76 | For and Against Participatory Planning & Economics
Added 2023-11-06 11:00:08 +0000 UTCIn this patron-requested episode, we discuss the proposals for participatory planning and economics developed by Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert. They contend that socialists should want to organize social production and consumption neither through authoritarian centralized planning, nor through market mechanisms, but by democratic consensus attained through federated workers’ councils. We appreciate the scope of the ambition and their visionary utopianism, and generally buy their criticisms of markets, but also discuss what we find unsatisfying in their approach. Mostly this means talking about how a system like the one they propose can’t stop a lazy scoundrel like Owen from defrauding the whole thing into the ground like it’s the USSR 2.0. But honestly it’s hard to hold that against them.
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, “Participatory Planning,” Science & Society 56.1 (1992): 39-59.
Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, “In Defense of Participatory Economics,” Science & Society 66.1 (2002), 7-28.
Robin Hahnel, A Participatory Economy (AK Press: 2022).
Music:
Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
Comments
Fun fact: the word “market” doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s an allegorical figure like Fortuna or the Owl of Minerva.
Nic Johnson
2023-12-05 17:38:05 +0000 UTCIn Albert and Hahnel's proposal, there is no concrete treatment of how social production is reconfigured on the world scale. Capital constantly revolutionizes social production and that is both a cause for its instability and its plasticity. The paucity of how productive relations would be configured on their voluntarist model is slightly short of compelling for a supposed replacement of the whole market form. Their entire argument rests on "oughts", whereas a proper socialist system is one of necessity. In line of their idealist conceptions which privilege voluntarism and the notion of solidarity, the authors fail to demonstrate how their consumption first scheme can accommodate the dynamic coordination of relatively autonomous councils. Much of the erroneous lines of thought seem to arise from this notion that social and material incentives are separate and it is here that they fail to even present the possibility of internal contradictions. In Kapital chapter 15 Marx uses the following example to illustrate how capital collapses social labor: "...a single needle-machine makes 145,000 in a working-day of 11 hours. One woman or one girl superintends four such machines, and so produces near upon 600,000 needles in a day, and upwards of 3,000,000 in a week. A single machine, when it takes the place of co-operation or of manufacture, may itself serve as the basis of an industry." In today's world market, the very term "social labor" is misleading when a single good may have its manufacture divied out amongst several continents. The jar of pickles in my pantry has cucumbers grown in India which were jarred in Canada and trucked over the greater part of the continent. In the authors' limpid redress of the supposed distribution problem, the issue of imbalances in value chains is hardly spoken of, with a supported appeals that the council form will take care of everything. Marx goes on to say, "The principle, carried out in the factory system, of analysing the process of production into its constituent phases, and of solving the problems thus proposed by the application of mechanics, of chemistry, and of the whole range of the natural sciences, becomes the determining principle everywhere. Hence, machinery squeezes itself into the manufacturing industries first for one detail process, then for another. Thus the solid crystal of their organisation, based on the old division of labour, becomes dissolved, and makes way for constant changes." Hahnel and Albert have the opposite problem. They imagine that abstract collective values (i.e. equity, efficiency, etc.) on their own power can affect the logistical sphere. Can we really expect that these abstract appeals would prevent a splintering of organizations where one aggregation wouldn't attempt to find advantage over the other? After all, there is not a tabula rasa of opportunity as the authors seem to think. In Maoist China this contradiction notably presented in the uneven development of the urban and the countryside. In this case, without a strong party, it is quite unlikely that the countryside would have been allocated a significant portion of the resources produced in the more productive cities. I could continue but I don't know if anyone would bother reading more.
Philip M
2023-11-06 20:42:51 +0000 UTCEnjoyable episode but man what a comically poor proposal. First of all they don't even correctly asses the basic fault in capitalist remuneration and this is something unique to capitalism, not assignable to all market forms, so that conflation is another error. The authors say, "In capitalism people are rewarded according to the value of the contribution of the productive capital they own as well as the value of the contribution of their labor." Just wrong in every way. This makes no distinction between how value is assigned relative to one's position in the productive process. In capitalism this is determined by ownership. The only thing the worker owns of significance in terms of the market is their labor power. Where exploiting comes is at the very fore, not somewhere downstream in the distribution, because in capitalism distribution is anarchically determined through the exploitation of labor. This is the central point in his critique of Ricardo who posited that trade will—other things being equal—evolve towards the exchange of equivalents. Marx makes clear that there is no equivalent exchange between labor and capitalists. This isn't the result of some moral failure, it's caused by the logic of the circulation process. Or the particular unreason that capital can harness some perpetual motion and manifest value endlessly. The value of commodities in capitalism was and more or less still is determined by the average quantity of human labour which is currently socially necessary to produce them. In modern capitalism, financiers don't own productive capital in the original sense: the "means of production". Rather, they are the owners of the very circulation of capital, the financiers; they lend credit and they are compensated in their own terms. Rates of interest, terms of credit, who and where, and so on, these are arbitrarily decided by the financier class. So the problem of capitalism is essentially twofold. The market performs a kind of alchemy which transmutes real human time and effort and real material into a virtual non-substance. It is that virtualization that allows for the most egregious forms of manipulation and accumulation and abuse of the market form by the monopoly capitalists. Hence capitalism is both anarchic in that what is produced, for whom, and how much is wholly contingent and it is also in the service of an entirely useless and debased elite. (1/2)
Philip M
2023-11-06 19:34:25 +0000 UTCCan you squeeze out of your wage slaves in the shortest time all else fog, diversion.
Ockitaris
2023-11-06 19:16:09 +0000 UTCeconomics is simple it's how much wealth
Ockitaris
2023-11-06 19:11:48 +0000 UTCDon't machinery is capital. Then how much does one need. I believe Marx said the means of production determines the type of society
Ockitaris
2023-11-06 19:09:04 +0000 UTCOh hell yeah let’s go boys
pelicans123
2023-11-06 14:03:15 +0000 UTC
