The things themselves

mark | September 7, 2012

The NHS has been entrusted to Jeremy Hunt, the man with an expressed desire to get stuck in to ‘denationalising the provision of health care in Britain’. The many ardent defenders of comprehensive at-point-of-need healthcare are suspicious (to put it gently) of the ability of the profit-pursuit to make ethical judgement calls, provide real value for money (rather than promises of the moon made in winning tenders), or to be as genuinely accessible to those without the means to pay.

The dismissal of Andrew Lansley may have been a chance for public acknowledgement of the public mood, and the removal of a figurehead who has drawn some of the fire.  But there’s no chance of heart.  The way forward is, by and large, corporate provision of healthcare: taxpayer-funded, shareholder-profiting, likely to be further boosted by a growth in private heathcare brought on by decreasing NHS performance.

I was talking the other day to someone involved in big public construction projects, who was bemoaning, since Thatcher, the contracting structure that, among other misplaced incentives and practices, places responsibility for design with the people who care about it the least, and who are effectively disincentivised from spending more than absolutely necessary.  Large housing developments – of that kind we are going to see roll out, to ‘get out economy going’, are, predictably, going to be low-quality, uninspiring, and unfit for flourishing lives.

Adam Smith was one of the first to warn of the dangers of placing control of something in the hands of people who don’t really care about it (by separating out the functions of ownership and management), or care about the wrong things.  Yes, mostly we work along broadly self-interested lines, we are in part economic creatures.  But there are many ways self-interest expresses itself in the world.  Some guide our collective work to make it productive, beneficial, beautiful, beneficial.  Some suck out life, quality, equity, and turn it into short-term shareholder return.

Perhaps at the root of a lot of the instinctive mistrust, thought-through fears, and evidenced detrimental impacts of something like the privatisation of the NHS, is the perception, and reality, that we are handing precious things to people who don’t quite care enough about those things themselves, and give those things to those people in shaky contractual structures with misaligned structural incentives.

Where do we fight?  For some, it’s defence of what we had, defiance and clear statement of the non-negotiable.  Hands off our NHS.  Renationalise the railways.  Leave it in the ground.  In short, stop letting corporations abuse that which we care about just because it’s in their interest and we’ve no choice but to buy what they’re selling.

But there are other fronts.  And one vitally important one is to be with those people who don’t care enough about the things themselves, and find out what in our edifices of self-interest can be shifted, deflected, challenged or reformed. If we can find a way to bring those things themselves into clear relief within our understanding of what it means to be involved in business or any form of corporate activity, that allows us all to re-integrate appropriate care of the things themselves and the pursuit of true value into everything that is done profitably-

- then perhaps we will start to demonstrate that, after all, we can entrust the world to ourselves?

The next, (I hope regular), blog posts here will be relections from the masters course I am doing with Forum for the Future.  Next up will be a drier overview of some initial starting points of exploration…

 

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The soul of an atom, or, a statistical shroud

mark | March 5, 2012

Seen from a distance, large numbers of dispersed human actions seem to conform to certain statistical laws and seem patterned, even predictable.  It can be tempting to draw from this a challenge to freedom and a mechanical, rational-economic view of individual behaviour.  It is perhaps more logical, certainly more inspiring, to draw from this a challenge to the concept of the more mechanical principles governing individual agent behaviour in comparable observed situations.
In other words, what we have is the observation that seen from a large enough distance and given enough common parameters and little chance for cooperative organisation, a multitude of agents acting with spontaneity and even free will appear to produce the same statistical and predictable behaviour as a set of simple, modelable actors with mechanical ‘agency’ and a dose of randomness.
What we take from this observation, however, should perhaps not be that we are a combination of mechanics and randomness – this would be assigning a reality rather than a utility to non-real world-models deduced from the maths of patterns.  It perhaps should be, or at least logically is as deducible, that other behaviour in nature that exhibits the same ‘predictability’ and statistical conformity in similar conditions (lack of the ability to cooperatively organise, and broadly common parameters or goals) actually on an individual level are buzzing with their own version of our glorious freedom, self-direction and agency?  That the ‘random’ and ‘spontaneous’ individual atoms have free will, but little chance to make it seen as such?
Of course, this inference the other way – that the presence of statistical patterns with elements of randomness implies the existence of free-willed agents – is clearly as unjustified.
(Thought drawn from ‘The Phenomenon of Man’)
One more thought, to follow:
What distinguishes the expressions of free will that cannot be mistaken for statistical noise from those which can, is a question of connection and coordination. This applies to the connections and coordination that enable our own thoughts to develop and our collected physical and mental being to direct our movement and action, but it also applies to collective human action.  Dispersed, scattered and with few links between us, the economist may be able to predict our mechanistic, value-maximising behaviour.  Connected, coordinated and therefore powerful, we are free to form and develop collective purpose and action that expresses loud and clear the unmistakeable presence of our freedom, creativity and will.  The day atoms arrange themselves into letters, words and paragraphs is the day the powerful of the world sit up, take notice and do precisely what they are told.

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Keystone XL pipeline means jobs

mark | January 5, 2012

George Monbiot’s tweet:

How corporations attack democracy: in this case with overt threats.

Led me to this article:

Keystone XL pipeline: Oil chief issues threat to Obama over decision

Now, let alone the outright industry threats to President Obama, and the particular entanglement of big business interests with union pressure that tries to pin Obama down to supporting the Oilsands pipeline.   Because here, it’s not really the threatened blackmail that is important.  Whether or not the pipeline is built is an issue that impacts on voters, on industry, on jobs, and those against the decision have every right to campaign against it, and let it colour their view of their President in the period leading up to the election.

The problem here isn’t industry pressuring democracy.  It’s that collectively we haven’t got a handle on giving ourselves enough work without overexploiting natural resources.  Exploitation is profitable, and people can’t see alternatives that do a comparable job at providing livelihoods and sustaining communities and lives.

It’s not an issue of democracy being in thrall to big business.   It is that, genuinely, Keystone XL pipeline means jobs.

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On sustaining what feeds you

mark | October 31, 2011

Today I listened to an talk by Michel Bauwens of p2p foundation, from last years’ International Commons Conference, and I read an introduction to a book on high-yield organic farming called ‘How to Grow More Vegetables (than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine)’.

And they shared a theme. Like so:

Conventional farming in fertile soil achieves high crop yields from plundering the soil’s minerals of the nutrients needed for flourishing crops.   In intensive monocultures, a freely available, complex and rich environment build up over hundreds of years is exhausted to the point of desertification within a few.  In contrast, the essential approach of high-yield organic farming is to focus intensively on building up and maintaining the quality of the soil, and in doing so also increase yields.

Michel spoke in the context of emerging commons-based communities in the interface between the ‘traditional’ commons practises of cooperatives and protest, and the new digital commons practices (open source software/hardware/data/design).  When they first emerge, it can be hard to see how they can be ‘economic’ at all, when they threaten jobs by creating an almost disconcerting and unbounded potential – businesses are geared very often around innovating and then protecting that innovation, not sharing it.

A basic need in both contexts is for an community of protectors of a resource, be it a natural ecosystem or a collection of open source hardware, that are firmly committed to sustaining and building this common resource, and work effectively together to do so.

But the crucial next step which Michel describes, the one that hooks it fully into a society’s functioning, is for organisations and businesses to emerge from the community of practise, steeped in the values of that community, finding ways to do business in that ecosystem in a way that increases, rather than decreases, that commons store.  You don’t fit into the wordpress ecosystem by stealing code and copyrighting it. You fit into the wordpress ecosystem by designing great themes that work alongside it, offering customisation and support – building up the ecosystem that feeds you.

His more pragmatic observation is that even businesses from outside that community will be forced to find models that align with its values, when the power of what the commons offers becomes too strong to compete with.

So we need to recognise what we hold in common, the store of wealth that we have access to, and make sure that we build up communities and practices that sustain these commons, whether it be soil fertility or open source hardware.  We also need business models that recognise the commons as not something to exploit but a rich communal provision to sustain, and find models which are only viable for the individual when they are viable for the ecosystem.  We need to concentrate on the soil.

Michaels’ talk can be found at: http://www.boell.de/economysocial/economy/economy-commons-10451.html

Also recently discovered: http://www.schoolofcommoning.com/

Link to the book:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1580087965/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link

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Do good, earn points: Innovative or corrosive?

mark | October 25, 2011

A frequent expectation, amongst those enthusiastic both about apps and about doing good, is that at some point we’ll work out a realistic and fun way to ‘game’ volunteering.  At which point, it willl take off like farmville and we’ll have a thriving economy of people doing good and earning redeemable points.

This is reflected in some of the applications to Nesta’s ‘giving innovation fund’ (worth a browse through, by the way, each applicant had to submit a short video as part of the application, a great move that really opens the ideas up for people to see and unveils a whole ecosystem of projects).

But back to the point at hand.  I’m troubled by this particular recurrent idea.

If we could activate these motivations, could harness powerful drivers of self-interest and game-mastery activity for volunteering, why would we not?

Why we should tread carefully

There are two problematic and contrasting traits which society commonly exhibits.  The nature, motivations and patterns of what we spend our time doing are in some contexts dysfunctionally separated (the strict segregation of our lives and workplaces into producing, consuming, and donating), and in some places dysfunctionally merged (the common unification of effects into a single metric, most noticeably the bottom line).  They are both to do we how we chop up and conceive life, and how we understand what we do and why we do it.*

So here’s a provocation:  Gaming volunteering, if it is successful as a driving motivation for volunteering (a big if) is guilty of both of these crimes.

  • It firstly introduces a demand that ‘volunteering time’ is deliniated and accounted for, rather than desiring it to exist as a pervasive, unaccounted social generosity.
  • It secondly tries to measure all volunteering against a single metric of points, with the consequence that we will not manage to measure and value what matters.  The more this metric becomes a serious factor in volunteering (how many points are gained from what), the more volunteering will suffer as a result.

Finally, suppose there are resolutions to these serious problems. Say we have an accurate points-based system that reflects the value of the work undertaken; we’ve delineated what counts as volunteering in simple and strict ways; we’ve got a thriving community doing good and collecting vouchers – this is the point we start running up against an even bigger problem.

This is one helpfully researched and documented by a joint programme of the Public Interest Research Centre and WWF-Uk, who have recently conducted research into the values we hold and how they interact; research of vital importance to social and third-sector organisations seeking to motivate altruistic behaviour.
Asking people to volunteer because there’s something in it for them actively decreases their inclination to be generous in normal life, even if it increase specific volunteering in the short term. Read the report to find out more – but in essence, the values we hold compete with each other for attention, and unsuprisingly the competitive, gaming, status, gaining-for-oneself value set is firmly opposed to the generousity, helping out, giving freely of your time value set.  Activating one has knock-on effects for the other - appealing to our competitiveness decreases our generousity and vice versa.

A corrosive delusion

We are at the moment living with a reinvigorated social belief, born out of our necessity to believe that corporations will not destroy the world: that we can and must align the poles of self-interest and common interest.  That to make money do good we must be able to make money out of doing good, and that to deny this is to fail to acknowledge the primary power of self-interest as a driver of individual and group action, and so abandon the world to the wolves in a Canute-like defiance of market forces.

This is a myth that is destructive to our ability to think outside of these parameters and act in ways oppositional to our competitive interest, something which we are fully capable of doing and even inclined to the more we think about it.

‘Enlightened self-interest’ is a pervasive and attractive phrase, and this generation needs more of it, but it needs to be understood very carefully. It is a truth that what is good for our neighbours is good for us, it is true to say that if we take a deep look at what is good for us and what we want we are inclined to be cooperative, generous, to build society and create mutual benefit.  But we cannot take from that we should be good to our neighbours because it benefits us.  And it is verging on the terrible to think that this acknowledgement in any way permits us to think that a good way of encouraging generosity is to pay us to display it – that the way to activate enlightened self-interest is to squish into its meagre, unenlightened cousin.

(It reflects a debate I recall hearing about, and I assume must come up fairly regularly, in the National Blood Service about the impact paying for blood donations would have on donation patterns.)

Ways forward

What value is there in the points/voucher system?

Volunteers often get involved for some reason and then stay on for others, as detailed in the comprehensive pathways to participation report.  Vouchers and points could play a simple role in encouraging first-time volunteers, providing an engaging interface for people who might otherwise not encounter or think of volunteering opportunities.  But keep them as an introductory logic, a trojan horse.
I’m also all for thank yous, tokens of appreciation, signals that help is appreciated – and if that comes in the form of a coffee voucher I’m not going to turn it down.

To take it a step deeper, there are lots of other motivations and implications in play when someone’s contribution is rewarded. Time banks are a fantastic innovation to can unlock and give accessible structure to reciprocal economies in ways that are inclusive and empowering.  But here participation is never associated with a competitive accumulation drive, but rather the need to be appreciated, valued, and to contribute.  So perhaps there’s a way that that kind of system can give a more formal and accessible way for participants to receive the benefits in kind that volunteer activities do offer, and perhaps giving charities a clear way to recognise and value individuals’ contributions in way that enforces the values underpinning the volunteering.

And ironically, to end with, (lest you read in this a denial that ) I think there is a lot of valuable work done by ‘volunteers’ that should be recognised and paid for as valuable productive work, and that paid work should be freed far more to align itself with social objectives, such that the distinction between ‘for-profit’ and ‘not-for-profit’ work becomes far less distinct.   How I can support this whilst simultaneously decrying rewarding volunteers with money will be the subject of a future post…. (see the RSA Animate Lecture on ‘Drive’ by Daniel Pink)

So, what do you think?  Would you volunteer for points or vouchers, or compete with your friends to see who’d helped out most? Am I being to harsh, can a widescale points-based incentive actually fit snuggly into volunteering activities, incentivising young people to plant the most trees and do the most social good?

Also to note: the pathways through participation report, from Involve, Institute for Volunteering Research and NCVO is good solid research into what creates and sustains participation, and worth a read if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

 *I’ve been rereading Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful”

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Human Scale, or, dealing with our emergent psychopath

mark | October 8, 2011

A couple of thoughts collided at the Schumacher centenary research day I attended yesterday (the festival goes on all this weekend in Bristol). This collision, looking at the various tactics of the sustainability/ethical trade movements through the concept of ‘human-scale’ systems, is about the challenge of engaging with collective, aggregated effects on the individual, personal level.

So here’s one of the main challenges posed by modern society: that of the dislocation, through a step-change in societal scale and complexity, of our actions from their effects.  Stuff’s got big and all connected and our actions have global ripples which we cannot hope to grasp.  Our economic system is lost in financial packages and algorithms, our products are compiled in several different locations across the world by people we would not be able to talk to, our fossil fuel and general resource exploitation subtly and steadily destroys gigantic systems we depend on.  We rely on a whole panoply of intermediaries to do a whole load of things we know zilch about, and we interact with them on a mostly incredibly simple basis – that of the consumer, in a straight swap of anonymous cash for historyless product.

Schumacher uses the concept of ‘appropriate scale’, and today the term ‘human scale’ was promoted, as a good thing for things to be.  To be understandable in the context of a situated, human life.  There’s a number of people we can maintain meaningful social contact with – around 150 – beyond that, individuals blur into a mass.

However, we are undeniably more than 150 people.  And there are many good things about that.  So, if no longer human-scale, what scale is this mass?

It is a common and widespread phenomenon, increasingly studied, that the whole really is more than the sum of its parts, that large groups of simple organisms modelled by straightforward rules can exhibit behaviour most intuitively assignable to a single, complex organism – think the ‘hive mind’.  It’s called emergent behaviour.  We can think about the whole system, the emergent organism and its characteristics and behaviour, and how it interacts with the world around it and if it does so ethically, but this is very unlikely to match up closely to how it is experienced in an individual agent (human) level.  So though on a whole-human-race level, the destruction of whole ecosystems is obvious and criminal, the individual human doesn’t often experience it at all, let alone as such – and those who do are rarely those most culpable.  Dispersed, the tragedy of collective inaction is a minor individual flaw that pales alongside more pressing concerns of vibrant human life.

From this understanding, the task of green movement to motivate dispersed humanity to ‘change course’ – to divert the actions of the whole-human monster from its current devouring, polluting and ecosystem-stripping – depends on its success at making a non-human-scale beast human-scale,  whether in demonising individuals for particularly heinous offenses or highlighting the immediate benefits of a greener, happier world.  This comes alongside the recognition that powerful external or group ideologies (the conventional way of pinning external considerations to everyday life), whether ecological or religious or scientific, only work for subsections, subnetworks of humanity:  the majority are turned off by religion, happy to disregard the abstractions of science and look on at the pious eco-conscious with condescension.   In a parallel, but different tack, we give up on understanding the effect of our actions and trust that consumer demand for human-scale desires and needs, whether through attractive green products or the rising cost of alternatives, can convert our world economy to one that lives within its means. Either way, attempted success lies in creating a suitable human-scale substitute for the acknowledgement of the effect of our (collective, not individual) actions, what lies behind ‘making it relevant’.

The seductive gleam of an electric car, a school-taught respect for ecosystems, a trust in the tables and graphs of science and the appeal of happy, clean, car-free communities are only human-scale substitutes for direct human experience of the impact of our actions.  Your personal conviction is a somewhat nugatory extra consideration if you have to drink water from a poisoned stream.  If it’s your friend you trap in a sweatshop, your neighbour you flood and your local reservoir you pour oil and excrement into, it’s already human scale.

The blur of humanity outside of our close networks, of course, isn’t actually a blur.  Everywhere, everyone has human scale life around them.  Increasingly through connectivity our close networks stretch to encompass more of the effects of what we do.  The green movement (or the global social justice movement) will succeed when behaviour of the beast becomes meaningfully human-scale, and we see how our actions impact the lives of those connected to us, and we understand the link between what we do and what happens.  In a recent RSA lecture, Jeremy Rifkin asked whether we and how we could extend our empathy to encompass the whole human race and to the biosphere as our common habitat – but a more accurate description would be to extend our potential empathy to the whole of the human race, and for us to come into contact with diverse parts of it.  (‘Empathy is grounded in the acknowledgement of death and the celebration of life and rooting for each other to flourish and be’).  The best chance we have on an individual level, in a world were geographically dispersed connection is far more possible, is to try to simplify and reveal the lines between action and effect and reveal those whom we affect to be our friends.

There’s a parallel discussion on work to be had – firstly the connection between a worker having human-scale work and being in touch with its whole impact, and the link between this and ethical/purposeful work, and secondly how large organisations and networks are their own fuzzy emergent beings, which with an understanding of how individuals respond to and give them their character, may gives us the context and opportunity in which to explore engaging with our whole-societal psychopath on a more appropriate scale.

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mark | August 1, 2011

We would like to pretend that pricing helps what is scarce go to those who value it most.

In our world, increased pricing just makes a good accessible to the yet richer section of a privileged sector.  Increasing the price of a good, and overvaluing the labour required to produce it shifts it further into the preserve of those who cannot understand its value, whilst we need to drastically undervalue labour, cut costs and exploit producers in order to make goods ‘affordable’ for those we have made poor.

 

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The New Spirit of Capitalism

mark | July 28, 2011

or, how we are continually persuaded to participate in the ridiculous

I have started reading The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello and will attempt a too-brief summary and pick out a few points I noted.

It is an analysis of the relationship of capitalism with the critique of it, and a narrative of the survival and adaptation of the capitalist system in the context of society’s changing collective identities, based on experience with and of the development of anti-capitalist critique, and empirical study of particularly management literature, in France between 1970 and 1995.  I confess to having so far just read the introduction (due to the volume of content I thought worth writing down, and the fact that it is stuck in a library), so this is very much an overview of an overview.

In brief, the story goes:

1. Capitalism has very little (if any) innate motivation for most of its key workers to cooperate with the system

“In many respects, capitalism is an absurd system: in it, wage earners have lost ownership of the fruits of her labour and the possibility of a pursuing a working life free from subordination.  As for capitalists, they find themselves yoked to an interminable, insatiable process, which is utterly abstract and disassociated from the satisfaction of consumption needs, even of a luxury kind. For two such protagonists, integration into the capitalist process is singularly lacking in justifications.”

(At this point, I start to be wary of how much I identify with this particular attitude)

2. As such, it needs to find justifications/narratives in tune with the demands, ethics, and current wants of its key workers

It needs to formulate

“descriptions that are sufficiently substantial and detailed, and contain adequate purchase, to ‘sensitize’ those to whom they are addressed.  In other words, they must both coincide with people’s moral experience of daily life and suggest models of action that they can grasp.”

In particular to answer the following

-          How is committed engagement in the process of accumulation a source of enthusiasm, even for those who will not necessarily be the main beneficiaries of the products that are made?

-          To what extent can those in the capitalist universe be assured of a minimum of security for themselves and their children?

-          How can participation in capitalist firms be justified in terms of the common good, and how, confronted with accusations of injustice, can the way that it is conducted and managed be defended?

These justificatory answers emerge as a ‘spirit’ of capitalism, on a different level to its basic economic functioning yet interacting with it and shaping it.

3. Critique formulates discontent into theory and voice, with which to challenge the confidence of this spirit and justifying logic.

Critique on capitalism operates by means of the effect it has on the central tests of capitalism ( a ‘test’ briefly being a social mechanism by which individuals rise in status in various dimensions – earning more money, knowing more, being more ethical. Social structures rely on these tests and their criteria being accepted as valid – who gets jobs, how much jobs earn, who is ‘respected’ and defered to, etc)

4. Capitalism adapts in response by concession or evasion

If these critiques are powerful enough to affect the key workers of capitalism (e.g. critique of lack of autonomy, creativity in large industry and business in 1970s), capitalism adapts by reformulating its ‘spirit’ to incorporate or neutralise these challenges.   Thus in the 80s and 90s capitalism adopts networks, autonomy, flexibility to defuse the automony critique and defuses union and worker challenges over equality by its changing organisational form giving unions less relevance and purchase (I’m less clear as yet about the mechanics of this process)

The next transformative critique is forming around social justice…

 

First thoughts

The mechanism of how critique impacts on capitalism

Does critique threaten enough to force a reaction?  And what does it gain from being developed, articulate critique, over being an observation of blatant injustice? The majority of workers are in all likelihood content to enter life as they find it, simultaneously both adjusting to their environments and also changing them, entering the places in life which afford them opportunities to prosper without expending undue effort (getting a job somewhere, working for someone). For example, at first glance the chance in business practice is as much a result of the development of technology to enable new patterns, and a generation adapting these workplaces to suit their more developed desire for autonomy/flexibility etc.  By and large, we adapt and self-manipulate into finding reasons to tolerate their lives.

But either way, the functioning of critique is the same: to shape the desires and ethics of individuals, challenge their acceptance of what is, so that the dominant economic system (capitalism) is forced to adapt and be shaped also.

The dominance of capitalism

There are related themes and challenges to this conception out other reading, containing a more power-technology-economics analysis of the development of and challenges to capitalism – explicitly shaped by a combinantion of the pattern of technology development and the capture of power by the interests of a capitalist-industrial class able to shape what is and what isn’t profitable economic activity, and questioning the extent to which big-business capitalism is secure as our dominant economic system – and the question of whether and how people can stomach it may become less relevant. But more of that shortly.

Automony vs security

I have had in my mind for a while the tension between increased workplace autonomy (more flexible working to suit people’s lives, diverse, satisfying, etc) and ‘safe’ social structures that provide security and stability necessary to build lives, plan futures, retire well. Placing the shift in capitalist organisation as being a concessional shift in the first direction and simultaneously making it harder to formulate and argue for adequate provision for the latter (note private-sector worker jealousy of public-sector worker security + pensions, and ‘value to the customer’ current spirit that justifies anti-unionism and near-poverty wages), gives me a first purchase. For a nice summary/articulation of some characteristics of advanced network-prompted worker autonomy (in a developed capitalist context), see http://www.thesocialorganization.com/2011/05/a-vision-of-the-social-organization.html

The relationship of this shift in working arrangements to networks, community and the big society is becoming sharper for me, so more on that later too.

No comprehensive critique

The authors provide a set of fundamental dimensions on which capitalism is vulnerable to critique. These are:

  • Disenchantment and inauthenticity
  • Oppression – as opposed to freedom, autonomy and creativity
  • Poverty and inequality
  • Opportunism and Egoism – destructive of solidarity

Which nicely summarises the issues I personally have with being a willing participant.  They contend that there is no critique that addresses all these dimensions, and its role is to correct excesses, to continual balance, notice the dimensions that are prominantly bad, and provide a powerful cultural challenge coalescing around one or more of these axes that forces capitalism to find a new point of negotation between these dimensions.  It is a balancing act, the irony being that if critique did not form to address its ills, it would fall off down at least one scale, and become socially intolerable.

I am as yet still of the idea that there is sufficient purchase in diverse alternatives to build up functioning sub-economies that instead of needing to constantly limit these structural negative consequences, build in their inverse as structural objectives – encouraging authenticity, preventing oppression, dynamically creating equality and dependent on collaboration and solidarity.  But we shall see.

So. Thoughts?

 

I have yet to read the rest of the book, and already it is rich and full of new ways of thinking about the shift and development of capitalism and the impact of critique.  It will appear again. Recommended.

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a participatory economics

mark | July 16, 2011

on Parecon (Participatory Economics – Life after Capitalism), by Michael Albert

A lucid attempt to outline the key principles, characteristics, and potential workings of an economic system based on collaborative, bottom-up planning of both production and consumption by self-managed and networked organisations – layered networks of worker and consumer councils managing a process whereby essentially harmonised plans are arrived at via negotiation.

There is a nice moment near the end of the book where briefly addresses the potential of this vision to excite enough to galvanise a genuine mass movement, and adds the little disclaimer: ‘The particular words one person uses to talk about Parecon may not be overly inspiring – something of which I may be guilty’.  It is true that he leaves the stirring passages and heart-tugs to others – but read it for some logical groundwork and practical direction.

The premise behind the vision and the ongoing effort is perhaps this: that  if we can see the potential of a third way between central planning and market allocation (not a compromise between the two, but a the third point of the triangle that, structurally, incorporates the relevant freedoms of the market and avoids its ill effects) then we should be aiming for it.  Even if we think it is only slightly possible, are generally sceptical of its plausibility.  His book, and the theory developed around Parecon, is an attempt to describe such a system.

I’ll not attempt a full review here, and aspects of the book will creep I’m sure into many later thoughts and posts. But these are what I consider to be two of the main pillars of its logic and call, or, inversely, the two large ‘barriers’ to the plausibility of the project.

1.

The main barrier is a belief in whether it is socially acceptable to, rather than to rise as high as possible give the laws of the economic game, have a game at all in which some get rewarded out of all proportion to their effort or sacrifice, but by exploitation of luck, advantage of birth.

i.e. How much do we value a version of the ‘Joe the Plumber’ premise – that it is preferable that inequality exists because there is a faint chance we may get on the right side of inequality. That is is preferable that there is a faint chance we may ourselves may somehow or other attain luxury out of all proportion to our work, win the right to own wage-slaves and command vastly disproportionate amount of people’s and the earth’s resources.

(Most of the other premises are at the moment relatively uncontestable. This is the social challenge, resting on it is the right to own property, to exploit where there is market advantage, to profit unduly from the work of others)

Would we rather have a game in which what we receive from society and our labour is in proportion to the effort and sacrifice we contribute?

2.

The second obstacle is whether we are up to it, as a species:  whether, even given supporting institutions that avoid accumulations of information advantage or capture of the sources of influence by a subgroup of society and education systems that gear us to being informed and taking appropriate concern and control, we would still rather hand over power and influence and control to an elite.

Whether we collectively do not want and would not want – even in a supporting environment – to appropriately influence the world around us, a have our due say in how we spend our lives, and what others do and we do collectively to the extent if affects us, our society and the things we care about.

You can only answer this question for yourself: would you?

I suggest that if some can, almost if not all can.  I suggest with others that whether we have engaged participation in life is up to what we are taught to expect and put up with, and whether we are taught both self-respect and empathy together.

The second half of this second objection is the assumption that western democracy and shareholder capitalism has got us there already, or only has a little further to go.  Can we, do we (all of us, not just an elite) habitually exercise an input proportionate to the extent if affects us and that which we care about?  Not just in our free time and at weekends but in our working lives, our productive labour?

So.

If we get ourselves past these objectives; if we believe these characteristics to be both desirable and have no reason to trust them impossible; if we decide that we think some version of it is good, preferable to what we have (1) and we decide that we think some version of it is possible, we have that capacity in us (2);  then it seems to me that we are most of the way there, and what remains is practical demonstration of the alternative, a truly participatory economy.

Further

Notably (for myself at least), work under a Parecon seems to tick both boxes in my previous post – The two good reasons for doing anything at all. The book suggests, expanding on Juliet Schor’s commenting that per capita output doubled from 1955 to 1995 and people were never given the choice to just work less, that with expunging work not collectively desired or directed at human wellbeing, it would only take a maximum of 13 hours a week to acheive the same level of per-capita output  ’relevant to meeting real needs and expanding worthy potentials’.

The most striking consequence for me of this mildly damning statistic, for at least me and those keen on economic efficiency, is the tremendous waste of billions of person-hours, and what could have been done, enjoyed, lived in its place.

For the moment, I want to be looking at aspects of this kind of system as it can be created independently, via organising and organisations, and organisations can take from Parecon thinking in order to make themselves structurally worthwhile, and inclined toward self-management, with worker/stakeholder participation at multiple levels.

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The two good reasons for doing anything at all

mark | July 8, 2011

There are, I suggest, only two good reasons for doing anything.

The first is that it is something that enough people need or want doing, such that a group of equals would self-organise to share the work and get it done.

The second is that it is some goal, product, aim, service or hobby that you, perhaps with others, want to spend your time creating or doing, rather than being at leisure.

The extent that our work is not like this, it is either the result of exploitation, or it exploits, or it is habitual and pointless – a waste of our time, energy, effort and lives.

I want our working lives to have these characteristics.  I believe that exploring how we can get them closer to having these characteristics – to the extent that we can start reshaping our effort and creativity toward what is actually worth doing, sustaining, bringing into being – will force us to face up to big questions of power, inequality, rationality, ethics.

I’m embarking on perhaps a very long project to expand, understand and map out these issues, find, get involved with and start good organisations, and generally work with others to help move us in this direction.

Interested? Please get in touch. I want at least reading suggestions and people to talk to over coffee, and even better, but more tentatively, people to work with in investigating/discussing/writing/planning/conspiring on this subject area.

 

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