Michael Albert (1)Besprekingen

Realizing Hope

I have had this book for five years without reading it. I bought it because there was an economics major who briefly had a stint in my university organizing group CCLeft. I don't think he got more than a couple of chapters in. He also never came back to our meetings.

For the first half of the book, I was able to trudge through the stale writing and the miserably boring concepts because I thought of it as an economics textbook, whereby I was able to criticise capitalism and central planning based on their central values. And it succeeded in that and several other ways.

I think to the extent at which Albert synthesized the rewards of past struggle from below and to the left into a coherent theory of economics (whether from anarcho-syndicalist Spain, or horizontal planning in Porto Alegre), this book (and the concept of parecon itself) was a success. It is when Albert begins straying from broad vision and into tiny things that are uniquely "Albertian," that is when he gets into a fastidiousness that is annoying to me. He uses the defense of "don't get caught up in the tiny details, this is merely a vision that has yet to be implemented" in one paragraph (a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with) and in the next, he is documenting, in the most tedious way, how a swimming pool might be collectively purchased with participatory economics.

During the "demonstrations" of ParEcon, I found myself wishing that Albert had coauthored this book with a sci-fi writer. Ursula K LeGuin, for example described a unique economy in a unique world, and showed daily life within those contexts, in her book, The Dispossessed. Albert, as gifted a thinker as he is, is not a sci-fi writer. Life within participatory economics seemed almost consumed by participatory economics, and therefore it was difficult to imagine what, for example, my life would be like in a society with participatory economics.

Albert also has a tendency to, understandably, compare his vision with capitalism, and shows how criticisms of participatory economics are more valid criticisms of the current economic order. However, once I agreed with Albert that participatory economics would be better than capitalism (not hard to do to an anti-capitalist who is perfectly willing to throw capitalism to the wind for almost any reason), those criticisms remained almost un-addressed. Furthermore, some of the more persistent arguments were made into straw-men and burnt. Like the concern about vision dominating and becoming dogmatism, a concern I had throughout the book. The person he described with that concern was like a funhouse mirror version of myself, which he then proceeded to criticize with, leaving me with my criticism nearly unaddressed.

A criticism that remains completely unaddressed is whether ParEcon is behaviorist. Can we reward people for social acts and punish them for antisocial acts, and come out with social people in a social society? How do I reconcile this with the much more progressive thought (in comparison to economics) going on in pedagogy and education that says otherwise?

In summary, I don't disagree with ParEcon. I'm just not excited about it. It sounds far-off and difficult, and I am not convinced it's the way. In terms of creating dual power, I think there are stronger strategies out there (dual-power unionism, married with popular neighborhood assemblies, and caucusing for oppression, for example). If I were to start an enterprise, I would probably use parts of parecon (for example, balanced job complexes), and parts of other theories. So I don't see where it fits, as a whole concept, into my life.

2020 edit: As I'm rereading my review here, I'm struck by the fact that even at that time I was put off by the desire to distill a life into constituent parts, and a separate manner of organizing each. So we have the awkward words ParEcon, ParPolity, ParKinship, etc. etc.
See also: http://libcom.org/library/participatory-society-or-libertarian-communism

Reviewed in the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard:

http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2006/04/post-capitalist-capitalism....

Michael Albert is one of the most important intellectuals alive, even if only leftists know it...This book seemed to me too easy an introduction to Parecon. I would move on to the book called Parecon, which is more detailed.

Albert is co-creator of Znet (the most important leftist website on earth) and SouthEnd Press, a radical book press. This book was an important step in Albert developing the idea of Parecon (participatory economics).
This is not an often-read book judging by the amount of members with the book. This book is however very important as it is a devastating critique of Marxism-Leninism. Lenin especially. It is a bit weak on Mao, but considering when it was written (1975), that is understandable.
An excellent bibliography: it covers the Russian Revolution, Marxism-Leninism, the Chinese Revolution, Maoism, Anarchism, the New Left, and is admirably concerned with forming a new ideology and exploring the oft-neglected psychological side of leftist politics.

Read this neglected book. If you can't get your hands on one, it is online on the Znet website.

This is not the most interesting book I have read lately, but it is one of the most important. It deals with the topics so often left vague in left-wing literature: the nitty-gritty of how a non-capitalist economy would actually allocate goods and services, balance supply and demand, avoid gluts or shortages, invest in infrastructure, reward work, manage workplaces, etc. Essentially trying to create a non-capitalist economic theory.

I have to admit that it was a struggle to keep reading sometimes. The talk of iterative planning, facilitation boards, nested councils, balanced job complexes, etc., is very nitty and very gritty. But it’s necessary. There are lots of slogans, lots of vague and inspiring essays about how things should be. I even wrote one myself a while back, and won a prize for it. That stuff is important, but we also need to take the next step. Capitalism is a horrifically unjust system: that much is obvious, even to many of its supporters. What makes it so hard to replace is that people don’t believe another system is possible. The fact that “Another world is possible” became a radical slogan is an indication of quite how much we have swallowed the lie that capitalism is the only possible way that human beings could ever hope to organise themselves.

Part of the reason for that is that so few people have set out a detailed description of how an alternative society would work. Contrary to popular belief, Marx never did. His analysis was of capitalism, and his references to a post-capitalist society were as vague as anyone else’s. What became associated with Marxism, socialism and anything else left-wing was the central planning installed by the Bolsheviks when they found themselves in power in Russia after 1917 and perpetuated thereafter in Soviet-influenced countries around the world and, to a lesser extent, by “democratic” socialist parties in capitalist countries. So Labour came to stand for more nationalisation and government control, and the Conservatives for the free market, and similar dichotomies arose in many other countries.

Unfortunately, both models have now failed.

Markets, by their nature, perpetuate injustice: those with accumulated wealth are at a huge advantage in any market interaction, and so achieve a favourable outcome, and so accumulate more wealth. In theory, when a sweatshop worker in Thailand decides to stitch shirts for a huge multinational corporation, they are entering into a free and fair contract. But the huge differential in power ensures that the deal heavily favours the multinational corporation. The company makes a huge profit on the shirts and accumulates yet more wealth; the worker goes nowhere if they’re lucky, downward if they’re not. Unions help to mitigate this effect by organising workers into bigger groups with more collective power, but they can only slow down the inevitable. The recent credit crunch shows more than ever the stupidity of relying on a system of individual greed to provide the best results for society as a whole.

Central planning, on the other hand, leads to the development of a coordinator class (”Party members”) who monopolise the decision-making and gain unjust advantages. Plans are developed centrally, with little input from workers or consumers, and enforced using state power. Party members, just like capitalist elites, need to protect their power and wealth from the rest of society, and because they are the state, they have direct control over the police, army, secret police, etc. It’s not hard to see how a police state would evolve in this scenario. Relying on the experts to do the right thing might sound good in theory, but in practice it’s no different from the medieval reliance on having a good king. It might happen, but if it doesn’t, society goes to hell. You need something else, to safeguard against abuse of power.

This book proposes a new way: participatory planning. I can’t go into the whole thing here - it needs a book. But these are some of the main principles:

Remuneration according to effort and sacrifice. The premise is that it’s only fair to reward people for what they can control. Nobody can control how much wealth they were born with, how much physical or mental ability they were born with, how much each person can produce, etc. What everyone can control is how much effort they make, and how much sacrifice (in terms of time spent at work, in training, etc.) they make. So this is rewarded.

Balanced job complexes. In a “parecon” society, everyone will be expected to take part in political and economic decision-making. Not just once every four years, but all the time, from a local level up to the regional and national level. But this will never work if some people, by working in empowering jobs all the time, become experts in decision-making, while others, by working in mundane jobs, become incapable of participating effectively. So everyone should have a “balanced job complex”. This means that in any workplace, tasks are shared around. You might be the manager on one project, and the note-taker on another. And if you work in a comparatively empowering place, that has to be balanced out by doing some mundane tasks somewhere else (e.g. collecting garbage once a month). Similarly, people who work in a steel mill will be able to balance out their comparatively unpleasant workplace by doing a few hours a week of empowering work.

Individual planning. Instead of relying on markets to set prices, each person makes a plan of how much they want to work and what they want to spend. This is all tallied up, indicative prices are set, and several rounds of planning are done to even up supply and demand.

Nested councils. Decision-making is bottom-up, not top-down. Decisions that affect only local people are made only at a local level. Neighbourhood councils then feed into local councils, regional councils, national councils, etc.

This is only a very brief sketch, and does not do justice to it. Because we are so used to how things are, the initial reaction to many of these ideas, especially when presented so briefly, may be to laugh at them. They may sound naive or unrealistic or impossible. But Michael Albert sets out a compelling vision and goes into a LOT of detail to explain it all. He doesn’t talk at all about how to get from A to B, and that for me is the biggest problem. But I guess that is addressed in other books - his main concern here is to provide an example of how we could organise society differently. There is no rhetoric, no calls to arms. It is very sober, very boring in places, but very necessary. If we don’t actively engage in the dull science of economics, it will be left in the hands of people like Milton Friedman, and the world will end in a fireball of lunacy.

The short tract "The Political Economy of Participatory Economics" seems mostly to have been intended as a 'formal' statement and modelling of Parecon for the academic economist public. The first half of the work restates the case for Parecon in a summary, sort of academic way - for more on this, see "Parecon: Life After Capitalism". Then, in response to a challenge by Allen Buchanan that nobody has been able to model an alternative to capitalist market economies yet, Albert & Hahnel create a modelling formula of the principles of Parecon, which they dub the "FMPE" (Formal Modelling of a Participatory Economy). This is highly superfluous on its own, given that it just mathematizes what they have already accessibly described in words, but it is a reflection of the sad state economics as a discipline is in that Albert & Hahnel have no choice but to do this if they want to get through to people in that field. Most important and useful here is the way Albert & Hahnel integrate their endogenous preferences theory, developed in their book "Quiet Revolution in Welfare Economics", which will be of interest to heterodox economists.

Along the way, they also address some concerns about the feasibility of their plans, though not any of the more serious objections: their moral hatred of hierarchy leading them to dismiss central planning for no real reason, the degree of bureaucracy involved in their council system which seems to easily surpass that of central planning systems, and the way in which their ideas for consumers' councils greatly seems to exaggerate people's capacity to understand and formulate their own preferences. Then there's the issue that such councils would have to be quite intrusive, as nothing could be bought or sold without councils knowing about it, so that all know about the private life of all in at least that respect. Albert & Hahnel go extremely far in their egalitarianism as well, even proposing to pay more to less competent people who undertake more effort in sports, not just at the top level, but all the way down. But at the same time, they don't seem to have realized that their council system still greatly favors people who are more talented at formulating their preferences and demands over people who are shy, lack self-knowledge, are uncertain about their life-goals, etc.

None of the above objections need defeat the proposal, but I do think Parecon needs an extra round of tinkering or two, with more ideas from more traditional socialist models put in instead of the rather overly egalitarian and optimistic proposal as it stands now. And it's telling that even an absolutely convinced socialist like me would accuse them of those things, precisely the faults socialism in general is often accused of by right-wing philistines; therefore, I may be wrong and underestimating people (as well as Albert & Hahnel), but it's also possible that Parecon as it is now is too much of a good thing.

In any case this booklet is probably not the first one one would want to buy to understand Parecon and the arguments about it, since this is really mostly aimed at economists. The book "Parecon" itself (link above) as well as "Moving Forward: Program for a Participatory Economy" might be a better buy for that.

Michael Albert's "Realizing Hope" builds on his earlier envisionings of Parecon, or Participatory Economics, a strongly egalitarian and democratic social structure (see: Parecon: Life After Capitalism). It is necessary to have read the above book before reading this one, since most of the argumentation and presentation concerning Parecon itself is missing here. Instead, Albert's book seems to be mainly aimed at refuting some critiques and dispelling some doubts about his vision, and in engaging other leftist currents, in particular Marxism and anarchism.

However, this book is rather disappointing on both fronts. Though I agree with a lot of the views of Parecon at least as a form of society to work towards, he gives absolutely no additional practical guidelines or information on how to achieve it, making the undertaking look rather more than less utopian after reading this work. The various chapters discuss how different aspects of our current society (sports, science, foreign policy) would look in a Parecon society, and these are aspects that are too often ignored by socialist theorists, so Albert does well to write about them specifically. But all he ever says is basically "under Parecon, we wouldn't have these problems, since Parecon would be egalitarian and democratic". That is not what we want to know - what we want to know is how to get there, and what specific measures in the short and even medium run would be a way to achieve such social relations.

Moreover, a lot of Parecon's weaknesses are not at all defended here, such as Albert's vision of having all production organized by workers' councils. While I agree with that basic idea, Albert in no way explains how this would work practically, in particular considering the absurd amount of information the different councils would have to work with and the huge amount of procedures necessary, because of Albert's stipulation that everyone in some way affected by something must have a say. What Albert does not seem to realize at all is that the combination of his totally bottom-up approach with the requirement of involving anyone in any way affected would lead either to a massive bureaucracy for every-day decisions and a lot of coordination failures, OR, and I think this is more likely, it would lead to a national or international level larger council making most of the economy-wide decisions top-down for coordination and efficiency's sake. In effect, this would end up precisely like the traditional Marxist view of social organization, which he refuses to admit.

Additionally, the chapter containing his critique of Marxism mostly consists of strawmen reasonings or refusing to take things in context, and is wholly unconvincing. His critique of class reasoning was refuted by Marx himself ages ago and adds nothing new to the discussion, whereas his pointing out of the negative effects of 'democratic centralism' in practice is fair, but much less significant than he makes it to be, in particular considering my above conclusions.

Overall, I do think Albert's view has a lot going for it, and his Parecon society is probably the kind of thing we as left radical people want to work towards. Also, his theory of the coordinator class, albeit not wholly as original as he seems to imply, is important to take into account and a quite useful tool for analysis. But Albert has not used the opportunity of this book to improve his defense of the practical issues with Pareconism as it stands, and I have issues with a lot of his theoretical analysis. It would be better if there could be a synthesis of views between Albert (and Hahnel)'s Pareconism and the traditional Marxist views (Leninist or otherwise), since a lot can be learned from both. But this book does not convince me to support Pareconism as it is now.½

Michael Albert, a prolific radical writer on everything from economics to gender issues, history and physics, has published his memoirs under the title "Remembering Tomorrow". Although he himself admits that writing isn't his greatest asset, the book is very readable and accessible, and of direct interest to everyone with left-wing sympathies. Albert tells us everything, from his family background to his activism at MIT (where he was expelled for being succesful at resisting the Vietnam War), from his failed PhD attempt in Economics to his collective publishing undertaking known as South End Press, and much more.

The format of the book is a series of short vignettes, most of them no more than two or three pages, where Albert tells us of some experience he has had and the important lesson for left-wing activism he learned from it. Although many of these insights and experiences truly are useful and interesting to read (for me as a young leftist), it can get tiresome after a while: sometimes the "moral of the story" gets a little too pushy. Michael Albert also describes some of his theoretical work in colloquial terms, explaining why he ditched Marxism (in my view not a very convincing point), how he came to the theory of the "coordinator class" and its importance for his worldview, and the struggles he has had with academia. He has a remarkable array of friends who are well-known in left-wing circles, such as Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Howard Zinn, which lends additional color to the book. Also described are his many collaborations with his erstwhile best friend Robin Hahnel, many of which are quite good books - it is sad to read that their friendship has ended.

Albert's many experiences in leftist activism, which he has been involved in more or less non-stop for some four decades, are invaluable for radical thinkers and doers today. His criticisms of many persistent errors on the left, such as disdain for working-class interests and activities like sports and television, ring true, and the expansive amount of self-criticism in this book is commendable and rare for memoirs. The book could have used a better editor, though. There are some odd sentences here and there, some parts are quite repetitive, and thee are also absolutely baffling errors: for example, when Albert describes being given an award on behalf of the President of the Italian Republic (from context this seems to have been in 2004), he then comments that this was "at the time the proto-fascist Enrico Berlinguer". But Berlinguer was the chairman of the Communist Party of Italy, so not a "proto-fascist" by any stretch, had been dead for twenty years, and was never in his life President of Italy! In reality, the nonpartisan Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was President in 2004. This is just an example, but it shows that the book needed a double-checking before publishing. Otherwise, a good read.½

Michael Albert is an important thinker who takes us beyond radical denunciations and pretentious 'analysis' to a thoughtful, profound meditation on what a good society can be like."-Howard Zinn

"It is to Michael Albert's everlasting credit that he has worked tirelessly to grapple with the very difficult questions of what a truly democratic economy might look like, and how it might work. Albert's thoughtful contribution deserves wide attention."-Robert W. McChesney

In this lucid political memoir, veteran anti-capitalist activist Michael Albert offers an ardent defense of the project to transform global inequality. Albert, a uniquely visionary figure, recounts a life of uncompromised commitment to creating change one step at a time. Whether chronicling the battles against the Vietnam War waged on Boston campuses or the challenges of creating living, breathing alternative social models, Albert brings a keen and unwavering sense of justice to his work, pointing the way forward for the next generation.

About the Author
Michael Albert is a longtime activist, speaker, and writer, is co-editor of ZNet and co-founder of Z Magazine. He also co-founded South End Press and has written numerous books and articles. He developed along with Robin Hahnel the economic vision called participatory economics, or parecon for short.

So you want to be a radical … but you're not sure what to believe in. Marxism seems discredited, you don't quite trust anarchists and the "smash the state" rhetoric and although patriarchy and white-supremacy are certainly real parts of the problem, they are not the only problem.

Well, the folks over at Z (Z Magazine) have a solution. It's not really anything new, but rather a reworking and meshing of many older theories. The authors argue that the serious flaw of many of the old radical left visions was their "monism." Marxism claimed the economy as the central social field and all else as "superstructure." The practical effect was that Marxists ignored the problems of women and people of color beyond the economy. Anarchists and radical feminists had analogous problems.

Liberating theory suggests that their are four, equally important, sphere's of society: economic, political, kinship and cultural. The authors argue that the institutions of these four spheres are interconnected and (most often) mutually reinforcing. Therefore struggle for revolution can not occur in one, ignoring the rest.

The debates in this book seem to me a bit old. Opposition to patriarchy and racism have permeated most of the left and there has been a recent resurgence of class and political issues with the stirrings of organized labor, Seattle, D.C. and the new third parties. So it seems to me many people now see the value of working on multiple fronts and inclusiveness.

However, these movements are also largely bereft of long term vision. This book, despite its dated quality, could provide a good foundation for such a vision.

I bought this book hoping to be blown away (rave reviews, my own attitudes toward Capitalism, etc.). I left the reading thoroughly underwhelmed. Albert, normally a decent writer, is a bad-to-moderate writer at best with this effort. And if Chomsky is right, that this "is the most serious effort I know to provide a very detailed possible answer to some of these questions, crucial ones, based on serious thought and careful analysis" (these questions being "what alternative form of social organization can be imagined that might overcome the grave flaws -- often real crimes -- of contemporary society in more far-reaching ways than short-term reform"), then we have a long, long way to go.

I don't know if you can understand how much I wanted to be wowed by this book.½