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Looking Forward. By Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel
6. Participatory Allocation |
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... It is clear that someone (some institution) has to tell the producer about what the users require. If that I someone' is not the impersonal market mechanism it can only be a hierarchical superior. There are horizontal links (market), there are vertical links (hierarchy). What other dimension is there? Of course, the producers are also consumers, and vice versa, but an inescapable division of labor and of function imply that this is so only at the top of an all-inclusive hierarchical pyramid. -Alec Nove The Economics of feasible Socialism
It is no longer enough to point out what we don't like, we have to work out 'what sort of society we do want'... -Sheila Rowbotham Dreams and Dilemmas
The bureaucratic centralist form of planning, in which what those at the top receive from below is principally only passive factual information and ,questions,' while what they hand down are actual imperatives, stamps the mechanism by which tasks are allotted to individuals. It is a point of principle that people do not have to seek tasks for themselves, recognize and deal with problems, but they are rather assigned to tasks as duties. -Rudolph Bahro
How can one show that resources used for library A should not go to library B, or for that matter to improve a science laboratory or the diet of children in kindergartens in Kampuchea? Or that the provision of a better telescope for an observatory is more or less important than building a new bridge, growing more carrots, investing in a new cement works, or increasing the size of coffee plantations? -Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism
When the workers are society they will regulate their labor, so that the supply and demand shall be genuine, not gambling; the two will then be com mensurate, for it is the same society which demands that also supplies; there will be no more artificial famines then, no more poverty amidst over production, amidst too great a stock of the very things which should supply poverty and turn it into well being. In short there will be no waste and therefore no tyranny. -William Morris How We Live and How We Might Live
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CENT: You claim central planning subverts participatory aims, but your vision would only yield chaos. Your model is so cumbersome that any sensible person would prefer mine or Mark's. You don't really mean for participatory economics to be other than a provocation, do you?
PE: I mean it to be a superior allocation system.
CAP: It's hard to believe you're serious.
PE: What makes you think participatory economics won't work?
MARK: Who will agree to so many meetings? People won't attend, and if you force them to, they'll be so put out they'll either muck things up or slit their wrists in frustration.
CAP: I agree. Assuming I don't starve waiting for food, I would approach your economy as a gigantic game I would play by giving misinformation, couching my proposals to elicit desired responses, and lying about my motives to win excessive requests. Eventually I wouldn't do anything I didn't want to whether I had promised to or not. Your system's a joke.
PE: The joke is that many people behave as you've just described in your economies, but not even you would behave that way in my economy. Of course all manner of obnoxious dealings occur in capitalist and coordinator economies. What Cap, Cent, and you too, Mark, expect participatory actors to do is only a transplanted version of how workers and consumers operate in your economies: everyone playing every opportunity for all its worth, trying to push themselves ahead regardless of the impact on others. But other than spite, what leads you to predict such problems in participatory economies? In a participatory economy one can't cheat to get rich or even to escape work, except maybe by faking illness. Remember, it's your neighbors and workmates you'd have to fool. Not a boss on a cruise in the Caribbean or a planner 3,000 miles away. Given that each person winds up with a roughly average set of burdens and benefits, the real issue is having a say in what that average will be, deciding whether to borrow or loan, and determining the particular components of one's own work and consumption. Misrepresentation is self-defeating.
MARK: There is something to what you say-in fact, examining it without prejudice, all you've done is replace markets with a primitive barter system. And in some respects you've come closer to the "ideal" sought in free market exchange than free marketeers because you've eliminated monopoly, monopsony, cartels, and various technical problems associated with markets...
PE: ... More important, the new system eliminates the antisocial bias of markets...
MARK: ... But we're not talking about establishing a system to work on some tiny island or for a group of friends going on a two-month outing. It doesn't mean much that you've overcome difficult problems present in realistic models by proposing an alternative only applicable to tiny economies where everyone can know everything. What about allocating goods and services for an economy with millions of actors and hundreds of thousands of products? What is the information burden in that context? Do you seriously believe we are all going to carefully choose among all available product options?
PE: Exactly. If we group products so that similar items are considered under one label-alcoholic beverages, beef, shirts (dress, heavy, and light), cars (large and small), trips (by time and distance), records, books-and if we eliminate all products that have little use value, and if goods aren't made to wear out so we don't replace everything so often; is there really too much to assess? Do you realize that right now, in our society, four or five credit companies have files on upward of 50 million people and use those files actively? Hard as it may be to believe, moving and managing
information, summarizing it, averaging it, and otherwise shaping it into useful formats that people can relate to won't be a big deal.
And regarding assessing purchases in advance, actually much of what is produced in modem economies is bought by companies and other institutions that already pass judgment on alternative possibilities well in advance, as, for example, when General Motors estimates car production and puts in orders for rubber, steel, etc. As far as time and energy is concerned, this not only can be done, it is done, though, particularly in market economies, often using the wrong data. I ought to also mention that as a bonus there will be no question of different brand names since whole industries will be internally coordinated to use the best available techniques and create a diversity of products of the highest quality. Instead of competition breeding innovation, special workplaces and teams in each, workplace will have this responsibility.
CENT: But who can sit down and list everything he or she wants for a whole year? And who would want to?
PE: You will sit at a computer console and go over a list of your consumption for last year and consider expected changes in society's total product and indicative prices for this year. In addition, you'll access some information about what is entailed in making products, and what their advantages and disadvantages may be. You'll punch out a personal consumption plan, alter it some, and then make it your first proposal. And yes, you will be able to go to showrooms to see new products and to try out ones you are unfamiliar with, choosing models with different refinements, even though you don't bother with such details at the planning stage.
CAP: He's raving...
PE: Nonsense. Shopping around might take time, but that's true now, too. Settling on a first proposal after shopping around might take as little as a few sessions of a few hours each or, in any event, less than thirty hours spread over the course of three weeks. For most people it won't take as long as filling out income tax forms now, or as the time spent dealing now with loans and bills over a few months, none of which delightful pastimes will exist in participatory economies.
No more driving to 3 stores looking for bargains. No more clipping coupons and licking green stamps. And Cent, no more standing in lines that you have not figured out how to get rid of in 70 years of vying. Consider how much time people spend shopping now-not just pleasantly browsing, but trying to find bargains, getting food each week in crowded supermarkets, or waiting on line for service. Think about a whole year's worth of that and then think about the time it would take to work on your participatory proposal and how much more interesting the latter project would be.
Yes, you would also have to update your proposal during iterations, 10 hours max, each time. Certainly some of the council meetings where you consume or work would be lengthy andexasperating. But for consumption planning, in any case, you can not attend or leave whenever you choose. Once a plan was set, subsequent shopping would be infrequent and subsequent workplace decision making would be without the hassles of catering to bosses. Much of what we seek to consume will be delivered to council outlets or even communities. Imagine the time that will save.
MARK: But what we want each week will continually change. Even if your slack and update techniques allow plans to accommodate the whole population, regarding weekly deliveries I certainly won't be able to decide in advance what I want every week unless I know when I'm going to have guests, when I'm going to eat out, and so on, a whole year in advance. Nobody knows that.
PE: That's true, so in our society we will put in orders for food deliveries on a monthly or weekly basis, whatever makes sense. And even though your order may fluctuate each week, it is averaged with the orders of everyone else in your neighborhood, so shippers are less likely to be surprised by bulk orders. The whole idea of averages allowing localized fluctuations with minimal inconvenience to producers works rather similarly in market and centrally planned economies.
For example, imagine that in a market economy everyone unpredictably decides they want twice as much milk, or shoes, or whatever. They would encounter delays probably worse than in participatory economies because the participatory model has much better communicative facilities. But if I were to offer this as a weakness of markets, Mark and Cap would just laugh it off. These things don't happen any more than other freak events of low probability. So why bring them up only when criticizing participatory planning? It wastes time and obscures truth. We would only have a problem if we had no means for updating plans in light of changed circumstances, tastes, etc. But we do have such means in the participatory system.
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