17 June 2006Charles Yee
Given 14 June in Stuttgart, Germany
How many of you are organizers, or have at one point in the past, been an activist for some cause? Do you ever have these meetings, especially if it's open to public, recruitment gatherings...and new people come in, and they ask you: What do you want? They might not say exactly that, but they want to know - what are you doing this for? Why should they join you? Why should they stay and spend their time and energy working with your movement?
You tell them racism, sexism hurts, war, imperialism, are horrible, globalization, capitalism, so powerful... We must stop the war, stop racism, or treating women badly, stop the gene food industries... We are angry at all the injustices happening around us, we can't sit on our hands and do nothing! We have to react! Actually, that is what we're doing, we are reacting... Do we know what we want? NO, we know what we DON'T want!
That's fine, you can be angry, and of course you should do something about it. But it's not very effective if you don't know what you want.
Suppose I spend the next 20 minutes and give you a speech on a phenomenon that is so powerful, it undercuts our opportunities, drains away our life's vitality, makes us suffer and eventually kills us. My arguments are so good you can't refute it, all the facts presented you know they're the truth!... Then in the end of this speech I say: Come and join me and fight against aging. Come join me in a social movement against aging. WhI think that's how we sound to people who come to our meetings; most of them know capitalism sucks already. They ask us what do we want? and we tell them capitalism sucks! We tell them how horrible it is, how powerful, it's everywhere. We ask them to join us in a futile pursuit with no aim. And they say: Okay, I am outta here!
Whatever your cause is, fight against racism, sexism, globalization, stop the war... If we want to build a movement, if we want someone to join us, we have to convince them that there is an alternative, and we can get there. Not like fighting against aging!
Lack of vision sometimes deludes us too, especially when it comes to strategy, this is happening on the left a lot these days. Here's what my vegan roommates do, I go to their demonstrations sometimes: They tell people if you stop eating meat, stop giving money to the gene food industry, stop paying to the meat industry, you will undermine capitalism.
Does that make any sense? If everyone stopped eating meat, the same companies just switch to selling soy! They go on modifying the seeds, and they chop down rainforests to grow your soy, and you don't put a dent on capitalism!
Suppose I am against sexism and I say we should all stop having sex! This is not activism! It's pessimism! You think there is no other way besides not consuming. If capitalism sucks, we are going to do away with the whole economy, no more meat, next thing no more soy, then we all starve to death because the only way to deal with capitalism is not consuming at all! Actually, there's a similar kind of rationale behind bio-regionalism these days...
Whatever activism I am devoted to, if I don't think I can win, I don't try to be strategic, I am not effective, sometimes I don't even know what I am doing!
So we need a vision that communicates to people, to give hope, and for ourselves as well, so we can go on. This lecture gives you an alternative to capitalism. A better world is possible.
What's a Society? What's a Revolution?
How many of you consider yourself revolutionaries? Not many? Why? When you hear the word revolution, you think it's too radical, it's violent. Actually, it's none of that. You can have a huge violent football hooligan uprising because the UK beat Germany, and that's not a revolution. Is curing cancer a revolution? It's a medical revolution, but we're talking about social revolutions. A social revolution is a change in society.
What's a society? By the way, the concepts/labels I use in this lecture are not absolute truths. I use them because they're useful for explaining reality, and maybe they will help us to predict things. If they're not good, I come up with new ones.
A society is a group, or a community of people, us. We have to live together, co-exist, and there're things we need from others, and things we give to others. What are these needs and gives? What kind of interactions are they?
There are four spheres of social life, Economy, Kinship, Polity, and Identity. These are the domains in which our social needs are addressed. Economy: we need to eat, produce and consume. Kinship: we need socialize, make babies, and raise them. Politics: we need ways to resolve disputes, we may need police to keep order and we need ways to arrive at shared norms and programs. Identity: we have identity, our race, nationality, our language, culture, religion, etc. to celebrate, communicate, etc. These four dimensions in social life exist in all times, and everywhere. If I transport you to a tribe somewhere, you would find them manifested in one or another way. If there's a time machine that sends you back to the distant past, you'd find them too.
The four spheres are made out of certain defining institutions, and institutions are defined by the roles they embody. In kinship, you have family, roles like father and mother. In an economy, if it's capitalism, you have private ownership of the means of production, and you also have the market, and roles like capitalists and workers, or buyers and sellers. You can't have capitalism without its defining institutions, and people fulfill its roles to get its benefits.
There are certain properties, or attributes of institutions. Take the market. What's in a market, which roles? Buyers and Sellers: I want to sell you something, for as much EUR as I can get from you. You buy it; you want to get it as cheaply as possible. Our interests are opposite. we're against one another, that's an attribute of the market. I sell you a car, you buy it. Is that other person affected by the smog coming out from the car? Does she have a say in the transaction? Not treating effects beyond buyers and sellers, or what we call externalities properly, is another attribute of the market. Neoliberals tell people markets are democratic, well, that's an attribute! They say: you vote with your money. Are they correct? Is a market democratic? If you have 10 times more money than I do, does that mean you have 10 times more human rights too? If the product is made from child labor, or if it kills rainforests, does the market tell you that? If I make some NIKE shoes and I can save money by dumping factory waste on some poor community, or if I could exploit kids in China, I am going to do it because if I don't someone else will, and I might go out of business, because I am in a market, and I have to compete...
So can you make socially conscious decisions when you're playing the roles under the market? Not unless you are willing to commit economic suicide. In fact, a market is an institution that encourages harmful behavior, miscalculates costs, and has all kinds of negative attributes.
Let's come back, what's a revolution? A revolution is a change in the defining institutions of one or more of the spheres of social life just mentioned. In the economic sphere, we want to get rid of capitalist institutions and replace them with new ones. A desirable revolution in the economy means putting in new institutions that fulfill needed economic functions - production, allocation, and consumption, where these new institutions also generate attributes consistent with our moral values, things that we would like to see in an ideal society. That is what participatory economics, or Parecon for short, aims to do.
Parecon Values
So what are the values we aspire to when we design our economic institutions? Parecon has to serve our economic needs and be consistent with, and institutionally reproduce, the values we hold dear.
So what are our values?
When we do values, we don't ask whether it's possible. We don't say, oh if we want this we can't have that, we might lose productivity, we might starve... not this, not that, and then in the end we have the values we have now under capitalism. When we do values, we say what do we want. It's the institutions that bear the burden of proof of whether it's possible or not to obtain our values and not starve, but first we have to know the values.
So all things equal, productivity equal, living standards equal, we want solidarity as a value. Solidarity means what is good for everyone else is also good for me, so I care about the welfare of others. I cannot get ahead by stepping on someone's head, which is what a market compels us to do. This is not controversial.
The second Parecon value is self management. Self management means your decision making power is proportional to how much that decision is going to affect you. So you don't decide whether I turn this page right now or not, I do. I don't consult you about that. There are many ways to come to an agreement about a certain decision for its respective players.
Consensus, majority rules, 1/3 rules, etc, these are tactics, they are not absolute. Sometimes it's worth it to convey all the relevant information to everyone and to debate every last difference, sometimes it may not be. But the value remains, your influence on a decision should be proportional to how much it is going to affect you relative to others. That's what we will try to accomplish.
The third value is diversity. There's diversity of 'stuff', products: people who tell you markets gives people all that they want, is that true? Suppose I am an investigative journalist and I write an article titled: ``Columbian drug lords kill 30,000, Philip Morris kills 30 million'. Is that going to sell? Yeah, people would pay to see the truths. But would they publish this in NY Times? Does the market give us all that we want?
Advocates of capitalism also assume that somehow the reason we want what we want comes from within. It just sort of bubbles up inside of us and we say ``this is what I want!' So it's in our genes, or it comes from our family, or education, or cosmic waves. What we want is really just what we want, it has absolutely nothing to do with the market itself. But is that true? (Prison commissary example, then kid in East Germany football vs piano example).
Do we want dignified jobs? Do we want to do something we like for a living? Do we want genuine association to our neighbors in the community? Do we want caring, loving, relationships? Can you get them with the system we've got? Hardly. Diversity is not just about products sold in shops, but also diversity of life's choices. We want to be able to fully develop our potentials and manifest our creativity, and we want to fulfill our true desires, desires that are not perverted by external circumstances imposed upon us.
What about efficiency? What does efficiency mean? It means to accomplish the goal you want with the least cost, you know, resources which you can use to do something else. What goal? What cost? Now when people say capitalism is efficient, what are they talking about? It is very efficient for profiting the pockets of a few. If that's the goal, capitalism is efficient. If I could hire child labor, exploit some poor women in China, is their health or dignity in my calculation when it comes to ``cost'? Of course if I am a capitalist employing them I don't care. It is not a ``cost' to me. It's their problem! If we define efficiency in the CAPITALIST'S WAY, slaves are very efficient! Destruction of the environment is very efficient. But what do WE want? We're rational social beings. We want to take into account all social costs. We want to be efficient, but we want to think about people's well being and we want to care for the environment. These things have to come into our calculation for efficiency.
The fourth, and the last value in Parecon is equity. Our income should be roughly the same and deviations from equality ought to be justified. Nobody is Bill Gates. So we ought to get more if we work longer, or harder, or at more onerousness tasks, assuming our work is socially useful. That is equitable. Getting more for having more power, or being born stronger or quicker, much less owning property, is not equitable.
Parecon Institutions
In Parecon we want to remunerate for effort and sacrifice. This means we pay people according to the time they spend on the job, how hard they work, and how onerous their working conditions are.
Does it make any sense? When we say something makes sense, we mean two things:
1. Is it moral? Is it just?
2. Does it make economic sense? Does it make people more productive or less productive?
In the US a CEO of a large corporation earns roughly 450 times more than an employee in a factory. Does that mean a CEO is 450 times more productive than an average workman? He gets paid that much because he has power. The same applies to remunerating for capital. It is not moral, and it doesn't make any economic sense.
Why not remunerate according to output, though? If you contribute more, you should get more too, that's just, right, isn't it?
Well, no, in Parecon we don't reward people for their output, (give cut sugar cane with better tools example), because maybe it's from better tools, (then give the bigger guy cut sugar cane example, and then the Mozart vs Salieri example), or because it's from better genes. It does not make any sense to punish someone by paying them less, simply because they have crappy tools, or because they're less genetically endowed. You know what, they're not going to be able to change it! And it does not make sense to reward people because they use high tech, or who're born smart either. They get paid when they work hard. In Parecon, efforts are measured by:
1. Your and your colleagues are in a worker's council. The worker's council is going to decide what your efforts are and what pay scale you get.
2. Your output has to be socially valuable. You can't do jobs that you are not qualified to do, I can't pilot an airplane. You can't just go and play in Weltmeisterschaft. Output matters. What you produce, if you are to be paid for the labor, has to be useful to society. And from your output we can see if this the best you can do by comparing with your outputs from before. But output does not determine pay. The determinant is valued effort.
We also pay more to people who make sacrifices by working under poor conditions. If you work as a dishwasher in a kitchen of some restaurant, we should pay you more than we pay, a lawyer for example.
But wait, you're going to say: lawyers have to be paid more! Why? Because of their hard work put into training and education. Assuming the society bears the cost of education for all, (dish washer vs lawyer example)
So remuneration according to time, effort and sacrifices is an institutional norm in Parecon. It is moral, and it makes economic sense.
The next institution in Parecon is balanced job complexes. What balanced job complex means is that instead of doing one task for a living, you are going to take up two or three different tasks: There are empowering works that allow you to develop your talents, often in good working conditions, like being a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer or an artist. But there are unavoidably some onerous, rote jobs in the economy, and everyone must also take part in doing them, washing dishes, sweeping the streets, screwing the screws, etc. In a balanced job complex, everybody does some empowering tasks, and some boring, rote tasks, such that the level of empowerment of each of our worklives are roughly the same.
Why do this? Because if a small group of people monopolizes empowering tasks and so also valuable skills and knowledge: medicine, engineering, then they have great bargaining power. They are going to ask for more pay, more privileges, they have power over the economy as a class, a coordinator class. What if you don't give them what they want? They quit, you get sick, no more doctors, you die; or no more football, uh-oh, and you die again! As for you, if you are just a deskilled worker, you wash dishes, your job makes you dumb and dumber, you have less power, we can replace you easily with anybody else, so you better accept the conditions we give you. You have no control over your life.
The key idea here, though, is that what we do affects who we are. If our work is apportioned to it makes some powerful and others weak, that's a class division that will affect all sides of life. Better for our work to be divided up so that it comparably empowers everyone.
So if we are dedicated to self-management, we should all do a balanced job complex. Balanced job complexes together with remuneration for effort and sacrifice ensures that everyone will have roughly the same level of income, reasonably differentiated by their individual effort. This is equity. It makes our life's options more diverse as well. You might ask, what about the loss of expertise? What about the 2% of the doctors out there now only working half their times as doctors, and the society is short on medical specialists? Remember, balanced job complexes applies to those other 98% of the population as well, are you saying that we cannot make up the loss of 1% of medical expertise from amongst the 98% of the population?
Balanced job complexes also promote solidarity: Suppose we all work in a concert hall and there are three divisions in the concert hall. To oversimplify a bit, it has an orchestra, and lets say playing in the orchestra ranks 7 out of 10 in terms of empowerment effects. There's a restaurant in the concert hall, jobs there are a 5, let's say. We also have a support group, people cleaning the toilets, collecting tickets, etc, those are the particularly rote and tedious jobs, but they have to get done. Let's say they are 3. Suppose everyone's average is 5. So I either work full time in the restaurant, or I spend half the time in the orchestra playing an instrument, and the other half doing some tedious work, selling tickets. This is all over simplified, don't take it mechanically, I just mean to give an idea of it. Now, suppose there is 10,000 EUR available for investment into one of the three divisions. It will make working conditions better, more empowering for the workers in either the orchestra, or in the restaurant, or the support group. It doesn't matter where you work, where would you like the investment to go?
If you are in our society now, there are no balanced job complexes, the investment will definitely go into the orchestra. Why? Because the orchestra is more powerful than the restaurant or the guys cleaning toilets, and if you don't give it to them they pack and go, good luck getting yourself another orchestra! But in a parecon we have balanced job complexes. That means everyone is going to be interested in placing the investment into wherever it is going to engender the greatest improvement from the investment. Why? Because since the jobs are constantly balanced off, we all benefit most from the maximum improvement wherever it takes place. Same idea applies to the economy. Actually, jobs are not only balanced in one workplace like our concert hall, jobs are balanced across the whole economy. So balanced job complexes promotes all of our values. In fact, balanced job complexes has the attribute that it encourages the society to eliminate onerous jobs and create empowering ones. This is what people mean when they say technology and machinery should be designed to rid boring, hazardous, or debilitating jobs, and free people to do more creative things, under better conditions. The next Parecon institution is councils. I am going to go over this relatively quick, you can ask me the details later, or refer to the book.
So, there are workplace councils, organized on the principle of self management. Decisions that affect a small project group are to be made by members of that group, decisions that affect the whole industry are made by the industry council, which has the responsibility of receiving votes and opinions from bottom up, and coming up with agreements.
There are also consumption councils. There are different types of consumptions. There's individual consumption, you have to eat, wear shoes, haircuts, etc, there's also community consumption, like a park, swimming pool, or if people decide that they would rather not spend their individual incomes getting a car for each and every household, they might decide to build public transport! After all, you save the money form the car and the gas so you can do something else! The system allows you to make consumption decisions with others, and as a result you have more luxury! This is solidarity!
Different scales of population have different kinds of demands, so if we want to build a power plant, this affects people in different areas differently, and each must have enough say that's in proportion to the degrees in which they're going to be affected by the new power plant. If you live near the construction of the plant, you should get a lot of say in terms of what kind of environmental protection protocols that must be included, and so on, because that is the area of concern in which you would be most affected. Others must share the cost of protecting the environment if they decide that the benefit of a new power plant to them exceeds that cost. This is self management, and incidentally, good for the environment.
How do production and consumption come together? Let's assume we have the data on the level of production and consumption of each product from last year. As a workplace, we take into account last year's production, the kind of investments we received, changes in personnel, changes in our working conditions and level of empowerment etc, then we propose a production proposal, this is how much we will make.
On the other hand, you as a consumer, by looking at last year's consumption data, you give an estimate of your individual consumption. If you would like a park in your community, you bring this up to the community council, and if there are enough people wanting it, your community makes a proposal to build a new park.
Now each side, producer and consumer have given a proposal. How do they come together? They can talk to each other directly, or we could use what's called an Iteration Facilitation Boards (IFB). The IFB will take the proposals and negotiate the two sides. There will be both quantitative as well as qualitative information passed along during the negotiation process. If a community demands an unreasonable number of something, take bicycles for example, the production side will be able to know why. Maybe all the bicycles from the years before broke down due to some defects, maybe there is a crazy fad and people begin to use bicycles to hold flowers at their front porch. Do we want to meet that demand?
There're some communicative tools that ensures the two sides settle after the negotiations.
1. First, there is the indicative price. Price in Parecon is the effect of participatory decision making from the workplaces. If something has a high social cost, like cigarettes, the medical workers need to talk to the tobacco workers and include health costs in the cost of cigarettes. Why? Because why should doctors and nurses work more than they normally would because some other product is making people sick? You have to pay the doctors right? And if a product requires onerous work, we have to pay the workers more, and the price for that product is higher to reflect this. If you want to consume coal and you have to pay more, you would think twice. The indicative prices reflect the social cost of the product, but in the negotiation process, if the demand exceeds the supply, the price could go up. This will encourage consumers to find cheaper alternatives, therefore demanding less, or the producers may decide to work longer, harder, or create new workplaces in order to increase production to meet demands. Indicative prices help demand and supply converge in the end. Computing and communicating prices is the job of the IFB.
2. The other communicative tool is the balanced job complex. If there is a sharp increase in products which requires onerous, debilitating work, more people would have to work on it. If the jobs are balanced in the economy, you will be affected eventually when you ask for things that debilitates people because you will get more onerous jobs too. It would be in your best interest to settle for less things that are socially harmful, debilitating to people, and more things which are socially beneficial, and creates empowering jobs.
Conclusion
The purpose of this lecture today is/ not/ that economy is everything,/ not/ if you change the economy everything will be fine. Also, the lecture does not imply that practice is going to turn out exactly as the theory says. My purpose rather, is to convince you, that/ there definite is an alternative to Capitalism/. In addition, we should be able to see that to live in an ideal society is not just to accept some changes in some far-away bureaucracy, be it the Bundestag, the White House, or some big corporate HQ. To live in an ideal society means to change the way we live, to participate! The implication to understanding Parecon means to imagine how such a society will impact the way we look at things and other people, the way we live our lives: from the moment we are born, every morning when we wake up- we have a balanced job complex; we can manifest our potentials and love what we do; we go to shops and we think about what people have to go through to make the things on those shelves; we can manifest our solidaric feelings for one another... There is no reason why this society cannot come true one day. That is a revolution.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=26&ItemID=10440
