Vancouver Participatory Economics Collective

MIchael Albert - Remembering Tomorrow

2007-07-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

Market myths exploded

2007-02-27T08:49:00.000-08:00

"When scientific studies like Robert Lane’s The Loss of Happiness in Market Societies (Yale, 2000) show that population satisfaction declines across the first world as income and commodity consumption rise above a certain level, the message does not compute to economists or policy makers."

On Z Net, John McMurtry deftly demolishes some cherished myths of the market. This essay is reminiscent of Daly and Cobb's classic book, For the Common Good. In that book, the authors show (amongst other things) that an open system, i.e. one that has infinite growth potential, like a market economy, CANNOT exist for long within a closed system, i.e. our ecology.

Mergers and acquisitions = 20% of GDP

2007-02-26T21:24:00.000-08:00

"If workers’ wages grow by more than 2 percent, the Bank of Canada clamps down hard. But in business, nobody questions an 'inflation rate' of 100 percent or more in the market for corporate control. What does this say about our economic priorities?"

Jim Stanford, author of a great book called "Paper Boom" a few years ago, takes a look at M&A (mergers and acquisitions) here (taken from hist piece in the Globe & Mail. He notes that M&A acitivity last year in Canada was worth $270 billion while business spent just $170 billion on capital investment. And it is the resource sector which is the driving force behind this trend.

"Canada stands out as a low-wage country"

2007-02-15T23:43:00.000-08:00

The reason for our consistent child poverty

Perusing a submission to the federal government by Campaign 2000 regarding the Canada Labour Code:
"A persistently deficient labour market is the major structural source of child poverty in Canada. Until the mid-1990s, child poverty generally rose and fell with the unemployment rate. Starting in 1995, however, the child poverty rate continued to go up even after the unemployment rate went down. A full-time job stopped being a guaranteed escape from poverty.
"Canada stands out as a low-wage country, second only to the U.S. among industrialized countries. Almost one in four workers, or 2 million adults, are in low wage employment in Canada. This compares to 1 in 20 in Sweden, or 1 in 8 in Germany. Low paid is defined as earning less than two-thirds of the national median hourly wage. In Canada, this is less than $10 an hour...
"Campaign 2000 recommends that the Canada Labour Code introduce a federal minimum wage of $10/hour, indexed to the growth of the average hourly wage."
According to the organisation, the rate of child poverty has sat stagnant around 15 percent for the past three decades.

Links: Economics of the Developing World

2007-02-03T23:41:00.000-08:00

Focus on the Global South is a great organisation. Their website has lots of materials on world trade including super-informative videos like:
A World Without the WTO

Also, check out the site of India Together. They're a grassroots oriented news and analysis site featuring journalist P. Sainath's writings (like here). Sainath has for some time documented the struggles of some of the poorest rural people in India. Along the way he has illuminated the shocking and tragic epidemic of farmer suicides.

For those into more detailed economic analysis, check out The Economic and Political Weekly, also out of India. Lots of analysis to dig your teeth into, examining gender, caste and regional inequalities, etc. etc.

The realities of foreign investment: bringing in the state

2006-12-05T21:50:00.000-08:00

So, last entry we looked at how Canada has become a pioneer in forging "nuanced" trade and investment treaties, designed to outfox countries which don't have extensive experience in trade arbitration. (We Canadians are, of course, well-versed in complicated arbitration, thanks to over ten years of NAFTA.) This approach seems to be bearing fruit with the new Canada-Peru FIPA, which seriously empowers private wealth while providing for further curtailment of public scrutiny.

Today we'll look a little deeper, at a theme that is always in the background but rarely mentioned when discussing trade and investment treaties: state power.

While advocates of deregulation and liberalization claim to oppose an activist state, the truth is that liberalized economies require heavy and frequent state intervention. Examples aren't hard to find: Argentina's financial crisis and the US savings and loans fiasco to name two.

The importance of the state holds also for foreign investors. An editorial in the Globe and Mail urges Canadian companies to seek a presence in China so they can "boost their share of China's infrastructure spending". While the business pages often scorn the "nanny state" at home, they almost never mention the fact that the white-hot economy of China owes its functioning to an authoritarian government which seldom leaves decisions to the market. Showing that the Globe editors understand this basic (but unstated) state function, they conclude with some sage and true advice: "Business could boom if governments hustled."

Similarly, the Globe's Steven Chase reported nearly two years ago that: "Ottawa also wants to sell nuclear reactors to electricity-hungry China."

But, there are limits to this sort of thing, of course. One such limit is a certain nation located immediately to the south. Chase continues:

"Beijing is hesitant to approve major investment in Canadian energy assets because of Canada's preferential trade relationship with the United States...potential petroleum investments in Canada could be harmed or forced to take a back seat to U.S. interests in the event of a supply shortage or serious conflict with Washington.
"The North American free-trade agreement gives the United States special access to the Canadian energy sector".

So the US has trapped Canada into a trade regime that hampers our capacity for independent action -- and as we have seen, Canada seems intent on passing on the lessons thus learned.

Perhaps the frankest expression of Canada's true position in international affairs was offered in the Toronto Star's business section (April 8/05). The occasion was the filing of a lawsuit by Scotiabank against the government of Argentina, alleging that the bank had not been fairly treated during the country's financial crisis. This was followed by a short lesson in Realpolitik:

"The news may also serve as a reminder to other homegrown banks that Canada may not have enough political muscle to defend businesses caught up in such situations.

"'When you get into a situation like this, there are going to be losers,' [U of T professor Albert] Berry said. 'The debtor government is going to favour the politically and economically favourable creditors (and) treat the little guys more harshly because you don't have (President George) Bush behind you.'"

by Dave Markland

Canada-Peru investment pact

2006-12-04T23:09:00.000-08:00

by Dave Markland
Last month, the governments of Canada and Peru inked a FIPA - a Foreign Investment Protection Agreement. A FIPA is a lowly species of free trade pact, undeserving of the "FTA" status of the deals we have with Chile, Costa Rica, Israel and of course the US and Mexico in NAFTA. (You can see a Canadian government page showing all our international agreements here.)

Canada already has 20 FIPA's with other countries, but this is the first since 1999 -- before the WTO Ministerial in Seattle which ran aground on public exposure and protest. As we'll see, FIPA's are the Canadian version of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BIT's), which have become the latest weapon for the promotion of neo-liberal policies.

FIPA interpreted

Here you can find a report on BIT's done by L.E. Peterson for a German think tank. It's useful to read it and compare it with the Canada-Peru deal.

In the report's introduction, the think tank's director observes that, in lieu of progress in the WTO and similar forums, the push for BIT's "goes ahead unrestrained", though the negotiations "are rarely in the political limelight". Peterson himself doesn't mince words: "[M]any hundreds of bilateral agreements have entered into force without public notice or scrutiny. This reality casts some doubt on the oft-repeated claim that the defeat of the MAI was somehow a 'major victory' for critics of unfettered globalization."

With that, Peterson goes on to show how these new bilateral accords are attempts to succeed where global pacts have failed. He makes several interesting points, relevant to the matter at hand. Below, I note those points and add comment on how the Canada-Peru pact illustrates his concerns.

Item: "The most notable of all BIT features has been the inclusion of a provision which grants foreign investors direct legal personality under international law. Equipped with this personality, investors may bring their own claims for damages" against national governments. This goes beyond NAFTA provisions, which require national governments to go to bat on behalf of business. The Canada-Peru FIPA itself makes these provisions Article 22.

Item: "Most investment treaties no longer provide that foreign investors must exhaust their domestic legal remedies before mounting an international claim", writes Peterson. On this matter, there is no language I could find in the new FIPA which stipulates that any other avenues must be exhausted before proceeding with a request for arbitration.

Item: Peterson relates that most BIT's make use of either of two international bodies (ICSID or UNCITRAL) designed to adjudicate commercial disputes. Cases heard under UNCITRAL are typically rather hush-hush affairs. In the case of the Canadian FIPA, it stipulates that arbitration can occur under either of those bodies.

Item: Peterson specifically notes that Canada, along with the US, has pioneered the practice of "adding more nuance and introducing additional safeguards" in BIT's. The purpose of this is to gain further advantage in negotiations with weaker countries, as "many other governments have devoted far too little consideration to using similar 'specific and detailed exemptions' so as to mitigate" the effects of aggressive strategies like those ascribed to Canada.

Item: One of the purposes of BIT's, according to Peterson, is to provide aggrieved international investors with more potential avenues of litigation against foreign governments. Consequently "governments (particularly poorer ones) might choose to err on the side of caution, and refrain from exercising seemingly legitimate regulatory or policy functions, for fear that their actions might not withstand scrutiny in the 'arbitral casino'"...

**More to come on this issue in the next blog entry.

Highlights from the Albert interview

2006-11-21T21:35:00.000-08:00

by Dave Markland

The youtube videos of an interview with Michael Albert which Bryan linked to in the previous blog entry are very worth checking out, I think. Here's a couple quotes:

"If workers' and consumers' councils are going to be key to the new society that we're going to construct, well then we'd better start building them."

"If self-management is what we're striving towards, then why not self-management in the movement?"

"[Movement media institutions, movement think-tanks, etc] often have a division of labour that's the same as ... major corporations... OK the content's a little better, but the structure is constantly putting the lie to the content. It's constantly pressuring to devolve the content -- which often happens. And it's not inspiring to anybody."

"Women taught us: You can't build a movement to change the world that's as patriarchal, or even more patriarchal, than the world outside. It will not only not have women leadership, it won't have women, period. They won't be able to stomach it -- and neither will sensitive men. So it's strategically disastrous as well as immoral."

"What is it that a working class person perceives when they encounter our movement? Do they perceive a movement that is classless, that is consistent with working people controlling their own lives, that's consistent with an end to the oppressions that they feel -- not just the owner, but managers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, being above them, having more power than them, having more income than them? This stuff doesn't come up. But it's what is at the heart of their alienation..."

"The movement, because it doesn't have a good economic vision, doesn't internally present and inspire the good economic values. Instead it feels more like law school, or a typical corporation... than like a movement that's about getting rid of class and elevating working people."

Michael Albert Interviews On Youtube

2006-11-16T15:22:00.000-08:00

TILMA: Free trade in western Canada

2006-11-11T00:05:00.000-08:00

BC – Alberta free trade: a quiet “tectonic shift”

The Trade Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement

In April of this year, the notably neo-liberal governments of BC and Alberta signed a trade deal called TILMA (Trade Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement), set to begin taking effect in April of 2007. While Maclean's magazine observed that some economists call it “the most important free trade agreement in Canada since NAFTA”, it has received very little ink in the mainstream press – and even the response of the alternative press has been distressingly slow at best.

What is it?

The touted purpose of TILMA is to dismantle non-tariff barriers to trade between BC and Alberta. Thus the deal “gives businesses and workers in both provinces seamless access to a larger range of opportunities across all sectors including energy, transportation”, and so on, according to the BC government website. (Notice that energy is first on the list.) The (Vancouver) Province newspaper sums up the agreement's promises thus:

“Streamlining business registration and reporting requirements so that businesses in one province are automatically recognized in the other;

Improving mobility so that workers certified for an occupation in one province will have their qualifications recognized in both provinces;

Providing businesses in each province open and 'non- discriminatory' access to government procurement of goods and services in the other province;

Adjusting investment rules to make them identical in both provinces;

And creating a dispute avoidance and resolution mechanism.” (May 7/06)

This is all pretty much boiler-plate stuff. Yet TILMA has been called “sweeping” and “bold”; the Canadian Council of Chief Executives says TILMA “goes further than any other government in Canada to tearing down the barriers" big business despises so much.

So why all the fuss? Well for starters TILMA incorporates the energy sector – something previous trade deals have left largely untouched. Also, the deal goes much further than even NAFTA in allowing businesses and individuals to challenge provincial and municipal laws before a TILMA dispute panel. And that dispute panel has the power to make binding decisions and to award up to $5 million to complainants -- payable of course by the taxpayer.

Is it really needed?

Most research supporting such a trade agreement comes from industry groups. Industry-backed studies typically see government regulation as producing only a drag on the economy. This ignores the costs of new obligations introduced by “free trade”. Surely the costs incurred by governments for legal consultations will be substantial. Also, the risk of being sued for what used to be considered a legitimate function of government must be substantial and costly.

In any event, serious studies of the extent of non-tariff barriers between provinces (like that of UBC's Brian Copeland) find them to be quite negligible and concentrated in a few industries – a situation that doesn't exactly call for a broad and sweeping free trade regime.

Who likes it and who was left out

Alberta's Intergovernmental Relations Minister Gary Mar told a chamber of commerce meeting that TILMA is "everything Canadian business asked for." In particular, proponents of TILMA see great opportunities for the energy sector, particularly around oil and gas. BC's Economic Development Minister Colin Hansen says the oil and gas sector “is very excited about this agreement coming into play." He dismisses suggestions from business circles that giant Alberta-based oil producers will muscle out independent providers in BC's booming northeast.

Meanwhile, the labour federations of BC and Alberta were not consulted in the crafting of the agreement. Indeed, the Globe and Mail's Murray Campbell says TILMA “was negotiated secretly and presented as a fait accompli.”

While both provincial governments make much of TILMA's alleged benefit to labour mobility, it will do little to alleviate the real reasons behind the labour shortage in both provinces: lack of investment in training.

Another can-opener

Students of trade deals have learned (the hard way) how to best communicate the nature of these complicated agreements to the general public, who of course have little opportunity to learn the intricacies of trade policy. Gone are the days when opponents of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement predicted the immediate end of Canadian sovereignty (or our beloved health system) with the simple signing of a document. These days, savvy leftists make arguments which reflect the ground-level processes at work when these deals are inked. Rather than ushering in immediate corporate control of our economy, NAFTA and its brethren are best seen as weapons of the wealthy which help to pave the way to more corporate power and less democracy. Since we're mixing metaphors, I have to say I'm fond of comparing trade agreements to a can-opener: a tool wielded by powerful corporations in order to rip open an economy over the objections of its citizens.

Agreement on Internal Trade: TILMA's weak predecessor

To get an idea of where this new TILMA can-opener comes from, it helps to look at Canada's Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), put into effect in 1994. The AIT has a familiar purpose: to remove barriers to trade between Canada's provinces. Yet, virtually all proponents of free trade agree that the AIT is far too weak to have the desired effects. The reasons for this weakness are several: first of all, the AIT requires consensus among the provinces for any trade liberalization to occur. Also, the document doesn't go deep enough: many industries are exempted. Third, the AIT lacks strong incentives (or threats) for provinces to make the changes business wants to see. Efforts by the usual neo-liberal suspects have been made to correct these weaknesses, but they have not succeeded; the AIT remains anemic in their view.

Thus arose TILMA, which side-steps AIT's consensus problem by dealing in only the two most rabidly conservative provincial governments, while other provinces are urged to get aboard lest they miss the train. Similarly, by incorporating the energy sector and by providing the potential for $5 million lawsuits, TILMA certainly lives up to Hansen's hype about it being business' dream come true.

The timing

It bears repeating that one of the stated goals of the creators of NAFTA was to lock-in a set of neo-liberal economic rules at an opportune moment. US officials realised that the neighbouring governments of Mulroney and Salinas were about as pro-American as they could hope for. Further, their idealogy was inevitably going to get these business-friendly governments voted out of power. Thus, NAFTA was intended as a legal buttress to hold that high-water mark.

The possibility that a similar concern motivated TILMA's crafting can't be discounted. Alberta's Ralph Klein, in power for 14 years in Alberta, announced his resignation shortly before TILMA was signed. He and BC's Premier Gordon Campbell, who is looking shaky after five years in power, started the drive for TILMA some three years ago.

Where's the left?

Traditional oppositional voices have been oddly silent on TILMA. Even the website of BC's opposition New Democratic Party includes nothing about the deal. Ditto for the extensive rabble.ca site. Honourable exceptions have been CUPE and the Council of Canadians. The Progecon blog (one to keep an eye on) has also carried very good analyses of TILMA.

It makes one wonder whether such tepid resistance points up a flaw in the Canadian left, so often mobilized to resist Yanqui imperialismo: an issue which can't be couched as US aggression is a hard sell. This is, I must say, just a hypothesis, and admittedly a weak one as the Council of Canadians is surely one of the most nationalist of left organisations.

Parting shot of reality

It's important to remember that policies of free trade and deregulation, though strongly desired by business interests always seeking a fast buck, over the medium- and long- term produce lackluster growth. (Witness the 1990's: lots of hype about incredible economic performance, but really a sort of middling growth rate.) So while the two western-most provinces seek to curtail government subsidy, Ontario (having kicked out Mike Harris' Conservatives) will have none of that. There the government “has offered millions of dollars in subsidies to individual auto-sector firms, a strategy the Liberals say has attracted $7 billion in new investment.”

2006-10-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

Nobel, microcredit and Canada in Afghanistan

Will microcredit save the world?
CTV news reports today that Canada's minister responsible for international development aid, Josee Verner, is in the midst of a "surprise visit" to Afghanistan. There, she announced (amongst other things) the granting of $5 million of development aid for Afghanistan which will go "towards micro-credit initiatives to help women establish their own businesses selling and growing fruits and vegetables."
Microcredit has been all the rage in development circles for several years, and the man chiefly responsible, Muhammad Yunus, was just awarded the Nobel Prize for his work.
Typically, microcredit schemes operate in the developing world where they loan out very small sums to small-scale women entrepeneurs who would otherwise not have access to credit. This is supposed to help these women pull themselves up by their bootstraps, meanwhile helping kickstart the economies of the impoverished regions where such projects are found. Thus, there is hope that the free market can help eliminate poverty in the Third World without the troublesome spectre of government involvement. You can hear the capitalist ideologues clapping their hands in glee.
The most celebrated microcredit project is the Grameen Bank, founded by Yunus in his home country of Bangladesh. Besides the supposed innovation of very small loans, the women who borrow do so in small groups which sink or swim as a unit. That is, if one woman in a peer group defaults, none of the other women in her group will receive any more loans.
Reality not so rosy
There is just one slight problem with the microcredit panacea: It's bollocks (apologies to the Black Adder):
**After 8 years under the Grameen tutelage, 55% of borrowing households could not meet basic nutritional needs. That is, the investment capital they are borrowing is in fact used for basic survival consumption, NOT investment.
**Far from loaning to the "poorest of the poor", Grameen borrowers must own their own house!
**Most women borrowers do not maintain control over the money borrowed; male family members end up controlling their businesses. Further, this dynamic tends to INCREASE as loans are renewed. That is, far from empowering women, the Grameen project tends to remove their decision-making power and reinforces traditional female roles.
**Grameen Bank isn't even successful from a capitalist's point of view: it has relied upon outside donations to stay afloat.
(See the great article by Gina Neff in Left Business Observer from 10 years ago.)
What it means
Mainstream commentators see the award of the Nobel to Yunus as confirmation for all of their prejudices: governments cannot eliminate poverty; the poor can pull themselves out of their circumstances; the free market cures all, and so on ad nauseum.
However, the reality which we just reviewed, shows that just the opposite is true. Walden Bello says it best: poverty elimination in the developing world will require "not only massive capital-intensive, state-directed investments to build industries but also an assault on the structures of inequality such as concentrated land ownership".

Henwood on immigrants

2006-10-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

Doug Henwood's Left Business Observer is always an exceptionally good read. Though it's mostly a print publication (so consider subscribing), there are some articles available online (here) which give a taste of the quality of LBO.
For the moment I'd like to call your attention to a new article on the LBO site, A nation of (yesterday's) immigrants. If you are at all curious about the economic effects of immigration (at least as it pertains to the US), it is a must read. He briefly trots out the evidence:
-Several "natural experiments" involving sudden mass immigration (Algerians to France; Cubans to Miami; Russians to Israel) show that immigration has no significant effects on wages or employment levels.
-Far from sucking the system dry, immigrants on average pay more in taxes than they will ever use in services.
-Immmigrants' children, no slouches themselves, tend to get more education and earn more than their native-born counterparts.
The article finishes is with a very interesting graph which charts Americans' attitudes toward immigration since the 60's. Very much worth examining.

Canada, human rights and the media

2006-10-13T18:01:00.000-07:00

by Dave Markland

Last week we looked at the findings of a UN report about Canada's human rights record (see previous blog entry, below). The UN committee had over two dozen critical comments and recommendations, many of which pointed up fundamental injustices in our country. Sadly, the major media soft-pedalled the report. We didn't see newspaper front pages screaming: “Renegotiate NAFTA, advises UN panel”, or “Canadian natives denied basic human rights, says UN”, or even “UN body finds Live-in Care Program exploitive”. Instead, what we got was mostly a bit of cut-and-paste journalism in a “Can we afford it?” frame.

UN urges bigger budget for social programs, says corporate media.
A full-text search of nineteen of Canada's English dailies returns 26 separate articles which reference the UNCESCR report, all published within two months of the report's release. Half of those articles ran on May 23, and nearly all of those were drawn from just two news wire reports. (I have copied and pasted these 26 results in the “comments” section for this blog entry.)
Steven Edwards and Carly Weeks' May 23 article, syndicated by CanWest, was run in no less than nine major dailies. (You can see it here.) This, combined with a short Canadian Press article made up virtually all of the coverage of the report, which was on the whole extremely scant.(The honourable exception was the Toronto Star – more on that in a bit.)
The half dozen points which Edwards and Weeks highlight from the report are revealing: minimum wage and welfare are insufficient; employment insurance covers very few workers; our poverty rate is still high; poverty rates among several vulnerable groups are high; Canada is urged to supply adequate child care services; and Aborginal leaders complain that Canada hasn't paid out what it has promised in the past.
The problem with this formulation of the Committee's findings is that it lets Canada off the hook for some of the most damning things in the report. Instead of noting the serious and systemic short-comings which the Committee alleged, the article seeks mainly to point up instances of alleged under-funding. Clearly, the UN Committee sought to underscore fundamental problems in Canadian society, and not simply to raise concern that we are not spending enough on social programs.
Tellingly, both the Globe and Mail and the National Post ran nothing about the Committee report on May 23. While the Post persisted in its silence, the Globe ran an article on Alberta's denial of wrong-doing in Lubicon lands (May 24). The Committee was also cited in two Globe opinion pieces over the following month (June 1 and June 22).

Opportunity knocks
There is little excuse for the near-silence and lack of follow-through on the part of the major media. Here, you can see a joint press release from the various advocacy groups which gave evidence before the UN panel. They held a press conference in Toronto on May 23, the day when (some) media gave limited coverage to the panel's findings. The press conference was surely a perfect opportunity for journalists to pursue further some of the issues raised in the report. Alas, it seems that only the Toronto Star took advantage of this opportunity.

The Toronto Star and Hamilton Spectator
The Toronto Star accounted for over half of all original articles penned on the topic – a total of eight separate articles. Further, the Star's coverage exemplified the sort of trajectory which one might expect from a decent (not to say perfect) newspaper. That is, the paper reported on the release of the report on May 23 on its front page (the only paper to do so); it ran some follow-up articles and op-eds through the rest of the week; and it cited the report again in an editorial entitled “Don't turn away from homeless” on May 30. Finally, an article in the Star's National Report (a Saturday feature section) notes matter-of-factly: “Last month, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights once again criticized Ottawa for failing to recognize social and economic rights as fundamental human rights.”
Meanwhile the Hamilton Spectator had decent coverage, too. (The full-text electronic search I used didn't include the Spec, but several bloggers archived some of their coverage.) This may be partly explained by the fact that at least two of the Canadian presenters in Geneva were from the Hamilton area – indeed one of them blogged for the Spec during his trip to Geneva where he spoke about poverty in the Hamilton area.
Here, it is distressing to note that, while at least one human rights expert who traveled to Geneva to testify before the panel was from British Columbia, no major daily in the province pointed out that the UN report specifically singled out BC for failings over human rights. (It took smaller papers like the Burnaby Now to let us in on that embarrassment.)

The one that got away
The most incriminating and shocking result of the proceedings of the UNCESCR was ignored in all but one media outlet. The Hamilton Spectator notes: “a carefully worded but stinging rebuke of Canada's repeated failure to meet its treaty obligations and is asking the Canadian government to report on progress annually -- instead of every four years.” (See it here.)
No other English print media passed this information along.

Aftermath
Since the release of the Committee's findings, the province of Alberta has continued to ride roughshod over the rights of the Lubicon. (See details of this important struggle here and here and here.)
Also, in recent budget cuts, Harper's Conservative government cut entirely the Court Challenges Program, which UNCESCR had specifically lauded while urging the program's extension.

Next week: The Fraser Institute's take on minimum wage: wrong again!

The UN on human rights in Canada

2006-09-29T18:42:00.000-07:00

Dave Markland: The UN on human rights in Canada

The United Nations' Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) is a body of human rights experts that monitors implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (drafted in 1966). All signatories to the Covenant undergo a periodic review of their human rights situation.

In May of this year, it was once again Canada's turn to come under scrutiny. And the evaluators had some sharp words of criticism for us. (You can get the whole report in pdf format here.) In this blog entry, we'll look at what the committee's report said. The next entry will examine the media coverage which this generated.

The gist of the report:

After a preamble, the report opens with some kudos for Canada – about a half dozen things we did well:

Canada still ranks near the top of the Human Development Index. (We're currently fifth.)
Since 1998, the proportion of Canadians living below the LICO (low-income cut-off – the closest thing we have to a poverty line) has fallen from 13.7% to 11.2%.
Regarding the health and education of aboriginal people, disparities have been reduced in the areas of infant mortality and rates of secondary-level education.
Advances in pay equity for women.
Increase in mandated parental leave from six months to one year.
An increase in spending on foreign development assistance.

Then come the criticisms, which I have sorted into somewhat inadequate and overlapping categories:

General:

Canada has not addressed most of the Committee's recommendations from the previous reports of 1993 and 1998.
Canada has failed to introduce legislation which specifically recognizes economic, social and cultural rights.
Provincial and Territorial governments have not been made aware of Canada's obligations under the Covenant.

Aboriginal issues:

Discrimination is still experienced by aboriginal women and their children in matters of matrimonial property, Indian status, and band membership.
Regarding Native land claims: Canada has not adopted an approach of recognition and coexistence. Instead, governments have pursued extinguishment of Native title, while shrouding this reality in new language.
The Committee “strongly recommends” Canada resume negotiations with the Lubicon Cree of northern Alberta. (Another link here.)
No concrete measures have been adopted to protect the intellectual property and ancestral rights and traditional knowledge of aboriginal people.
The Committee recommends that Canada drop section 67 of the Human Rights Code which prevents First Nations people from filing complaints of discrimination before a human rights commission or tribunal.

Women:

Many women in Canada are forced to stay in abusive relationships because of inadequate housing and services.
Domestic violence has not been included in the Criminal Code.
Canada should work to eliminate exploitation in the Live-in Caregiver Program. (Here too.)
Canada should pay serious attention to “difficulties faced by homeless girls”.

Poverty:

The absence of an official poverty line.
Minimum wages and social assistance levels are insufficient.
40% of food bank users are children and young people
Between 100,000 and 250,000 Canadians are homeless.
Pronounced rates of poverty for aboriginal people, persons with disabilities, African-Canadians, youth and single mothers.
Between 1998 and 2003, poverty rates increased for single mothers and children. British Columbia was singled out in this regard.
Few workers qualify to receive Employment Insurance.

Legal and economic rights:

The Court Challenges Program (which provides funding for constitutional challenges) regrettably has not been extended to include challenges to provincial and municipal law.
Canada has reduced funding for civil legal aid programs.“The drastic cuts in British Columbia raise particular concern in this regard.”
Some workers (e.g. public servants, teachers, professors) are excluded from the right to strike, which is “not satisfactory under articles 4 and 8 of the Covenant”.
Many tenants are legally evicted from housing when their rent payments are not greatly in arrears.
Canada doesn't recognize the right to water as a legal entitlement.
Canada should consider amending NAFTA's Chapter XI, in order to ensure economic, social and cultural rights.

Education:

Canada's support for post-secondary education, social assistance and social services “has not been restored to 1994-1995 levels, in spite of sustained economic growth”.
The Committee notes the “discriminatory impact of tuition fee increases on low-income persons”. African-Canadian students are especially hard-hit.

Next week: An in-depth look at how the media covered the UN report.

Albert's latest book, "Realizing Hope: Life Beyond Capitalism"

2006-03-24T15:51:00.000-08:00

Below is an interview with Michale Albert about his latest book, Realizing Hope: Life Beyond Capitalism. It was originally posted on ZNet:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=26&ItemID=9668

1. Can you tell ZNet, please, what your new book, Realizing Hope: Life Beyond Capitalism, is about? What is it trying to communicate?

Margartet Thatcher and every bully with a bomb shouts "TINA: There is No Alternative." Realizing Hope shouts back, you lie. There is an alternative. And we can win it.

Realizing Hope addresses vision and strategy for capitalist societies. It presents participatory economics, called parecon for short, in the first chapter, to set the scene. Then Realizing Hope discusses other spheres of social life like kinship, culture, ecology, international relations, and government as well as more specific parts of society like education, science, technology, crime, art, sports, and media.

In each case, Realizing Hope explores two issues:

-> First, what does having a desirable economy such as parecon imply for future relations in the domain considered? How do schools or home life or churches or labs or courts have to change to fit with a classless and equitable economy, and what will having liberated economics impose on society's other realms?

-> Reciprocally, second, what does having liberated relations in kinship, culture, polity, education, art, sports, science, etc., imply for the economy? How must an economy change to fit the requirements of liberated new relations in these other parts of society?

Even more, beyond exploring vision, Realizing Hope also examines old strategic approaches and offers diverse new strategic ideas.
A huge number of people feel two things. (1) That no better world is possible: There is no alternative. Suck it up and bear it. (2) That even if a better world is theoretically possible, we can't attain it. We can't fight and overcome the obstacles to change. Don't push rocks up hills, the hill is too damn big - they are coming back down.

Realizing Hope takes up vision and strategy precisely to overturn these two fears. It is a rally cry and a toolbox for social change.

2. Can you tell ZNet something about writing the book? Where does the content come from? What went into making the book what it is?

After publishing Parecon: Life After Capitalism a couple of years ago, I have spoken in many parts of the world about who gets how much income and why, who decides economic outcomes, what tasks and responsibilities people have in the division of labor, and how allocation occurs. Invariably, in addition to talking about these economic matters, I am asked questions about dealing with crime and disputes, legislating programs, household labor, socialization, sex, race relations, immigration, religion, the climate, imperialism, and especially activist strategy. The vision sounds great, but how do we win it? Strikingly, people's interests have been incredibly similar in the U.S., Turkey, Britain, Brazil, Australia, India, France, Italy, Venezuela, and Greece, where I have gone.
To encounter so many people in so many places repeatedly asking about more dimensions of social life than economics has forced me to confront such matters, both listening to what diverse people already had in mind and also working through some new ideas and implications stemming from parecon. The pressure to respond also sent me to study historical experiences from past generations, and to assess current struggles, too. To relate to the audiences I encountered, I had to revisit matters beyond economics. I began to write about those matters, and in time the book Realizing Hope took shape.

Most of the writing of Realizing Hope was like writing any other book. You think through your views and you set them down, trying from draft to draft to find engaging and clear ways to communicate. What was a little different about Realizing Hope however, was that I not only wanted Realizing Hope as a whole to be highly accessible, I wanted each chapter to stand on its own. That was not so easy, but I hope it worked out well.

3. What are your hopes for Realizing Hope? What do you hope it will contribute or achieve, politically? Given the effort and aspirations you have for the book, what will you deem to be a success? What would leave you happy about the whole undertaking? What would leave you wondering if it was worth all the time and effort?

It is my feeling -- and I voice it every chance I get to the point of being boorish about it -- that lack of emphasis on vision and strategy is a very serious debit for social struggle. People constantly wonder - "what do you want, how are you going to get it?" We reply, "capitalism sucks."
I think we instead need to explain where we are trying to go, and that this means we need to explain not just values, but institutional goals.
I also think we need to explain how we are trying to get there, and that this means not just today's tactics, but organizational and strategic priorities that fit into a broad plan of moving forward.

More, I think we need to communicate all that vision and strategy compellingly to others because I think that short of both knowledgeably believing in a better future and also pragmatically believing that giving their time to activism will help reach that future, most people won't participate. That capitalism sucks won't cause people to rebel against it - if they lack hope.

Finally, it also seems to me that if we are to avoid elitism, almost everyone in the movement needs to make vision and strategy their own. Activists need to know what they are fighting for, why, and how. That's what real democracy, participation, and self management entail.

So for all these reasons I have this compulsion to urge people to address vision and strategy in accessible ways that continually seek new insights in pursuit of shared views. Naturally, I also feel the need to try to do that myself, and Realizing Hope is part of that process.

I therefore hope Realizing Hope prods much more work on gender vision, race vision, ecology vision, international relations vision, political vision, and vision bearing on particular sub parts of society such as education, art, science, and others. And I also hope Realizing Hope helps put the economic vision, parecon, before a wider audience who will in turn assess it, improve it, and either transcend or advocate it.

The book I did recently on economic vision, titled Parecon: Life After Capitalism, was indeed only about economics. I have learned from that experience that not everyone - not even everyone who wants a better world - wants to plow through a whole long book entirely about production, allocation, and consumption.

In Realizing Hope I have made the economics just one very accessible chapter. And the rest has something for everyone. Realizing Hope has religion and family. It has sustainability and foreign policy. It has government and eduction. It has science and art. Realizing Hope touches all bases and for all these reasons, I hope almost everyone who is concerned about poverty, racism, sexism, power, war, and ecological crises will find Realizing Hope engaging and provocative. I hope each chapter will help readers to see many possibilities regarding vision and strategy for that area. I hope it will prod people to contribute to moving movement comprehension and practice forward. That's the goal. Realizing Hope prods, seeks, calls for, and indeed literally begs for - as I do at every opportunity - participation in arriving at widely shared vision and strategy.

So what will make me happy or sad about having written Realizing Hope?
Realizing Hope will be a success if it stimulates and provokes wider concern with vision and strategy and contributes, as well, some ideas to that endeavor. At the opposite pole, I would doubt the wisdom of having spent lots of time writing Realizing Hope if it sits on the publisher's shelves, dormant, or if it is read here and there and has little impact beyond the moment of reading, or even if it is read very widely, for that matter, but there are no positive tangible results after the reading. A political book isn't written to momentarily individually entertain. Rather to be worthwhile, a political book has to have lasting collective benefit. And so I hope that will be true for Realizing Hope.
Ultimately, from my experience as both a publisher, reviewer, and author, I know the impact and worth of any book depends on many variables. My job, having written Realizing Hope, is to try to propel enough people to hear about the book, and get a feeling for what it is about, so that it at least has a chance of being considered for reading. That's a problem of reviews and promotion and the like - always a difficult path to traverse, especially for an author.
If people do hear about Realizing Hope, however, then I think we should all hope that people's interest in vision and strategy is great enough for many who learn of the book's existence to give it a try.

After that, if people do read Realizing Hope, then the ideas it offers will either in turn provoke other ideas and actions, or they won't. Whichever happens ought to influence next attempts - about vision and strategy.

TNS: Equal Pay, Balanced Job Complexes and Other Oddities

2006-03-24T15:45:00.000-08:00

Here is a blog from The NewStandard's Brian Dominick which talks about their self-conscious efforts to work on the Parecon model. Check out the NewStandard to see what a fine quality news product they deliver:
http://newstandardnews.net

A lot of people have commented that they appreciate glimpses into how the PeoplesNetWorks collective operates, and I think the most interesting aspect of our organizational structure is also the one our readers probably know the least about: the participatory economics model we use for staffing.
As a collective, every member has equal decision-making authority. There is absolutely no hierarchy.

In order to truly preclude hierarchy, everyone has to get equal pay for comparable work, regardless of specialty, seniority, education, race, sex, age or other factors taken for granted in modern workplaces. We remunerate ourselves -- as well as our freelance writers and editors -- according to effort and sacrifice, rather than these other factors designed to maintain hierarchies in our society. And while our pay might not compare to the corporate mainstream (even remotely), we're aiming for internal balance first. We'll challenge the big guys soon enough.

And in order for that pay arrangement to make sense, we can't just have a janitor, an office manager, a webmaster, a secretary, a reporter an editor and a publisher, or some such traditional structure. Instead, we need to distribute tasks fairly, in proportion to the total amount someone works. (At the moment, we have two collective members working 2/3-time until they leave their other jobs and become full-time.)

That does not mean that we all do an equal amount of webmastering and reporting, of course; there is a division of labor here. But we try our best to balance out different types of work, while still allowing people to specialize.
We have three basic categories of work at the moment: managerial, administrative and content-building. The managerial work is fairly easy to balance -- we meet together (mostly by telephone, since we're spread across the East Coast) as a collective, and we work on various committees carrying out specific projects and tasks.

Then there is the administrative work, which is perhaps the most varied. This includes managing the e-store, bookkeeping and accounting, answering the tons of e-mail we receive, tech support and site repairs, promoting the website, and so much more. We take these tasks, or chunks of them, and mix and match until everybody is doing a proportional share of something they can at least tolerate, if not enjoy.

Then there is the content-building work. Obviously, we have writers and editors. Most of us do some mix, but there are obvious specialties and tendencies. We have three levels of editorial work here: primary editing, secondary editing and copy editing. Also in this category is website development, as it is a surprisingly creative and empowering role at The NewStandard.

Anyway, as proud as we are of this structure, we can't claim to have invented it, or even to have been the first to use it. But that's good news for you, if the idea interests you. It is called "participatory economics," or "parecon" for short, and there is a whole website and many books devoted to the broader concept on which our workplace design is based. (I also just found the Wikipedia entry and a MySpace site, if those are more your style.)

But more importantly, we aren't the first to put this into practice. South End Press and Z Communications have been doing it for decades, and our friends at Mondragon bookstore/coffee house and G7 Welcoming Committee Records -- both in Winnipeg, Canada -- have formed great examples as well.

VPC Back in Action...

2006-03-24T15:22:00.000-08:00

Any regular visitors to our website and blog may have noticed a very long absents of movement from our collective. Well, after taking a very long break, we've begun to regroup over the past few months and are now beginning another round of momentum of organizing efforts. 2006 should see the Vancouver Parecon Collective achieve new levels of Parecon education, advocacy and organizing. So, with that said, we hope you continue to check us out and maybe even take it to the next level and get involved! To stay up to date on our organizing and activities sign up to our mailing announcement list: https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/van-peg

Economic Justice and Democracy

2005-03-02T21:00:00.000-08:00

We'd like to point your attention to Robin Hahnel's latest book Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation published by Routledge Press. It's now available for ordering and hitting book stores near you any day now. Robin Hahnel has taught political economy at American University for over 25 years. He has co-authored, along with Michael Albert, numerous books on
participatory economics.

Click on this link for more info on how to order the book.

Here is a brief description of the content from the Routledge website:

Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation
(Routledge, 2005) argues that progressives need to go back to the
drawing board and rethink how we conceive of economic justice and
economic democracy. After carefully examining competing notions, this
book argues for defining economic justice as reward commensurate with
effort, or sacrifice, and economic democracy as decision making power in
proportion to degree affected.

After explaining why capitalism, central planning, and market socialism
are all incapable of providing economic justice and democracy, and after
examining why both social democracy and libertarian socialism failed to
sustain the cause of equitable cooperation, permitting the economics of
competition and greed to dominate the last quarter of the twentieth
century, a coherent set of economic institutions and procedures that can
deliver economic justice and democracy, while protecting the environment
and promoting efficiency, is carefully spelled out.

However this "participatory economy" is only a long-run goal, or guiding
vision. The final five chapters explore how to promote the economics of
equitable cooperation in the here and now through economic reform
campaigns and movements that already exist, and through alternative
experiments that promote cooperative over commercial values. Ways to
broaden the base of existing economic reform movements while deepening
their commitment to more far reaching change are emphasized.

Here are some briefe reviews:

"Can cooperation and democracy supplant greed and competition as the organizing principles of our economic lives? Robin Hahnel wrestles relentlessly and insightfully with this profound question throughout this wide-ranging study. ECONOMIC JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY provides one serious roadmap toward a more just and egalitarian society; and as such, makes an important contribution toward the revival of the socialist tradition."

–Robert Pollin, Professor of Economics and Co-Director, Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts-Amherst

"Robin Hahnel's book is an excellent overview of the principles of economic justice, and the practical and theoretical flaws of both capitalism and the various attempts to reform or eliminate it. But it's far more than critique; it's also a blueprint for a better society, and offers plenty of ideas on how to get there. Even if you're not fully convinced, it will make you think. And how many books do that?"

–Doug Henwood, Editor, Left Business Observer

"Robin Hahnel breaks new ground here in articulating his vision of a participatory economy and-equally important-in showing how progress may be made toward this long-run goal within the interstices of the current capitalist system. Economic Justice and Democracy is essential reading for anyone concerned about overcoming the ravages of contemporary world capitalism and building a better society."

–Thomas E. Weisskopf, Professor of Economics, University of Michigan.

"Robin Hahnel's path-breaking book reconceptualizes our understanding of economic justice and economic democracy. This immensely readable and inspiring work should be on the bookshelf of every academic, activist and citizen who is seriously interested in creating a just and democratic world economy in the 21st century."

–Ilene Grabel, Associate Professor of International Finance, Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver

And here is what the table of contents looks like:

Editor's Preface: By Marcus Raskin
Introduction
Part I: Economic Justice and Democracy
1: Economic Justice
2: Economic Democracy
3: Debilitating Myths
Part II: Rethinking Our Past
4: Neither Capitalism Nor Communism
5: Social Democracy: Losing the Faith
6: Libertarian Socialism: What Went Wrong?
Postscript: In Defense of Libertarian Socialism - Noam Chomsky
Part III: What Do We Want?
7: Post-Capitalist Visions
8: Participatory Economics
9: Legitimate Concerns
Part IV: From Competition and Greed to Equitable Cooperation
10: From Here to There: Taking Stock
11: Economic Reform Campaigns
12: Economic Reform Movements
13: Experiments in Equitable Cooperation
14: Conclusion

For our recent interview with Robin Hahnel on "Parecon & the
Environment" click here.

A Call to Artists: Support Parecon

2004-12-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

by Jerry Fresia
Originally posted on ZNet.

A history of art over the last 100 years, not as the history of the product, the piece, but as the history of decision making within our industry, is the history of investors acquiring greater control over the distribution, the definition, and the making of art products – and thus over who we are. It is the history of power slipping further from the people who make the piece to the people who profit from the piece. Yes, there are individual art stars aplenty. But as workers in an industry, we are being ground into dust.

I would argue, at a minimum, that our responsibility as artists is to help invent institutions that protect and then expand the opportunity for autonomous creative work. Our responsibility, in light of our current situation, is to help build an economy sympathetic to the notion that art, as access to a creative life, is the province of every human being.

With this in mind, let the following commentary serve as a call to artists to endorse the idea of a participatory economy and in particular the institutional design laid out in Michael Albert ’s Parecon: Life After Capitalism (Verso 2003).

Unless we make building socially just institutions part of our understanding of what it means to be an artist, all the verbiage about “content” and all the pieces of art dedicated to peace, equality, and a better way of life, will, in the end, serve only as evidence that we got it wrong, that we fundamentally misunderstood what it is we do. All that stuff will serve as evidence that when we needed to and when we were called upon to build better ways of being creative as a people, we thought that art was simply about things.

A Commentary and A Call to Action

For the past 15 years I have made my living entirely as a visual artist. I have been able to do this only by exhibiting outside of the institutionalized academic-museum-gallery system. I exhibited out of doors in the parks of San Francisco so that I could control the distribution of my work and enjoy direct and personal relationships with my audience. In addition, for a ten year period, I worked with public and private officials and artists in re-inventing this mode of exhibition to the point where it was something quite unexpectedly professional, wonderful, enchanting and lucrative - as opposed to the conventional “swap meet” set of exhibitions that one might expect to find outside of established venues.

However, the model was impossible to sustain for a simple reason. Too few artists wanted to take time from their work to build an organization. Most artists had only one set of interests: making their art and promoting themselves within established institutions. In other words, the dominant modus operandi of the artist, as I know it, is the artist as individual and as entrepreneur. However, within the art industry today, entrepreneurialism cannot lead to ownership of any consequence. Decision making with regard to distribution (exhibition), what counts as important art, and what gets funded is not in our hands no matter how “good” any of our art might be. The decisions that structure our life chances are in the hands of an investor class, an oligarchy, that exercises substantial influence over boards of trustees, both academic and museum, non-profit foundations, public art commissions and the galleries and auction houses that follow in their wake.

The individualist/entrepreneurial approach cannot lead but to utter dependency – a dependency on those who own galleries and control exhibition spaces, on critics, on those who control foundations or access to education, on those who direct competitions, on curators. This list is endless. And because we have become so thoroughly dependent on the institutions within the art industry, we are compelled to adopt as our own, the very ideas, assumptions and practices that the oligarchy uses within those industries that require our marginalization in the first place.

If we provide free inventories to galleries before they take 50 or 60 percent of any sale, we say that that is the nature of things. If the work we make following art school is not saleable it is because the public is uneducated. If the cognoscenti define important work as conceptual – that is a non-visual visual art - we make an effort to understand not to challenge. When we are told that only 12 of us in a city of nearly one million people ( San Francisco ) can make a living in the gallery system because we have chosen a difficult way of life, we believe it.

But it gets worse. According to these cognoscenti, art is not a thing of value, it is the thing of value. We produce that incredibly valuable thing and yet we are tagged, as a class of workers, with the moniker “ starving .” And we accept it! Unlike other trained professionals, we have no expectation of having health insurance, a modicum of security, the ability to buy a home, have kids, send them to college, go out to dinner regularly or even travel comfortably. Instead our expectation is that we will have a second job or a partner to support us in order to do the work that transforms the filthy rich into better people.

My argument is that we toil in isolation and buy into the notion that the average person cannot really understand our noble sacrifice or that it is beyond the intelligence and aesthetic sensibility of the public because we have lost touch with the history of our profession particularly as it relates to our life outside the studio. In order to become free artists we need to become free from the institutions that require our marginalization. We need to get back into the game of defining art ourselves, of teaching art independently of universities, of building movements with other members of the community and other artists, of controlling exhibitions, and of enjoying direct and personal relationships with the public that artists from Micheangelo to the Abstract Expressionists enjoyed. In short we need to build alternative institutions that permit us to have some important say over what we do, what we make and how it is distributed.

Let’s take a look, then, at Michael Albert ’s Parecon, a well thought out proposal for a participatory economy that would better serve the interests of artists as artists and as living, breathing members of communities. Briefly then, I would like to touch upon his concept of Worker Councils, Balanced Job Complexes and Participatory Planning and how each might impact our lives.

Worker Councils:

Another word for participatory economics is democracy. Together with other artists and members of the community in which we live, we would decide what work would be produced and for what purpose. I can hear artists screaming bloody murder as I type: we don’t want a “big brother” telling us what to do. Agreed. But we haven’t been doing too well with the director either. In fact, it would be a bit hypocritical to inveigh against a workers council without first doing something about how we are bossed around right now. Consider this:

Following WWII, a tiny handful of economic elites, by virtue of their right as property owners, together with their political and cultural allies were able to direct and shape the lives of visual artists in the following ways:

Important art and important careers – read a modicum of remuneration – had to be divorced from European influences.

Art that suggested political commentary had to be displaced by art that suggested psychological angst – read abstraction .

The teaching of art had to be removed from the studio and the jurisdiction of the master artist and placed into the hands of corporate representatives or boards of trustees and into the university.

The studio itself, once a locus of social and public activity and a place of exhibition and distribution had to become the studio of the isolated, angst-p robin g artist. By the 1970s, the studio, as the workplace of the individual artist, was transformed further. It now resembled a factory, where the studio floor was the work site of artist assistants who followed the direction of artists who in turned collaborated with the investor/collector.

By the late 1960s painting and easel painting, as far as “important work” was concerned was declared “dead,” thus weakening the individual artist’s access to and control over his or her means of production.

So the question is this: what is it that we want? With worker councils we, as participant decision-makers, would enjoy far more power over our work and our lives than we have yet experienced.

Balanced Job Complexes

The principle central to this concept is a principle that most artists probably already accept: creative work is the province of every human being. As an artist interested in finding more people responsive to what I do, I find it a terribly exciting possibility that everyone might have the opportunity to engage in creative work themselves. Indeed, if my chances of making a living as a creative person are under assault, as in fact they are now, it is in my interest to have involved as many people as is possible in creative work; that is, work not only where workers also make decisions but work where the creative process is central to the work process.

In helping to design balanced job complexes we would have much to contribute. Our work is not governed by the clock. We make time for reflection. An aesthetic dimension is always paramount. Mind and body is not separate. Could it be a rewarding experience to play a meaningful role helping to construct ways of working rooted in a good deal of the knowledge we possess? Might it be fulfilling to have this kind of on-going discussion with the broader community? Might it not broaden the interest in what it is we do? Would these types of personal contacts be a welcomed balance to the isolation of the studio?

Besides, artists are already deeply involved in what could be described as a balanced job complex. If we are painters, we are already photographers, web designers, mailing list managers, marketers, promoters, frame-makers, grant writers and expert application makers. If we have jobs in addition to making art we are even more extended. In a participatory economy, much of the competitive work, such as making applications, might be reduced in favor of teaching and the sharing of our knowledge of design, color, writing, song, dance, theater and various other aesthetic considerations with a population who has not had the opportunity, in their everyday life, to explore the various ways they could creatively and rewardingly accomplish socially useful tasks.

Participatory Planning

Participatory Planning is the negotiation among workers and consumer councils that is intended to replace the market system of distribution, a system of distribution based upon price and one’s ability to pay. It is important to recognize that while various market relations have existed practically forever, for most of human history social relations (kinship, communal, religious, political) existed apart from the relationships of the buying and selling. But we happen to live an a very unusual period, historically – one where virtually all our social relations are embedded within the market , where decisions about what we make, who gains access to it, how we live and use our time is determined by the impersonal imperatives of price and profit. But this is an historical anomaly, a convention that can be changed.

Second, the irony for artists in this regard is that the market relations into which we enter in order to gain access to the means of life are skewed to the advantage of the very wealthy largely because planning mechanisms already have been inserted within the market . But these planning mechanisms, unlike the participatory model that Albert advocates are exclusionary and elitist. If you have strong misgivings about challenging market forces of distribution, as an artist you ought to be quite upset already. The investors and owners of culture are quite adept at using an array of planning mechanisms - art commissions and auction houses that utilize market forces, for example, to control the goose that lays the golden egg.

The question becomes, if market planning mechanisms are already in place, why do we permit them to be controlled by a few whose interests run counter to ours? And arguably against the interests of many? If we are the goose that lays the golden egg, how does it come about that our precious golden egg is taken from us? With our cooperation?

My suspicion is that we are too busy making art to take a good look at the institutional matrix that has us by the short hair. One good example, along these lines, is our acceptance of one planning mechanism that was designed to mitigate against popular influence in the arts: the public benefit corporation, better known as the non-profit.

Non-profits are planning mechanisms. They are run by community elites, generally with artist representation, for the purpose of protecting culture within a market environment from popularizing influences. Sociologist Paul DiMaggio notes that non-profits, while claiming service to the entire community actually function to mystify art and separate the community from the world of art and artists. Alice Goldfarb Marquis concurs and points to the “high-art” worlds of museums, operas and symphonies where financial and social elites use the non-profit planning mechanisms for the same purpose. She notes that this capturing of culture is often accomplished by “pasting an altruistic, morally chase veneer over basically self-serving activities.” Wealthy donors and trustees, she explains further, have long aligned themselves with “liberal, reformist intellectuals and critics who see themselves as guardians of high culture” and who have campaigned “against almost every artistic innovation of the past two centuries.”

The non-profit as planning instrument by the investor class may be most visible in the creation of “art centers.” In the creation of the Lincoln Center in New York City and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco , for example, redevelopment interests together with cultural elites and non-profits use the rhetoric of public access around art to acquire monopoly control over the distribution of the art product. Their “art centers” then become the sites for glitzy chic-chic art events in order to anchor the array of upscale hotels, restaurants, and retailers that return competitive dividends to real estate investors. Many of us work with non-profits and do our best to make them function in a way that serves the community. But I must ask, is it not the case that we are always poor? That we are always beseeching the rich? That our non-profits are not dedicated to challenging the starving artist paradigm or amplifying public involvement as decision makers?

Artists today cannot have it both ways. We cannot run from parecon-type market alternatives in the name of artistic freedom and at the same time play our role as side-kicks within existing planning mechanisms that permit the wealthiest among us to direct and control all that we do.

Summary

I am not criticizing the intention of artists. We contribute much to rallies, marches and the numerous exhibitions, plays, music and stories that inveigh against war and injustice. My concern is that this art spirit is not part of an institutional critique. We need a critique of our institutions so that we can develop a concrete strategy to build new ones. Artists opposed to the war, to use one example, might be more effective by using their creative talents to build institutions that make the kind of war in Iraq impossible. The good artist and the justice good artists seek cannot exist unless we first create the institutions that require both.

Our history is replete with such transformations. While the Impression period is often referred to as the movement where visual art was first ridiculed and later accepted as prescient, let us recall that it was ridiculed not by the unsophisticated masses in need of education but by the educated and powerful whose control over culture had to be eliminated. Impressionism was a frontal assault by artists upon art institutions that in the words of the rebellious artists erected artificial barriers between themselves and the public.

Ditto jazz, rock’n roll, and Beethoven. Recall also that Michelangelo said of a statue that it was only by the “light of the public square” that it could be judged. The point is that we as artists are of the public and we are of the community. No better. No worse. And together it is necessary for us to regain control over our lives in order to become the artists we wish to become. Our best chance is to create the institutions necessary to give our voice best purchase. Democratic institutions. Participatory economics. Parecon.

Finally it is important, I believe, to explore further the artistic sensibilities that were wide spread 100 years ago, sensibilities that suggested revolutions required dancing, that suggested that if what we create is not a better world, what is the point of our work? Creating better institutions, ones in which our voices are heard meaningfully is both our responsibility and a pragmatic solution. It must also be our art. As Bertolt Brecht has said, “canalising a river, rafting a fruit tree, educating a person, transforming a state… are instances of fruitful criticism and at the same time instances of art.”

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: One Year of Parecon Organizing

2004-11-16T23:47:00.000-08:00

By the Vancouver Parecon Collective:
Jamie Campbell, Dave Collins, Bryan Berndt, Matt Grinder, Daniel Palmer, Chris Spannos, David Pehota

It’s been just over one year since the Vancouver Parecon Collective came into existence. It was sometime in September 2003 that a few of us Vancouver Pareconistas stumbled upon one another. Since then we have created a project that has far exceeded any of our expectations of 12 months ago. In fact, we have opened further doors for future possibilities that are exciting, intimidating, inspiring and hopeful. Here, we want to review some of our achievements as well as some of our failures. We also share some of our aspirations for the near future. We do this with the hopes of encouraging others to pursue similar adventures.

Looking Backward

After meeting each other we discovered that we all shared a very strong interest in economic justice. But not the kind of economic justice that is claimed in the myths and lies extolling the virtues of capitalism, with its privately owned productive property, competition, markets, corporate hierarchies, class rule and inequitable remuneration schemes. Nor were we interested in the kind of economic justice that has been heralded by promoters of authoritarian models of communism characterized by central planning, state owned productive property and a small elite of coordinators who plan the over all economic course of society. No, we found our commitment to economic justice articulated in Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert’s vision of Participatory Economics. A model with federations of workers and consumers councils, decentralized participatory planning, balanced job complexes, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and indicative pricing. An economic system that promotes the values of solidarity, equity, self-management, diversity and efficiency.

Beyond discovering our similar commitments to social and economic justice we also had the luck of good timing. Before meeting, one of us was asked to give a parecon presentation to a bunch of university students. We quickly mobilized to create leaflets, a web site and mailing list. We even recorded the talk with the hopes of disseminating the audio. The night was very memorable because it was raining cats and dogs, with may other activist events happening all over town. We had a very impressive turn out for the circumstances, 15-18 people. The evening was filled with very insightful discussion from a wide diversity of perspectives. We emerged from the evening with a sense inspiring success. It affirmed our belief that people were interested in a model of economic justice that transcended both the failures of capitalism and central planning.

We quickly began organizing regular monthly meetings to encourage participation. Our collective then grew, and fluctuated. We were, are, and have been teachers, students, social service workers, computer programmers, journalists, antiwar activists, mothers, political party representatives, vegetarians, vegans and carnivores.

Tabling events also became a common, and effective, outreach tool for our initial organizing. We tabled the first four opening nights for the film “The Corporation”, literally reaching thousands. Vancouver’s “Under the Volcano” festival and May Day fair were also a good places for us to mix, mingle and meet new and like minded people.

Soon we were organizing our next workshop, "Participatory Economics: A just alternative to capitalism & communism" held at the University of British Columbia. And only a few months later we gave another workshop for “Critical U”, a Simon Fraser University program aimed at giving people access to university curriculum, outside the university, in Vancouver’s east side. This presentation was also a success and you can view pictures of the event here:
http://vanparecon.resist.ca/photos.html

In April of 2003 Global Justice TV broadcast our UBC presentation on televisions across British Columbia’s lower mainland. Not just once, but three times! They did an excellent job editing and producing a program with high production qualities. You can down load the video file by clicking on this link:
http://globaljustice.ca/video/parecon.mov

In May, the Vancouver Area Anti-Capitalist Convergence asked the Vancouver Parecon Collective to present a workshop on “Alternative Economic Models”. We presented various models of capitalist, socialist and democratically planned economies;
specifically participatory economics. Our purpose was to orient Vancouver’s anti-capitalist movement towards thinking about what alternatives are available. We also attempted to explore the desirability and feasibility of these different economic models, and how to get there. The result was our talk “Parecon & Other Alternatives to Capitalism”. You can listen to the talk by down loading the file here:
http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=9200

Around this time we asked Noam Chomsky to comment for us about the importance of organizing for a participatory economy. We thought we’d use it on our web site and other promotional material. To our pleasant surprise, Noam kindly generated a comment in which he said, "A great many activists and concerned people ask, quite rightly, what alternative form of social organization can be imagined that might overcome the grave flaws -- often real crimes -- of contemporary society in more far-reaching ways than short-term reform. Parecon is the most serious effort I know to provide a very detailed possible answer to some of these questions, crucial ones, based on serious thought and careful analysis."

This comment obviously exceeded any of our expectations. We are very grateful to Noam for this.

Perhaps one of the most difficult events to organize to date has been our showing of the documentary film “The Corporation”. This was supposed to be a fundraiser for a local anarchist book store, Sparticus Books, which caught fire and burnt to the ground. We also hoped to raise money for another parecon project, The NewStandard. For this event we had The Corporation’s co-director Bart Simpson present to introduce the film. After the film we held a workshop on parecon. The whole event went off without a hitch, with one substantial exception. Organizationally, it was a success. We put an enormous amount of effort into the event and it went very smoothly. However, financially it was a total failure... We put close to a thousand dollars into it and made only $150.00 back, collective bummer. That didn’t stop us from enjoying the rest of the day out for lunch and at the beach. There was even a strong sense of accomplishment in our experience organizing the event. We decided we wouldn’t keep the money we raised, that’d be better to give it to the groups we were fundraising for. So in the end we felt it was a success. You can view photos for this event here: http://vanparecon.resist.ca/photoscorp.html

Another notable event was the “Post-Market” flea market and discussion group, a two day event organized by “Counter Publics”, group of local activist artists. They invited us to hold an info table at their flea market for the first day. The flea market was a very stimulating experience offering an opportunity to interact in new ways via barter and exchange. Participants could trade goods and services for any other goods and services, the only rule being that participants couldn’t use money. One of us traded a copy of “Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century” for a bottle of juice. We didn’t even try to calculate whether the indicative prices embodied in our goods made this an equal exchange, such are the limitations to barter, and we were thirsty.

For the second day we participated on a discussion weaving together the topics of participatory economics, the open source software movement and surrealism. It was here that we were able to fully elaborate on the benefits of a full system of democratic planning as compared to markets or barter systems. We also discussed art in a parecon and the implications of the open source movement for the anti-capitalist movement.

Another area of our work has been our attempts to generate more content, via audio and print media, exploring all aspect of participatory economics. We have written, published and produced commentary, interviews, reviews and essays on a wide variety of parecon related focuses. From “Parecon: The Unofficial Economics of Star Trek” to a look at the possible future of architecture in a parecon in our essay “Architecture of the New Society”. Most recently we interviewed Stephen Shalom on “ParPolity: Political vision for the Good Society”. And, an interview with Robin Hahnel, “Participatory Economics and the Environment”, will be on our web site in the new year. You can find all of these on our home page:
http://vanparecon.resist.ca

All this has been very exciting and again, more than any of us have expected over the past year. However, there are still areas that we want to work on that we think are very important, but have been unable to make very much progress. This area is the creation of actual parecon institutions to put our theories into concrete practice. This is different than the work we are already doing in the sense that we are all volunteering our time and energy to parecon organizing. The organizing is dispersed among what our own time and commitments allow us to do. This means that, even though we may try to share our work equitably, some times our efforts are scattered and even dissipate around certain projects. In this context we are constantly fighting against institutional pressures, capitalist and other, in order for us to make our project sustainable. And not only sustainable, but to grow. In this effort we have had many ideas and plans to try to create divers parecon enterprises. These efforts have been overwhelmed by the enormity of redirecting our energies from everyday commitments in our lives. Instead, and this is reaffirming, we seem to be making progress on many other fronts. One of which is the battle to make parecon a visible alternative economic system that people can then choose from. Locally we have made very impressive progress. Globally, we hope to act as an inspiration and perhaps one model , for how others can organize for a participatory economy.

Looking Forward

One way we have tried to over come some of these barriers over the last year is to develop a “One Year Plan” which looks forward mapping out the coming twelve months. However, the process of looking forward is harder then reviewing our past. It demands much more creativity and, in the process, a reevaluation and realignment of our commitments. Below are some of our ideas for the coming year:

- Make our collective organizing efforts financially sustainable, and even allow growth.

This would be done by trying to generate regular parecon content for our web site, mostly from Vancouver Parecon Collective members, but also from other divers writers, activists and theorists. This would mean developing some kind of membership and donation base for our web site. In addition to creating regular systems for generating content, applying editorial practices, skills, tasks and deadlines, just to name a few things we’d have to do on top of what we already do as volunteers.

- Proposal for Participatory Budgeting

This is someting we are currently working on. We hope to make a broad proposal for participatory budgeting, both locally in Vancouver, provincially in British Columbia and also nationally for Canada. We hope to stimulate efforts between divers activists, community groups, Left think tanks and policy institutes to create a “shadow participatory budget” which will demonstrate its effectiveness at empowering workers and consumers. This would be used to critique official budgets and push for a series of non-reformist reforms of participatory policy proposals. The outcome would hopefully be to stimulate mass movements and political will power to implement these alternatives.

- Further Education: talks, workshops, radio programs, essays and interviews

Something for us to look forward to this winter is our showing of the “Parecon Shed Sessions”, a seven part video series examining many aspects of parecon and other alternatives to capitalism. This would be accompanied by after movie discussions and weekly readings.

We also hope to continue holding workshops and other educational events. In addition we are currently brainstorming new ideas and focuses for articles, essays, and interviews.

- Canadian National Parecon Organization

This is something that we think is definitely feasible since Canada already has a rich history and practice of experimentation in parecon institutions. The folks in Winnipeg are the main source of this experimentation. They have the Mondragon Bookstore & Coffeehouse, G7 Welcoming Committee Records and the Arbeiter Ring Publishing house. We think we should some how network with the folks in Winnipeg but have not made any attempts at this so far. In addition, our experience in Vancouver tells us that there is interest in parecon across the country. Some kind of national organization could help facilitate interaction and organizing for parecon groups across Canada, becoming an effective tool for advocacy. However, many issues arise and these are also similar to those found in the next possibility.

- An International Organization for Participatory Economics

This is motivated by a reoccurring desire among us in the Vancouver Parecon Collective to establish, networks, cooperation and solidarity among all parecon organizations, enterprises and individuals. The purpose would be to create an effective parecon advocacy group internationally. We have periodic discussions about this but have no clear ideas. In his March 10, 2004 blog entry, “Advocating Parecon: An Organization”, Michael Albert explores this issue. It’s worth quoting the whole blog entry at length for the clarity of the issues Michael outlines:

“What about creating an organization of pareconists, so to speak? I don’t know whether this would be positive if it were it to grow to considerable size, nor even whether it would grow at all, for that matter. So this is an idea that pounds away in my mind…not escaping those borders into actual practice.

On the one hand, and this is always the easy part, imagine we had an organization for participatory economics called ope or something. Suppose it had ten thousand or even a hundred thousand or a million members worldwide, with chapters in dozens of countries. Suppose it was internally self managing. Suppose it advocated, explored, debated, and tried to flexibly, locally implement pareconish structure as well as trying to win non-reformist reforms in a trajectory leading toward parecon. Would this be a good thing?

To my thinking, of course if parecon is a good thing then such an organization would be wonderful.

But, you say, if we did this now it wouldn’t be this big and so powerful and so structurally consistent with pareconish values at the outset. Well of course it wouldn’t – that takes time. But nor could it ever get to that desired stature unless it got started at some initial time and place and scale, however initially small and inferior to ultimate hopes. So there is an argument for doing it.

On the other hand, who is going to define such an organization at its outset? What confidence can we have it would remain or become self-managing as its membership grew? What confidence can we have, for that matter, that it would grow rather than petering out at the expense of our efforts? What confidence can we have that such an organization would be open and exploratory and constantly innovative, as compared to being stodgy and sectarian. How can we be confident that it would implement changes flexibly as compared to being an adventurist nuisance or just plain incompetent? Should these and other concerns cause us only to function with great care, or should they cause us to entirely reject such an attempt?”

We hope our experience over the last year, and our hopes for the coming, can help explore the possibility of such an attempt. However, we also hope that our experience inspires others to start organizing themselves, both locally and globally. And we want to hear your ideas too. So please e-mail us at vancouverparecon@resist.ca

The Vancouver Parecon Collective is currently Jamie Campbell, Dave Collins, Bryan Berndt, Matt Grinder, Daniel Palmer, Chris Spannos, David Pehota
http://vanparecon.resist.ca

Life After Capitalism – And Now Too

2004-10-23T19:11:00.000-07:00

Following up on our last entry, here is Michael Albert's talk given in Rimini Italy at the Conference of the Pio Manzu Institute. The occasion was for Albert receiving the Medal the President of the Italian Republic for work on Parecon. See our last post for more details...
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The talk:

Why have Robin Hahnel and I devoted great time and energy to developing, describing, and now advocating an economic model to replace capitalism?

What are the model's features, how does it differ from other models, and what are its immediate implications?

We address economic vision because in the words of the great 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."

We address economic vision to undo that perplexity.

Capitalism is theft.

The harsh and subservient labors of most citizens fantastically enrich a few others who don't have to labor at all. In general, those who work longer and harder get less. Those who work less long and less hard get more.

On the upper West Side of New York City, barely a mile apart exist neighborhoods in which the average disposable income is on the poorer side about $5,000 per year and on the richer side about $500,000 per year.

The richest people in the U.S.are worth more than the populations of whole countries. The poorest people in the U.S.live under bridges in threadbare cardboard shelters, or stop living at all.

This gap is not due to different industriousness or talent. It is due to social relations that force the many to enrich the few.

Capitalism is alienation and anti-sociality.

Within capitalism the motives guiding decisions are pecuniary not personal, selfish not social. We each seek individual advance at the expense of others.

The result, unsurprisingly, is an anti-social environment in which nice guys finish last.

In U.S.hospitals, roughly a half a million people a year die of diseases they did not have when they entered. This is in considerable part a matter of hygiene and other correctable problems.

Yet there is no massive campaign to save these lives. It would not be profitable.

Starvation the world over has the same root cause; to feed the poor is not as profitable as over feeding the rich.

What health we attain, what food we eat, what housing we inhabit, comes to us because someone was seeking not health, sustenance, or shelter for all, but profit for themselves.

Economic logic seeks profit rather than social well being. Benefits for the weak arise only as a byproduct, not an intention, and rarely at that.

As Keynes put it, "Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."

Capitalism is authoritarian.

Within capitalism's workplaces those who labor at rote and tedious jobs have nearly zero say over the conditions, output, and purpose of their efforts.

Those who own or who monopolize empowering positions have near total say.

Not even Stalin controlled when people could rest, eat, or go to the bathroom, but corporate owners routinely exercise such power.

Corporations annihilate democracy.

Capitalism is inefficient.

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

It wastes inordinate resources on producing sales that aren't beneficial, and on enforcing work assignments that are coerced and therefore resisted.

Capitalism is racist and sexist.

This is not intrinsic to the relations of production, but occurs because under the pressure of market competition owners inevitably exploit racial and gender hierarchies produced in other parts of society.

When extra economic factors reduce the bargaining power of some actors and raise that of others or when they impact expectations about who should rule and who should obey -- seeking profit, capitalists abide and even enlarge the injustices.

Capitalism is violent.

The pursuit of capitalist market domination produces nations at odds with other nations.

Those with sufficient weaponry exploit the resources and populations of those lacking means to defend themselves, at times even unleashing unholy war.

Capitalism is unsustainable.

Markets propel short term calculations and make dumping waste on others to avoid costs an easy and unavoidable road to profit.

As a result, money grabbers accumulate and accumulate, ignoring or willfully obscuring the impact not only on workers and consumers, but also on today's environment and tomorrow's resources.

We see the results in sky, water, and soil, mitigated only by social movements that force wiser behavior.

I could continue detailing the morbid failings of capitalism, but I don't think it's necessary.

In 2004 only a relatively few people are made so immoral by their advantages, or so profoundly ignorant by their advanced educations, or so confused by media, that they fail to see that capitalism is now a gigantic holocaust of injustice that is anti-human in virtually every respect.

As John Stuart Mill put it, "I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human beings."

But what do we want instead?

Participatory Economics, or parecon, is built on four institutional commitments.

First, in parecon people participate in economic life via nested workers and consumers councils that repeatedly arise whenever people seek to control their own economies, as most recently in Argentina.

The added feature of parecon's councils is a commitment to self managed decision making.

People should influence decisions in proportion as they are in turn affected by them.

Sometimes self management is best accomplished via one person one vote and majority rule. Sometimes it entails that a different tally is needed, or consensus, or that only some segment of the whole populace votes.

In parecon, the tallying procedures we use are tactics to attain the appropriate self managing say for all involved actors.

Such self managing workers and consumers councils of course bear little resemblance to the top down corporate entities we endure today.

Second, remuneration in a parecon is for effort and sacrifice, not for output or bargaining power.

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.

Parecon rejects someone earning by virtue of having a deed in his or her pocket. There is no moral or incentive warrant for that.

Parecon also rejects a thuggish economy in which people get what they can take, as in market exchange.

More controversially, parecon also rejects that we should get back from an economy the amount we contribute to it by our personal labors.

How much we produce depends on many factors we can't control: our having better tools, or our working in a more productive environment, or our producing more valued items, or our having innate qualities that increase our productivity.

Economic incentives need to induce productive labor even when it is onerous. Remuneration for effort and sacrifice makes moral and economic sense. Rewarding the luck of having more productive genes, tools, etc., does not.

Third, participatory economics needs a new division of labor.

If a new economy were to remove private profit, utilize self managing councils, and remunerate effort and sacrifice, but were to simultaneously retain the current corporate division of labor, its commitments would be inconsistent.

Having 20% of the workforce monopolize largely empowering and pleasurable work and leaving 80% with more obedient, rote, stultifying, and onerous work, guarantees that the former group - who I call the coordinator class - will rule over the latter working class.

Even with a formal commitment to self management, by virtue of the work they do, the coordinators will enter each decision discussion having defined its agenda, owning the information relevant to debate, possessing compelling habits of communication, and embodying the confidence and energy to fully participate.

In contrast, having been deadened and exhausted by the work they do, workers will come to decision discussions only disempowered and exhausted.

Coordinators will determine outcomes, including choosing to remunerate themselves more, to streamline meetings and decision-making by excluding those below, and to orient economic decisions in their own interests.

This is about classes, ultimately.

By virtue of their deed to property, owners in capitalism preside over means of production. They hire and fire wage slaves. But eliminating this relation is not the same as attaining classlessness.

Another group in place of owners and also defined by its position in the economy, can wield virtually complete power and aggrandize itself above workers.

To avoid rule by this coordinator class over workers requires that we replace corporate divisions of labor with a new approach to defining work roles.

Parecon calls this third institutional commitment balanced job complexes.

Everyone in any society will by definition be doing some collection of tasks as his or her job.

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

In contrast, a participatory economy will combine tasks into jobs so that the overall empowerment effect of each job is like the overall empowerment effect of every other job.

We don't have managers and assemblers, editors and secretaries, surgeons and nurses. The functions these actors now fulfill persist in a parecon, but the labor is divided up differently

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

The total empowerment and pleasure that the surgeon's new job affords is made average by remixing tasks. She now has a balanced job complex that conveys the same total empowerment and pleasure as the new job of the person who previously only cleaned up.

The domination of what I call the coordinator class over all other workers is removed not by eliminating empowering tasks or by everyone doing the same things. Both these options are not only irrational but impossible.

Nor is coordinator class rule eliminated by just extolling rote work as important, which is possible and has even been tried, but which is structurally vacuous.

What eliminates coordinator class rule is distributing empowering and rote work so that all economic actors are able to participate in self managed decision making without undue advantage accruing to some due to their economic roles.

Finally, fourth, what if we have lots of workplaces and communities that are 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, but, in addition to these features, we opt for central planning or for markets for allocation?

Would this constitute a new and worthy vision?

With central planning the planners would be distinguished by the conceptual and design character of their labor, and no doubt also by their academic or other credentials.

They would seek to have agents in each workplace with whom they could interact and who would be responsible for enforcing the central plan, people who held similar credentials to the planners and were vested with similar dominating rights.

The dynamics of central planning are down go instructions up comes information about the possibility of fulfilling them, down go altered instructions up comes more information, down go final instructions up comes obedience.

The command structure is authoritarian and as we saw in the old Soviet Unionthe class implication is to resurrect the coordinator/worker distinction in each workplace and in the whole economy. Central planning undoes our other innovations and so must be rejected as unfit for allocation.

Markets are similar in their unworthiness, and the case is even more important because markets have so much more support around the world, and even on the left.

First, markets would destroy equitable remuneration by rewarding output and bargaining power instead of rewarding only effort and sacrifice.

Second, markets would force buyers and sellers to try to buy cheap and sell dear, each fleecing the other as much as possible in the name of private advance and even economic survival. Markets subvert solidarity.

Third, markets would even produce dissatisfaction as an aim, because only the dissatisfied will buy, and then buy again, and again. As the general director of General Motors' Research Labs, Charles Kettering put it, business needs to create a "dissatisfied consumer"; its mission is "the organized creation of dissatisfaction." Following his own advice, Ketteringintroduced annual model changes for GM cars -- planned obsolescence designed to make the consumer discontented with what he or she already had.

Fourth, markets also mis-price transactions, taking into account only their impact on immediate buyers and sellers but not on those affected by pollution or, for that matter, by positive side effects. This means markets routinely violate ecological balance and sustainability.

Fifth, markets create a competitive context in which workplaces have to cut costs and seek market share regardless of implications for others.

To do what markets force them to, even new workplaces with self managing councils that favor equitable remuneration and balanced job complexes would have no choice but to maximize revenues to keep up with or to outstrip competitors.

We would have to dump our costs on others, gain revenues by inducing excessive consumption, and cut production costs at workers expense.

And since to do these things requires both a managerial surplus-seeking mindset, and also freedom from suffering the pains that the managerial choices induce, we would hire folks with the appropriately callous and calculating minds business schools produce, and we would give these managers air conditioned offices and comfortable surroundings, and tell them, okay, cut our costs.

Ironically due to the pressure of markets we would impose on ourselves a coordinator class, not via natural law, and not because we seek to be subservient, but because markets force us to do it to win market share and avoid going out of business.

All these particular ills, I should note, are aggravated the more unencumbered - or in the current lexicon, the more free - our markets are.

There have rarely if ever been markets as competitive as those of Britainin the early nineteenth century. Under the sway of those nearly perfectly free markets, however, as the economist Robert Solow put it, "infants typically toiled their way to an early death in the pits and mills of the Black Country."

Solow adds that "well-functioning markets have no innate tendency to promote excellence in any form. They offer no resistance to forces making for a descent into cultural barbarity or moral depravity."

Markets are therefore ruled out for a desirable economy.

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

Parecon's answer is participatory planning.

What we need in place of central planning and competitive market allocation, is for informed self managed workers and consumers with appropriate training and confidence, and with social motivations, to cooperatively negotiate inputs and outputs each accessing accurate information and valuations and each having a say in proportion as choices impact them.

What allocation system can accomplish all that?

Worker and consumer councils propose their work activities and consumption preferences in light of best available and constantly updated knowledge of true valuations of the full social benefits and costs of their choices.

Councils engage in a back and forth cooperative communication of mutually informed preferences.

They utilize a variety of simple communicative tools including indicative prices, facilitation boards, and other features which permit actors to express, mediate, and refine their desires in light of other actor's desires.

Workers and consumers indicate their personal and also their group preferences. They learn what others have indicated. They alter their preferences in an effort to move toward personally fulfilling work and consumption as well as a viable overall plan.

At each new step in the negotiation each actor seeks personal well being and development, but each can improve their lot only by acting in accord with more general social benefit and not by exploiting others.

As in any economy, consumers take account of their income and the relative costs of available items and choose what they desire. Workers similarly indicate how much work they wish to do in light of requests for their output, as well as their own labor/leisure preferences.

In capitalism, as the famous advertising executive Ernest Dichter says: "We must use the modern techniques of motivational thinking and social science to make people constructively discontented.... If you are relatively happy with your life, if you enjoy spending time with your children, playing with them and talking with them; if you like nature...if you just like talking to people...if you enjoy living simply, if you sense no need to compete with your friends or neighbors--what good are you economically?"

But in a parecon, not only does no one have any interest in selling at an inflated price, no one has any interest in selling more for the sake of income either - because selling more is not how income is earned. Nor is there any competition for market share.

Motives are simply to meet needs and to develop potentials without wasting assets. We seek to produce what is socially acceptable and useful and to fulfill our own as well as the rest of society's preferences as the only way to get ahead personally or collectively.

Negotiations occur in a series of planning rounds. Every actor has an interest in the most effective utilization of productive potentials to meet needs because each gets a share of output that is equitable and grows as the whole output grows.

Every actor also has an interest in investments that reduce drudge work and improve the quality and empowerment of the average balanced job complex because this is the job quality and empowerment level that everyone on average enjoys.

I can't fully describe parecon and all its diverse mechanisms and show how the model is both viable and worthy in a summary talk such as this.

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

Parecon doesn't reduce productivity but instead provides adequate and proper incentives to work to the level people desire to consume.

It doesn't bias toward longer hours but allows free choice of work versus leisure.

It doesn't pursue what is most profitable regardless of impact on workers, ecology, and even consumers, but it reorients output toward what is truly beneficial in light of full social and environmental costs and benefits.

Parecon doesn't waste the human talents of people now doing surgery, composing music, or otherwise engaging in skilled labor by requiring that they do offsetting less empowering labor as well, but by this requirement surfaces a gargantuan reservoir of previously untapped talents throughout the populace while apportioning empowering and rote labor not only justly, but in accord with self management and classlessness.

Parecon doesn't assume sociable much less divine citizens. Rather it creates an institutional setting in which to get ahead in their economic engagements even people who grow up entirely self seeking and anti-social must attend to the general social good and the well being of others.

In capitalism buyers seek to fleece sellers and vice versa. Capitalism trains people to be anti-social. To get ahead they must learn the lesson well.

In parecon, in contrast, solidarity among citizens is produced by economic life just like vehicles, homes, clothes, and musical instruments are. Due to the logic of remuneration and planning, my gain is built on and derives from your gain and social gain, rather than opposed to each.

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

When Margaret Thatcher said "There is no alternative," she accurately identified a central obstacle to masses of people actively seeking a better world.

If a person sincerely believes there is no better future, then he or she will understandably react to calls to fight against poverty, alienation, and even war by replying, go get a life, grow up, face reality.

You might say to me, you can't fight war and poverty, that's a fool's errand. It is like blowing in the wind. It is like fighting gravity.

In that context, parecon is a vision aimed to replace cynicism with hope and reason. It seeks to clarify that capitalism is not like gravity - we can replace it.

The citation for the Award of the President of the Italian Republicthat I was graciously given yesterday, said that parecon is the "the most powerful and fully articulated challenge to the current models of socio-economic thought" providing "a new major highway in economic organization as a feasible proposition."

Anyone who believes that about parecon, it seems to me, ought to fight like the dickens not only to ameliorate the current ills produced by capitalism, but to usher in the benefits of this new type economy.

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 these acts.

The abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor union organizers, the anti apartheid activists, all the seekers of freedom and dignity are heroes for us.

It seems to me we should not admire something and then avoid doing that same thing.

If we admire standing up against injustice, we ought to ourselves stand up against injustice.

If we admire seeking a better world, we should ourselves seek a better world.

If we admire rejecting exploitation, alienation, domination, and its violent maintenance, we should ourselves advocate and fight for an economic model and societal structure that will eliminate these horrors.

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

Thank you

Medal of the President of the Italian Republic

2004-09-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

Michael Albert has recently won the "Medal of the President of the Italian Republic". It is for his and Robin Hahnel's years long effort to creat "a bold, innovative economic theory aimed at replacing self-serving competition in the economic field with egalitarian cooperation."

Below is Michael's award invitation, to be accepted in mid October. It is signed by none other than Mikhail Gorbachev....
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Medal of the President of the Italian Republic
Awarded by the International Scientific Committee of the Pio Manzù Centre to Michael Albert

The highly prolific American economist Michael Albert is the author of a bold, innovative economic theory aimed at replacing self-serving competition in the economic field with egalitarian cooperation.

Together with his co-author Robin Hahnel, Professor of Economics at American University, Washington D.C., he has developed and popularised a radical economic model, known as Participatory Economics, which constitutes an alternative both to capitalism and to what used to be the Soviet-style model of Real Socialism.

In Participatory Economics, solidarity takes the place of competition and remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of work replaces remuneration for property, power, or output. Likewise, methods of self management replace authoritarian decision making and a new method of allocation called participatory planning replaces markets.

To realise his project of radically changing a private-enterprise production system that generates economic inefficiency, Michael Albert counts on workers and consumers operating in councils according to the principle of participatory self-management.

The Pio Manzù Centre recognises that this American economist’s radical new theory constitutes the most powerful and fully articulated challenge to the current models of socio-economic thought and that Albert’s outstanding merit lies in the fact that he has indicated a new major highway in economic organisation as a feasible proposition.

Signed
Mikhail Gorbachev, President
Rimini, 17 October 2004

First Post

2004-08-22T21:01:00.000-07:00

This is sthe first post of the Vancouver Partcicipatroy Economics collective. We are a group that is interested in Participatory Economics, a much more just and democtartic alternative to capitalism.