[This is a reply to the article "We Are More than We Eat" by Odessa Steps in The Northeastern Anarchist #10. These articles are part of a debate on participatory economics at http://nefac.net/en/taxonomy/term/28.]

We live under a system with a series of oppressions woven together: domination and exploitation of workers by elite classes of owners, managers and professionals; a system of gender inequality that disadvantages women; a racial hierarchy that places people of color at the bottom; oppression of gay people by a rigid heterosexist culture. And over it all, protecting elite interests, is a top-down state apparatus, not really controllable by the people even in so-called "democratic countries."

It doesn't have to be this way. Humans have the capacity to control their own lives. We can think ahead and develop plans of action, to self-manage our own activity. This is the human potential for self-management. In the plans that we might develop, inspired by our own aspirations, many of the activities would inevitably require the help of others or involve common work for common benefit. Through communication and the back-and-forth process of giving each other reasons for proposed courses of action, we have the ability to coordinate and cooperate with each other, to self-manage together. In fact humans have not only the potential but the need to self-manage their own activities, to fulfill their goals through activities they plan out and control themselves. 

But in both the capitalist and Communist countries, working people are forced to work to fulfill the plans of others, exploited for the benefit of elites. This is the denial of our human need for self-management. As class struggle anti-authoritarians, we propose to replace the existing systems of domination by a new arrangement that gives people free scope to develop their potential for self-management, to control their lives. Not only in social production but in all spheres of life. In what follows I focus mainly on eliminating the class system. We need to keep in mind that class is not the whole story about oppression.

What Creates Class Oppression?

What creates the division into classes? The property system within capitalism is one source. A small investor class owns buildings, land, equipment, etc. This class has a monopoly over the means of producing the things we all require to live our lives. The rest of us are forced to sell the use of our working capacities to their firms, to work under structures of domination that profit the owners. Marx views capitalist society as mainly a dynamic opposition based on ownership, a conflict between labor and capital. But in reality there is a second structural basis for class division that emerged in mature capitalism, generating a third major class.

At the beginning of the 20th century large corporations coalesced. These firms had sufficient resources to attempt a systematic redesign of jobs and production processes, attacking the autonomy and job control exercised by workers under traditional craft methods.  "Efficiency experts" like Frederick Taylor advocated concentration of conceptualization and detailed control over decision-making in the hands of a hierarchy that would take control off the shop floor.

The period between the 1890s and the 1920s saw the growth of a new class of professional managers, engineers and other expert advisors to management. I call this the coordinator class. The expansion of the state in the 20th century also contributed to the growth of this class. Ventures had grown too large, and the political economy too complex, for the investor class to run everything itself. It was forced to concede a realm of power to the coordinator class.

The social power of the coordinator class is not based on ownership of productive assets but on a relative monopolization of empowering conditions — control over their own work and over the work of others. Engineers participate in the control of workers when they design software or physical plant in ways that enhance management control. Lawyers help to maintain labor subordination when they help to break unions or defend the legal interests of the corporation. Managers track and direct our work.

Thus, the ability of the capitalists to appropriate wealth through their ownership of means of production is not the only systematic rip-off of the working class under capitalism.  Capitalism systematically under-develops the potential of workers to develop skills, to learn from controlling our work, and to run the economy ourselves. Decision-making, expertise and control over the conditions of work of others is appropriated as the possession of the coordinator class.

Moreover, the coordinator class has the potential to be a ruling class. This is the historic meaning of the Leninist revolutions. These revolutions eliminated the capitalist class but created a new class system, based on public ownership of the means of production, corporate-style divisions of labor, and the preservation of income inequality. The working class continued to be a subjugated and exploited class.

Coordinator class rule flows from the strategic and programmatic commitments of Leninism. The idea of a "vanguard party" is that it concentrates expertise and manages popular movements, eventually capturing control of a state apparatus and then implementing its program top-down through the state.

Odessa's organization, the British Anarchist Federation (AF), doesn't "see" the coordinator class. Odessa and the AF lack a program aimed at dissolving its class power.

Participatory economics (parecon) includes a number of structural elements to ensure liberation of workers:

·         Institutions for the self-management of industry are based on the direct democracy of assemblies in the workplaces.

·         To avoid market competition, social production is governed by a social plan that is crafted directly by workers and residents of communities, through individual, workgroup and community proposals, articulated through a federative system of workplace and neighborhood assemblies.

·                      

·         The buildings, land, equipment, and so on of the entire system of social production are owned in common by the entire society. Production resources are allocated only to self-managing worker production groups through a socially controlled planning process.

·                      

·         Workers would be empowered to design their jobs to ensure that there wouldn't be a concentration of empowering tasks and responsibilities into the hands of an elite. All jobs involve both some of the physical work of production and some of the conceptual or control or skilled work. This is called job balancing. Job balancing would be controlled by the mass democratic worker organizations and its purpose is to protect workers against the emergence of a coordinator elite.

·                      

·         Income would not be based on ownership of assets or power in a corporate-style hierarchy. Able-bodied adults would earn a share of the social product for private consumption based on their effort in socially useful work.

·                      

Odessa rejects the job-balancing proposal:

"Suppose instead of trying to create equal jobs we start from the assumption that people are (socially) equal."

But how do people become socially equal? And what structures do we need in society to secure this social equality?

Syndicalism and Parecon

Human beings are, as Marx said, "beings of practice." This means that the types of activities that we do tend to shape the tastes and capacities of people. Systems of oppression reproduce themselves over time by shaping the psyches of people, to"fit" intovarious roles.

A society with class subordination and other structures of oppression forcespeople into certain patterns of behavior, shaping their consciousness in certain ways. Managers and professionals who control the design of jobs and the activities of others acquire specific skills, as well as a sense of their entitlement to run things. Facing powerful control structures as individuals, subordinated workers often develop a sense of not having any power to change this, a fatalistic acquiescence. Our potential to design and control our own work, and to attain mastery over the production process, is under-developed by a system that doesn't call upon us to make the decisions.

If the working class is to liberate itself, we must overcome fatalism and internal divisions (such as along lines of race and gender) and acquire the unity, organizational strength, self-confidence, self-discipline, personal skills, and high levels of active involvement in struggle needed to mount a fundamental challenge to the elites. This is why a revolution that can overcome the existing structures of oppression requires a protracted process of change in the working class itself.

The structures of subordination never have total control. People resist.

One way we learn about the system is by fighting it. When we become committed to struggle, we gain the motivation to acquire skills to make our struggle more effective. How much collective action and solidarity we see around us will affect our beliefs about our power to change things. If a person faces the corporations and the state as a lone individual, they may believe "you're on your own." If people standing up for each other begins to become more common, and we see an increase in collective action against those who have power, we will be more likely to start thinking in terms of collective action as a solution to the problems that affect us instead of looking only to individual solutions.

If we are to create a society in which the people can directly control their lives, where workers run the industries where they work, the process of self-management must emerge in self-management of mass organizations of working people. The self-managed mass organizations prefigure self-management of social production by workers and the direct self-governance of society by the mass of the people. 

Mass organizations directly controlled by their participants give people a means of collectively self-managing struggles within capitalist society, and help to develop in people a sense of their power to run things. Through a more or less protracted process, the working class can break longstanding habits of acceptance of the various structures of class, race and gender domination, create power through growing horizontal solidarity, and gain the self-confidence needed to run society. The working class thus develops the actual capacity to challenge the elite classes for control of the society.

What I've just described is my understanding of libertarian syndicalism. In the early 20th century, syndicalism in the USA was understood in terms of mass organizations in workplace struggles, but we can extend the concept to apply to struggles that develop in other spheres.

The importance of self-management of struggles, and of organizations, follows from participatory economics. If we are to avoid a process of social change simply empowering a coordinator elite, then we need to work to avoid practices and forms of organization that concentrate expertise and decision-making into the hands of a few. The equivalent of job balancing can be practiced in mass organizations. We can work to consciously share knowledge and develop skills broadly in the rank and file, to avoid dependency on particular people and to grow the ability of the rank and file to be effective agents of social change. Worker organizations can attack capitalist wage differentials by demanding bigger wage increases for those who do the hardest work or endure the most sacrifices.

Market or Social Plan?

Pro-capitalist and Marxist economists typicallyagree that markets and central planning are the only alternatives for allocating worker time and other resources in social production. The libertarian Left in the past — anarcho-communists, syndicalists, guild socialists, councilist Marxists — vaguely suggested that there must be some alternative to the market and central planning but failed to specify clearly how this would work. Since the 1970s a number of radical economists have developed a third alternative for allocation: participatory planning. In parecon's version of participatory planning, the entire society would "self-manage" planning, "from below," through individuals, production groups and neighborhood assemblies, and federations of these, putting forward their proposals and then revising them in light of what everyone else has proposed.

But Odessa confuses the mere existence of a social plan with central planning:

"I argued that the parecon system could not prevent people working harder or longer, earning more consumption shares, delaying consumption in order to build up 'capital' and then using this capital to subvert the parecon system in their own interests. All the texts on parecon suggest there would be laws and regulations to prevent it, that the system would simply not provide inputs (money, machinery and supplies) to proto-capitalists. But isn't this a centrally planned and controlled economy?"

Since any social plan would require rules and a means to enforce those rules, it follows that Odessa is opposed to governance of social production by a social plan. The absence of social planning would make a market system inevitable.

If some anarchists favor an economy of trulyautonomous local units, not governed by a social plan, they are committed to a market economy whether theyrealize it or not.

Central planning is one special type of social planning. A central planning agency acquires information about the capacity of the various production facilities and information about consumer demand. The planners craft the plan and then issue marching orders to the production groups. This tends to generate a managerial hierarchy in production, because the planning elite will want to have their own managers in the various production facilities to ensure that their plans are carried out. Central planning thus generates a class system.

Parecon proposes a different process for creating a social plan. There would be no elite central planning agency. The plan would be crafted by individuals and neighborhood groups articulating requests, and byproduction groups making proposals for what they would do. These elements make up the plan, and to ensure a "fit" between the consumer requests and production group proposals, people at the base of society revise their proposals in a series of "rounds" — a horizontal, interactive process of negotiation.

Odessa's essays never tell us how society can ensure effective use of production facilities and human work. At one point Odessa writes:

"What is to stop people simply turning up at your factory and taking what

they want; there is no property. And if the workers decided to 'collectivize'

the factory and get rid of the boss (you), you couldn't stop them, either

by moral or physical force."

Is Odessa here suggesting that anyone could just waltz in and take effective possession of any production facility? What if a gang comes along and happens to have more guns than the workers who "collectivized" that factory? Doesn't accountability presuppose that the people in society have the power to determine who controls production facilities? And wouldn't that be a "power relation"?

Let's suppose that a group of people have taken control of a coal mine and power plant that provide the electricity for the surrounding region. What is to stop them from using their effective possession of this facility to demand a larger share of the social product? If the power plant group uses itsunilateral power over that plant to demand more of society's product in exchange for electric power, we see the re-emergence of market relations.

What if the group running the power plant were to decide that generating enough electricity to power a certain town 50 miles away is too much trouble? So they cut off power to Alicia's house. If she is denied a say in this decision, her self-management is being trampled.

A market is a system of allocation by bargaining power. Unilateral control of any production facility, even facilities that do not have a natural monopoly like a public utility, sets up a bargaining power relationship to the customers. Unilateral control also freezes out the surrounding community from an effective say over side effects such as pollution.

To protect the self-management of Alicia and others, and prevent the re-emergence of market relations, there needs to be an overall social plan governing the use of the power plant. In a libertarian society, people have freedom of action only to the point that the freedom of others is not undermined. This means that the freedom of action of the power plant group must be restricted to protect the freedom of Alicia and others served by the power plant or impacted by its pollution. The social plan is, in this sense, an instrument of social self-management.

Odessa claims that the re-emergence of market relations would be prevented by the "abolition of money." But if unilateral control (effective possession) of production facilities leads to the formation of market exchange, money would emerge to facilitate those exchanges. Calling for the "abolition of money" is mere rhetoric unless Odessa can show how the underlying social relations will not tend to re-create a market system.

We want to avoid a society based on the power of money as capital. Money exists as capital when it can command labor and resources to produce things to make more money. Capital is a social relationship. Although prices as a form of social accounting would exist in parecon, money wouldn't exist as money-capital, because the capitalist social framework would be missing. Labor time and other resources would be allocated in production only through the social plan, and only to self-managing production groups where job balancing is in force. I know that many Left-libertarians do not like the idea of prices because it reminds them of the roles that money plays in capitalism.  But this akin to the argument of people who want to throw out all technology because of the oppressive ways that capitalism uses technology.

Prices are needed in order to have an economy that is effective in producing what people most desire. To see this, it is helpful to look at the concept that economists call social opportunity cost. If groups of construction workers are building health clinics, their work time, and the materials they are using, cannot also be used to build other things we might want, such as houses. All the things that we've lost because we've committed worker time and resources to build the health clinics is the social opportunity cost of the clinics. How do we know that the clinics are more important to people now than those other things? To know where we should be allocating our work time and resources, we need to know what people regard as the most important, the things they desire most strongly. The only way to know this is for people to make a choice in a situation where they have only a finite, quantitative entitlement to consume, and they choose what they want produced only up to the limit of their budget. This forces people to make their priorities clear.

This principle applies to choices of community assemblies about public goods as well as choices of individuals about private consumption goods. The choices that people make provide us with relative evaluations of the different things we could produce.  Without this information, we have no way of knowing whether the overall allocation of worker time and resources in production will be effective in producing what people most desire.

For allocation, Odessa proposes a simple request/response system. People who want housing would send in requests to construction groups, and the construction groups would respond by building houses. Thus far, this is in agreement with parecon, which also envisions consumers making requests and producers responding with proposals for production.

But there is no assurance that an initial set of requests for production would add up to a do-able and effective total plan. What if the community really needs health clinics and schools, but so many requests for bigger houses come in that the construction groups couldn't build the houses and also build the clinics and schools? What if people demand more than could be produced without working 14-hour days? If the issue of having to make a choice were put to them, maybe they'd agree that the schools and clinics were a higher priority right now.