finding a better way: on the economy

An Introduction to the Economy

Edited by Autonomy Alliance

This pamphlet was published by Autonomy Alliance, 2009.

Autonomy Alliance opposes racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, and authoritarianism. In turn, we propose alternatives to the existing

oppressive institutions that rule our lives.

You can contact Autonomy Alliance at [email protected]

Distribute freely.

What is so bad about Capitalism?

Capital: Wealth (money, property, or labor) which can be used to create more wealth. example: factory owners who profit from selling goods created by the labor of workers in their factories are able to purchase more factories.

Capitalism: The “free exchange of goods and services” in which those who have capi-tal are able to collect more at the expense of those who do not.

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Capitalism: Do What?

CAPITALISM!!!! A politically charged word that might get you into an argument with whomever you are talking to. But, what the hell are we talking about when we say Capitalism?

A lot of people these days talk about “Capitalism” as if it is anyone who earns money. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the person living “free” at home with their parents, taking “free” money from the welfare state, or begging for “free” money on the street corner probably has more in common with a real Capitalist than most “wage slaves” in an honest job.

For those who don’t know much about capitalism, let us set some preconceptions aside.

Capitalism is not the same thing as democracy. Actually, no, capitalism and democracy are two very differ-ent things. Democracy is, essentially, the idea that people should have control over their lives, that power should be shared by all

“But, aren’t the enemies of capitalism the opponents of democracy?...

Didn’t we defeat them in the Cold War?”


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rather than concentrated in the hands of a few.

Capitalism is something altogether different.

In the United $tates (and other Western nations), we’re used to hearing that we live in a democratic society. It’s true that we have a government that calls itself democratic, but, how democratic our society is asks another question entirely.

Government is only one aspect of society, of course, and it is far from the most important one when it comes to considering day to day life. The economic system of any given society has more influence over our lives than any court or congress could, for it is economics that decides who has control over the lands, resources, and tools of society, what people have to do each day to survive and “get ahead,” and ultimately how those people interact with each other and view the world.

And, capitalism is one of the least democratic economic systems.

In a democratic economy, each member of society would have an equal say in how resources are used and how work is done. But in the capitalist economy, in which all resources are private property and everyone competes against each other for them, most resources end up under the control of a few capitalists. Those capi-talists can decide how everyone else will work, since most of the

others can’t live without earning money from them. They even get to determine the physical and psychological landscape of society, since they own most of the land and control most of the media.

Capitalists with little capital to begin with have little power (or “leverage”). If they do not engage in equally ruthless exploitation of their workers and advertising, they will quickly be out of business. In other

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words: everyone is at the mercy of the laws of competition.

Oh yeah? Here is how the free market is supposed to work:

• people are free to seek their fortunes as they choose, and the ones who work the hardest and provide the greatest value to society are reward-ed with the greatest wealth.

“well that sounds fair to me!”

But this system has a crucial flaw: it doesn’t actually offer equal opportunities for everyone.

Success in the “free market” depends almost entirely on how much wealth you already have access to. When capital is privately owned, an individual’s opportunities to learn, work, and earn are directly tied to the amount of wealth s/he has. A few schol-arships and government grants can’t offset this. It takes resources and time to produce something of value, and, if a person doesn’t have those resources herself, she finds she is at the mercy of those who do.

Meanwhile, those who already have those resources can make more and more wealth, and eventually most of the wealth of the society ends up in the hands of the few. Hence the saying, “Capi-tal collects itself,” a statement every economist acknowledges, is proven. This leaves everyone else with little capital to sell other than their own labor, which they must sell to the capitalists to survive!

When you participate in a capitalist economy through wage slavery, your labor power, time, and creativity are being bought. Whether or not the prices for wages and goods are set low or high is determined anti-democratically. And who benefits from most of these exchanges in capitalism? The capitalist class benefits from

“But i <3 the free market!”


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this anti-democratic economy.

“The capitalist class?...Well, who the hell are they?”

Good question! Lets be really clear about what we mean by class so that we may talk about the classes that make up the whole of society in the United $tates. Social class refers to the hierarchical distinctions (or stratification) between individuals or groups in soci-eties or cultures.

To get a better idea of what this means outside of its simple definition let us examine the three major classes in U.$. society.

The Capitalist Class -

The Managerial Class -

The Working Class -

Ok, that tells me alot... Capitalists own large amounts of produc-tive property (capital). For example, this would include individuals like Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, and large stock-holders in companies like Coca-Cola, Nike, Whole Foods, etc.

Managers are those who hold a monopoly on jobs and training to make decisions and coordinate (or manage) the workplace. The kind of people that belong to this class can include: bosses, managers, top cops, officers in the armed forces, doctors, law-yers, etc.Workers spend most of their days in the drudgery that is work without a say over how or when it is done. This class can include: factory workers, shop workers, office workers, nurses, farm workers, sol-diers, migrant workers, temporary work-ers, the unemployed, etc.

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Aside from not being democratic and being completely alienating to all those involved, capitalism encourages a specific set of values in society.

The most reinforced of these values is anti-social competition.

“But doesn’t competition lead to productivity?”

The competitive free market econ-omy not only encourages productivity at all costs, it enforces it. Those who do not stay ahead of the competition are trodden under it. When unwanted goods are produced, markets compell these goods to be advertised in ways that create wants among consumers..

Production of advertisements holds no value. It only produces dissatisfaction among consumers. Charles Kettering, General Direc-tor of the General Motors Research Labora-tories claims that his and (GM’s) goal is “the organized creation of dissatisfaction” without buying a GM product. This is the goal of com-mercials that leave one feeling that our next hot date cannot be worthwhile without dia-mond rings. If we decided how many com-mercials would be on television, we may de-cide none, but media markets cannot produce this.

“So what? Big deal!”

Advertisements in the U.S. end up consuming about 1/4 of the market. This eliminated sector of the labor market


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could then be used elsewhere, reducing the whole of society’s work-load by 1/4, with the same amount of valued production. In other words, we could work a 30 hour week with the valued productivity and pay of a 40 hour week.

“What kind of costs are we talking about here?”

For one thing, there are the long hours we spend at work: forty, fifty, sometimes sixty hours a week, at the beck and call of bosses and/or customers, working until we’re well past exhausted in the rate to “get ahead.” On top of this, there are the low wages we’re paid: most aren’t paid nearly enough to afford a share of all the things our society has to offer, even though it is our labor that makes them possible.

This is because in the competitive market, workers aren’t paid what they deserve for their labor. They are paid the smallest amount their employer can pay without leaving them to look for bet-ter wages. The employer has to do this because s/he needs to save as much extra capital as possible for advertising, corporate expansion, and other ways to try to keep ahead of the competition. Otherwise, s/he might not be an employer for long, and employees will end up working for a more “competitive” master.

There is a word for long hours and unfair wages: exploita-tion. But that is not the only cost of the “productivity” our competi-tive system encourages. Employers have to cut costs in a thousand other ways, too; that’s why our work environments are often un-safe. And, if it takes doing things that are ecologically destructive to make money and stay productive, an economic system that re-wards productivity above all else gives corporations no reason to resist trampling over wildlife and wilderness to make a buck. That is where our forests went, where our ozone layer went; that’s where hundreds of species of wild animals went: capitalists burned up in a rat race.

“But, isn’t this what consumers want? Don’t they buy it?”

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Capitalism encourages what is profitable instead of what so-ciety needs. A very good example of this is the Super Bowl. Compa-nies print two basic kinds of T-shirts to sell to Superbowl fans: the T-shirts for the actual winning team, and the T-shirts for the team that lost. Obviously, Super Bowl Champion T-shirts for the ones that lost won’t be profitable to sell but are still produced in massive quantities. Often this is why you can find people in Third World countries sporting champion T-shirts for last year’s losing team.

The fact is, these shirts could be made by using less re-sources, less labor, less transportation, and produced at alto-gether lower costs, if they were sold a day or two after the Super Bowl. If companies waited, though, the hype and sensation of the victory would not be at its peek. Consumers would not be willing to pay $30 for a T-shirt two days after the Super Bowl, but they will if they are lost in the hysteria of the moment.

Capitalism likes to tout that it is very efficient at production, but this is simply not the case. Capitalism is all willy nilly in terms of demand. Markets invoke guessing what and how much people want to consume. This leads us to another major in-efficiency in capitalism: pricing. Markets mis-calculate the price of everything. Paying attention to the prices of most goods and services around us reveals the disconnection of the payments we make for goods and the costs of their production. This happens when companies have a lot of advertising and popularity to hike their prices.

“I understand some companies having more

power over their prices. But, how does


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competition prevent production being cost efficient?”

It also occurs when companies that withhold valuable re-sources due to competing contracts. When trucks refuse to ship any goods but those for Target to a city, they are preventing the efficient use of space and transportation of goods. These privately owned trucks result in excessive truck shipments, wasted resources, extra labor use, and raised prices. (Raised prices means wasting your labor, becausee you pay for these goods.) If resources were shared, the cost of transportation could be dropped tremendously.

Another key factor in pricing goods is the lack of informa-tion. The most obvious example of this problem occurs in sweat-shops. Information about the social costs of production (rape and intimidation of young women workers in the Third World) is not supplied for consumers before buying T-shirts in the First World. In fact, to profit capitalists must inflict as many anti-labor actions as they can, while withholding this information from consumers. This imbalance of available information is known as “imperfect informa-tion.”

“So, you’re saying capitalism inflicts a lot of pain on the Third World?”

The violations and lack of labor and environmental laws

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around the world allow for low costs when producing many goods. Even though union-made shirts may have nearly no transportation costs, a sensationalized, well-advertized brand name on a sweat-shop shirt creates “consumer dissatisfaction” when consumers do not own the shirt. However, the production cost of the sweatshop shirt was almost nothing. Union workers who made a shirt, on the other hand, received higher wages. It doesn’t matter if union-made shirts are much cheaper in capitalism, they are not only competing with shirt prices. They are going up against immense advertising power and capital.

A Nike shirt may cost $0.50 to make, because they ex-ploit cheap labor. A union-made shirt may cost $3.00 to make, because they pay a living wage. These Nike shirts can be priced at $40 and out-compete union-made shirts priced at $20, merely due to Nike’s fetishized image.

“Okay, so we just need to fix some labor problems.

That’s it, right?“

As a result of this bizarre pricing of shirts, most of our shirts are made in less economically developed countries, even though this requires more transportation costs. Unfortunately, production of shirts and many goods in the Third World has added the inefficient elements of extra transportation (environmental damage), intimida-tion of workers (lower wages), loss of information and news on pro-ductive conditions, and creating even more bureaucracy in the chain of production.

Thus, not only do markets miscalculate prices through competing financial costs, but they do not even attempt to include social costs. The cost of environmental damage is not figured in to contribute to more environmentally friendly innovations. The cost of dead fishers is not a factor in the continuation of production or the pricing of those workers’ seafood.

“You’re saying markets


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kill people? I guess you’re going to tell me

now that they are racist?”

Markets in the U.S. tend to play off and encourage racism, sexism, homophobia, heterosexism, animal abuse, and other social ills. Negative stereotypes and a lack of positive role models are broadcasted by a media system that only seeks proftis. Capital-ism creates caricature stereotypes of gangsters and thugs; rednecks and hillbillies; sex-machines and ditzes; frat-boys and man’s-men. These caricatures are easy to laugh at by those not offended by them. However, capitalism does not ask if degrading women is ethical or morally okay. It asks, “Can we make money from showing this im-age?” Constructing self-respecting identities for minorities is not a concern of capitalists.

In fact, constructing any identity for minority children has not shown to even be a concern of market systems.

Media markets have led many minority children to lack self-respecting identities, led many girls to think they are only good for being “pretty,” and they reinforce a multitude of negative stereo-types for every cultural identity.

Social relations are also (partially) constructed in the work-place. For example, unemployment (amount of people actively looking for work and cannot find it) among African-American males is higher than any other cultural or gender group. Unemployment is used to create job insecurity, so workers will accept lower wages. It should not be a surprise then, that African-American males are among the lowest paid for equal labor in society. Their work is sought only in communities that are desparate for work.

“Wouldn’t this eventually elevate minorities to a

higher status?”

No. Capitalists’ goal of dehumanizing minorities is to pit

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other workers against them, lowering the chances they will work together and bargain for more power at work. Also, once one com-munity is in worse condition, it makes capitalists afraid to invest money into these communities. This is why ghettos stay ghettoized, and suburbs continue to boom.

“Aren’t these people lazy, and aren’t there

non-racist capitalists?”

In recessions, unemployment skyrockets and factories are closed. It is not the case that people are lazy or that factories are broken. This is all a result of the boom-bust cycle inherent to mar-kets. These recessions hurt communities that have the least edu-cation, training, lower property value, and higher crime rates first. Even from a non-racist capitalist’s perspective, making profit re-quires ghettos to be hurt first.

“You mentioned innovations. What about those? Don’t

they come from competition?” Actually, the last wave of technology that revolutionized the direction of our economy was during and after WWII. Transistors and other breakthrough technologies were developed but not in the private sector. These breakthroughs occurred in university laborato-ries and the public sector. Capitalism has only tinkered with the use of technological breakthroughs that were brought to us by the public sector. In other words, capitalism encourages innovations at in-efficiently small increments. The public sector tends to be better at innovation, because private companies are too competitive to share information and re-sources for technological research.

But even incremental changes are stifled by capitalism. Most people in capitalism work mind-numbing jobs that encourage


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obedience. These jobs teach workers to stifle creativity and innovation. Man-agers and capitalists, on the other hand, work jobs that encourage innovation, but they are a very small minority. We can only imagine how innovative our economy could be if workplaces en-couraged people to be creative and in-novative. Workplaces could allow all workers (not only managers and capi-

talists) to make decisions, feel empowered, learn more, and experi-ment with technology and production.

“But, without copyrights and property laws, where are the incentive?”

Property laws actually prevent innovation upon the copy-righted invention. They stagnate innovation to prolong the making of profits. Computer software is the most obvious example of this. Mozilla Firefox’s web browser is not owned for profit, comes with seemingly endless add-ons, and it can be used on any operating sys-tem. Firefox can even be changed and customized for individual users.

This is all because Firefox is not run for profit.

Internet Explorer, on the other hand, is confined in many respects. It cannot run on just any operating system, and cus-tomizing its source code is illegal. It costs money. And most rel-evant to this question, Internet Explorer runs far behind the innova-tion speed of Firefox. Similar comparisons can be with almost any computer software, and those programs copyrighted always run far behind non-copyrighted (“copy-lefted”) programs.

“Aren’t humans naturally selfish?“

The idea that competition uses human nature for efficiency

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is based on outdated assumptions about human nature. Today, we know that humans are not blood-thirsty characters by nature. Hu-mans live in conditions that encourage certain behaviors. In capi-talism, we can expect people to behave more anti-social, because it rewards cut-throat competition. However, even in its most individu-alist form, social and compassionate behaviors still appear. It seems senseless for us to then say, “Humans are naturally competitive,” unless we also say, “Humans are naturally compassionate, caring, and sharing.”

“But, we need capitalism so we can be free from government.”

Although capitalism may appear to be free from government interaction, it needs government. Capitalism naturally develops toward monopoly; capital collects itself as more powerful compa-nies overpower others. Companies, even from the beginning, pay off politicians from the local to the federal level. These politicians work the will of these companies in office. This leads governments to protect businesses from demands for labor and environmental regulations, and then, not enforcing these laws when they exist.

Police are usually called in to break up strikes, not to pro-tect strikers. The government is used against workers and for capi-talists. The United States invades countries, smothers others with economic power, and props up market-friendly dictators around the world. This is the rule of capitalism. These are not exceptions to the system. This anti-human system does not work for us. Markets fail at meeting every value we should hold in an economy.

As world famous (and pro-capitalism) economist, John May-nard Keynes, ironically said, “The decadent international but indi-vidualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves…is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods.”

“There Is No Alternative!’“


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The Need for Vision

There seems to be a misunderstanding on much of the Left1 when attempting to gauge the level of discontent among work-ing class people. Discontent and inactivity are not the same. We should not assume that just because people aren’t on strike or riot-ing, they must be happy. As the Left mountains more and more books to explain to working people how horribly capitalism alien-ates their lives, nothing changes. But that does not mean work-ing people enjoy their jobs! Nor does it mean that working peo-ple do not understand that they get unfair wages for their labor.

Book after book proclaims, “You should hate your job and politicians;” however, the stack of books that propose an alter-native way of organizing the economy is tiny. It would be like a doctor diagnosing a disease, telling a patient how awful life will be to live with the disease, and offering no remedy. This is what the Left does to the working class: “Our current economy di-vides workers’ tasks into meaningless labor. It encourages people to be selfish. It causes wars and corrupts politicians. It encour-ages wasteful interactions, like advertisements…” but if we of-fer no solution, we should only expect people to numb their pain.

There are occasional references to a vague economic justice, “socialism”, a worker-run economy, and other ideas; but workers (especially in the U.S.) have been told their whole lives to fear these

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vague suggestions be-cause they lead us to no-where but gulags2. Due to corporate media and American history (the Cold War), people are taught to make excuses for why we “need” capi-talism. The most com-mon of these was stated by England’s former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who said, “There is no (better) al-ternative.” It has become the job of revolutionaries to justify why its call for revolution is not a call for centrally-planned3, top-down, au-thoritarian economies, and why our proposal is better than capitalism.

Before the Russian Revolution, the demand for socialism was beyond the horizon. As Russia lost the Cold War, the dis-cussion on socialism was slowly “resolved” in mainstream dis-course. The reasoning to justify capitalism became not that capi-talism was a success. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Almost every economist today admits that capitalism is an unjust system of allocation and that it was an unsafe system that kept nations at peace.* Slogans for capitalism after the Cold War became mat-ters of content, not enthusiastic prolamations of “freedom” in production. For example, like Margaret Thatcher’s famous state-ment is, “There is no (better) alternative [to capitalism],”which is the equivalent of saying, “At least it’s not the Soviet Union.”

Thus, the task for social revolutionaries today must be to explain what we want, why our vision is not what is often called “socialism”, and why what we are proposing will be more satisfying

* John Maynard Keynes, said, “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”


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than capitalism. Our new hurdle requires vision to be openly discussed, modified, and clarified. This discourse allows work-ing people to decide what society should be like and grow confident that their vi-sion can be realized. It also helps us con-struct strategies that bring us closer to what we want and in a better position to get it.

What Are Our Options?

Capitalism is born out of private owner-ship and competition. Government plays the role of protecting capitalism and the most powerful capitalists’ property. Even immediately after the American Revo-lutionary War, Daniel Shay led a rebel-lion (Shay’s Rebellion) of small farmers against the federal government and its imprisonment of small farmers who could not afford to pay their debts to large banks (because these farmers had been fighting in the War). Throughout American his-tory, there are countless examples of the government (local, state, and federal) act-ing in the interest of businesses, because politicians rely on them to prop up politi-cal campaigns and political parties. This is why we have wars for profit. Businesses make money from government contracts.

Capitalism, by its very nature of pit-ting businesses against each other, forces behind-the-scenes behaviors between companies and politicians. Working peo-ple are not stupid, and seem well aware of the fact that they are getting a raw deal at work. Even the most outspoken pro-capitalist economists do not attempt to

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make the case that capitalism is ideal.

When we look to the alterna-tives, one we often see is “centrally-planned socialism” (also known as “coordinatorism”), which is what the Soviet Union had. This gets rid of the chaotic booms and recessions/depres-sions of the market; resources can be pooled and used more efficiently; and resources could then be redistributed throughout workplaces in solidarity with each other. This sharing of resourc-es allows items we need to be available more cheaply than luxury items.

Milk and bread were very cheap in the Soviet Union. They were the only economy in human history to go from being an al-most entirely agricultural society to an industrial global superpower in only one generation. However, when they got rid of the capi-talists, the bosses stayed in place. Man-agers are generally despised by workers, oftentimes more than capitalists. In the Soviet Union, managers and central plan-ners still held a monopoly on empower-ing work and decision making. When-ever workers began to act autonomously4 from management, whether in opposition, or even just running the workplace more smoothly, the role of the manager/planner became questionable. If workers could operate with no managers—if they could learn the skills to “manage” workplaces themselves—then, management served no point. And, for this reason, management began to take on an even more anti-working class character than it did under capitalism.

Central Planning Boards and factory bosses had hierarchically different jobs and


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interests. When workers would submit plans, management could rubber-stamp it. However, if management and the Central Planning Board6 continually served no engaging role in planning, their role and power could be withered away. As a result of their potential to wither, led them to protect their position of economic and political power by coming out against workers and their self-management.

Though centrally planned socialism succeeded at encourag-ing solidarity in the Soviet Union—women gained respectable sta-tus, overt racism was virtually ended, and resources were shared—it failed at allowing workers to control their workplace how they wanted. It failed at carrying out self-management. Workers still worked menial and alienating jobs in the Soviet Union. Also, though workers’ incomes generally increased from central plan-ning, they were still economically subordinate to bosses and Cen-tral Planning Boards/Committees. They did not achieve equity.

It is our job, as revolutionaries, to put forth a realistic vision for people to see that we are not naively demanding a child’s dream. Our vision have protections against another economic nightmare. What we want is realistic, feasible, and explainable. We want an economy in which workers organize the economic cooperatively, work in sol-idarity, and can act autonomously from one another. We want a so-ciety in which work includes a variety of tasks, and where there are no exclusive bodies of decision makers. We want a democratically planned economy, in which everyone is encouraged to participate.

Endnotes 1. Left— the political wing that pushes society forward to challenge traditions, having a tendency to social, not anti-social, actions. 2. gulag — prison work camps in the old Soviet Union (also in North Korea today), in which people who disagreed with or defied the government, their boss, or military authority were sent and used for forced labor. 3. centrally-planned economy — system of production, consumption, and distribution, where the economy is planned out for efficiency, but power is centralized and able to be exercised by an exclusive group of government of-ficials. 4. autonomously —separate from a central authority. 5. Central Planning Boards — government officials (either elected or appointed) to represent workers in a centrally-planned economy. These Boards presided over workers’ plans and often required a certain amount of knowledge and skills. They also held tremendous responsibility and information, which altogether resulted in their own participation in the planning process, but not workers’ participation.

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Parecon (Participatory Economics)

What Is Participatory Economics?

Participatory Economics (parecon) is an economic model we pro-pose to bring direct democracy into the workplace and allocate goods and services through an environmentally sustainable, demo-cratic participatory planning process. It is very different than mar-kets and centrally planned economies. Parecon is modeled to maxi-mize the following values of an economy:

• self-management • solidarity • diversity • equity

What Is the Philosophy Behind Parecon?

Parecon is the culmination of historical efforts of people to construct a democratic economic system. Parecon was initially prepared by Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert as a proposal for an alternative economic system. Being discontent is not enough; workers have

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been aware they are not paid enough for a long time. We need an alternative to know where we want to go in our social movement. What we must do is propose a model and ask, “Is this more desir-able?” and if not, “How can we change it make it what we do want?” Also, having a vision (like parecon) can guide our strategy and tac-tics, by asking, “Will this strategy/tactic help get us to our economic vision?” Just as vision guides strategy, what we want in an economy guides how we evaluate it. In other words, we evaluate capitalism as oppressive, dehumanizing, failed, and unjust because it dissatisfies what we value in economic relations:

• Self-management— people have decision making power in proportion to the extent they are affected by the decision. • Solidarity— people should be encouraged to work together and have connected interests to better empathize and humanize their relations, not pitted against each other to the point that their economic relations are anti-social, degrading, and dehumanizing. • Diversity— variety of products to fit many of cultural communities, gender identities, political opinions, and job tasks; variety of tasks or even jobs. • Equity— people should be paid based upon personal effort and sacrifice, evaluated by co-workers.

Economies, though, need to have more than desirable social relations. What good is an economy if we don’t produce efficiently?

• Efficiency— the economy should meet the goods and services demanded in society by using the least amount of time, labor, and resources as possible, with the minimal amount of social sacrifice; maximize social benefits while minimizing social costs.

What Would Work Be Like? An enormous problem with work in every highly developed economy has been the ways division of labor takes form. Overwhelmingly, they leave some workers disempowered and alienated, doing nothing but the most menial tasks all day or merely taking orders; yet,


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another group has a monopoly on the skills, knowledge, information, and decision making power. Capitalism has classes of capitalists and workers, who have different interests.

In between capital and labor, bosses (“coordinators”) coordinate the workplace and act as a group with separate economic inter-ests from both capitalists and workers. Thus, workers owning a factory is not enough to keep bosses/coordinators from (re)emerging as the new rulers. To guard against this new dominate class that has governed post-capital-ist economies, we advocate balanced job com-plexes.

A balanced job complex attempts to balance the amount of tasks workers experi-ence that are empowering or disempowering, and make sure that those necessary tasks of drudgery are collectively shared, not carried by a denigrated social group. Also, balanced job complexes should offer an environment in which creativity is available through resources and experiences. Workers who experience me-nial and onerous tasks could then have access to autonomate their productivity and improve their day of work, a more powerful incentive than anything in capitalism.

A balanced job complex spreads those less empowering and rote tasks throughout so-ciety. It makes sure each worker has access to and is equally empowered to make decisions. In other words, a balanced job complex creates the conditions required for workers’ participa-tion.

As discussed earlier, the Soviet Union

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did not have balanced job complexes, and bosses/coordinators re-emerged as a new dominant bureaucratic class. More recently, in the Argentinian workers’ factory occupation in the early 2000s, a noted problem was that many workers arrived at workers’ council meeting exhausted; some arrived after 7 hours of paperwork; and some arrived prepared with planning proposals for the meeting, ready to debate. Some workers were exhausted, and some were had jobs that numbed their mind all day. Others had been empowered from managing all day. These workers all came to meetings with different goals, expectations, and degrees of participation.

Even if workers were paid for time at a meeting, why would workers who just came from a miserable day of labor feel like par-ticipating? Miners were exhausted and only wanted to shower, go home, and be with their families; secretaries had taken orders all day and knew nothing about how the mines actually functioned. The no-tion that these workers would be willing to participate equally with a boss is absurd. Most often, miners simply nodded their heads to whatever suggestion or proposal, so they could go home. Thus, it should be obvious that merely intending (or even allowing) a work-place to operate democratically is not enough if the division of labor is left alone. Workers must learn participation through their jobs, if they will be expected to participate in society.

This can be done by workers moving to workplaces where more/less empowering work is done. This can, also, be done by workers diversifying their tasks within a single workplace. There is no one-way-solution. The most probable case is that workers will plan this with personal preference. In any event, tasks would have to be rated by the workers who performed them to be sure a new bureaucratic class does not form to exclude workers from decisions, planning, and other ways of participating in society.

How Should Be People Paid in Parecon?

The only just reward for able people’s labor is that they should be remunerated (paid) according to effort and sacrifice. Today, people are rewarded for how much they bargain for their labor from


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capitalists. Capitalists are rewarded based upon how much pro-ductive property they own and how valued their products currently are on the market. Like rewarding property on the market, skills and trades should not be rewarded less or more due to the market’s value. That labor should still be rewarded, and, if specialized jobs have all been done in full capacity for the year, workers with that specialization can then work in other parts of the economy, instead of being unemployed. Naturally, there is no reason unemployment should exist in parecon, because workers can move to accomplish tasks in solidarity, lessening everyone’s workload.

Another way to reward labor could be based upon output (quantity produced). This may seem more sensible at first, than bar-gaining power, accumulated property, and market’s immediate ex-change value, but it is also a silly idea.

Suppose we rewarded for output in professional baseball; with this method, we would have to say that Albert Pujols is not paid enough by the St. Louis Cardinals! Pujols has been Most Valuable Player in the National League in 2005 and 2008, and surely brings in a large proportion of the attendance, advertisement, concession, souvenirs, and other finances for the Cardinals. However, no one in their right mind thinks it is just for Albert Pujols to have made more than $13,870,950.00, in salary alone, for 2008. Thus, rewarding for property and output are both unjust measures.

Since all jobs will be more or less balanced, not only for em-powerment, but also effort and sacrifice, people will be paid more or less according to hours worked. If one wants or needs to consume more than average, one must work harder (or work more hours).

Who Would Own the Parecon Workplace?

In a parecon, workplaces and other productive property would be

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owned collectively. This does not mean personal property does not exist! Nobody wants to take your toothbrush, television, house, or bedsheets.

What About Hierarchies?

Parecon eliminates the need for a fixed hierarchy in the workplace, because it assumes equal access to information, education, training, and decision making. However, it is impossible to do some tasks without professional advice and guidance. Such professional and skilled jobs would be more fluid, because of the equal accessibility; but those workers with a high amount of specialized qualities will also have a balanced job complex. If a decision must be executed too quickly to hold a meeting and a vote, such a position could be rotated (or elected with immediate recall) maintaining balanced job complexes. The goal is to maximize participation and self-manag-ment, and we must be adaptable to our future needs.

Would the Workplace Be Democratic?

Yes. Parecon is also de-signed to promote self-management. Work-place decisions on what the workplace or entire industry will do are made by those affected by the decision. Dif-ferent decisions call for different decision mak-ing processes. For ex-ample, which way the shop pushes parts down the line may be a ma-jority decision; but ban-ning one worker from a workplace may require a consensus decision process. Perhaps a higher threshold is necessary for some decisions; there is no prescription for this process. Self-management


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implies that whatever process occurs, it involves only those affected by it.

So, if someone works at a desk and wants to display a picture of friends, no one should have a say but that in-dividual. However, if that individual wants to listen to a stereo at the desk, the surrounding workers would be equally affected and should have an equal say in the stereo, its potential volume, and what may be played on it. The whole world is affected by CO2 and other greenhouse gases, thus, everyone should have a say in global environmental policies.

How Could We Allocate Goods and Services?

Every year, people can plan consumption for the upcoming year on an individual, neighborhood, community, provincial, state, region-al, national, and/or global level. Individuals would state how much food, clothing, entertainment, and other goods and services they will want to purchase in the coming year. Everyone should, also, sub-mit proposals for collective consumption (such as swimming pools, community centers, street cleaning, parks, and so on). This could be as detailed as necessary and should not take any longer than our current bills and taxes.

These consumption would be are submitted to facilitation boards (an industry similar to accounting). Workplaces and indus-tries can simultaneously submit proposals regarding how much they plan to work. The workers and facilitators can accurately project the productive capacities of each workplace. Workers should also use this time to plan what kind of work they would prefer to do next year. These production plans could be submitted to the facilitation boards to be integrated into a plan for the economy.

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All these proposals could be summed up, giving an aggregate pro-duction and consumption plan for the year. Environmental and social costs can then be added or subtracted to the prices of those goods and services. This would more accurately and dem-ocratically reflect the costs of goods. Both plans (consumption and produc-tion) and possible prices from those plans should then be given to both, workers and consumers.

Consumers and workers will review the newest possible plans and prices. This second round in the plan-ning process is largely an attempt to bring outlier plans that offset all collective prices to a more stable equilibrium price. This allows us to reallocate our goods and servic-es more efficiently. Since consumption and production effect prices, consumers and workers should be encouraged to seek alternative ways of meeting their needs that will not offset a price as harshly. This is necessary for ecological diversity and distributing produc-tion. However, if huge changes would be made, they would effect the economy drastically, and they could require explanations for the changes.

For example, if steel is in high demand from the construc-tion industry—so much that steel is priced very expensively to dis-couragge its consumption—an explanation for such a demand may be necessary to discourage steel consumption and encourage alter-native consumptions (like iron or brick). And when a community decides in a later round of planning to build something with iron, instead of steel, they should submit some sort of explanation about their decision to switch. After each round of planning between workers and consumers, we should be a little close to a healthier looking economy.


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After this second round of prices are reviewed, a third round could begin. By this time, consumption and production plans should be within a reasonable range of each other. Further changes and deviations should probably require an explanation. Any further rounds of planning should allow for less and less deviation from the consumptive and productive planning median. This ensures that the prices and plans converge to create a compromise that is beneficial for the whole society. From the most recent planning possibilities, we could generate a set of plans that incorporate data from the previ-ous rounds. These plans could then be voted on as a referendum for the economy, further stabilizing the economy.

How Would This Protect the Environment?

The price of any good will rise in proportion to its environmental cost, creating a disincentive to produce such goods. Any activity that leads to an unrecoverable or disastrous environmental effect could be discouraged or even prevented altogether. Over time, this would lead to sustainability, even in a technologically advanced so-ciety. Environmentally friendly technologies and policies would be more probable than capitalism, to say the least.

Isn’t This Bureaucratic?

Workers could allot time to be paid for their participation in plan-ning, and consumers would enter proposals and discuss communi-ty projects to the degree which it interests them. Redirecting the currently wasteful resources (advertising, tax work, banking, stock investments, etc.) to planning would require less time, education, resources, and labor. Also, it would result in everyone participating without hierarchy. So, no—a bureaucracy emerging is improbable. Parecon would increase self-managment.

Would There Be Money?

Money is efficient as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a measure of value, but it is of no real use. It has no real utility or use value, other than exchange. Also, most de

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veloped economies already operate with most of their exchanges being credit or bank based; so people today don’t even use money for a lot of their purchases. Therefore, it makes more sense for the economy to run off a credit system earned from labor. A labor-based credit system would also function without interest and its ac-cumulation.

Will This Solve All of the World’s Prob-lems?

Some of the world’s problems are rooted in the economy, but not all. It is important to note that, while economic revolution may leave us in a better position to approach relieving other op-pressions, it does not cure all problems. Humanity’s needs are much more diverse than those that are met by the economy.

Examples?

Parecon is a relatively new model, and so there have been no parecon revolutions around the world. However, a number of workplaces self-consciously apply the lessons of the parecon vision, seeking to implement and refine these through practical experience. Below are a few we are aware of.

South End Press

Over twenty-five years old, South End Press utilizes balanced job complexes and approaches its editorial and other publishing related decisions as much in accord with parecon values and aims as condi-tions permit.


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“A central organizing principle of the [Mondragón Bookstore and Coffeehouse] collective is the notion of a job complex. A job com-plex is simply a grouping of jobs and job types that strikes a balance between creative and empowering types of work on the one hand, and more rote and menial tasks on the other.”

G7 Welcoming Committee Records

Producers and distributors of music “by and for people working for radical social change.” The G7 Welcoming Committee collective seeks to create a “humane and ethical workplace” through participa-tory economic principles.

Arbeiter Ring Publishing

A collectively-run publishing house in Winnipeg, Canada, Arbeiter Ring uses participatory economic structuring “so that all members have comparable responsibilities and are equally able to participate in decision making.”

ZMag — A monthly periodical aiming “to assist activist efforts to attain a better future,” Z Magazine has been a long-time supporter of the parecon vision, in print as well as in practice.

ZNet — Home of the ParEcon Project, ZNet features a wide range of material on social change and vision. The staff at ZNet strive to bring parecon values into their work and their workplace.

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What We Want,

What We Demand,

What We Want

1. We want to eliminate class. This means no capitalist class over workers. This also, means no managerial/bureaucratic class over workers. Workers should have control over the economy. For this to occur:

a. Productive property cannot be inherited or privately owned.

b. Workloads must be rated by the workers and then balanced. This eliminates a monopoly on knowledge, information, skills, resources, and empowering tasks, which are all necessary for social participation.

2. We want an economy that values equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, efficiency, and ecological sustainability.

a. Equity: By rewarding effort and sacrifice in duration of time, we can better achieve equity.

b. Solidarity: By putting workers in solidarity with other workers, and consumers with other consumers, people would have more empathy for other participants. This could more accurately price goods and allow us to


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reduce (but not necessarily eliminate) wars, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other prejudices. This would also eliminate unemployment. c. Diversity: We want a division of labor that provides a mixture of tasks, instead of one that minimizes workers’ human potential. A division of labor should strive to increase creativity and innovation. We want a society that produces a diverse array of healthy products and social relations, not one that degrades women to monolithic objects, and not one that degrades minorities to a status of “undesirables”.

d. Self-management: We want people to have a say in decisions insofar as they are affected by them. We support solidarity within autonomy. This means if a group of workers or consumers decides to function differently, and it only effects them, their choice should not be dictated by outside forces—even if these “outside forces” democratically voted to intervene.

3. We want to revolutionize the economy, while keeping in mind that the economy is not the only institution in dire need of revolution.

4. We want an economy that does not rely on speculative in-vestments, but one that democratically invests in a healthy future for society. We want to end the cyclical boom-bust tendency of market economies. Market chaos causes crises, economic waste, unemploy-ment, job insecurity, poverty, loss of finances, and other ills.

a. We want to democratically plan our economy. Planning can be done through workers’ councils (supply) and consumers’ councils (demand).

What We Demand

Workers must gain control over the economy in order to institute changes they want. They must be empowered to move forward,

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raise demands for more power, and challenge authority. These de-mands can lead workers to more radical demands.

The following demands are commonly raised in labor move-ments, because they accomplish these tasks:

1. Full Employment

2. Higher minimum wage

3. Right to free association, free assembly, collective bar-gaining, and other basic organizing rights

4. 30-for-40: 30 hours of work for 40 hours of pay

5. Maternity leave for both parents

6. Democratic control of labor unions

7. Redistribute empowering tasks to the rank-and-file to increase participation

How We Get It

1. We should include in our or-ganizations the types of self-managed decision making, balanced job complex-es, equitable payments and dues, and participatory democracy we envision.

2. We should work for “non-reformist reforms”. These put oppressed people in a better social position to further assess prog-ress, while maintaining revolutionary proposals. Demands made against existing institutions ought to enhance people's lives, ad-vance the likelihood of further struggle, and advance the conscious-ness and organizational capacity to pursue those aims.

3. We should meet working people where they are today, if we want to clearly communicate and ally with a class struggle for liberation.

4. We should share institutional vision.


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a. This vision should guide our goals and actions by generating questions about the productivity of these strategies and tactics. For example, “Does hating sports bring us closer to identifying with working people?” “Will abandoning every union offer working people more, or less power over their lives?”

b. This vision should inspire us to know that what we are striving for is feasible, as well as excite and empower working people that another world is possible!

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finding a better way: on the economy

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