The model of the “Participatory Economy,” developed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel over the last 30 years, has attracted attention as a serious answer to “TINA” — “There Is No Alternative” (to capitalism) — and as a conception of socialism that claims superiority over proposals for central planning, “market socialism,” and “negotiated coordination.” The 2012 publication of Hahnel’s Of the People, By the People: The Case for a Participatory Economy provides an opportunity to examine this conception critically and systematically. Despite its many insights and contributions, the Albert–Hahnel model suffers from two crucial problems: its commitment to an abstractly speculative approach to the design of social institutions, and a limiting fear of authority and hierarchy that has clear roots in classical anarchist thinking. This latter feature results in a model with an uncanny resemblance to Walrasian competitive market equilibrium — despite its progenitors’ programmatic denial of this connection.
Introduction: In December 2008, after the current economic crisis erupted, Walden Bello speculated that capitalist elites might respond with a new political project: global social democracy.[1] By injecting into global governance a greater concern for equity and sustainability, global social democracy could avoid the evident failure of neoliberal policies.
The April 2012 issue of Science & Society is a Special Issue, "Designing Socialism: Visions, Projections, Models." This entry combines four items from the issue: "Editorial Perspectives," by S&S Editor David Laibman; "Introduction," by Guest Editor Al Campbell; the set of five Questions regarding socialism that each participant in the issue was asked to address; and the list of participants, or Contributors.
The current political conjuncture is dominated by enduring struggles and new dilemmas for the Left trying to stop the bleeding. The enduring financial crisis has posed the matter starkly: is neoliberalism in terminal crisis and over, or are the ruling classes intensifying its distributive norms and its political form? The outcome of the May Federal election revealed some of the same patterns: an historical consolidation of the hard Right Conservative government of Stephen Harper, and an unprecedented electoral surge for the social democratic NDP (and however harsh one is on the nature of contemporary social democracy, it is the first time that any political party in North America who has its ideological roots in socialism has captured such a significant part of the electorate and emerged as the second party).
1. Where did parecon come from? What is its history?
Participatory economics, or parecon, came mainly from the cumulative struggles of diverse populations trying to win liberation from capitalism. Parecon owes, in particular, to the anarchist and the libertarian socialist heritage, to the most recent experiences of the New Left of the Sixties, but also to every historical uprising and project aimed at eliminating class rule from the beginning to the present. It has learned from successes and from failures.
What's happening is a renovation of left-wing thought. The ideas of revolutions that we used to defend in the 1970s and 1980s, in practice, have not materialized. So, left-wing thought has had to open itself up to new realities and search for new interpretations. It has had to develop more flexibility in order to understand that revolutionary processes, for example, can begin by simply winning administrative power.
A talk given at the World Social Forum 2010, Porto Alegre
The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints. Three percent compound growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades).
