It has been noted by some activists that the list of articles, essays, books on what’s wrong with society, when piled on top of each other, would reach the moon. Yet, the articles, essays, books on alternatives to capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, etc. wouldn’t reach past a persons ankles. Over the years, Z Magazine has published as many articles on alternatives as we could find and that could fit in our pages. This year we will be attempting to increase the visibility of alternative visions in our pages with a special section of articles that address the question “What Do We Want.” If we have an alternative or alternatives, what is it, what are they? We invite our readers to join the discussion by sending in their ideas and comments.

• To explore ideas about long-term vision and related long- and short-term strategy and programs with the hope of reaching agreements and/or clarifying persisting differences
  
  
• To develop a basis for working together
  
  
• To facilitate joint projects and shared vision/strategy
  
  
• To generate enough agreement to initiate continuing and/or enlarging group connections
  
  
• To display all related essays, proposals, debates, etc. so as to incorporate ever wider circles of activists in the collective process of arriving at shared vision and strategy, then acting on it.
  

—Most graphics in this piece are by Matt Wuerker.

 

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A Parecon/Parsoc Perspective

Imagine a set of claims about vision and strategy for a participatory society. Imagine each claim is refined over time until the remaining list is important enough that 40 countries each send from 5 to 50 activists to a 5-day gathering of roughly 1,000 who further refine and then broadly agree on a final document. Imagine that this conference in turn conceives and promotes a proposal for an International Organization for a Participatory Society, including an interim structure, program, and methods of recruitment and action based on an initial 40 national chapters—then proceeding from there. Imagine that a year or so later 3,000-5,000 delegates from 60 countries representing 75,000-125,000 members gather to finalize a broadly-shared vision, structure, process, strategy, and program of this rapidly growing organization. It’s a nice image, but can the Reimagining Society Project generate the shared claims needed to go forward? To argue that it can, here are some tentative claims.

Elevate Vision: My first claim seeks to refute the mainstream view that “there is no alternative” while also transcending the left view that even if an alternative is possible, it is not a priority and/or that unity around producing a convincing practical vision is virtually impossible. Rather, I maintain that only substance can counter cynicism and only by knowing where we want to go can we take steps to get us there. People who reject developing and sharing vision of a better society argue that vision might fuel sectarianism, overextend our knowledge, divert attention from important concerns, and might be monopolized by an elite using knowledge to accrue power.

Nonetheless, we should not leave vision to narrow academic groups or other elite formations. We should instead develop, advocate, and use vision flexibly and widely. We should welcome constructive criticism and seek continual innovation. Our antidote to misleading and elitist vision must be an inspiring, popularly-shared vision—while welcoming continual innovation and rejecting jargon or posturing.

Elevate Ethics: To compellingly argue for a new society, we need to describe the key institutional features that make it liberatory. But before we do that we must settle on values. Our values provide a measuring stick for how institutions might be organized. So our values come before institutions, as a moral and intellectual foundation.

Social life is endlessly diverse and complex. Most decisions about policies and structures are for people to determine in future times in light of their evolving circumstances and preferences. It would overstep our rights and responsibilities to get too detailed about the future. All that we need are the essential features.

But what values can help us with all this? And how do we get a list of values down to a workable length? People have dozens, maybe even hundreds, of values they favor. Undoubtedly, there is no single answer to picking a manageable subset that encompasses all our central desires. But different short lists can have the same social implications, so movements and organizations can arrive at the same destination despite having started with different values in the forefront. For example, would any leftist deny that people should have control of their lives without diminishing the same level of influence for others? Or that societies should deliver a fair allocation of the benefits and costs of social life, including fair resolution of disputes and effective use of assets to meet needs and develop potentials? Or the central importance of mutual aid and solidarity, of diversity in outcomes and methods, including ideas, lifestyles, life choices, etc.? Would any leftist deny the need for ecological balance? Would any leftist deny the importance of horizontal participatory relations in place of hierarchical and top-down elitist relations in all spheres of social life?

Multi-Focused: Surely a new and better world should include new and better production, consumption, and allocation; new and better laws, adjudication, and collective action; new and better relations of kin, family, sexuality, and nurturing; new and better relations of community, religion, race, and culture; new and better ecological relations and practices; and new and better international relations; as well as, of course, new relations in more specific parts of life, such as innovations specific to science, art, sports, education, health, and so on. Given that we need social vision to inspire and guide practice; given the importance of all sides of life, it follows that we need vision for economics, kin relations and socializing, cultural and community relations, legislative relations, ecology, and international relations—and not just for one or another of these. Being multi-focused not only says all these realms are centrally important, but that there is nothing to be gained by trying to prioritize them.

Win Classlessness: To have classes means to have groups that by their position in the economy have different access to income and influence, benefitting at one another’s expense. Attaining classlessness means establishing an economy in which everyone by their economic position is equally able to participate, utilize capacities, and accrue income, and in which no one can accrue excessive income or influence at the expense of others.

We cannot eliminate the distinction between those who own the means of production and those who do not own the means of production unless no one owns the means of production everyone owns the means of production equally. But class division can also arise from a division of labor that affords some producers, who I call the coordinator class, far greater influence and income than others, who I call the working class. The important thing is that capitalism also has a third class (besides owners and workers), the coordinator class that sell their ability to perform specific tasks like workers, but have great power and status built into their structural position in the economic division of labor.

Our movements and projects must not only be anti-capitalist, they must also be pro-classlessness. They must prioritize both eliminating the monopoly of capitalists on productive property and also the monopoly of coordinators on empowering work.

New Economic Values: First, we should also seek positive economic values such as equitable distribution—each person who is able towork receives back from society in proportion to what he or she expends.

Second, economies affect not just income, but also relations among people. We would presumably prefer to have people concerned with and caring about one another in a cooperative social partnership, rather than seeking to fleece one another in an antisocial competitive shootout. Our second economic value is therefore solidarity and mutual aid.

Third, economies also affect our range of available options. Since most humans are social beings who can enjoy vicariously what others do that we cannot and who can benefit from avoiding over-dependence on narrow options, then diversity enriches possibilities and protects against errors. Our third value is therefore diversity.

The act of decision making itself affects us by influencing our mood, our sense of involvement and personal worth. Our fourth value is self-management—people having a say in decisions in proportion as those decisions affect us.

What an economy should do is reveal the full and true social costs and benefits of economic choices, including accounting for their impact on ecology. Our fifth value is ecological balance.

Lastly, economies also affect the social output we have available for people to enjoy. Indeed, this is the reason economies exist. If an economy honors the above values, but wastes our energy and resources, it unnecessarily diminishes our prospects. Even as an economy operates in accord with equity, diversity, self-management, and ecological balance, it should also efficiently utilize available natural, social, and personal assets to meet needs and develop potentials without undo waste, avoidable byproduct problems, or misdirection of purpose. Our sixth value is efficiency, understood as meeting needs and developing potentials in accord with self-managed choices without wasting assets or incurring avoidable costs along the way.

Reject Capitalism and 20th Century Socialism: Seeking classlessness and the values listed above should compel us to reject private ownership of productive property, corporate divisions of labor, top-down decision making, markets, and central planning. For all these economic institutions, the propensity to produce class division in turn homogenizes options within classes thereby violating diversity, and creates a war of class against class, thereby violating solidarity.

New Institutions: Rejecting capitalist and other oppressive economic structures leaves us needing to advocate new economic institutions. For workers and consumers to influence decisions requires venues through which we can express and tally our preferences—i.e., self-managing councils and balanced job complexes. If each person gets a mix of empowering and disempowering tasks, so that each participant is comparably empowered and thus comparably prepared to participate in self-management as the rest, the division of labor basis for class division is removed. Allocation should be accomplished by self-managing worker and consumer councils and it should be undertaken by cooperative and informed collective negotiation. All this implies a defining institutional feature of participatory economics, participatory planning.

Revolutionary Organization: Creating institutions in the present that incorporate seeds of the future makes sense partly as an experiment to learn more about our aims, partly as a model to inspire hope and support, partly as a way to do the best possible job of fulfilling participants now, and partly to begin developing tomorrow’s infrastructure today, including incorporating council organization, balanced job complexes, equitable remuneration, and self management in their organizational structures.

Today’s Tasks: Change will not come via an unfolding inevitable tendency in current relations that sweep us, uncomprehending, into a better future. Change will come, instead, via self-conscious actions by huge numbers of people bringing to bear our creativity and energy in a largely unified manner that will incorporate continuous and lively internal debate, which will continuously develop overarching shared aims. It is incumbent on us to collectively seek wider agreement, to add additional spheres of social life, and to solidify into an organizational and programmatic unity, in accord with shared views.

Michael Albert is co-founder of South End Press and Z Communications. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Parecon: Life After Capitalism, Realizing Hope, and Remembering Tomorrow (a memoir).

 

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Global Strategy
 
Agency Trumps Structure

By Janet Cherry

Buzz Aldrin’s Unified SpaceVision recommends that human beings unite across national boundaries (under the leadership of the USA, of course) to colonize other planets (starting with Mars) in our solar system. Klaatu, on the other hand (the alien in the 2008 movie The Day The Earth Stood Still) considers intervention from outside the solar system as necessary to remove the destructive influence of human beings from earth in a last-ditch attempt to save this precious resource, one of few that can support complex life forms, before it is too late. Klaatu (or director Scott Derrickson) in my view is closer to the mark than Buzz: the problem is not the planet earth. The problem is one species and that is us.

The question is how to achieve what is needed. Strategy, not description of the problem. A plan of action to attain a broad vision, not a detailed construction of an unattainable vision. My premise as optimist, rationalist, humanist, and pragmatist is the conviction that human beings have the potential to organize society in a way that is both sustainable and just. Sustainable entails changes in patterns of production, distribution, and consumption. Justice involves first an end to warfare and second a reorganizing of the global polity around the principles of participation and human rights. Economic, social, and political solutions cannot be separated out; they must be tackled simultaneously—dare I say holistically?

This can only be done effectively on a global scale, through a grand strategy; a strategy conceived and implemented by people who take control of the situation. The strategy has to be inclusive first and foremost of the agendas of the following: the poor, the South, the unemployed, subsistence farmers, indigenous peoples, women, and children. It must be premised on survival, access to resources, and fundamental freedoms. It will not succeed if it is an agenda of privilege. It will not succeed if based on competition, ruthless or regulated. Cooperation for survival is not an idealistic dream, but an evolutionary necessity. The strategy entails radical changes in patterns of production, consumption, and distribution. Such a strategy, moreover, demands and relies on low-cost or free access to electronic communication and on freedom of information. It entails the creation and expansion of alternative financial institutions; of self-sufficiency in food production at the regional level; and regional markets for distribution of resources. It is a strategy that is collective, global, and anti-nationalist; premised not on blaming certain countries or governments, but of putting pressure on and taking control of all governments.

This strategy requires a united, coordinated global effort of millions, acting in concert from the grassroots, with a common vision but with flexibility and creativity at the local level. This entails a multi-tiered strategy. Not just a small is beautiful approach where personal and then collective but local initiatives change the way we live. These are important and form the building blocks of a grand strategy which involves—on the next tier—pressure on local authorities; pressure for responsive local government, responsible use of resources, and participatory planning, in order to take control of our local resources and all aspects of our lives.

The next tier is the regional level—going beyond narrow national interests to share resources and markets on a regional level, building self-sufficiency, lessening dependence on international financial institutions (IFIs), global markets, and aid agencies. This involves pressure on our own governments—wherever they are, whatever their policies—to look beyond their narrow interests and adopt transnational strategies. A series of demands, at the local, regional, and international level—intersecting and reinforcing each other, never in conflict. Free clean water. Clean energy. Closure of coal power stations. Local, diverse, and accessible food production and distribution. Closure of arms manufacturing. Jet travel replaced by virtual communication. End to private vehicle ownership and manufacture and replacement with affordable clean-powered vehicles for family/community use. Communal facilities. Free primary health care. Reducing the power of financial institutions through community exchange networks, banking systems, savings clubs.

All these occur within a flexible, de-centralized political economy; regulation by international/state institutions, which set overall parameters/limits. Within these parameters, locally controlled economies allowing for maximum participation and variation, including communal, cooperative, personal/family property and combinations, with tax incentives and redistribution determined by local authorities which are democratic and accountable.

A Global Coalition

To implement such a strategy is not to create a new NGO or another local, regional, or global movement. These movements exist: from the World Social Forum to international and regional labor organizations, women’s networks, environmental and development networks, economic justice and fair trade networks, and NGOs working at a global level on environmental issues, survival of indigenous peoples, human rights, and war resistance. What would such a strategy entail? A global coalition, to obtain the cooperation and coordination of existing networks. Not to create a new movement, a splinter off an existing movement or a faction of a political tendency. To construct a broad vision around this common interest, and a strategy that can be implemented to achieve this vision.

Such a strategy would involve regional strategy teams to identify a series of campaigns. From a local level, to withdraw from existing institutions and practices, to establish alternative institutions, to take control of existing institutions where possible; to target local governments, to participate, plan, demand, and pressure them to adopt different practices. At a regional level, to share resources, end wars, create cooperative trade agreements, fair labor practices, close mining and weapons manufacturing down, and take control of resources—water, minerals, oil. And at an international level, to create alternative institutions of regulation, finance, fair trade, distribution of commodities. Such a multi-tiered strategy allows for maximum flexibility, creativity, and control from the bottom, with agreement on a minimum program of demands and action at the top level.

Tactics to be used in such a series of campaigns would be drawn from the arsenal of tried and tested methods used by social movements the world over: the withholding of ordinary people’s labor, time, money, and participation in the institutions that are unresponsive to the movement’s demands. Plus, the creation of alternative institutions and the contribution of ordinary people’s time and energy to making these institutions work. All that is needed is to link these tactics into an effective series of campaigns targeted at specific objectives; an incremental series of campaigns whereby people realize their power and take it back. And change the way in which society is organized.

What is needed is: (1) a broad vision; (2) a movement; (3) consistency in holding to that vision; (4) coordination across geographic boundaries; (5) consistency in strategy; (6) creativity in finding on-the-ground solutions; (7) pressure in shifting governments and international agencies in the necessary direction; and, finally, (8) a sense of urgency.

Janet Cherry was born and raised in South Africa. She is currently a senior lecturer at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, in the Department of Development Studies. She is also a trainer for the Centre for Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) based in Belgrade, Serbia.

 

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By Ann Ferguson

To think about a better world, we need to theorize a bit about what is possible, given human nature, as well as what is attainable, given human history. While many Marxist-oriented thinkers have assumed that human nature is totally plastic and depends on the structure of economic relations as to whether it is basically self-interested, altruistic, or community-oriented, many feminists of all stripes have argued that it is important as well to think about the structure of family, sexual, and love relations to understand people’s priorities and proclivities in their intimate relations with each other.

In addition, I would argue that we need to posit a third area that is key to understanding human interpersonal power relations, and that is our racial and ethnic relations with each other in variously structured community relations. Given how human history is littered with examples of wars and oppressive relations such as slavery and imperialism of one tribe, nation, and/or self-identified ethnic or religious community over others, any vision of a better world needs to theorize how to combat racism, ethnicism, and the effects of previous imperialism in its model.

Political relations—the structured rules and practices of how human groups make decisions in a community that affect their lives—are a fourth area. We cannot ignore the difficult question of how to structure the state so that it allows both for representative and for participatory democracy. Only democracy from below by broad-based decentralized social movements can counter entrenched elites.

These four sites: economic relations, political relations, love relations, and community relations are important to our understanding of how power relations come to be structured unequally and oppressively. Any vision of a better society that can challenge these historical inequalities needs to have strategies to challenge unequal control of labor power, political power, love power, and community power.

Feminists have critiqued the economic, political, and sexual power that capitalist white supremacist patriarchy has given to men in relation to women of their class, race, and ethnic groups. We also insist that, as the personal is the political, the domains of sexuality and family relations, and the gender division of labor in productive as well as caring labor, need to be seen as primary sites of unequal gender and sexual power relations for women and LGBTI people. These unequal power relations will not automatically be eliminated by bringing about some version of economic socialism, whether it is centrally planned or decentralized council socialism or market socialism. None of the attempts to create socialism, including the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, and Cuba, have succeeded in equalizing relations between women and men or heterosexuals and LGBTI people.

Strategy

It is heartening to think of the anti-capitalist solidarity networks that are already being forged globally against structural adjustment and the so-called “free trade” policies. The creation of new New Left coalitions—that have included the Zapatistas in Mexico, the MST in Brazil, and other social movements, which have connected through the World Social Forum process—is a hopeful sign. But I am concerned that what is being left out is the importance of the visions and strategy of gender, sexual, and race-ethnic equality within these movements. It should never be just some version of economic socialism or grassroots democracy that we put forward as an alternative vision to global capitalist globalization. Rather, both the vision and the strategy of organizing need to include ways of reconceiving gender, sexual, and race-ethnic structures that perpetuate inequalities in the world social formations of today.

For example, I have argued previously that eliminating male domination requires restructuring the relations between the so-called private sphere of the family and sexuality and the public sphere of wage labor. This will require that social movements and geographical communities begin to reorganize the caring labor in families and communities that is currently done on an unpaid basis by women, so that it is expected to be done by both men and women, including those men who are involved in political movements. Social movements of the left will also need to set new standards that encourage parity by gender for their political leaders, that challenge domestic and sexual violence against women by any of their members, and that advocate civil rights for LGBTI people, including gay marriage, adoption, domestic partner rights, etc.

The Zapatistas have already sought to change sexist aspects of the indigenous cultures by developing the Revolutionary Law of Women that encourages women’s education, rights to marriage by choice and political leadership, among other things. The Brazilian MST landless rural workers’ movement has developed a gender commission and adopted a rule that requires that men who commit domestic violence against their wives leave their squatter communities. The FAT independent trade union and workers’ cooperative movement in Mexico teaches activists to organize around women’s rights in communities as well as their members’ rights in paid work.

We need to demand that the organization of the state and economy acknowledge that both men and women have the right to care for children, sick people, and elders and that opportunities and economic and social supports be in place for people to be able to do this caring labor in the home and in the community without having to sacrifice their economic well-being to do so. We need to strategize how to bring about a change in the social division of public and private labor so as to replace the male breadwinner-female caregiver model with a universal caregiver model that expects all people to provide caring labor in a re-organized social order.

We must also not forget the role and continuing effects of European and U.S. imperialism and racism in taking over, enslaving, and racializing conquered peoples and nonwhite immigrants. Our vision of a reimagined socialism must include reparations in foreign aid to compensate for colonizer nations’ many years of economic exploitation of subjugated peoples, as well as Black and Native American reparations for U.S. descendants of slaves and indigenous peoples. Politically, our political deliberations must consider ways to give various subjugated racial and ethnic groups within nations adequate representative voice in representative democratic systems. Such measures could include political caucuses, but must also include cultural education that includes not only the tolerance called for by liberal, so-called multicultural education, but further measures of understanding and respect that seeks to incorporate aspects of minority cultural groups into mainstream legal and political processes.

Our ideal vision and strategic approach to creating a socially just society must tackle not only economic inequality and exploitation by class, but also gender, sexual, racial, and ethnic oppression, marginalization, and violence in the priorities we bring to bear in the social coalitions for radical change that we organize, so as to work for a reorganization of the social power relations of labor, love, community, and politics.

Ann Ferguson is a feminist philosopher and professor of Women’s Studies and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the author of Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality and Male Dominance (1989) and Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression and Revolution (1991).

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By Jessica Gordon Nembhard

In New Orleans, the worker cooperative movement, as well as the general cooperative movement, brings innovative democratic economic development strategies to a city and region in obvious need of new ideas and alternative strategies, particularly to better support and reinvigorate low-income communities and communities of color.

Many development challenges lend themselves to cooperative solutions. Resident ownership and community entrepreneurship address issues of the export of capital and industry from cities to suburbs and overseas. Credit unions and pooling of capital help to address the lack of banking services, redlining, and predatory lending in urban areas. Employee ownership (and some Employee Stock Ownership Plans-ESOPS) create and save decent, meaningful jobs, and promote workplace democracy, income generation, and wealth accumulation. Many inner-city worker-owned cooperatives lead their industries in providing living wages, often with health and vacation benefits, job stability and mobility, training, and self-management. Cooperative home ownership and Community Land Trusts address lack of affordable housing, rising property values, and abandoned properties as well as increasing community control of land and home ownership. Housing cooperatives expand home or apartment ownership to more people, addressing both financing and maintenance issues. Cooperative ownership is growing in the provision of social services such as home health care, health care, drug rehabilitation, childcare, as well as in fair trade, green jobs, and environmental sustainability.

Cooperative ownership also helps to address skill mismatches, lack of appropriate skills, and poor quality of education in some communities because cooperatives have a strong education mission and training record. Cooperatives build capacity among members, continuously educate and train their members to fulfill the needed expertise, and increase members’ own growth and contribution to the enterprise. Cooperatives also help to keep local resources and money circulating (and re-circulating) within a community. Cooperatives often develop and survive as a response to market failure and economic marginalization. Cooperative economic development has been successful as an urban as well as a rural economic development strategy to create jobs, increase incomes (and sometimes assets), and reduce poverty around the world. Although cooperative models are not well known or well publicized, the United Nations and the International Labor Organization have recently recognized the potential of cooperative enterprises for economic development and poverty reduction.

African Americans have a strong, but often hidden history of economic cooperation. New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta have played important roles in that history. The second largest contingent (after New York City) of charter members of the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League in the 1930s, for example, came from New Orleans. In 1886, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union established “exchanges” in New Orleans, Houston, Mobile, Norfolk, and Charleston, where members bought and sold low cost bulk items and borrowed money (from the membership’s pooled savings).

In addition, cooperative alternatives have been pursued continuously by Black communities in the Delta though continually thwarted by the “plantation bloc.” There were cooperative and worker-owned businesses in New Orleans before the recent catastrophe and the cooperative movement has been very much involved in relief efforts and rebuilding. African Americans have utilized cooperative ownership in good and bad times throughout U.S. history. After the Civil War, in Baltimore, Maryland, for example, where African American caulkers were considered the best at that craft, white caulkers felt threatened and tried to chase Black shipyard workers out of the state. White carpenters boycotted shipyards with African American caulkers, and white mobs attacked Black caulkers and stevedores on their way home. A group of prominent African Americans along with Black stevedores and caulkers started their own cooperative shipyard to protect their jobs and safety, and maintain their standard of living. According to WEB Du Bois, the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company survived as an integrated workplace for 18 years, and succeeded in integrating the all white unions at that time. One hundred and ten years later in Los Angeles, when Black bricklayers suffered persistent discrimination and under-representation in jobs and management, their union worked with the A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund and a private employee-ownership development agency to help them establish their own worker-owned construction company. In 1919, in Memphis, the Citizens’ Co-operative Stores operated cooperative meat markets.

The Commercial Department of the Bluefield Colored Institute in Bluefield, West Virginia formed a student cooperative store probably in 1925 to sell supplies the students and school needed and to give students business experience. After two years in business the cooperative paid all its debts and owned its own equipment and inventories. The store also began to pay dividends of 10 percent on purchases made to its members. The student members voted to use profits to pay for scholarships to the Secondary School and Junior College. Food from the ‘Hood, started in the 1990s in LA, is also a youth-owned cooperative business (selling salad dressing) that saves student members’ earnings to use for scholarships to college.

The Young Negroes’ Co-operative League is an example of a cooperative federation. It was founded in December 1930 by about 25-30 African American youth. Its goal was to form a coalition of local cooperatives and buying clubs loosely affiliated in a network of affiliate councils. By 1932 the League had formed councils in New York, Philadelphia, Monessen (PA), Pittsburgh, Columbus (OH), Cleveland, Cincinnati, Phoenix, New Orleans, Columbia (SC), Portsmouth (VA), and Washington, DC, with a total membership of 400. The Freedom Quilting Bee, a handicraft cooperative in Alberta, AL was established in 1966 because the women in share-cropping families in the area needed a more stable income. The women began selling quilts and using other entrepreneurial strategies after many of their families lost the plots they were sharecropping because of their Civil Rights activities (registering to vote and attending speeches and rallies). The cooperative bought 23 acres in 1968 to build the sewing plant. They also used the land to help member families who had been evicted from their farms.

Toxic Soil Busters is a youth-owned and run soil abatement and lead poisoning education business in Worcester, MA. Green Worker cooperatives combine worker ownership and green jobs in emerging environmental industries. Their first worker cooperative in the South Bronx, New York, ReBuilders Source is a recycle, reuse building supplies warehouse.

All of these cooperative enterprises have many things in common. Members come from marginalized communities and are not being served well or at all by prevailing market forces or government agencies. They need to generate income and build assets, and need control over their own economic lives and their communities in order to do so. They come together (often with the help of a leader or community organization), study their circumstances, study the alternatives, and pool their resources, talents, and capital. They launch businesses that address their needs and needs in their communities and that keep them in control through democratic participation and governance.

Given all the possible positive effects of cooperative ownership and the variety of models for how to initiate and sustain such development, cooperative economic development is a viable revitalization strategy.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard is a political economist and Associate Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in African American Studies at John Jay College, CUNY.

 

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By Robin Hahnel

What can those who want to replace the economics of competition and greed with the economics of equitable cooperation learn from those who struggled to build socialist economies in the 20th century? I think we should embrace our forebears’ goals—economic justice and economic democracy—and honor the memory of the millions of socialist militants who dedicated their lives to pursuing these goals, often at great personal cost. But I think we can also learn from our forerunners’ efforts and sacrifices what will not achieve these goals. Planning by an elite, no matter how well intentioned, will not achieve the historic goals of socialism.

It is far from obvious how comprehensive democratic planning should be organized. The traditional socialist vision of democratic planning remains blind to the need to provide workers in enterprises and consumers in neighborhoods with a considerable degree of autonomy over their own behavior. On the other hand, libertarian socialist and anarchist visions are blind to the need for carefully designed procedures to help producers and consumers—who should be autonomous in some regards, but not in others—plan activities that are highly interrelated both equitably and efficiently.

Ten years ago, socialists in Venezuela embarked on a new path and have accomplished a great deal. The norms of democracy have been scrupulously observed, major political initiatives have never lacked a popular mandate, and the building blocks for a new kind of socialist economy have been created. Educational Misiones, neighborhood health clinics, people’s food stores, worker cooperatives, participatory budgeting, municipal assemblies, nuclei of endogenous development, and communal councils together comprise what Venezuelans call their “social economy.” However, Bolivarian revolutionaries have yet to decide how to coordinate the activities of different elements in their social economy. While they are highly critical of market relations, markets remain the de facto mechanism for coordinating relations among most elements of the social economy. On the other hand, our Bolivarian comrades insist they have no interest in replacing markets with traditional central planning.

The Challenge

The challenge is how to empower worker councils and consumer councils while protecting the interests of others in the economy who are affected by what these councils do. The challenge is how to give groups of workers user rights over parts of society’s productive resources without allowing them to benefit disproportionately from productive resources that belong to and should benefit everyone. Market systems treat all economic decisions as if they affected only the buyer and seller since those are the only people involved in the market decision-making process, thereby disenfranchising all others who may also be affected. On the other hand, a democratic version of centralized planning, where the values of different final goods and services are determined by some kind of democratic voting procedure, treats all economic decisions as if they affected everyone equally, failing to permit workers who are more affected by a decision greater say than those who are less affected.

A Solution: Participatory Planning

The participatory planning procedure that is part of the model known as a “participatory economy” is designed to solve these problems. The participants in a participatory planning procedure are worker councils and federations, consumer councils and federations, and an Iteration Facilitation Board (IFB). Conceptually, the planning procedure is quite simple. (1) The IFB announces current estimates of the opportunity costs of using all resources, categories of labor, and capital stocks as well as current estimates of the social costs of producing all goods and services. (2) Consumer councils and federations respond with consumption proposals. Worker councils and federations respond with production proposals listing the outputs they propose to make and the inputs they need to make them. (3) The IFB calculates the excess demand or supply for each final good and service, capital good, natural resource, and category of labor, and adjusts the estimate of the opportunity cost or social cost up or down in proportion to the degree of excess demand or supply. (4) Using the new estimates of opportunity costs and social costs, consumer and worker councils and federations revise and resubmit their proposals. Individual worker and consumer councils must continue to revise their proposals until they submit a proposal that other councils vote to accept. The planning process continues until a feasible plan is reached.

Households submit requests for private consumption goods along with effort ratings household members received from their workmates to their neighborhood consumption councils. Consumption “allowances” for any children, students, and disabled or retired members of households are combined with the effort ratings of working adults and, if the ratings and allowances are sufficient to warrant the cost to society of producing the household consumption request, it is automatically approved. The neighborhood council can also approve requests in excess of what the effort ratings and allowances of a household justify if the council finds reason to do so. The consumption proposal of a neighborhood council consists of the sum total of approved requests for private consumption goods from its member households, plus any neighborhood public goods like sidewalks, playground equipment for a neighborhood park, etc. It is this neighborhood council consumption proposal that is submitted during each round of the planning process, along with the average effort ratings and allowances of all members of the neighborhood council. Federations of consumer councils also submit requests for public goods in each round used by all who live in larger geographical areas.

Members of worker councils will have to meet to discuss and decide what they want to propose to produce and what inputs they want to request. Members of neighborhood consumption councils will have to meet to discuss what neighborhood public goods they want to ask for. And representatives from councils that comprise a federation of consumer councils will have to meet to discuss what public goods larger groups of consumers want to request. However, these are all meetings within worker and consumer councils and within federations, not meetings between councils and federations. Moreover, these meetings are only concerned with what the councils or federations want to do themselves. The discussion is not about what people think the overall, comprehensive plan for the economy should be, but about what we might call “self-activity” proposals. The IFB merely performs a mechanical calculation to adjust estimates of opportunity and social costs between each round in the planning procedure. It does not “set” prices, much less dictate what workers or consumers can do. The IFB bears no resemblance to Central Planning Ministries, which do have power over who will produce what and how they will produce it. In participatory planning, workers and consumers propose and revise their own activities in a process that reveals the social costs and benefits of their proposals. Not only do worker and consumer councils make their own initial proposals, they are responsible for revising their own proposals in subsequent rounds of the planning procedure as well.

The participatory planning procedure protects the environment in the following way. Federations of all those affected by a particular kind of pollutant are empowered in the participatory planning process to limit emissions to levels they deem desirable. A major liability of market economies is that because pollution adversely affects those who are “external” to the market transaction, market economies permit much more pollution than is efficient. The participatory planning procedure, on the other hand, guarantees that pollution will never be permitted unless those adversely affected feel that the positive effects of permitting an activity that generates pollution as a byproduct outweigh the negative effects of the pollution on themselves and the environment. Moreover, the participatory planning procedure generates reliable quantitative estimates of the costs of pollution and the benefits of environmental protection through the same procedures that it generates reliable estimates of the opportunity costs of using scarce resources and the social costs of producing different goods and services.

It is my conviction that this is where participatory annual planning most outshines other versions of democratic planning. Of course a participatory economy cannot give every person decision-making authority exactly to the degree they are affected in every decision that is made. Instead the idea is to devise procedures that approximate this goal. How does participatory planning do this? (1) Every worker has one vote in his or her worker council. (2) In larger worker councils, sub-units govern their own internal affairs via one worker one vote. (3) Consumers are free to consume whatever kinds of goods and services they prefer as long as their effort rating is sufficient to cover the overall cost to society of producing the goods and services they request. (4) Consumers each have one vote in his or her neighborhood consumption council regarding the level and composition of neighborhood public good consumption. (5) Federations responsible for different levels of collective consumption and limiting pollution levels are also governed by democratic decision-making where each council in the federation sends representatives to the federation in proportion to the size of its membership. (6) But most importantly, worker and consumer councils and federations not only propose what they will do in the initial round of the participatory planning procedure, they alone make all revisions regarding their own activity during subsequent rounds.

Conclusion

I believe organizing comprehensive planning as an iterative, social process of “self-proposals” combined with information sharing, followed by democratic approval based on clear criteria of social responsibility maximizes the potential for popular participation in annual planning. Unlike other approaches to democratic planning, the participatory planning procedure provides unprecedented autonomy for worker and consumer councils over their own activities. Since what they, themselves, will do is what concerns people most, this is an important virtue when we try to convince those who have long been disenfranchised that it is finally worth their time to participate in economic decision making.

Robin Hahnel is Professor Emeritus at American University in Washington, DC where he taught in the Department of Economics. He also taught at the University of Maryland, Lewis and Clark College, the Catholic University in Lima, Peru, and Portland State where he is currently Visiting Professor in the Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices.