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It is necessary with bold spirit and in good conscience to save civilization....
We must halt the dissolution that corrupts the roots of human society.
The bare and barren tree can be made green again. Are we not ready?
-Antonio Gramsci
In the book
you've just read we've described many details of a new economy, but
of course much is still missing.
Occasionally
we have dealt implicitly with an issue, but no explicit treatment appears.
Other times, undoubtedly, we haven't had the foresight to recognize
issues. More important, economics isn't everything and we have said
practically nothing about kinship, culture, politics, ecology, and international
relations. Here we note some of "what's missing" that requires
further work.
Economics
There are many
alternative approaches to organization and decision-making that might
be employed in different versions of participatory economics. We have
offered only an example or two in each instance. But there are other
matters as well. One important question is whether there should be special
institutional features to safeguard the ecology. Will self-management
and the new motivations of participatory planning suffice? Or will additional
structures be needed? Suppose people need to evaluate a major investment
with long term environmental benefits but which makes contemporary work
more onerous. In participatory planning each actor has a say, proportionate
to the effect he or she feels. Who speaks for future generations?
Or suppose we
discover in the year 2029 that a particular computer monitor damages
the optic nerves of its users. Are people who used the monitor entitled
to compensation? Should the planning process reassess work complexes
for prior years and award those who worked with these monitors better
than average complexes until equity is attained? If the answer is yes
for the health damaging monitors, what about less extreme cases? Must
there be a continual regrading of everyone's past contributions and
recalculation of future responsibilities so that everyone bears a fair
burden and enjoys a fair return in light of corrected evaluations of job complexes?
We also did
not address the issue of children's budgets and economic rights. Should
each additional child entitle his or her parent, parents, or guardians
a whole new budget allotment or only a partial one? Should the size
of the additional allotment vary with the age of the child? Should retired
workers get a full budget allotment? What are the implications of different
options for people's incentives to have children or retire? If dependents
have rights regarding how their budgets are spent and if guardians/parents
violate those rights, what recourse do dependents have? Could these
matters be handled differently in different cultures or locales, or
is only one solution consistent with equity, self management, and variety?
While we have
described many aspects of a participatory economy, we did not model
participatory planning mathematically or prove "convergence and
efficiency properties." We refer readers concerned that it is impossible
to generate indicative prices with the properties we claim for them,
or that convergence and efficiency could not be achieved via participatory
planning, to our companion volume, The
Political Economy of Participatory Economics (Princeton University
Press, 199 1). There we provide rigorous proofs of "convergence
and efficiency properties" under diverse assumptions and discuss
the relevance of conclusions based on such models. Similarly, we have
not spent as much time as some readers might wish distinguishing our
model from other more familiar systems based on central planning and
markets. But the companion volume does this and we saw no need to repeat
the arguments here.
We also refrained
from reviewing historical experiences that bear on the feasibility and
desirability of participatory economics. Yes, the discussion of Northstart
Press is based on experiences of South End Press, this book's publisher,
where, within the limits imposed by operating in a capitalist economy,
participatory economic principles and procedures are enacted. But what
about Mondragon in Spain, or the experience of the Spanish anarchists
before the Second World War? What about experiments undertaken in China,
Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Poland? What about employee-managed enterprises,
cooperatives, or experiments in communal living in the U.S. and elsewhere?
These undoubtedly harbor lessons that could help refine participatory
economic vision. Examining such experiences to further understand economic
equality, self management, and variety should, therefore, be a worthwhile
undertaking.
A final critical matter addressed without practical evidence being offered
is whether a participatory economy will really work. To verify a vision's
worth certainly entails thinking hard about the vision and its components
in the manner undertaken in this book. But before embarking on a full-scale
construction involving a new physical or chemical design, serious people
not only think hard about the situation, they also do experiments with
simulations and/or scale models of partial implementations Following
the same pattern, ways should be found to run simulations and to implement
parts of participatory economics to test hypotheses about its rules
and behavior and to verify its predicted features. Yet we have said
little about these types of verification in this book. Moreover, in
our companion volume, The Political Economy of Participatory Economics,
while we describe a methodology for undertaking experiments and
simulations, we do not undertake the tasks themselves. This work remains
to be done
A particularly
useful and manageable task would be to create a computer simulation
to mimic the operations of a participatory economy. This would permit
testing the effects of different assumptions about consumers' and producers'
preferences and behaviors, different rules for revising proposals, different
procedures for calculating indicative prices, etc. Such a program might
also allow individual users to interact on their own PCs as if they
were a consumer or producer in a participatory economy planning their
economic involvements for a year. This could make more tangible the
activities involved in participatory planning.
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