5 December 2007Znet
What is the population of Turkey? 70 million? The population of US where I come from is roughly 300 million. How many people do we need on our side to create a new Turkish society? How many people do we need on our side in US to create a new US society? Does anybody want to have a guess? How many do you think we need to have? Nobody knows the answer for sure, of course. But I think if we want to change the US into a society that is truly fulfilling, truly liberating, truly equitable, truly just, which does not have class divisions, which does not have racism, which does not have sexism, then I think we need a movement which has a hundred million participants, a hundred million people not just following a banner, but who actually share the vision, who actually participate, in designing and defining what the movement is about, what its means are, what its procedures are. And likewise, for Turkey, we need about 25 million.
There are many people in the US who never think about actually winning, who never think about actually creating a new world. There have been a few phrases which characterize that mindset. In the US people often say: “I want to be on the side of the angels.” Or they say: “Fight the good fight.” “Fight the good fight” means: Imagine you are going to fight Mike Tyson. If you are going to fight Mike Tyson it would not matter how long you train, how hard you work, you are going to get killed! Or imagine you are going to put together a soccer team from a group of randomly chosen people in this room. And we are going to play the Brazilian national team. Then “Fight the good fight.” means we are going to loose, but it urges that we should at least go out and make it appear that we are trying. There is no responsibility to actually try hard, however, because it makes no difference. There is no responsibility to have a serious, coherent and good strategy, because, again, it makes no difference. We are going to lose no matter what. There are lots of leftists, lots of anti-capitalists not just in the U.S. but around the world, and I bet here in Turkey too, who approach the idea of struggle in this fashion. But that is not me! I want to win, and I believe we can win.
However, I know we don’t have a chance of winning if all we try to do is “fight the good fight.” Suppose we are really serious and we really do want to win. We have to do what is necessary, step by step and methodically over years, to develop a movement that can win. What is the first question that should arise for us?
I was once on a panel in about 1995. There were five or six of us on the panel. It was a green party panel in the US. And I have to admit I wasn’t paying attention to the other speakers. I was sort of meandering around in my head and daydreaming, and suddenly I had a thought. That was 1995 so it had been 30 years from 1965, and I asked myself how many people in the US from 1965 to 1995 had come into the vicinity of the left; anybody who had been involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement, the labor movement, the women’s movement, civil rights movement, gay lesbian movement, no-nukes movement, other anti-war movements, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, or anybody who had taken a course from a radical professor, in other words anyone who had come into the range of, into the proximity of the left.
A very conservative estimate of the number of such folks was 10 million. Probably a closer estimate would be 15 million or more. So let’s take 10 million as our number. The next part of the thought was: We’re supposed to be the good people. We’re supposed to be the caring people. We’re supposed to be the insightful people. Where the hell are we? And I had thought to myself, sitting there on that Green panel, if we had retained all those people, and if each of those people had been trying to attract new people, and we had been holding those as well, then by 1995, as thirty years had gone by, we would have had thirty, forty, or sixty million people on the left in the US.
And I asked myself whose fault was it that we didn’t have them? It was our fault! If we didn’t have them, was it because the government was powerful? No, they get repressed away. Was it because the media was immense and powerful and manipulating? No, because I am not talking about losing people we didn’t have access to. I am talking about losing who we got into the vicinity of, and had a chat with or in most cases worked with.
After all, if we leftists are the good, caring people with a good vision for the society, then our movement should be gravitational. As people come into the vicinity of it, they should be drawn closer to it. They should be more committed to it over time. But what the thought experiment I did while sitting on that Green panel shows, is that instead, people bounced off our movement, rather than sticking to it. So I decided to call this “the stickiness problem”, because we couldn’t get even people we were reaching to stick.
This problem was not small. If we are serious about changing the world, this problem is infinitely more important, than coming up with the third decimal point analysis of the World Bank. Arguably the “stickiness problem” should be our prime focus. It is something that we could solve, and if we did solve it, the impact would be huge. On the other hand, if the movement doesn’t think that it can win, then this stickiness problem is sort of boring and useless. Can’t win anyhow, so why bother trying to solve it. And anyway, it is much easier to write a book about how bad poverty, war, and capitalism are. We can do that with great confidence that we know what the answers are. We can do that and look erudite. So if we want to win, and if we want to develop a movement that can do so, one thing we have to talk about is the “stickiness problem”. I will come back to this, now another problem...
When I became a leftist in the mid-sixties, people were saying: “Ah, I get it, you annoying person, you don’t like what we have - but what do you want?” And I heard this question repeated for forty years: “What do you want?” And the left doesn’t answer.
Suppose we are made a stack of all the leaflets, books, essays, videos and interviews that have been produced by the left from sixties until now, that explain how bad racism, sexism, capitalism or war are,. It would probably reach to the moon; it would be a very high pile. People are not asking, please notice, over and over, “explain again please for me why poverty is bad”, “explain again why sexism hurts,” “explain again how bombs kill,” they are asking “What do you want?” And we answered, over the years, with a moon-high stack of noise explaining how bad everything is to the people who are suffering it and already know. Yes, we gave deep and sometimes even brilliant expositions of causes…but, still…
Suppose instead we made a stack of all of leaflets, books, essays, videos and interviews that answered the question “What do you want?”, that put forward a real, institutional vision of an alternative to capitalism, racism and sexism, I claim that stack might reach my knee. It is rare indeed that anything we produce even address the vision problem. And you often can’t even put the book with “Socialism” in its title in this stack, something that ostensibly it trying to answer the vision problem, because with few exceptions if you read one of those books, there are three hundred pages about what is wrong with capitalism, and five pages on what we want. So I call this “the vision problem.” I want to talk about this first and then I will come back to the stickiness problem. They are partly connected, as we will see later.
So suppose we want to deal with the vision problem.
In 1969 when people came to me and ask “what do you want”, and they were partly saying it just to shut me up. They knew that we didn’t have an answer. And what they were saying was: “You can’t give me an answer, so get the hell out of my face, get off of the street and go home!” And my response to that was basically something like this: “I don’t need to have an alternative way of doing cotton to be against slavery. I can be against slavery, even though I don’t know what the answer is yet about how things are going to work when we get rid of it.” And similarly I don’t need an alternative to capitalism to know that I am an anti-capitalist, and I am going to get rid of it, and I am going to fight against it. I said that in 1969 and I was technically, logically correct. I was morally correct. But I was strategically completely incorrect. And regrettably that is the reaction of the left ever since. And now, when people ask the vision question they are mostly not trying to shut us up. They are instead asking the question because they sincerely want to know what we want. I claim that the absence of a vision is a very big part of why the left is so small. I know I am only motivating a discussion about vision, so far, but we have a lot of time, so bear with me while I do that just a bit more.
In the period of gearing up for bombing Afghanistan after 9/11, a person came to the house where I live to fix our computers. He was a young man about thirty. He had a family, kids, and a wife. And he had his own small business, a computer repair business, with a couple of employees. We do Z and ZNet out of this house, a very radical place. He sees the posters on the wall, he sees the magazine, and we started a discussion. This is somebody who voted for Bush. He is in the constituency that the right wing in the US appeals to to grow. We started to talk, and he wanted to understand what was going on in the war planning. So I explained the reason why the U.S. couldn’t use international courts to deal with the situation, because that would legitimate the international courts, and it may apply to the US, who sees itself as above the law, so we didn’t want to do that. And then he says “Yeah, but why do we have to be so violent about our approach?” And I said: “If the mafia loan somebody money, and the person doesn’t pay, the mafia punish the person, right?” And he immediately understood that the US, as the big emperor of the world, when some country disobeys, has to punish it. Of course if he had been a PhD in political science, journalism, or economics in the US, he wouldn’t have understood any of it. It would have been impossible to explain to him, given how crowded with rationales and gibberish his brain was. But as someone who hadn’t had years of that degree of indoctrination, he got it right way - and now comes the important part.
I said to him, while we were gearing up for the bombing, “If you study and you look deeply, you see all the groups on the ground in Afghanistan, all the groups that are providing aid, food, and shelter to the population, are saying to us: ‘Don’t bomb!’”. In fact they were on their knees pleading with us. “Don’t bomb, because if you do bomb, you may kill five to seven million people.” Not with the shrapnel from the bombs, but because you are going to disrupt the growing season, and there will be starvation.
And I described this in some detail and the fellow whom I was talking started to cry. Not many people in the left have that reaction. But he felt real pain, and, remember, he voted for Bush. For the sake of completeness, nobody in the media or academia or the government contested the idea that five to seven people could die. That was accepted as the professional assessment of the likelihood before the bombing. So we bombed despite the possibility of that many people dying.
And this fellow then said to me: “But Michael, I don’t want to hear this, my wife doesn’t want to hear this, my friends don’t want to hear this, and the people who work for me don’t want to hear this.” And I said back to him: “Just like you don’t want to hear a description of the pain and horror that an earthquake can impose on people.” And he said to me. “That is exactly right! There is nothing I or anybody I know can do about it.” “I can work hard, try to get a little more income; try to take care of the people who I love; try to make a nice environment where I am, but I can’t influence that.” Notice, he didn’t say “You lie. The US is the glorious benefactor of the world. You are lying!” No, he believes me about the explanation and prediction, and he agreed it was incalculably horrible.
Then I said to him: “Look, if I was saying, in order to stop the bombing, we have to overthrow the government and overthrow capitalism; I would understand a little bit better your saying that we can’t do it, or at least we can’t do it in time. But surely you can see if we had twenty or thirty million people demonstrating in the streets in the US opposing this massive massacre, it would in fact not happen.” He said back to me: “I guess you are right about that, but then we would just bomb somewhere else.”
The point is, this person who voted for Bush, really does understand how bad things are, how criminal and unjust things are, but he thinks There Is No Alternative! TINA. He thinks it’s just inevitable.
The vision problem is this: We keep telling the people “poverty hurts, racism hurts, sexism hurts, and war hurts.” But people already know. More than that, they know that it is systemic. They don’t know the nineteenth decimal point detail, but they know the main points. In contrast, when we built movements in the 1960s nobody knew. When those movements began, people were horrified with the hypocrisy and the lies. They were surprised to find out how horrible Vietnam was. When the women’s movement was born in 1967-68, when women sat around the living rooms, and described their personal circumstances one after another going around in a circle, and described being dismissed, being ignored, being maltreated, being beaten, being raped, being brutalized by men, and the stories were so similar going from person to person, it provoked a revelation that the pain was systemic. Women realized, it’s not my fault, it’s not even my guy’s fault, who is a schmuck. It is a big system causing these problems.
And the same thing happened for race; the same thing happened for poverty. People discovered that the cause of suffering wasn’t personal inadequacy. It was a systemic crime. And people got very very angry at having been deceived and at the injustice and basically exploded into the movements of the 60s. Now, however, four decades later, that scenario can’t be repeated. It will never happen in the same way, again, because now everyone knows everything is broken. There is no shock in our messages about injustice. There is no surprise.
This guy visiting the house who voted for Bush knows broadly the state of the world, the horror of it. He wasn’t shocked by my revelations. They came as no real surprise. Instead of the ignorance of injustice being the obstacle to people acting, what we have to overcome with our speeches and our talks and our writing, is the ignorance of an alternative, the belief that there is no alternative, the belief that nothing we do will matter. I am going to hammer on this a little bit, then we will get to addressing the vision problem, because even though many people nowadays are finally saying they see the need for vision, in fact most people don’t act on this recognition, this insight.
I was recently in Orlando, Florida and Salt Lake City, Utah. Orlando is in the part of Florida that is overwhelmingly military bases. And Salt Lake City is the center of the Mormon religion in the US. I was in these cities right before the most recent round of antiwar demonstrations. And then I was there into the demonstrations, and spoke to their local organizers about their experiences. And I asked them: “When you go out to organize people to come to the demonstrations, what was response did you get? Was it like when we went out to organize anti-Vietnam activism, when people beat us?” No! In fact what they encountered was people saying “I am with you, I agree with you, war is horrible, our policies are horrible”, person after person after person, expressed agreement. But in fact all those people weren’t with them, because they didn’t come and demonstrate. So this is a serious question to answer. How come all these people said they are against the war, they were with the demonstrators, but then they didn’t come and demonstrate?
We can put that question a little larger even. Before the war in Iraq, there were demonstrations around the world, the largest demonstrations ever to be held anywhere on the planet against a war, even before the war started. That is unprecedented. So here is the threat of a war, and at the outset, before it starts, you’ve got millions and millions of people demonstrating against it. But in the broader population in the US, only about 20% were against it. If you are an organizer, what you would expect in the following period, after the war began, was that the millions would keep growing, which would bring the opposition up to a climax. But that is not what happened. Especially in the US. Instead this is what happened: The number of demonstrators has gone steadily down. The number of people who oppose the war, however, has gone steadily up. So now you’ve got two thirds of the US population against the war, and relatively speaking, almost nobody demonstrating.
This is the biggest question that confronts a day-to-day antiwar organizer who wants to win. Yet no day-to-day organizers and with a few exceptions no commentators even notice the problem, much less try to explain it and do something about it.
The drop off in active opposition didn’t happen because all these millions of people got scared. And it didn’t happen because the organizers suddenly lost their opposition. Still they oppose the war, just as much as the outset. It happened for due to the same dynamic as with the guy who came to our house before the Afghan war. It happened due to a feeling of hopelessness, a feeling that nothing we do matters, and so there is no point in demonstrating. This is regrettably a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it is true that the US government does not care how many Americans in the privacy of their own home are against the war. War policy is not about democracy. They don’t give a shit about our views per se. They care about oil. They care about geopolitics. They don’t care about what the American people or any other people think. So what is the antiwar movement for? Presumably, it is to end the war! But if so, we have to understand what kind of opposition is needed to end the war. And then what it has to understand what is needed to get to that level of opposition.
During the anti-Vietnam war, as it went on and on, many big-shot congressmen, senators, and even corporate executives changed sides and became antiwar. The big-shots thought that everybody is interested what they think and feel, so when they had a change of mind they held press conferences to explain why they changed their views.
None of them got up and said: “I was for the war, now I am against the war, because I discovered that we are obliterating the population of the Southeast Asia in an immoral holocaust.” None of them said: “I discovered that the US military drops toys in Vietnam that are small bombs designed to explode when the kids grab them. The toys are plastic so that when the charge penetrates the body of the kids the Vietnamese adults won’t be able to find them. They can’t use their X-Ray equipment to find the shards of plastic that are embedded into the kids. The idea of this weapon is to put pressure on the Vietnamese infrastructure. I can no longer abide that.” The U.S. didn’t want to kill the kids; they wanted to maim the kids to make it as difficult as possible for the Vietnamese who have to take care of them. So the person who switched sides, who was a big senator, congressman, or corporate lawyer, never said “I discovered this abomination and it made me sick and I decided to switch sides.” This is why activists turned against the war, but not why elites turned against the war.
The elite lawyers, and doctors and congressmen, and senators didn’t even say: “I discovered that American soldiers are dying in great numbers.” They didn’t care about that either. So here is what they did say: “In all good conscience, I can no longer support the war in Vietnam. Our streets are in turmoil. We are loosing the next generation of our youth. The fabric of our society is being torn apart. I can no longer support the war.” What they didn’t add, but what was the core of it, was: “I was supporting the war because I wanted to advance my elite interests. What stopped me from supporting the war, and it was the only thing that could stop me from supporting the war, was that pursuing the war was in fact harming my interests. Pursueing the war was harming my interests because a side effect of the policy was a movement which was beginning to challenge everything about society, including my corporate power. I could longer bear that threat.”
So the irony nowdays is that the opposition in the US has gone from 20% to 65%, and of course that doesn’t affect the policy much, because that opposition is only antiwar and is confined to private opinion in peoples’ private lives. So it doesn’t raise a threat that is big enough to make elites feel that they should give up in Iraq; that they should go home. There is no threat; there is no danger to them if they continue to pursue the policy. The threat would be if there were growing movements, and if the movements were getting ever more militant, and also ever more diverse in their focus, addressing not just this war policy, but war per se, and moving on to corporations, and to government, and to the structure of society. That trajectory of opposition would be dangerous. Elites would have to stop that threat by stopping the war. So the simple truth is, if the millions of people demonstrating before the way even began had kept demonstrating and most importantly had gotten larger and larger, and more and more militant, and more and more broad in their focus, then the war would have been over a while ago. So the fact that the millions didn’t stick with their activism matters. It’s why the war persists. So, why did the millions stop protesting. Why didn’t they become more militant, more numerous, and more broad in their focus?
I think it is partly because we don’t understand what we are doing. We don’t understand that to have success requires that we have demonstrations after which we get a little bigger, a little stronger, and a little more committed. We think success for a given protest is ending the war with that protest. When it doesn’t happen, we get frustrated and go home. Instead of seeing what we have accomplished, how we can proceed and end the war, we take war’s temporary continuation as evidence we can never succeed, and stop trying.
The second problem contributing to folks giving up rather than persisting is the vision problem. We lack an overarching idea about what the alternative is, and how to reach it; and that too frustrates us and leaves us getting depressed over time, and going home. And then there is also the stickiness problem.
Okay, so finally getting to the topic at hand – sorry for all the delays leading up to it - what is the answer to the question “What do you want?” How are we going to come up with an answer that is compelling, real and inspiring? What is the alternative to capitalism? I want to propose a possible alternative that is called participatory economics.
Our problem is to come up with an alternative to capitalism? How can we even think about that? OK this is how I think about it, and maybe it is a good way, maybe it is bad way, you have to decide.
First of all, what is economics; what do we want economics to do; and how does economics do it. Economics is, as we all know, just producing stuff, distributing stuff, and consuming stuff. Given that, then, what do we want for an economy? What values should it promote? That’s a methodical way to develop a vision. First the values we want. Then the institutions we want.
Economy affects relations between people. What are the values that we want an economy to implement regarding relations among people? Do we want the economy to make us antisocial, individualist and not caring about each other?
You say, no, we want solidarity, and I agree. Solidarity is the value we want to have, and it means caring about each other. We want our economy to cause us to be mutually concerned, to cause us to have solidarity, instead of having an economy that compels us to enter into a rat race where the only way you get ahead is by trampling on everybody else. So that is our first value: SOLIDARITY. And it’s not controversial. I don’t know anybody who would say, other things being equal; I would like a society that makes people antisocial and noxious to each other. Everybody will agree that solidarity is a good value.
What else? Well, an economy sets the range of options that we have available. What is our left value for that? Do we want a narrow homogenized range of options? If we don’t want that, what do we want? You say diversity! Yes, I agree. We want a wide range of options. We don’t want all our eggs in one basket, as the saying does. We want choice, and to be able to enjoy that others do things we don’t. So that is the second value, and it is also not controversial.
Next? Well, an economy sets how much stuff we get. It affects people’s incomes. What is the value for that? You say equity. I agree, but what does equity mean? This is now controversial. An economist would say there are a few possible choices we can make in how to distribute income. Let’s consider them, to find the value we like.
The first possibility is that you get income for all the property you own, for the productivity that comes from it. If you are Bill Gates, and you have a piece of paper in your pocket, a deed that says you own a large part of Microsoft, you are worth much more than the population of many third world countries combined. I assume that the people here will agree that it makes no sense for people get vast amounts of income because they have a piece of paper in their pocket. So I will reject that.
The second possible norm is what people teach in the Harvard Business School, Oxford, or Cambridge. And Al Capone agreed, as well, that it is the right way to distribute income. Al Capone, the famous American gangster, mass murderer, and thief, said, when asked what he thought of America: “I love America. In America, it’s wonderful! You get what you can take.” And this norm is to distribute income in accord with bargaining power. If you have more power, you get more income; if you have less power, you get less income. That’s actually what operates in a market system. I assume that you don’t want to align yourself with Al Capone and with the professors at the Harvard Business School – I am not sure who is worse. I reject that also.
The next possible norm is the one that most socialists advocate. This norm is that each person should get back from society as an income an equivalent to what they contribute by their labors. This sounds pretty good. If I contribute a certain amount by my labors, then if get less, that means somebody gets some of what I produced. If I get more, that means I am getting some of somebody else’s product. So I this norm we should get equivalent to what we contribute by our own efforts. But I reject this norm, even though it is what most socialists advocate, for a number of reasons. And we can explore what those are.
How many of you know who Michael Jordan, the basketball player is? Sadly, virtually everyone. Well, okay, Michael Jordan is an American basketball player in the NBA, probably the most famous American athlete in the last fifty years. He is retired as a player now. While he was playing, however, running up and down the court and shooting baskets, he was earning say twenty million dollars a year for playing basketball. Okay, how many of you think he was overpaid? Virtually everyone. How many of you think he is underpaid? OK, no one, and that means that none of you are socialists, because if you think people should be remunerated for the value of their product, Jordan was vastly underpaid. You may not like that his product was so highly valued, yourself, but that’s not relevant. The population loved to watch Michael Jordan play basketball. So much so that the value he was contributing to the economy via his play was way more than twenty million dollars a year. Who got it? The owners of the Chicago Bulls, the owners of the Nike, a lot of different people who had the bargaining power to take it. So in your guts some place, it appears that you have an intuitive problem with the idea that people should earn the equivalent of the value that they produce.
Let’s do another example. The two of you there, in the first row, go out to the field to cut sugar cane. You, on the left, are six foot tall, two hundred twenty pounds, solid as a rock, and very strong. You, on the right, are not nearly as strong. You both go out into the fields and work for eight hours. You work under the same sun with the same conditions. You, the big strong one, cut this much, a very big pile. And you, not so strong, cut this much, half as big a pile. Should we pay you each so the one who is stronger gets twice the income as the weaker one? If we are remunerating according to output, that is what we should do. If we think that there is something wrong with doing that, then we have to look for some other norm. This is a question of what we like and don’t like…of values…not of facts.
Suppose the two of you go out the next day and this time, you who are smaller have a better tool, a better cutter. Now the size of the piles of product are reversed and you who are smaller but who have a better tool cut a bigger pile, and you who are bigger but using a worse tool cut a smaller pile. Should we reward and punish you because you are using a better or a worse tool?
If we reward output, it turns out we are rewarding a lot of different variables. We are rewarding the genetic endowments, the skills, the size, and the talents we are born with. We are rewarding the equipment we use. We are also rewarding people that happen to be producing something that has greater value. All of these variables are morally and economically mistaken, in my view, as bases for income. I suspect you have already seen the moral mistake. But what about the economic mistake?
An economist will say: “Part of the reason we remunerate is providing incentive.” If I give you a lot of money to play basketball like Michael Jordan, I am willing to offer you 20 million dollars, can you, yes, you in the second row, or anyone in this room, do it? No! Do the high wages have any effect on our genetic endowments? No! We can’t change our genetic endowments. If you offer me a lot of money, I can’t make myself bigger and stronger. There is no incentive effect on genetic endowment. In fact if I offer Michael Jordan 20 million dollars to play basketball, he might play for a year and retire because he has enough to live on for life. The reason he doesn’t is not financial, it has more to do with that he likes to play. So the incentive logic is missing; it doesn’t work. What you can elicit with incentives is more hours of work, harder work intensity, or willingness to work under worse conditions. And these are what we ought to remunerate people for, in my view, both for moral and incentive reasons. So I want to say that the third value for a worthy economy is equity, but what I mean by equity is that we are remunerated for the duration – how long we work - for the intensity –how hard we work – and for the onerousness of the conditions under which we work.
Before we move on, why would a mainstream economist say the idea of paying for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially useful labor is a bad idea? Think about doctors. A doctor in the US earns 400,000 dollars a year, and a person who flips hamburgers earns let’s say 30,000 a year. But if we were to reward for duration, intensity, and onerousness, then the person who flips hamburgers would likely earn more than the doctor. So the problem, somebody would say, is if you have this norm of remuneration, nobody will want to be a doctor. Indeed, they say it over and over again, so much, that for most part we believe it. In fact, however, it is total bullshit. And all we have to do to realize that is to think about it clearly and carefully.
Let’s take two of you, over there in the fourth row to the left. Suppose you are just getting out of high school. You, the gal, are going to become a doctor. You, the guy, are going to become let’s say, a coal miner. As a doctor, you are going to earn 400,000 dollars. And let’s say you are going to earn 60,000 dollars when you become a coal miner. The reason we are going to give you 400,000 dollars a year, the brilliant economist tells us, is because during the years he is laboring in the coal mine, you are going to be in the medical school and then an intern in a hospital, and only after all that a full doctor. So you go to the college, and then to the medical school, and you are an intern and then you finally earn 400,000 dollars a year for the next 35 years. The guy goes out of the school straight to the coal mine, thus avoiding the horrible fate – are you already getting the picture - of being an intern or a student in the graduate school and instead earning 60,000 dollars a year.
So let’s test this analysis, instead of simply accepting it. I am going to start lowering the doctor’s salary. You, the gal header for med school, tell me when you decide to go to straight to the coal mine instead of medical school because I am not paying you enough to become a doctor not paying you enough to endure the tremendous suffering of medical school instead of being in the coal mine. How about if I lower it to 300,000 dollars? You won’t switch? Okay, what about 200,000 dollars? 100,000 dollars? 50,000 dollars? In the US, I have done this on campuses all over the country, and I have never had a student who didn’t say after a while: “I don’t know what lowest amount I can live on is, but that’s how low you have to go to get me into the coal mine instead of med school.” Now what about the person header for forty years in the mine. I am going to raise your salary from 60,000 dollars up. Please tell me when it is enough for you to decide to go to the college, and then to the graduate school to become a doctor. How about 60,000 dollars and two cents? I have never encountered anybody who doesn’t say, “I will switch even if you lower the salary.”
This is very instructive. However amusing, it actually isn’t just a game. It reveals important truths. There is, right in front of our face, the gigantic lie in modern economic thought, and we even don’t think about it. Indeed, we accept it without questioning. Why does the doctor earn 400,000 dollars a year? It is not to pay you for the tremendous onerousness and horrors of going to graduate school. That is utter nonsense. So why do you earn it? It is simply because you have the power to take it. And what gives you that power? What makes it possible for you to take all this payment is your keeping down the supply of doctors. The American Medical Association is an institution of doctors in the US. Its purpose is not to enhance the health of American people. Its purpose is to keep the salaries of the doctors really high, and it does that by keeping the number of doctors low, by maintaining their monopoly on certain knowledge, skills, and roles.
Just to finish this out – who is the greatest enemy of doctors in the society? That’s right, nurses! Because nurses could do a lot of doctors’ work. So doctors need to keep a monopoly of the knowledge and skills associated with medicine to keep their bargaining power high. The criticism raised by an economist that “remunerating effort and sacrifice – duration, intensity, and ownerousness of socially valued labor - is a bad idea because we will have no doctors” is just false.
So, continuing along with our effort, we now have solidarity, diversity, and equity as our values, where equity means remunerating for effort and sacrifice, duration, intensity and onerousness of work.
What’s next. Well, economy affects how much say we have, how much influence we have, over what is produced, how much, by what means, etc. What is our leftist value for that? Democracy? I agree that that would be a step forward, but I have a slightly different answer.
Suppose this is a workplace and you all, plus me, are the workforce. We each work in a little area of the workplace. You there, way in the back – yes, you - you also have a little area, and suppose you want to put up a picture of your wife, or you children in your little area. Who should make the decision? You should, by yourself, you say. But what about that guy over there. He should have no say, you say. So you should make this decision all by yourself? Alone? Like Stalin? And actually, it turns out the answer is yes and we all know it. That decision is a private matter.
It doesn’t make any sense for us to say that all the workers in this workplace should meet and decide if somebody can put up a picture of a spouse or child in her work area. It is obvious, that this should be a unilateral decision. We all get it. Suppose instead, somebody wanted to bring a boom box, and wanted to play heavy metal music. Now the question is: Who should make the decision? Everybody, you say? Well, what about the guy next door who can’t hear it? So, now you say everybody who is affected by it. Okay, I agree. And what we discover, quickly, by this little thought exercise is a norm that I call self-management. We should all have a say in decisions proportional to the degree we are affected by these decisions.
This means that sometimes only one person should decide, because he or she is overwhelmingly the only one affected. Sometimes we should use democracy - one person one vote, majority rules - because that’s the way we can allot to everyone as closely as possible the appropriate amount of influence. Sometimes we ought to use consensus, because for some kinds of decision requiring consensus most closely conveys to each actor the appropriate self-management influence. So that’s the fourth value I want to propose: self management.
Okay, again, before going on, what’s the critic going to say is wrong about this value? Nobody would say it’s morally wrong, I think. Instead, the typical response is: “It sounds nice, but what if we get stupid decisions? We need experts to make decisions.” And my response to that is: “Yes, there is a sense in which I agree with that.” But who is the foremost expert in the entire world in your preferences? Yes, correct, you are! In the US, sadly, I sometimes get answers like: “My mother.” If we are going to paint the walls of the place we work, it’s true we need the advice of a chemist, an expert, to tell us that a particular brand of paint has lead in it and will kill us. But that just says we need a process to consult an expert to get that information. But we don’t need the chemist to decide for us. We get the information, but then since we are affected, we decide. Indeed, for tallying preferences, to consult the expert means to consult each person affected, because they are the expert on their preference.
So this is what I want to claim about all these values that we so quickly – relatively speaking – arrived at. If we are trying to design or describe an alternative economic vision, then we should conceive a set of institutions which can produce and distribute stuff, and in the process of doing that can increase solidarity rather than diminish it, increase diversity rather than diminish it, create equity rather than obliterate it, and provide everybody a self-managing say rather than a few people dominance and most people subordination.
Now, let’s have a break, and in ten minutes, we will develop, somewhat quickly, an economic vision called participatory economics to replace capitalism, using this advisory – to find institutions that accomplish what we desire – and I will talk a little about implications of that f process for, first the vision problem - that’s easy and obvious - and then the much more interesting stickiness problem: Why do movements loose members?
[BREAK]
So what we have now is: We know we don’t like capitalism, because it impoverishes us, it oppresses us, it denies us control, and on and on and on. And we started to develop an alternative economy to take the place of capitalism. We discovered some values that, for the purposes of exploring the idea of an alternative, make sense to us: solidarity, diversity, equity, and self management. And now we are trying to figure out an economic system that can actually deliver on these values.
Suppose this room we are in was a workplace. Suppose we all work here and we produce bicycles. And suppose we all decide to create an exemplary workplace which embodies the values and practices that we hope to have in a new economy. This is no mere hypothetical exercise. It happens often. In Argentina, for example, not a long time ago, hundreds of factories transferred from private ownership by capitalists to control by the workforce. So suppose we are like them and we are trying to figure out how to organize our bicycle factory. Since we believe in self-management, the workers, us, will have a say to the degree that we are affected by decisions. So the first thing that we are going to need is to set up a workers’ assembly, or a workers’ council. And in this workers’ council, we are going to have deliberation, discussion, and voting to implement the self-management rights to each worker. We are very serious about this. We are very committed and we mean to do it. And we can, just like those workers in Argentina.
When they took over factories, they, like us in this example, immediately created workers’ councils, and immediately made them much more democratic, though not quite going as far as what I mean when I say self-management. This idea of having a workers council is not very controversial on the left. Anybody who is anti-capitalist, as all historical experiences have shown, has created workers’ councils.
Okay, so we have ours, and now we look around in our workplace, and we decide that we want equity. We are going to remunerate for how long each of us works, how hard we work, and the onerousness of our work. So now we start to have meetings, and we start to have discussions, and we do work, and so on. But we keep the old division of labour. So, with that still in place, still about 20% of us have the managerial, engineering, personnel, conceptual, and otherwise empowering jobs. And about 80% of us are still doing the rote, repetitive, and disempowering work. And I say we have this ratio because on average this is about what we have in any industrialised society. On the one hand, 20% have jobs that include an array of empowering activities, which means activities that give them social skills, confidence, knowledge about what is going on , and access to daily decision making. On the other hand, 80% have jobs that are composed only of rote and repetitive tasks which don’t convey those empowering attributes.
So, okay, imagine that we all come together in a workers council meeting, to make decisions. Who sets the agenda of the meeting? We are having a discussion and a debate. Who has the confidence, information, and the verbal skills to be involved in this debate? Yes, correct, the 20% set the agenda and do the debating. Sure. And the rest of us, the 80%, are essentially bystanders. We choosing among the leaders who to follow.
And who is earning more? Well, first, at the outset who is going to be earning more? What were we committed to? We just started this workplace, we have our values, and so we are remunerating for effort and sacrifice, for duration, intensity, and onerousness. But that means at the outset who is earning more? You in the 80% would be earning more, because your work conditions are worse! The 20% empowered few are working in the air-conditioned offices, and you are working in front of the blast furnace. They work with their feet up on the desk, you work standing all day. They take a three-hour lunch break, you work overtime. If we remunerate for duration, intensity and onerousness, you, the 80%, get more.
Typically, in factories taken over by workers, they don’t go quite that far. But they do start up by equalizing wages. So you can take it in either way if you prefer; either you in the 80% are enjoying equalized wages and you are earning the same, or you are actually earning more due to the new norm that we favor. But in the firm’s decision making meeting the 20% do all the talking. They set the agenda. They do the debating. And it is their will that determines outcomes. And you, the 80%, are bored and exhausted from your work. So after the excitement of the early days of the new workplace structure wears off, you start to stay home during the meetings. And after a while, the 20% are doing all the talking, all the agenda setting, all the debating, and the 80% is not even attending the meetings. What do the 20% decide then? What is the first thing they decide when things have got to that stage? Yes, that is right, I think. They raise their own wages. And when the 20% raise their own wages, do they say to themselves: “Because we now have the power, and they, stupid them, aren’t coming to the meetings, we will rip them off.” And if you don’t say that to yourself, what do you say to yourself, which you certainly don’t, what do you tell yourself? Why are you paying yourself more? Yes, that is right. You feel like you are more important. You are smarter; you are more creative; you are crucial. That’s what the 20% tell themselves.
How do the 20% view you, the 80%? As ignorant, as just children. They say they must paternalistically make decisions on your behalf. You are, to them, stupid. That’s what they tell themselves. So they feel OK about themselves when they raise their salary. If you want to know the whole truth, they even go further. The 20% at some level think that they are doing you the 80% a favour. Because your taste has become so impoverished and limited, they decide you wouldn’t know what to do with all that money. It will just make you tense if you have it and must decide what to do with it. Whereas when they take the money, they know how to spend it on good food, art, and everything else. So they think they are doing you a favour.
So now we have a problem in our exemplary workplace. With the old division of labour still in place, despite that we are all absolutely committed to self-management, and despite the fact that we are all committed to equity, the old division of labour subverts our efforts. Slowly but surely, it forces our workplace to be class divided. And the class division is not owners above workers. There is no owner. Instead, those newly at the top don’t have a monopoly over property; they don’t own the bicycle factory. They have a monopoly on certain knowledge and skills, and especially on the empowering work that conveys their knowledge and skills.
If I could, I would like to take the time to tell two stories that bear on this division of labor problem, before we to find a solution.
I went to a glass factory not so long ago in Argentina, one among many factories I visited. This factory was previously failing, which is to say it was not turning over a sufficient profit. The owners decided that they wanted to sell it. The workers said: “No! If you do that we are going loose our jobs, so instead we are going to take over the factory.” And they did take over. And then the people who were the managers, engineers, and those who were doing all the empowering work in the factory decided that they would leave too; they felt they could get better work elsewhere. So now there was a factory that is producing glass; the owner had gone; all of the engineers, managers, financial officers, had gone too. The workers took over. They equalized the wages. They established workers councils. They instituted democratic participation and voting (but not self management). The tasks that the people who left were doing for the most part still needed to get done. So the workers, now in charge, chose among themselves, people to do those tasks. There was a meeting and the chair said, essentially: “Who wants to do the financial job?” Nobody wanted to do it; nobody knew how! Finally one courageous woman says: “I will do it but it will take a while to learn.” So in six months she is doing what the chief financial officer was doing before. And the firm is now making a surplus where is wasn’t before.
I talked to this woman who became financial officer, and I asked: “What was the hardest thing to learn in the transition from working in the glass foundry in 110 degrees heat all day long, to now doing the financial officer’s job? Was the hardest thing to learn the computer software?” She said: “No, not particularly.” “Was the hardest thing to learn the accounting concepts, the idea of tracking all this stuff and keeping these records, was that the hardest thing?” She said: “No, that wasn’t the hardest thing.” Can anybody here guess what the hardest thing was? No, well, okay, I didn’t either, but then she said to me: “Learning to read was the hardest thing.”
Just think about that for a minute. She is working in the glass foundry; she is now the chief financial officer six months after the workers took over, and to make this jump not only did she learn the software and accounting, but she learned to read! The idea that people can’t do empowering work is just a big lie.
Now here’s a different story. Again I was in Argentina, and I was in a room full of representatives from factories that were taken over where I had been invited to speak. I said: “Before I speak, how about if you all tell about your experiences in the factories that you took over, and then I talk.” So they started to do that, going around the room. And after four or five of them had spoken, there is some crying in the room. People are literally crying. And by the time ten of them told their stories, they were so sad, so depressed that they could not do it anymore, and I started talking. What upset them so much was that each was telling a similar story, though each thought it was unique to their workplace. In fact, the horror story each told was true for the rest, as well. What was happening in all these workplaces which were so exciting, and so inspiring at first, in which people were moving from working in the glass foundry to do the financing, and in which there was equitable remuneration and real democracy, after just a period of months, in some cases almost a year, they were reverting to the old style of activity. The representatives were depressed, because these people were serious, and really wanted to create an exemplary workplace to be a model for the future. And one after another they had to say: “It’s not working; it’s unravelling.” And one of them finally said: “I never thought I would feel this way, but maybe Margaret Thatcher was right; maybe there is no alternative. Maybe all the shit is just the way it is.” So, what was going wrong?
What was going happening is that despite making some wonderful changes and having great values, these workers kept the old division of labour. The woman I spoke of earlier, as one example, moved from blast foundry to financial officer. But she was still financial officer. What we described earlier hypothetically in our heads for our own workplace was that unless we solved the division of labor problem, 20% would dominate due to having a monopoly over the empowering tasks and thus the knowledge, information, social talents and confidence that convey power, and that was exactly what was happening in these firms. The old division of labour was kept in place and it was subverting the equitable remuneration and the democracy the workers had adopted. So what is the solution?
No one wants to hazard a guess, even? Once somebody I know came up to me and said: “Everything in your parecon seems so simple. It sounds simple when you talk about it, but it is not that simple.” Well, it is true, working out all the details, going further than we are, is a little harder. But for the most part, the essence of it really is simple, for someone open to it. Most economists, political scientists, or philosophers will have a hard time understanding a word of what I am saying, but that isn’t because it is hard. Rather it is because their educations prevent them from even hearing the words offered. But I do try to make it clear and familiar. So now I am going to give an example to make the solution to the division of labor problem, which may sound weird at first.
Suppose we are on a field trip to a country which we have never visited before and even never heard of. We quickly realize that in the workplaces we are visiting there are no owners, the workplaces are all social. But when we look inside these workplaces, we see that even without owners, they are just like the workplaces we are familiar with. There is top-down decision making. There are big divisions of income. We look more closely and after a bit we see 20% of the employees have better circumstances, more power, more income, and 80% have less of all that. So we look more closely and we discover the 20% dominate all the decision making. And then we see something more, something peculiar. Before the workday begins, every day the 20% each eat two chocolate bars. The 80% get no chocolates. We investigate these particular chocolates, and it turns out that oddly enough these chocolates convey to the people who eat them great confidence, social skills, capacity to do intellectual work, empowerment, and so on. If I now ask you then what do we have to do in this workplace to get rid of the hierarchy in which 20% dominate 80%, what is the answer? Not very complicated: you are correct, chocolates for everybody! We either get some more chocolates, or, if we have all we can get, there has to be less chocolate given out, but for everybody.
Now let’s come back to the case of the worker controlled Argentina workplace. To get rid of the emerging hierarchy, what do we have to do? What is analogous to the chocolates? You are saying lots of things: decisions, education. All these things are relevant, yes, but I think the comprehensive way to understand what you are getting at is to focus on “empowering work”. What the 20% in the Argentine factory with the old division of labor has a monopoly on is not chocolates, but instead the tasks that convey information, knowledge, skills and decision making. So to follow the logic of redistributing the chocolates, we have to give everybody a share of empowering activity.
So participatory economics says: “We should have a new division of labor” which means in our bicycle factory that we have taken over, in addition to the workers councils, in addition to the self management decision making, in addition to the equitable remuneration for duration, intensity and onerousness of socially valuable work, we need to institute what is called “balanced job complexes”. This means each person should have a mix of tasks and responsibilities, but instead of combining only the empowering tasks and giving that to the 20%, and only the disempowering tasks and giving that to the 80%, we have each person’s job be a combination that is comparably empowering to everyone else’s. In other words, we create a situation in which the elite 20% no longer exists because no group does only empowering tasks. There is nobody in the workplace who by virtue of their daily activity is elevated above everybody else.
Suppose you are a surgeon in a capitalist economy. We switch to a participatory economy. Do you still do some surgery? Yes, right, of course you do. But what else do you do? Yes, right, you clean the bedpans, you sweep, or you work in the cafeteria. You do a mix of tasks. And your mix is comparably empowering as everyone else’s mix.
Okay, what’s the problem with this? What would a mainstream economist say is wrong with this?
They would say: “This would be inefficient.” Why? They would say: “Look, he has got all these surgical skills, and he is not using all of them if he is cleaning the floors! Giving somebody a heart transplant in the five ours that it takes to do so is more efficient than cleaning bedpans in these five hours.” Yes, you are right, that is what the economist says, and he is right, it is true, up to a point. The critic will say: “It sounds good the way you describe it, fair and just, but what good is that, given that we will all die! We will have a classless economy, but we won’t enjoy it because we will be dead!”
So what is the answer? More surgeons? Right, more people doing surgery so the total they do is as much, or in fact quite a bit more, than the surgery that was being done before. But where do the surgeons come from? Where do we get more surgeons from? Medical school? Yes, but we have already got all the surgeons who were graduating before, and we just cut their work, and now they are doing surgery only, let’s say, half as many hours a week as before, so we now need to add the same number of surgeons again. Where do we get them from? Okay, yes, that is right, we get them from the 80%. And if you think the 80% can’t generate that kind of surgical talent and likewise for all the other empowering jobs, then you are racist, sexist and classist. And we can literally prove that.
Suppose we were having this discussion forty years ago in the US. If we put all the surgeons in a stadium, how many women would there be in the stadium? Essentially none, or very few, at any rate. Were they not there because they had a genetic deformity that prevented them from the possibility of ever doing surgery? That’s what a lot of people believed forty years ago. But how many women are there in medical school in the US today? What percent, does anybody know? Correct, a little bit over half. So that shows us no matter how prejudiced we might be that the sector of the population which consists of women was not contributing surgery forty years ago not because of incapacity, but instead, just like the woman in Argentina not doing any empowering work and then doing the financial job, it was because of the structure that precluded it. If you looked around the women forty years ago and interviewed them, you would discover that they lacked confidence. They were relatively ignorant. Many would have even said that women couldn’t be doctors, some would have been horrified at the thought. But all these results, forty years ago, were due to the functioning of the institutional structures. Of course, women then didn’t know how to do surgery, they didn’t have any training and were blasted by sexism.
So let’s talk about the current time, again. If we switch from a capitalist economy to a participatory economy, the surgeons under the parecon will have a balanced job complex. They will do, let’s say, half as much surgery, actually less, because we are going to shorten the work day as well, as before. So, we have to get more people doing surgery from somewhere else. We get it from the 80% working class. It’s not that every person from the 80% could be a surgeon. Just like not every women forty years ago could have been a surgeon even if they had good training, etc. But the overall pool of people has more than enough surgical capacity to replace the surgery that we have lost, and likewise for other empowered tasks. So we get the surgery we need but without retaining the old division of labour. In fact we get much better surgery for a diverse array of reasons that we don’t have the time to explore now.
So now let’s assume our workplace has done all these changes. The Argentina workplace not only did equitable wages, not only did self management, not only did workers’ assembly but suppose they also changed the old division of labour. Some of them in fact did a good deal of that. But still they gather around a room to describe the situation, and still they will report it is going bad. Why?
Suppose we have a bicycle factory. We change it to be pareconish and it has all these new features, but suppose we are still operating in a market system. If so, what do we have to do? What does the market require of us? Somebody says profit. But that is not quite right. We don’t have an owner, there is no profit on property. We do have to compete. Correct. But compete for what? We have to compete for market share. Right.
We produce bicycles. If we don’t compete for market share, what’s going to happen to our workplace? Correct, we are going to go out of business. In that case we would have a perfect workplace but no work. We would fail and go out of business. So we must compete. We formed our workers’ assembly, and we decided in our workplace we want to have day-care. In our workplace we want cleanliness and we want air conditioning. We want nice lunch breaks. We don’t want speed up. We don’t want to work at a ridiculously inhumane pace. If we make a mess outside the plant, if we make pollution, we would like to clean it up, because we are responsible and we also live in a neighbourhood. But now, having decided to do all that, still, because of the market we have to compete, and in order to compete what do we have to do?
We have to cut costs. Correct. But why do we have to cut costs? To keep market share. Correct, but how? We have to generate a surplus. Yes, you are right, but why? What do we have to do with the surplus? What do we need it for?
Well, we have to spend it on advertising, in order to compete. We have to spend it on innovations too. So we need it, where do we get it. How do we have bigger surpluses than others in our industry?
The other firms aren’t cleaning up their pollution. If a dirty technology is cheaper than the clean one, they will use the dirty one. They turn off the air-conditioning for the workers. They impose speed up. They sell bicycles cheaper and cheaper, at least to the consumer, and they are making a surplus and they are out-advertising us. We are losing market share and we are losing our jobs. We have to do something, quick.
For those interested, I am broadly describing Yugoslavia under what we call “market Socialism”. The workers had complete control over the workplace. They started out by equalizing wages, having democracy, but then they had to compete in the market. So they had to make some decisions. They had to decide to get rid of the day-care; to turn off the air-conditioning; to speed up their work; to use dirty (cheaper) instead of clean technologies.
Returning to our own factory, right here, are we going to be good at making those decisions? This is the first somewhat subtle point of the evening. I think we are not going to be good in making these decisions, because they are going to hurt us. It’s hard to oppress ourselves. Suppose we want to find somebody else to make these decisions. Where will we look to find this person who is exceptionally well trained to make these decisions: a person who has learned not only how to do this, but also to feel no hesitation to make decisions that hurt other people? Where do we find this beast?
The Harvard Business School! That’s exactly right! And what did the Yugoslavs do? They hired managers from elite business schools often in the west. So we hire these guys to come in and make cost cutting decisions for us. Do we give them a balanced job complex? Do we give them the same work conditions that we endure? Correct, that would defeat the purpose of going out to get them. If we hire them, and then we give them a balanced job complex just like the rest of us, we haven’t made any progress. They will become bad at making the needed decisions too. So instead we hire them, we give them an air-conditioned office; we give them whatever they want; and we then say: “OK, fuck us!”
What we are talking about now is the market system and how it subverts the logic of our just workplace. Against our values, against our desires, the fact that we retain markets subverts our efforts and pushes us back into having a class above most workers. As with the old corporate division of labor, markets also impose on us a coordinator class/working class division. Central planning does the same thing, and it’s more obvious. The central planners are the coordinator class, and have no interest in negotiating with a self-managing workers’ council. So instead they interact with people just like themselves in the workplace, people that have a monopoly on empowering work and related education, so on, so forth.
Somebody earlier said that education was the thing that distinguishes the coordinator class from the working class. And I just want to address that for a minute. It’s true that education is a credential, an entry fee to the coordinator class. In a capitalist economy it is essential that the educational system produces such people in the society. That means that the educational system has to prepare 80% of the population to be wage slaves. Remember being in high school and the end of the day is coming, and you are looking up and watching the clock, and it is moving so slowly, and you are praying for the end of the day to come. If you don’t remember that ever happening, then you were channeled into the 20%. But if you were being channeled into the 80%, you will remember that experience. But I bet you didn’t just get up and walk out. You sat there and endured boredom and obeyed orders. And that is what the school system is for, for the 80% of the population: to teach us to endure boredom and take orders. If it didn’t do that, it would be dysfunctional under capitalism.
After the 1960s in the US, the government looked back and said: “Good God! What went wrong?” From their point of view the 1960s was a horror show. And they sponsored a very high level commission called the Carnegie Commission to investigate and try to discover what was the cause of the 1960s, and what had to be done to prevent it ever happening again. And this commission of high level college professors, lawyers, etc. investigated, and surprisingly they came up with part of the explanation. What they reported was: “We are overeducating people.” What they meant was that the school system was creating graduates who actually expected to have some dignity in their life. And then they got out and discovered that they were not, they were wage slaves with no integrity and dignity, and they got mad. And the commission said to the government that the solution to this problem was to cut back education, make higher education more expensive, take money away from schools where working class people were, create community colleges and vocational schools where people just continued to learn to take orders and endure boredom. This was the logic of capitalist class structure and its division of labour.
In a participatory economy education is exactly the opposite. Everybody winds up with a balanced job complex. It is desirable for the society, therefore, that we all fulfil our capabilities as fully as possible. Maximum development of our capacities is actually needed for us to become good citizens in this type of society.
Just as a sidebar: The US did successfully changed the education as a result of this recognition. In fact, they did it so successfully that if you look at the US now, you see the results. The student body of graduate level education in the US, of PhD programs - one of the few remaining areas that the US is the best in the world at - is more and more, and in many cases more than 50% and growing, not Americans. The reason for this is because the graduates of the American educational system are so poorly educated that they cannot get into American graduate schools.
So, getting back on track, participatory economy is workers’ councils and also consumers’ councils - I haven’t talked much about the latter, though it is crucial for really understanding the whole system - self-managed decision making, balanced job complexes, equitable remuneration for duration, intensity and onerousness of socially valuable work, and now, finally, we also need a new allocation system that can replace markets and central planning.
I am not going to describe the allocation system at length because it is getting late and you are too tired and it will take a while. But I am going to make a remarkable claim about what is called participatory planning, the new allocation system for a parecon. I claim that participatory planning which is the last core institutional feature of the participatory economy, in place of markets or central planning, can properly valuate the goods in the economy including what are called externalities, or ecological effects; does not subvert the features of our workplace, but instead facilitates and advances exactly these features we have said we want; and also delivers to each worker and consumer an appropriate level of self managing influence over economic decisions. Now that is a massive and somehow implausible claim. But what we should be able to agree on is that if it is true, and I claim it is, then the combination of participatory planning and the other institutions that we talked about, constitute an economy, a participatory economy, which produces solidarity, equity, diversity and self-management, and which is classless. And if that is true, then we have an alternative to capitalism, and to the thing that is historically called Socialism, as well. No more TINA.
At this point, there is no reason for you to believe my claim. At most you might think it is starting to sound plausible. To go further, you would have to investigate it and think about it more, and decide what you think. But if you decided it was true, then you become a pareconist, an advocate of participatory economy. If you decided it was wrong, it was flawed then I honestly think what you should do is to start over again, and come up with something better, because we need a vision to get to any place.
What about if we have the questions now and deal a bit more with the stickiness problem later, after the questions? Or maybe it will come up in the course of questions, OK?
Q: Can you compare participatory Socialism and participatory economics?
The question is: What is the difference between what you are describing, participatory economics, and the thing that is called Socialism? Well, if somebody wants to label what I am describing as “participatory Socialism”, fine, you could do that. The word Socialism has two alternative ways of approaching it: The thing we all like, those of us who identify ourselves as socialist, is the values that are associated with the word: Equity, solidarity, people controlling their lives, self-management, justice, and so on. So if you mean by Socialism that, then participatory economics is what you mean by Socialism. So to give an example from the world outside, when Hugo Chavez says he is for 21st century Socialism, what is he saying? What he is saying is not very clear because he doesn’t offer much explanation, but I suspect what he is saying is: “We don’t like the institutions that went under the label ‘Socialism’ no matter when or where, before. But we do like the socialist values. So we want something new which embodies these values. If he was here I would ask him: “Please, and does parecon fit what you are looking for?”
But what about the other meaning of the word Socialism? The other meaning is institutional. The word conveys a certain set of institutions that have been historically identified as Socialism. Those institutions are: First, getting rid of the private ownership of the means of production, getting rid of capitalists. I share this aim. Second however, Socialism has always included the old corporate division of labour. We discovered, however, that the old division of labour subverts our values. So we can’t support that feature. Socialism has historically also meant remuneration partly by bargaining power and partly by how much you contribute, but we rejected that too. Socialism institutionally and historically meant central planning or markets, and we rejected that, as well. So we rejected the institutional model called socialism, and I think a lot of socialists do too, but a lot of people are confused about that. And I like to be very clear and explicit.
So to get even more explicit and clear about this, let’s go a step further. For those of you who are Marxist, Marx teaches if somebody says something about values, we should look beyond their words to their practice. If Bill Clinton stood before you and made a speech, he would say he is for freedom; he is for justice, he is for equitable distribution of wealth; and lots of other values, and he would say it all very well, convincingly and emotionally. A Marxist in the audience should say: “Wait a minute; I shouldn’t take this at its face value. I should look behind the rhetoric, to the practice.” And when we do that, we discover that Bill Clinton supports institutions, such as private ownership, corporations, etc. that are contrary to the values that he claims to advocate. So we no longer accept the rhetoric of Bill Clinton. We say, “No! We know that you are not in favour of these values! We know you are not!”
You see the analogy coming. An eloquent Marxist gets up and says: “I am for equity; I am for sharing; I am for self management; I am for justice”. If we are good Marxists, when we hear that we should say: “Wait a minute, I am going to look behind the rhetoric, at the practice.” If we want to behave as a good Marxist, at least in this respect, we have to have class in our mind. So what do we do?
Suppose we look at every book or pamphlet that has ever been written by a Marxist-Leninist that has Socialism in it. We look at every case that a Marxist-Leninist movement has taken power in a country and introduced a new economy. In every case, book or practice, we discover that the new system elevated a new ruling class. In every case it was not socialism as we mean the term with the good values; it was coordinatorism, an economy that elevates 20% to ruling status. In the US, the word socialism means for most people the institutions that have been identified with it. It is only for a relatively tiny number of leftists who want to be identified with the good part of the heritage for whom the word means something else. So I don’t want to call this model, this vision that I like “participatory socialism” because that would confuse everybody about what it is. It doesn’t have the socialist allocation system; it doesn’t have the socialist division of labour; it doesn’t have the socialist remuneration system; so I think it needs a new name.
Q: Is the participatory economy about just a vision of a society that we may or may not reach in the future? What does a pareconist mean? Is it about just the dissemination of the vision only? What are the implications of the participatory economy for social movements, for what we should do and how we should do it?
Of course the whole story is not just talking about the vision; it’s also fighting for it. Talking about the vision is important, yes. Spreading the idea, so to develop a large number of people who share it, and therefore will work together in a way that is consistent with it. We don’t want to wind up at coordinatorism. We don’t want to windup at the old system. So we are going to make a revolution to go from capitalism to participatory economy and also from patriarchy and sexism to feminism and from racism to what I call intercommunalism, and from political authoritarianism to what we might call participatory politics. But what does it mean to seek gains differently?
The first thing that it means is that we should construct movements that embody our values and our vision now. If we have movements that internally have the same division of labour as we find in capitalism, movements with institutions that have the same division of labour, then working people will not trust the movement because the movement will be about coordinator rule, not working class liberation. So, one clear implication is that our movements should have balanced job complexes and self management. There is another more subtle implication. You individually, or the movement can be anti-capitalist, can be sincerely anti-capitalist, but not be for classlessness. Instead you can be against capitalism but for elevating the coordinator class. So the movement’s strategy, policies, and structure could be leading to coordinatorism, as Leninism or Bolshevism did. But that leads us further into a more important point I think. And this also takes us back to the stickiness problem, brought up earlier.
If you go back and look at 1967/1968, women and blacks were saying to the movements in the US: “You can’t continue to operate with the same kind of sexism and racism that exists outside in the broader society replicated here inside the movement. It’s hypocritical, it’s immoral, but it’s also suicidal. It is suicidal, because the movement will not attract and retain women, blacks, Latinos, and so on. It will be too alienating for them. We won’t benefit from their leadership. Our movement will be weak.” This lesson was incorporated and worked on, and things are much better now than earlier. But now look at the the issue of class. If somebody came to you and said: “You know what, the Southern plantations in the old South in the US were very efficient. They cut the sugar cane. Therefore, the person says, I think, we should emulate the Southern plantations. We should have slavery and racism.” Every person on the left would be horrified at such a position, and would think that the person was crazy or some kind of provocateur. If somebody says, similarly: “We should have the atmosphere of a male locker room. It will be efficient and pleasant and the women should provide sex and clean up.” Again we would all be horrified with the idea that anybody would say such a thing about a movement to make a better world. Because if we did that the movement would be horrible for women, and also hypocritical and incapable of having good views about gender, and so on.
Now comes the analogy. If somebody comes along and says: “We should learn from corporations how to be more efficient.” For me that’s just as horrifying. But not only do people on the left say that, in fact movements repeatedly incorporate corporate attributes in their structures. Our movements have internal divisions of labour that are like the corporate division of labour, and we often have decision making like they do, too. We often have dues structures that are less progressive than the US income tax system. And you know what: working people are not stupid. Just like women could see sexism in the movement, and blacks could see racism in the movement, working people can see classism in the movement. And it’s alienating and oppressive to them, and they don’t stay in the left.
So this is another big implication: Our movements have to be congenial to, supportive of, and empowering to working people as compared to just the sons and daughters of the coordinator class. This is a profoundly important point. If our movement’ culture, its decision making, and its distribution of tasks are corporate and thus classist, then our movement will be alienating to working people. And we will see what we see: Too few working people and too much likelihood that they are going to leave. But it is not because they are not committed that they tend to leave. It’s because our movements are so flawed. I don’t know much about Turkey, but in the US, the following kinds of things exist. Movement members very aggressively disparage McDonalds, and anybody who eats there as a fool and manipulated. But they typically don’t similarly disparage a nice restaurant and anybody who eats there. The restaurants employ wage slaves, like McDonalds. What is the difference that causes us to be so hostile to the one and not to the other? Sadly, I think it’s because McDonalds caters to working people.
In the US every leftist in reads the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times for an hour or more a day. Then they announce that the New York Times is one of the most despicable institution on the planet, which it is. It lies, manipulates, and bends the news in the interest of powerful elites. And then leftists go back and read the news the next day for two hours, again. In the US a working person never reads the New York Times, or almost never, but often reads, instead, the New York Daily News, the tabloid paper. But they don’t read the whole of the Daily News. Which part of the Daily News do they mostly read? Yes, the sports section. And which part of the newspaper tells the truth? Yes, the sports section! And that is the only part, and the obituary page to a degree. All the parts that tell the truth are what the workers read. Lots of leftists call workers stupid and idiots, and manipulated and tricked, because they read the one part that tells the truth. We have to think about this. If in the US we take a poll of the people in a movement and you ask what sports do you like and what do you dislike, the only sports movement people will admit to liking are often tennis, and maybe a few like figure skating, but somehow leftists in the US, white ones and young ones, anyhow, think that football, American football, baseball, and basketball are only for idiots. Bowling and car racing are also denigrated, the two most popular sports in the U.S., I believe.
Here a pattern emerges. I would give many more examples, if we had more time, but the point is, what workers do and like is often disparaged by movements. In contrast, what the coordinator class does is often celebrated and emulated by movements. And we wonder why our movement is relatively unattractive to working people.
I don’t know whether you have this image in Turkey. In the United States, it is the image of a guy who is drinking beer and lying on the couch and watching football all day on Sunday. Does that exist in Turkey? Yes? Okay, well, in the U.S. I often ask the audience how many people have felt that way, that disparaging view of the guy watching on Sunday, that stupid buffoon lying on the couch, watching the game all day. How many of you felt that way about the person wasting their time? A lot, I see. Okay, and then I say what should the worker do instead, in your view?
Somebody always says “well, why don’t they go play ball and read instead of watching it?” Well the answer to that in the United States is that over the last fifty years, the US has destroyed all the areas where you could play. Social policies have fragmented the people away from each other, so most people don’t know enough other people to assemble a team. And even if you do, there is no way to get around, and no fields to play in, and no equipment. And this is all intentional policy. Then I would say, okay, if that is out, what else would you suggest the worker do on Sunday instead of watching the ballgame, and somebody invariably says “why don’t you read Chomsky on a Sunday afternoon?”
You laugh, but people really feel just that. And I say “OK, what happens if the worker does read Chomsky on a Sunday afternoon, on Monday?” It doesn’t take a genius to think these things through. If you want to know why people do or don’t do something, just ask yourself Okay, what would have happened if you didn’t, or did, do it. So, the working person in the United States skips football and reads Chomsky every Sunday afternoon. What happens on Monday? Can he socialize with his fellow workers any more? Right, the answer is no. The discussion is all about football. If you want to have friends, if you want to interact, you have to know all about football. What about doing his work on Monday? Is it any different because he read Chomsky on Sunday, or God forbid he read Albert on Sunday? Is it any different on Monday when he is trying to do his work? Correct again. Yes, I agree with you that it is much harder, because now he has right on the surface the alienation and the anger of the details instead of ignoring them and setting them aside. The injustice, due to your reading and highlighting it all, is now right in your face. In the absence of mass movements, what happens if you try and manifest that anger in actions? What happens if you try to manifest that anger in the workplace? What happens to you? Correct, you loose your job. So, on Sunday, is the worker stupid or smart for watching the ballgame rather than reading Chomsky? All of a sudden, it starts to look like the worker is smart on Sunday. They are doing something in this crappy world that delivers a degree of pleasure, facilitates socializing aids in having friends, avoids the crap of constantly sticking your head in pain and suffering, and avoids the risk of getting fired due to being too angry. And the arrogant leftist, not spending ten seconds to think about it, disparages people for this kind of choice.
Leftist typically all too often see things so that everybody other than them looks like an idiot. We act as though the reason people - read workers – buy stuff is because they are tricked into it by the ads. But that’s not why people buy stuff. People buy stuff to get a degree of fulfillment in the shitty context we all have to endure. The dirty, nasty truth is much worse than that we are tricked. When a corporation advertises clothing or cars or food, how do they do it? What do they appeal to? What needs do they say they are going to fulfill by their images? Come on, what do they try to appeal to? How do they try and sell it? Status is one thing, yes, what else? Power, happiness…yes. Come on. Sex, indeed, that’s right. And they suggest that the item will also convey some kind of dignity. Is the audience tricked? Careful. No, the audience in fact is not tricked. Why? Because the advertisement’s claims are largely true. That is the sad reality. We live in a world that is so constrained in its options that it is true that if you go and buy new clothes, you have the possibility of encountering somebody and having sex. It is true that you have to get new clothes, or a car to have dignity and status. It is true that you have to buy this stuff as very nearly the only avenue to a degree of fulfillment.
Imagine a working person, having a nice chunk of cash, who goes and buys a nice shirt in hopes of meeting somebody and impressing them. On the other hand, imagine a radical who buys a copy of Negri’s “Empire” in hopes of being considered smart and having status and then, yes, having sex. That’s surely why people buy this book, isn’t it. Because virtually nobody can understand it. People act like they understand it, but don’t. So, respect the working person’s decision, a sensible one, given the constraints and options available. Not the radical decision, the idiotic one, even in the given context.
There are tons of examples like this. Let me just give you one more that is, I think, pretty thought provoking. Remember I described the Afghan war and leading up to it the acknowledged possibility of bombing killing five to seven million people. If you could have been a little bug on the wall in the Pentagon when they were planning to bomb Afghanistan, so you could hear the deliberations, I guess probably for two/three/four days, they deliberated and discussed it. They didn’t devote one day to discussing the implications for the Afghan people. People whose average life span is about 40 years, two thirds of whom are illiterate, most of whom have never heard of Bush or Bin Laden, and yet they are embarking a policy of killing five to seven million of them. And they didn’t spend a day discussing it and speaking about it. They didn’t spend two hours doing that, they didn’t spend twenty minutes doing it. They didn’t spend two minutes doing it, they didn’t spend ten seconds doing it. No time at all. For them, the Afghan people were like this: You leave your house and you are stepping on ant. You don’t deliberate whether to leave the house or not. For our government, that’s how much the population of Afghanistan counts. Not at all.
Was there ever a No Nukes movement in Turkey? Yes, okay, good, then perhaps this example, continuing on the above, will apply here as well. In any case, in the United States, the no nukes movement in the 1980s was very very large. At the height of the movement, there were demonstrations of a half a million people in New York. There was massive civil disobedience in which we charged the fences around nuclear power plants and smashed them down and stepped into the plant grounds. By and large working people hated the no nukes movement. When leftists tried to explain it, what we were saying is that the reason they hated it was because they were afraid of losing their jobs. There is a tiny aspect of truth to that, but it is mostly nonsense. Nuclear power plants don’t employ workers, they employ coordinator class members. And they are highly automated. So what didn’t they like?
The no nukes movement said shut down the nuclear power plants. If you shut down the nuclear power plants what do you have more of? Well, you might want more wind power, you might want more solar power, you might want more power from the tides. What did we actually have in 1985? Coal. And where did coal come from? Coal mines. And who does the work? Workers! And what do they get as payback for the work they do? Black Lung disease! And the movement didn’t ask: “What are the implications of our policy choice, of our demands to shut down nuclear power for working people?” Just like Bush didn’t examine what the implications of bombing Afghanistan to the Afghan people are. There is a very disturbing analogy which says there are movements dismissive of working class people. They don’t care about or understand or give a damn about working class people. Now maybe that’s too strong, but that’s what working people feel, and so they stay away.
So what we need is a movement that is congenial to, pleasant to, and empowering to working people. Just like it has to be all those things to women, to blacks in the United States, to Kurds in Turkey. The movement wins changes or reforms for people at the bottom and to a degree for people in the middle, but not for people at the top, and the gains lead to people desiring more and able to fight and win more. We need a movement that builds workers’ and consumers’ councils and that incorporates balanced job complexes and self management.
When we have a movement that desires a participatory society, a society that has a participatory economy and that also has participatory kinship, feminism, participatory culture, communalism, and a participatory political system, when we have a movement that has a shared agreement about what it is for, the vision, then we will have a movement which can have coherent strategy based on that vision. Then we will make progress, rapid progress.
Thank you...
