This book review of Moving Forward reveals Michael Albert's ideas about participatory democracy in the workplace. Jonathan Sterne points out that Albert is providing an answer to the call for a new soci0-economic structure that would be more beneficial to all than the current capitalist system. Albert calls for workers' participation in democratic processes within the workplace and teases out social and economic consequences that would be superior to the hierarchical formation of capitalist societies based on wealth. Other consequences faced by the environment and race relations require further examination since they are not covered in the book. Albert's ideas are worthwhile study for envisioning the reality of a more egalitarian and participatory future. - Editor
Any left movement worth its name needs to present a compelling alternative to existing ways of life. If we have a sense of what's wrong with our society, it is incumbent upon us to try and come up with a better alternative. Though this position seems commonsensical, it has been immensely difficult for leftists to agree on a concrete agenda...
Michael Albert
Reviewed by Jonathan Sterne
Thursday, November 15 2001, 11:51 AM
Any left movement worth its name needs to present a compelling alternative to existing ways of life. If we have a sense of what's wrong with our society, it is incumbent upon us to try and come up with a better alternative. Though this position seems commonsensical, it has been immensely difficult for leftists to agree on a concrete agenda for change or a vision of the good society. Many have given up: in the academic circles where I run, one often hears preemptive objections to "utopian," "totalizing," or other forms of programmatic thinking on the basis that these enterprises are inherently vanguardist, or worse, oppressive -- since in imagining alternatives, social visions inevitably exclude other possibilities.
So it is no surprise that Michael Albert's Moving Forward begins with a defense of programmatic thinking, since the book is meant as a blueprint for a more just economy. For over ten years, Michael Albert and his sometime collaborator Robin Hahnel have been working to refine a vision of participatory economics -- or "parecon" -- a series of books, interviews, and articles. Albert's Moving Forward is the latest print contribution to this project. In this very accessible book, Albert outlines the basic principles of parecon, anticipates and answers basic questions about his model, and argues for its necessity.
Albert's project should be applauded by all leftists, whatever their particular orientation. Though I will take issue with some of the specifics of his platform below, I strongly recommend this book and the parecon project as food for thought. They represent a needed alternative to the ongoing myopia of left thinking -- in the U.S. and elsewhere. Early in the book, Albert anticipates a variety of objections to his kind of programmatic thinking. He argues that while we cannot have a blueprint for social change, we need some sense of what we want so that we can go after it. More to the point, "values support and inform vision, but they are not its entirety" (p. 11). Rather than nebulous goals like "equality," Albert actually tries to reason out what equality in the economy might look like.
Moving Forward is structured around Albert's platform: seeking just rewards for effort, self-management, dignified work, and participatory allocation. Each section of the book offers an outline of his position, and then anticipates objections and responds to them in a question-and-answer-style format. The book avoids specialized and technical discussions, aiming instead to offer the broad outlines of the position. Readers interested in a more technical discussion of parecon in terms of economic theory would be wise to turn to Albert and Hahnel's The Political Economy of Participatory Economics. The book ends with discussions of economics and "the rest of life," practical questions around platforms, and a discussion of the reform vs. revolution dyad that's plagued left thought for some time.
Albert's goals are relatively simple and straightforward, though they would ultimately require a total transformation of the capitalist economy. I will briefly sketch each of them:
Albert argues that renumeration should be made according to effort, sacrifice, and need -- and not according to actual contribution to the economy. This is an important departure from traditional left economic thinking. Albert persuasively argues that renumeration according to actual contribution rewards the accumulation of wealth or other forms of fixed capital. If two people expend the same effort cutting sugar cane, but one has better tools, that person will make a larger contribution.
Albert's conception of effort and sacrifice is relatively simplistic rather quickly reproduces the mental-manual labor distinction (I'll return to that below) and tends to suggest that manual labor in most events requires more effort and sacrifice than mental labor. His examples of manual labor are rote working class jobs like coal mining and cane cutting while his examples of mental labor are largely professional managerial class jobs (though he does mention secretarial work on more than one occasion). Still, this is not a tremendous weakness in his argument, since rather than assigning a fixed calculus for effort or sacrifice, he argues that workers should rate one another on this scale. Though the logistics of this would need to be more fully worked out at each site, workers would rate one another on some kind of scale, either a 0-100% with fine gradations, or they could assume everyone performs an "average" job only deviate from that rating in special cases. Next, compensation would need to be regulated among workplaces by rating productivity against expectations and resources. As Albert points out, these are just proposals e logics themselves would be negotiable. The point is simply to replace wage labor with a more egalitarian and participatory model.
This brings us to the second part of his platform: self-management. He argues that the default for parecon should be democratic self-management, while acknowledging that there will be times when it is most appropriate for the good of a society to delegate decision making to a particular group that may have some kind of expertise. He does not argue for a consensus model of decision making (a good thing, since consensus models of decision making can be paralyzing), acknowledging that even in an ideal society, well-intentioned people will have differences of opinion.
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