Democratic Economy vs. ParEcon

[YadaRanger]

I like get get some comments and possibly start a debate based on the video and the 4 others in the line up.

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et91gXGMLwA/YOUTUBE]

[syndicat]

"Economic Democracy" is the tendentious name David Schweickart gives for his brand of market socialism, tho it is true that some others have done this before, such as Robert Dahl.

Some of the problems with Schweickart's market socialism:

1. He backs the Mondragon model of cooperatives. In these coops the managers and experts are dominant, the workers are subordinate. It's a techno-managerial class dominated institution, not authentic workers self-management. For details see Sharryn Kasmir's "The Myth of Mondragon."

More generally, Schweickart doesn't recognize the tecno-managerial or bueaucratic or coordinator class. He's not opposed to their domination over workers. He's not actually concerned about the empowerment or liberation of the working class. If you read his book "Against capitalism" it's basically a moral argument against capitalist private profit and capitalist property, it's not based on a class analysis and the self-emancipation of the working class.

2. Schweickart's market driven brand of socialism would mean that each firm would still be pursuing maximum profit. And this means they'd be looking for ways to lower expenses at the expense of others in society, such as pollution. Schweickart might think government regulation would be the solution to this. But the government would be influenced by major industries, who would want to minimize their expenses. there'd be ecological problems similar to what we have now.

[YadaRanger]

thanks a lot syndicat.

do you agree with the parecon theory more so?

i agree with your critique of his brand of market socialism, i hope this thread turns in to a discussion on possible solutions to the structural problems of parecon and market socialism.

the left, and ecspessually the anti-statest left really need to start thinking about, and talking about practical methods and systems to achieve our goals

[syndicat]

I think two of the ideas that Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel have contributed that are useful are their idea of participatory planning, and the idea of re-integrating conceptualization and decision-making with the physical doing of the work, eliminating the separate coordinator or techno-managerial class.

Their proposed governance structure has been proposed by the libertarian socialist left before. The Spanish anarcho-syndicalists also advocated a dual governance system with both neighborhood and village assemblies of residents...what they called "free municipalities"...and workplace assemblies. And then federation of these through congresses of delegates from the base assemblies.

The idea of work re-integration is similar to what Kropotkin called "integration of labor."

The innovative part of their proposal is participatory planning. This enables an efficient economy to work without profit-oriented market system. It avoids the problems of trying to make all decisions in one big meeting, and the problems of statist central planning. Each assembly and local unit makes their own plan, and in some things, like public services, there might be regional or national plans, and then they interact to "adjust" their plans to each other.