we deal with envy in our lives?

Money is the great distorter that forces us to withhold love in order to survive.

Poetry. But money is only a symbol of work or resource control, and so perhaps those things need to be addressed more fundamentally. Maybe work is an inherent human condition of living - it can give meaning to life and rhythm to the days if it isn't turned into slavery by the avaricious.

Outlaw debt first, and see what happens. Encourage and reward music and art and writing and things we now think of as "hobbies" and see what happens. Feed the starving with our discarded production and see what happens. Outlaw automobiles and see what happens.

Fuck shit up different.

[American Dream]

I have complex feelings about Participatory Economics as it currently stands, but there definitely is a worked-out proposal for an alternative economics that is neither centrally-planned communism (ala, say, the Soviet Union), nor today's destructive regime of Capitalism. Built in to this system there is a clear provision for differential compensation corresponding to the varying amounts of effort and sacrifice made by individuals who work within this structure:

Participatory Economics

October 11, 2011

By Michael Albert


Text of a speech delivered to a CNT Sponsored gathering in Barcelona, Spain.


Thank you for having me. It is a pleasure to be here.

I hope we will have time for ample discussion as I very much look forward to hearing your insights on our topic which is participatory economic vision.

To begin, then, in the words of the great British economist John Maynard Keynes –

“[Capitalism] is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous -- and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.”


Let’s see if we can undo that perplexity.

First, briefly, what is capitalism's real problem?


Capitalism is theft.

The richest in the U.S., for example, have wealth unparalleled in history.

The poorest in the U.S., however, live under bridges inside cardboard shelters, or stop living at all.

The gap, in the U.S. and similarly here in Spain, is a social product, a theft.


Capitalism is alienation and anti-sociality.

Within capitalism the motives guiding decisions are pecuniary not personal.

The motives are selfish not social.

We seek individual advance at the expense of others. Not collective advance to mutual benefit.

The result is an anti-social environment in which nice guys finish last and economic logic seeks profit rather than social well being.


Capitalism is authoritarian.

Within capitalist workplaces those who labor at rote and tedious jobs have nearly zero say over conditions, output, and aims. Those who own the workplaces or who monopolize empowering positions have nearly all say.

Not even Stalin, for example, ever dreamed of people having to ask his permission to eat or to go to the bathroom, yet corporate owners routinely exercise such power.

Corporations bear the same resemblance to democracy that killing fields bear to peace.


Capitalism is inefficient.

Market profit seeking squanders the capacities of about 80% of the population by training them to endure boredom and to take orders, not to fulfill their greatest potentials.

Market profit seeking also wastes inordinate resources on producing items that aren’t beneficial, and enforcing work assignments that are coerced and therefore resisted.


Capitalism is racist and sexist.

Under market competition owners inevitably exploit racial and gender hierarchies produced in other parts of society.

If extra economic factors reduce the bargaining power of some actors while raising that of others, creating hierarchical expectations about who should rule and who should obey, capitalists will exploit the hierarchies.


Capitalism is violent.

The race for capitalist market domination produces nations at odds with other nations until those which accrue sufficient power are in position to exploit the resources and populations of those who lack defensive means.

The ultimate manifestation is imperialism, colonialism, and unholy war.


Capitalism is unsustainable.

The money grabbers accumulate and accumulate, regardless of human need and desire. They ignore or willfully obscure the impact of what they do not only on workers and consumers, but also on the environment.

The market propels short term calculations. It makes dumping waste to avoid costs an easy and competitively enforced avenue to gain. The results appear in sky and soil. They are mitigated only by social movements that compel wiser behavior.


Capitalism Sucks

I could of course recount for many hours the failings of capitalism, its morbid human implications both in theory and in hard statistics, as I am sure you all could too.

But I think there is no point in doing that here, or really, almost anywhere, anymore.

I think by this second decade of the twenty first century only a relatively few people are made so callous by their advantages, or are made so profoundly ignorant by their advanced educations, or are so manipulated by media and their own naiveté, or so coerced by their positions that they fail to see that capitalism is now a gigantic holocaust of injustice.

Everything is broken in virtually every respect, and everyone knows it.

As Keynes said, capitalism is not intelligent, is not beautiful, is not just, is not virtuous -- and is not even delivering the goods.

So what do we want instead?


Parecon

Participatory Economics, or parecon, which the replacement for capitalism that I advocate, is built on just four institutional commitments.

Parecon is therefore not a blueprint for a whole economy. It is a description of key features of just a few centrally important aspects of an economy.

Parecon is enough, and just enough, for us to know that with parecon future people will self manage their economic lives as they decide.


Workers and Consumers Councils

The first feature of participatory economics is nested workers and consumers councils of the sort we have seen arise most recently in places such as Argentina and Venezuela.

The added feature of parecon’s councils, however, is a very explicit commitment to self managed decision making.

People in a parecon influence decisions in proportion as they are in turn affected by them. If a decision will affect me more, I will have more say in it. If it will affect me less, I will have less say in it.

Sometimes self management entails one person one vote majority rule. Think of deciding the start time for the work day.

Sometimes self management could require a different tally, maybe two thirds or three quarters needed to win, or that only some segment of the whole populace votes. Think of decisions that mostly affect a work team, where only that team votes.

Sometimes for those who are deciding to best approximate perfect self management, consensus is needed. Think of a team deciding its schedule, giving everyone a veto because a bad schedule can so adversely affect each person.

There are even times, many times, when we all believe dictatorial decision making most accords with self management. I decide whose picture I place in my work area, of what color socks I wear, and I do it alone, by myself, like Stalin.

The point is, in a parecon, all such voting approaches and even particular ways of presenting, discussing, and debating before finally voting, are tactics we utilize to attain as closely as makes sense the appropriate self managing say for all involved actors.

So as our first commitment we have self managed workers and consumers councils.


Equitable Remuneration

The second central feature of parecon, is about equitable remuneration.

Other things equal, in a parecon we will earn more if we work longer, if we work harder, or if we work under more harsh or harmful conditions.

Remuneration will be for duration, intensity, and harshness endured. It will not be for property, power, or output.

Parecon rejects the idea that someone should earn more by virtue of having a deed in his or her pocket. There is no moral warrant for profit nor is there any incentive warrant for it.

Parecon also rejects a thuggish economy in which one gets what one can take. This is characteristic of market exchange. It is the kind of remuneration that business school graduates celebrate. You get more if you have the power to take it.

Al Capone, the famous American Gangster, was once asked about his feelings toward the U.S.

He answered, "I love America. America is great. In American, you get what you can take."

So business school graduates and Al Capone agree, keep what you can take - but parecon rejects thuggish remuneration.

Most controversially, parecon also rejects that we should get back from the economy an amount equal to what we contributed to it by our own labor.

Many socialists favor this norm, but parecon rejects it. The reason for this rejection is that parecon understands that our output depends on many factors and rewarding output rewards each of those factors.

If we have better tools, we produce more. Should we get more income due to the luck of having better tools?

If we work in a more productive environment, or producing more valued items, we produce great value. Should we get more income due to the luck of working one place rather than another?

If we have innate qualities that increase our productivity, we produce more. Should we get more income due to having been born with a great voice, or great reflexes, or large size, or a fantastic talent for calculation?

Parecon says no to all three.

We should not get more for luck in tools, luck in our workplace, or luck in the genetic lottery.

Instead, we should get more only if we work longer, or harder, or at more onerous conditions, doing socially valued labor.

Parecon's remuneration makes moral sense and also induces productive labor as incentives should.

The usual complaint about pareconish equitable remuneration goes like this.

Doctors won't go to college and medical school and endure training if they aren't paid way more than coal miners digging in the ground and folks flipping burgers at MacDonalds.

Thus with parecon's remuneration scheme we will lose doctors and other creative, necessary workers, and will all suffer. The economists tell us this, students repeat it, virtually everyone takes it for granted.

In fact, however, the claim is utter nonsense. It is repeated so often that most people take it as gospel, but it is far from that.

Consider that if you think about it for just a couple of minutes, this is what it says.

Sam and Sara are just getting out of High School. Sara is heading to a coal mine, or MacDonalds. Sam is headed to college, then medical school, then to be an intern.

Sara, let's be generous, is going to earn $60,000 a year for the next 45 years, and retire. Sam is going to earn, once a doctor, $600,000 a year, until he retires.

So here is what the economists are telling us.

Sam needs to get that salary because if we pay him less he will not go to college, not go to medical school, not be an intern, and not be a rich doctor.

Apparently, the suffering of college compared to being in a coal mine for the same period, and of medical school compared to being in a coal mine for those years, and of interning compared to being in a coal mine, is so horrible, that the payment for the next few decades is needed as a kind of bribe.

I hope you can already see this is absurd.

In fact, if we asked Sam to choose between his doctoring path and the coal mine or MacDonalds path - and to do it in light of a lower salary offered for a doctor...and we then started dropping the proposed salary, and said, tell us, Sam, when you are ready to give up doctoring to switch because you are not being paid enough - the results are absolutely predictable.

I have done this experiment dozens of times, with pre med students, with doctors, with other students, all of whom not five minutes earlier told me pareconish remuneration was idiotic and would lead to no doctors, and I have always gotten the same result.

They say no to switching from medicine to coal or burgers at $500,000, $400,000...all the way down to $60,000 and then $50,000 and then they typically stop me. And they say, well, I don't know. How low can I go and still survive? And they are always laughing, addled at how obvious it is that their economist teachers were either lying or idiots.

The reality is, of course, that doctors make as much as they do because in capitalism they have the power to take that much. It has nothing to do with justice or incentives. It has everything to do with market competition and power based on a monopoly on skills and knowledge, which is very carefully maintained.

And in a parecon, even though paid instead only for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, of course we will all want to do things we are good at and can make a contribution at. This is not only moral, it generates economically correct incentives.


Balanced Job Complexes

For its third feature, participatory economics needs a new division of labor.

If a new economy were to remove private profit and install equitable remuneration and also incorporate self managing councils, but were to simultaneously retain the current corporate division of labor, its commitments would be inconsistent.

If you look at workplaces here, around the world, or for that matter in 20th century socialist economies, you will find a startling commonality. The way work is parceled out into jobs is very consistent.

One job has only empowering tasks. The next four jobs have only disempowering tasks. Another job has only empowering tasks. The next four have only disempowering tasks.

Having 20% of the workforce monopolize empowering work and 80% do only more obedient, rote, stultifying work is the corporate division of labor.

It ensures that the former group – who I want to call the coordinator class – including, by the way, doctors - rules over the latter group, the working class.

The coordinators have all the knowledge, social skills, confidence, and even energy needed for discussing and making decisions. The workers are robbed of knowledge, not allowed to advance their social skills, and exhausted.

Even with a formal commitment to self management, the coordinators enter each decision discussion in a workers council having set the agenda for the discussion, owning all the information relevant to the ensuing debate, alone possessing the habits of communication that will inform the debate, and alone possessing and exuding the confidence and energy to fully participate.

The workers, in contrast, having been bored and exhausted by the repetitive and disempowering work they do, will come to decision discussions only ill prepared and eager to get home.

The coordinators will therefore determine outcomes. In time they will begin to see themselves as superior. Disempowered workers will begin to avoid the meetings. The coordinators will then choose to remunerate themselves more, to streamline meetings and decision-making by excluding those below, and to orient economic decisions in their own ruling class interests.

I sat in a room in Argentina some years back with about fifty workers, each from a different occupied factory. I was to give a talk, but suggested we go around the room with people telling of their experiences, first.

These folks were just meeting each other, and initially very upbeat. They were, after all, all occupying and making successes out of factories taken over from the prior owner.

By the third person to report, the room was quiet and the upbeat mood had dissipated. By the fifth person, things were maudlin. There were tears in people's eyes by the seventh person, and I intervened and said I had heard enough to begin my talk, which I did.

Each worker had told a similar story. The last one put it roughly like this. "I never thought I would ever say anything like this, but maybe Margaret Thatcher was right."

"We took over our factory," she continued. "We equalized wages, save for differences in time worked. We instituted democracy and even elements of self management. Time passed. We made a success of the workplace, but now, I hate to say it, all the old crap is coming back. Our democracy is becoming sham. Incomes are diverging. Alienation is setting in. Maybe it is just impossible."

So I spoke about the effects of the corporate divisions of labor they had retained, and why that was the explanation for the coordinators accruing more power and eventually also more income.

Due to about four fifths doing working class jobs, and about one fifth doing coordinator class jobs, the latter dominated, and developed warped self perceptions and perceptions of others, too, and in time the old crap returned.

Having this knowledge was the difference between folks succumbing to cynicism and despair, and folks realizing that there was a way forward.

The large scale upshot of all this is that one kind of class that exists above workers is owners. Having a deed to property, capitalists own means of production. They hire and fire wage slaves. They seek profits.

But the startling point about the oberservations is that even with this owning class eliminated, classlessness is not necessarily attained.

Another group that is also defined by its position in the economy, not by ownership but by its position in the division of labor, can still wield virtually complete power, including aggrandizing itself above workers.

It follows, that to avoid coordinator class rule, which is exactly what exists in what is called market and centrally planned socialism, we must replace the corporate division of labor with a new approach to defining work roles that doesn't overwhelmingly empower some while overwhelmingly disempowering the rest.

Parecon calls this third institutional commitment balanced job complexes. Each of us in any society, will by definition be doing some collection of tasks. That is what a job is.

If the economy employs a corporate division of labor, our tasks will combine into a job that is either largely empowering due to including mainly empowering tasks, or is largely disempowering due to including mainly disempowering tasks.

In a participatory economy, instead, we combine tasks into jobs so that for each worker the overall empowerment effect of his or her job is like the overall empowerment effect of every other worker's job. Everyone has what we call an average balanced job complex.

In parecon, that is, we don’t have managers and assemblers, editors and secretaries, surgeons and nurses as we now do. The functions these actors now fulfill persist, but the labor of accomplishing the functions is divided up differently.

Of course some people still do surgery while most don’t. However, those who do take scalpel to brains also clean bed pans, or sweep floors, or assist with other hospital functions.


The total empowerment the current surgeon’s job affords is altered by remixing tasks in a parecon. She still does some surgery but she winds up with a balanced job complex including other tasks, like cleaning bed pans, in sum conveying the same total empowerment as the new job of the person who previously only cleaned up.

The domination of the coordinator class over all other workers is removed not by eliminating empowering tasks, nor by everyone doing the same things, both of which options are impossible.

Instead, we distribute empowering and rote tasks so that all economic actors participate in self managed decision making without advantage or disadvantage due to their economic roles. There are only people who work. There is no division of that large group into two classes.

Some say this approach will waste talents and as a result, fall short in delivering the goods. Their feeling is that we will lose some of the highly productive labors of doctors and lawyers and engineers, and so on, who will have to do a mix of work, including a fair share that is disempowering.

In truth, this viewpoint is either sloppy thinking, or is classist.

Yes, if Sam does surgery in capitalism 40 hours a week, and then in parecon does it only 20 hours a week, or 15, then we have indeed lost 20 or 25 hours of Sam's highly productive labors since Sam is spending that much time cleaning up.

And if this happens for all doctors, the total doctoring done by the old doctors has dropped by half, or more.

The critic smiles and proclaims that this approach will not deliver the goods.

This is sloppy thinking if the critic simply failed to notice that we altered society so that the 80% who previously were schooled to endure boredom and take orders, thereby crushing the creativity out of them, are in parecon instead schooled to fulfill all their talents and capacities - so that that huge new pool of people is available to provide additional folks doing surgery.

It is classist thinking, however, if the critic remembered this fact, but felt it was irrelevant because people in the 80% would be incapable of doing good surgery - or good lawyering, doctoring, managing, etc.

Why is that classist? Because it says that working people are intrinsically incapable, and not merely beaten down.

Now none of you need to be convinced this is nonsense, I hope, but you will find yourselves having to convince others of the point, often. So here are two techniques I find very effective.

First, I ask them to imagine that it is 1955 and we have taken all the surgeons in the U.S. and put them in a gigantic stadium. I say, look around and tell me if there is anything noteworthy.

They say, yes, of course, they are all men. And I point out that at the time, all of those men, and even a very large percentage of women, would have said that this was due to women being inherently incapable of doing good surgery.

I then add that now 51% of medical students in the U.S. are women, so that this virtually universal belief was not wisdom, but was sexism, and I point out that it is exactly the same thing to look around at working people now and see that they aren't surgeons and don't have other empowering work, and attribute this to their lack of capacity rather than to injustice.

The second way I try to overcome such prejudice is by telling a story about Argentina.

I was there, in a glass factory that had been occupied by its workforce when the capitalist gave up and wanted to sell it.

The coordinator class folks also left, figuring they were better off elsewhere. But the workers stayed. And months later, when I visited, the workers had the plant working, and indeed thriving.

I spoke with a woman who was doing the chief financial officer job, basically accounting, financial policy making, etc. She has been, before, working at an open furnace.

All day she would repeat a few movements, tedious, unskilled, deadly. Day after day she did it. Then, after the take over, she was assigned to do finances.

So I asked, what was the hardest thing to learn. She didn't want to answer - she was shy.

So I said, was it using computers? No. Using spread sheets on the computer? No. Learning accounting concepts? No.

I was running out of guesses, so I said, okay, please, tell me.

And she said, well the hardest thing was that first I had to learn to read.

Just think about that. From working class boredom, through learning to read, to running the finances, in a matter of months. So much for a lack of capacity.


Participatory Planning

Finally, we come to parecon's fourth institutional commitment.

Suppose we have lots of workplaces and communities all committed to having workers and consumers councils, to using self managed decision making procedures, to having balanced job complexes, and to remunerating for effort and sacrifice.

Suppose, in addition, we opt for central planning or for markets for allocation. Would this constitute, all together, a new and worthy vision?

No, it would not. Both central planning and markets, by their impositions on behavior and options, would destroy self management, balanced job complexes, and equitable remuneration.

With central planning the authoritarian logic of order giving and order taking would impose coordinator class rule.

With markets, the competitive dictates would not only violate equitable remuneration and self management, they too would impose coordinator rule.

These results are not only predictable, following out the logic of these modes of allocation - and if we had time for that we could show it - but they are and have been visible in real world situations, notably what have been labelled centrally planned and market socialist economies, which would have been better labelled, however, coordinatorist.

But then what replaces markets and central planning to round out the defining features of participatory economics?

Participatory planning is the fourth institutional commitment of parecon. It is essentially cooperative negotiation of inputs and outputs by the workers and consumers self managing councils.

There is no time to walk through what this looks like in any detail beyond saying that it has no center, no top, and no bottom.

The dynamics of participatory planning reveal true social costs and benefits.

They provide appropriate incentives enabling equitable remuneration.

They convey motivations for actors to mutually aid and benefit one another via solidarity.

And they arrive at self managed decisions in an efficient manner.

Okay, so suppose we combine workers and consumers councils, self managed decision making, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and participatory planning.

That is participatory economics, or parecon.

Our claim is that parecon is not only classless, and not only fosters solidarity, diversity, and equity – but to the extent possible and with no recurring biases, it apportions to each worker and consumer about each economic decision, an appropriate level of self managing influence.


Parecon doesn’t reduce productivity per worker hour but provides adequate and proper incentives for everyone to work well.

Parecon doesn’t bias toward longer hours but allows free choice of work versus leisure.

Parecon doesn’t pursue what is most profitable for a few regardless of impact on workers, the ecology, and often even consumers, but instead orients output toward what is truly beneficial in light of full social and environmental costs and benefits for all.

Parecon doesn’t waste the human talents of people now doing surgery, or composing music, or otherwise engaging in difficult and skilled labor by requiring that they do offsetting less empowering labor as well, but instead by that means surfaces a gargantuan reservoir of previously untapped talents throughout the populace.

Parecon apportions empowering and rote labor not only justly, but in accord with self management and classlessness.

Parecon doesn’t assume divine citizens. Instead, it creates a context in which to get ahead in their economic engagements even people who grow up entirely self seeking and anti-social must be concerned for the general social good and the well being of others.

In capitalism buyers seek to fleece sellers and vice versa. People are trained by the economy to be anti-social and to get ahead they must learn those lessons well. In capitalism, nice guys finish last – or in my own more pithy rendition, garbage rises.

In parecon, in contrast, solidarity among citizens is produced by economic life just as vehicles, homes, clothes, and musical instruments are. We all gain if the whole society benefits by larger overall output, or by increased productivity per hour, or by less onerous work conditions - or if we work harder or longer to gain the extra income.

We all have an interest in changes in the economy that improve society's overall average job complex - because we all share in its attributes.


Strategic Implications

Finally, what difference does advocating parecon make for our present behavior?

When Margaret Thatcher, the British reactionary Prime Minister, said “There is no alternative,” she accurately identified a central obstacle to masses of people actively seeking a better world.

If one sincerely believes there is no better future, then it follows that to reject a call to fight against poverty, alienation, and even war, is understandable.

If I were delivering the most powerful speech any of you had ever heard, a tear-jerking description of a scourge of humanity that undeniably diminishes all our lives and in the end kills almost of us, and at the end I said please, in the name of justice and your own well being, come join me in a movement against this horrible devastator of humans - aging – you would all laugh at me. You might even say, thinking I was a bit nuts, go get a life. Grow up. Face reality. You can’t fight aging, that’s a fool’s errand. And you might say it, dismissively, and with good reason.

And haven't we all encountered people talking to us like that?

Well, the truth is most people sincerely think capitalism is forever. Capitalism is like a law of nature.

And in their view, to fight against capitalism, or even against its symptoms, can indeed seem like a fool’s errand.

When we say come join us in a movement against capitalism, they hear us saying, come be an idiot - come fight for the impossible. And they tell us to grow up and get a life.

As an advocate of parecon I hope to provide an economic vision able to turn that feeling upside down, a vision able to replace cynicism with hope and reason.

I am not suggesting that you should have heard this talk and become a pareconist.

This talk doesn't provide enough detail, enough evidence, and nor have you had sufficient time to mull it over.

What I do hope is that you will be feeling, hey, what if parecon really does answer the claim that there is no alternative? What if it is a viable and worthy alternative to capitalism?

In that case, you might think to yourself - I would need to know about it, I would even need to advocate it. So, to find out - I need to explore it further.

When we all go to movies and see courageous souls of the past represented on the screen, fighting against slavery, or against the subordination of women, or against colonialism, or for peace and justice and against dictatorships, we rightly feel sympathy and admiration for their acts.

Abolitionists, suffragettes, labor organizers, anti apartheid activists, all seekers of freedom and dignity are heroes to us.

But if we admire standing up against injustice, shouldn't we ourselves stand up against injustice. If we admire seeking a better world, shouldn't we ourselves seek a better world.

If we admire rejecting exploitation, alienation, domination, and its violent maintenance, shouldn't we ourselves advocate and fight for an economic model and societal structure that will eliminate these horrors.

I believe participatory economics is such an economy and should be part of such a new society.


Thank you

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/particip ... albert-1-2

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[Luposapien]

Would just like to point out that there is a name for that bottom/left corner of the political compass graph: Libertarianism. The term was originally used as a descriptor of non-hierarchical socialism, and was later co-opted by the capitalists. Another name for this is Anarchism. Of course, Anarchy has largely been conflated with the complete breakdown of all social order, or a decent into pure chaos, but this is not, in fact, what it means (though there are several branches of anarchism, not all of which are communal in nature). I think it speaks to something fairly significant that our culture has effectively destroyed the language needed to even speak about this type of politics.

[American Dream]

A tale from our (collective) history:

The Soldier

Ricardo Flores Magón


The labourer and the soldier met each other along the way.

– Where are you bound? the soldier asked.

– Off to the factory, answered the labourer. – And yourself, where are you bound?

– I’m off to the barracks: the village of Jalapa has revolted and we have orders to go there and crush the revolt by fire and sword.

– Could you just tell me – the labourer pressed him – why those folk revolted?

– Certainly, I’ll tell you as best I can: all of a sudden these folk refused to pay their house rent, the rent on their land, their government taxes and when the authorities turned up to evict the tenants and drive the share-croppers off the land whilst at the same time collecting the taxes, the villagers resisted, stabbed the magistrate, the notary, the gendarmes and the chairman of the town council and all of the officials: they set the archives on fire and atop the tallest building they erected a red flag bearing the inscription in white lettering: “Land and Liberty”.

The labourer shuddered. It occurred to him that these were folk from his own class, the poor and the disinherited, the proletarians who had revolted.

– And you’re off to fight them? – he asked the soldier.

– Naturally – answered the uniformed slave. These villagers have trespassed against the right of private property and the government has a duty to protect the interests of the rich.

– But you aren’t rich – the labourer told the soldier – What interest have you in killing these folk?

– I have to enforce respect for the law – the soldier dryly responded.

– The law? – cried the labourer. – The same law that upholds privilege! The law that is an oppressive burden to those at the bottom and an assurance of freedom and well-being for those on top! You are poor and yet you support the law that grinds down those of your own class. Your relatives, your brothers, your family are all poor: the folk who have revolted in Jalapa are poor who suffer just as you do, as your relatives, and there may well be a member of your family among the rebels!

The soldier shrugged his shoulders, spat on to the grass along the roadside and threw the labourer a look of scorn and haughtily shouted: – The law comes before all else! If my own father were to break it, I will kill my own father, because those are my orders!

– Fine – said the labourer. – So go and kill the flesh of your flesh, the blood of your blood!

The labourer and the soldier continued on their way in different directions: the former was off to toil for the greater enrichment of his master: the latter to kill so as to see that his master might enjoy “his” wealth in peace.

Jalapa was a hub of activity, of rejoicing, of boundless enthusiasm. The sad faces of the evening before had disappeared. All of the villagers were on the streets celebrating the day of freedom. One old man was haranguing the crowd like this:

– Comrades: now that every one of us is his own master, let us celebrate our victory: let us draw up an inventory of everything in the village and its environs so see what we can call upon in terms of provisions and tools and then, like brothers, and once we have celebrated our success, let us set to work to produce what is useful for all and …

Not that he got to complete that sentence. A shot rang out and the old man, mortally wounded, fell, never to rise again, his face turned towards the sun.

The soldier had killed his own father…



From: Regeneración, 1 June 1912. Translated by: Paul Sharkey.


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[Nordic]

I think it's fine and proper if someone who actually generates a lot of wealth should have the option of getting a piece of that wealth, especially when he or she is generating wealth for other people.

Case in point - intellectual property.

Let's look at a prominent example. James Cameron. He makes a movie that generates over a billion dollars in revenue, a movie that was all him (he wasn't a hired gun but generated this thing out of his own head). Shouldn't he be entitled to a percentage of the wealth that his idea and artistic creation generated? Especially considering that if he didn't get the money, others would (and do anyway), others who really didn't do anything but get their hands in the revenue stream?

At the same time, nobody needs a billion dollars. There needs to be a system whereby even the James Camerons of the world have to either recycle their own wealth back into the economy (okay, James, finance your next movie with the revenue from your last, ha!) Or they should have to give it away to people who need it.

There needs to a system for this. Perhaps the wealthy person woukd have to give the surplus money away to some kind of Democratically approved charity rather than the government, and perhaps the person could have some control over how it's shared (rather than have it just be taxed by the government, where it could be used to finance wars and assassinations and corporate welfare).

Nobody needs a billion dollars, and anyone who hoards money beyond a certain point is guilty of some kind of crime.

[barracuda]

Instead, we should get more only if we work longer, or harder, or at more onerous conditions, doing socially valued labor.

The assumption here is that we are all of us possessed of the same genetic predispositions towards working long hours, or harder, or under extreme conditions, when the fact is simply that we are not, and so this plan has it's own built in elements of discrimination.

Let's look at a prominent example. James Cameron. He makes a movie that generates over a billion dollars in revenue, a movie that was all him (he wasn't a hired gun but generated this thing out of his own head). Shouldn't he be entitled to a percentage of the wealth that his idea and artistic creation generated? Especially considering that if he didn't get the money, others would (and do anyway), others who really didn't do anything but get their hands in the revenue stream?

There is an argument that the filmmaking process which has created Avatar is highly detrimental to the planet at large, no matter how much trivial enjoyment comes from watching the film for two hours. Engaging entire buildings of computers churning away for years at a cost of three hundred million dollars to make a cartoon for children is one of the most wasteful expenditures I can imagine outside of war. There are social costs to this type of economic activity, along with its rewards. Not to mention that his fortune comes from charging what - thirteen dollars to watch a movie now? Movies are to goddam expensive! No matter how grandiose the conception. Oh, and fuck 3-D. Really.

Further, Mr. Cameron is engaged in an activity he loves entirely. This has to be considered as a reward of its own, right? His profit should be allocated towards the funding of perhaps schools for film, or towards securing portions of the rainforest for preservation in a common trust, rather than for the enrichment of a single individual. To quote Uncle Ben, "With great power comes great responsibility." Not great wealth, or hotter wives, or bigger cliffside Malibu houses.

[American Dream]

Instead, we should get more only if we work longer, or harder, or at more onerous conditions, doing socially valued labor.

The assumption here is that we are all of us possessed of the same genetic predispositions towards working long hours, or harder, or under extreme conditions, when the fact is simply that we are not, and so this plan has it's own built in elements of discrimination.

I would not pose myself as some sort of absolute defender of Albert and Hahnel's Parecon proposals.

That said, I would firstly wonder about the evidence in favor of genetic predispositions towards "working long hours, or harder, or under extreme conditions" and in what sort of complex ways environment interacts with such predispositions.

Secondly, I would wonder whether such (presumed) predispositions would completely mitigate the difference between a fun and easy job and say, doing hard labor in a sweaty, dark and dangerous mine...