Looking Forward. By Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel

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  11. Conclusion and Transition

 An hour's listening disclosed the fanatical intolerance of minds sealed against new ideas, new facts, new feelings, new attitudes, new hints at ways to live. They denounced books they had never read, people they had never known, ideas they could never understand, and doctrines whose names they could not pronounce. Communism, instead of making them leap forward with fire in their hearts to become masters of ideas and life, had frozen them at an even lower level of ignorance than had been theirs before they met Communism.

 -Richard Wright

To present the Russian regime as "socialist" or as a "worker's state" as do both the left and the right in an almost universal complicity, or even to discuss its nature in reference to socialism to determine at what points and to what degree it deviates from it, represents one of the most horrendous enterprises of mystification known in history.

-Cornelius Castoriadis

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold Greater than their mighty armies magnified a thousand fold;  We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old, For the Union makes us strong.

 -Solidarity Forever

Alignment With Other Movements

Economic and other activists must evolve interactive strategies. This will have profound implications for the ways economic struggles treat issues of gender, race, ecology, and international relations, not only at the level of demands and appeals to constituencies, but at the level of organizational forms and movement culture. One principle that should be applied in all movement work is respect for the legitimacy and strategic priority of liberatory struggles in all areas of life. There must be no presumption on the part of participatory economic activists that their struggle is more important than efforts to transform gender, political, race, ecological, or international relations. The success of participatory economic movements rests on the successes of liberatory movements organizing to transform other spheres of social life just as much as the success of those movements depends on a participatory transformation of the economy. Presumptions about the theoretical and strategic priority of class over politics, race, and gender in progressive social change is unwarranted and has long proved counter-productive to establishing movement relations needed for eliminating political, gender, race, and class oppressions.

These implications undermine fundamental beliefs of Marxist and Leninist strategic approaches, as we discussed in the Prologue. Therefore, we believe the vision elaborated in this book has profound implications for the strategic approaches movements should employ to attain new goals. Of course it will be activists in all phases of economic struggle who will refine the participatory vision, as well as elaborate strategies for attaining it.

Transition from Coordinator to Participatory Economics

We have argued that markets and central planning impede participatory economic values, and that societies that do not have councils, balanced job complexes, payment according to effort, and popular participation in allocation do not elevate workers and consumers to power over their own lives. In other books (see page 6) we have considered these matters, as well as other issues of strategy, in greater depth, addressing relations between workers and coordinators, and among factions of coordinators in the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. We explained that often struggle continues over the "coordinator versus the workers' road" long after capitalism is overthrown. Two questions arise:

1. What might a transition from a coordinator to a participatory economy look like?

2. How could workers advance the cause of participatory economics in post-capitalist settings where coordinator rule is not fully entrenched?

The experience of Solidarity in its early years in Poland provides information regarding the first question. Solidarity's early efforts included building a network of councils based primarily in production yet sensitive to consumers needs. Further, Solidarity's early demands, and the tone and language of the movement, emphasized not only material changes affecting income distribution and investment policies, but also qualitative changes in social relations regarding justice and participation.

Indeed, the experience of Solidarity in the early 1980s, and of movements in Hungary in the 1950s and Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, as well as their subsequent failures, suggest that many of the strategic guidelines and pitfalls outlined above for transition from capitalism to participatory economics apply also to the transition from coordinator to participatory economics. On the one hand, this shows how incomplete the guidelines are, since coordinator and capitalist economies are quite different and detailed programs for transforming these two types of economies must differ in important respects. But the overlap also shows that struggles for full economic liberation waged in the two kinds of economy are similar in important respects as well.

In a coordinator economy, as in a capitalist one, participatory strategy must emphasize:

1. Formation of producer and consumer councils.

2. Reforms that improve the terrain from which new struggles are waged, that empower working people, and that demystify expertise.

3. Increasing solidarity among workers, consumers, and liberatory movements in all spheres of social life.

4. Definition of equitable job complexes.

5. Democratic dissemination of information and skills.

6. Criticism of markets and central planning and espousal of participatory planning as a superior alternative.

Whether we are talking about transforming a capitalist economy or a coordinator economy, regrettably we are talking about an economic revolution that will likely involve intense class struggle. However differently they will defend themselves, capitalists and coordinators are both likely to steadfastly cling to power and privilege. As the "Revolutions of 1989" have demonstrated, transitions between coordinator and capitalist economies, in either direction, can occur without excessive disruption if large segments of ruling elites in either system fall on hard times and become convinced that change is in their interests as well. But transitions from either coordinator or capitalist economies to a participatory economy will inevitably be much more confrontational. While an oversimplification, the reason is obvious. Changing elites-especially when many individuals can successfully change one elite hat for another-is a different affair from eliminating privileged elites altogether. In any case, minimizing the human cost of liberation will be a high priority of strategic planning.

In a situation such as Cuba's, where coordinator and working class tendencies continue to vie with one another with no final resolution between them, there may be moves to reduce income differentials without any effort to define equitable job complexes. Different factions may struggle over what types of incentives to use and the role of planners. The national government may employ authoritarian central forms alongside more democratic local forms. Struggles against chauvinist consciousness may be waged even while patriarchal divisions of labor are being recreated in the economy. Experiments in cultural diversity might coexist with efforts to impose artistic or literary uniformity. Transition could conceivably occur without too great disruption, as compared to the situation for established coordinator and capitalist economies, if working class forces gained strength in the state and economy simultaneously.

But whatever other factors might influence the balance of forces between those favoring liberating outcomes and those favoring new hierarchies, in any such situation, in all existing economies, one disadvantage progressives face is that, to date, the only well-established models for revolutionary social transformation have emphasized nonliberating forms. When the dust of battle settles and the time for construction arrives, the only textbooks and blueprints available deny the possibility of egalitarian and participatory outcomes. Struggle always seems to pit pragmatists with answers against activists with hopes. One side presents blueprints for how to organize the economy and its units; the other side complains that the blueprints fall short of liberatory expectations. We hope our attempt to flesh out the participatory vision will give substance to libertarian hopes.