Michael Albert's "Parecon"--- An Infantile Communist Critique

[Rakhmetov]

You guys are surely familar with Albert's anti-Leninist tirades in his books What Is to Be Undone? (1974) and more recently Parecon. What gibberish childish leftists spout when confronted with the great genius of Lenin. Albert is obviously an anarchist with no trust in a vanguard force that will break the will of the capitalists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics

[GPDP]

Albert can hardly be called an anarchist. At least most anarcho-communists tend to be militant and primarily oriented in the class-struggle, while Albert tends to focus more on "oppression" and puts class as but one aspect of it alongside race, gender, sexuality, kinship, etc. Not to mention he has something of a reformist streak. I remember him writing a column describing an imaginary interview with Obama if he was a pareconist, and being like "buh?"

All that said, he did influence me greatly. He, along with Chomsky, got me into left-wing politics. In retrospect, however, I now disagree with a lot of his ideas and talking points.

[Gorilla]

I can't competently put together a shopping list for an entire week - constantly having to go out and pick up this or that because it's run out. No way I could put together a list for the whole year as parecon says every household must. And damn sure no way I want the snoopy-ass couple across the way seeing my list after it goes to the neighborhood planning board.

I'd much rather do things the worst centralist-commandist way than submit to that nonsense.

http://popartmachine.com/artwork/LOC+1091472/0/%5BStalin-speaking-to-workers-in-locomotive-plant%5D-LOT-5836-%5Bitem%5D...-painting-artwork-print.jpg
Pictured: a more privacy- and consumer-oriented alternative to parecon.

[Raubleaux]

Yeah, Albert is pretty bad. "Parecon" is like some utopian shit I would've thought of when I was in high school.

[Delenda Carthago]

Parecon's basic problem is that it puts points different type of work with different values. And this is capitalism from the back door. Plus I ve seen the dude when he came in Athens for BFest and I thought that everything he said was on a petit bourgeois base that I really didnt like.

[Jose Gracchus]

As a framework for a post-revolutionary economy, parecon is not so bad. The Zaragosa Congress of the CNT published a plan for dual-governance based on inhabitants of communities, as well as workers in formal workplaces/places of production, where in many ways the two sides could be looked at as a fleshed-out idea behind the workers' and consumers' councils.

I don't think anyone would need to literally come up with shopping lists. More like the community assembly everyone would participate and simple use of existing statistics and a kind of commission of workers could write-up and correlate a consumption plan for the locality.

"Pareconism's" worst streak is its conception of politics, which seems to totally side-step a core emphasis on class struggle, and also elevates community, gender, and "political" spheres as co-equal to class struggles. I think that was probably en vogue in the 1970s and college-New Left millieu he emerged out of, but I think it is very weak. An upside is its stress on deliberately and intentfully tacking the capitalist division of labor and distribution of education and skills within the economy, which I think a lot of Marxists miss on stressing strongly enough.

[robbo203]

You guys are surely familar with Albert's anti-Leninist tirades in his books What Is to Be Undone? (1974) and more recently Parecon. What gibberish childish leftists spout when confronted with the great genius of Lenin. Albert is obviously an anarchist with no trust in a vanguard force that will break the will of the capitalists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics


Lenin as "great genius"? You surely have to be jesting! It would pushing matters to call him mediocre as a thinker. His works are often confused, full of gaping holes and blatant contradictions and some of his philosophical stuff like Materialism and Empirio-Criticism is quite mechanistic and dire.

That said, Parecon too is mostly nonsense and clearly not very well thought out either