Notes towards an alternative economics.

We have a host of theories on the left designed to offer positive prescriptions for reform and action. I am concerned here with economic life. Among those of an anarchist bent, the most comprehensive contemporary proposal is undoubtedly Michael Albert's parecon (participatory economics). This system is grounded in extrapolating economic life from some left values, equity, solidarity, diversity, and self-management. The most salient characteristics of this plan include the following: mixed job complexes; coordination of production through workers' and consumer councils; remuneration according to effort and sacrifice; and participatory planning.

This is an intelligent system developed by brilliant thinkers, whose tireless devotion to human emancipation in unquestionable. Their system incorporates elements of the best in left and anarchist history and theory, and as a whole parecon offers something very rare, a comprehensive vision for economic transformation of the world.

The strength of this proposal makes it difficult to critique, but that same strength makes it a suitable starting ground for offering a different schema for a new economic organization.

I am completely sympathetic to all of Albert's proposals and the values girding them. My criticism lies not with any particular aspect of his program. I find fault in that it is precisely this, a program, a system developed from abstract ethical principles that he proposes we apply throughout the economy. It is utopian in a sense Albert readily embraces, rightly proposing that utopian projects can guide real positive change in the world as long as we are mindful of any disempowering or absolutist tendencies within them. I agree, I agree to the worth of his project, but I also think this obscures a fundamental weakness.

A "utopian" project that attempts to build the skeleton of a new society in the shell of the old has tremendous merit and potentially has great power and possibility. But there are two ways we may construct utopian projects. We can build them from ideals, ethical precepts, and then hope to mold the world to those precepts. This entire strategy is problematic, both because of the dangers of utopian dogmatism and formalism for individuals and collectivities, but also imply because it doesn't connect to what actually exists in the world primarily and so becomes that much more unrealistic and unachievable.

Marx damned utopian projects, anarchist, cooperative, liberal, and he was both wrong and right to do so. He wwas wrong to deny the importance of real collective agency and the necessity of autonomist collective action that tries to create something outside the bounds of capitalism and the state rather than simply seizing the mechanisms of capital and state. But he was right to point out their detachment from the world that is in favor of abstraction that has no real connection to existing struggle, and the economic possibilities in which we find ourselves.

I will not spend another word critiquing Albert, because again I agree with his principles. Instead I want to offer some observations towards an alternative economic world that I'm drawing from existing operations in the world.

As an anarchist (or one who tries to live up to the word when he can, however unsuccessfully and confusedly), I draw my initial concerns not from formal ethical principles, but from what people seem to be doing that seems outside of or opposed to capitalism. I don't want to tell anti-/non-capitalists how they should organize their projects. I want to see what the projects they undertake seem to have in common at the economic level. What actually distinguishes them from qualities we find in capitalist enterprises, and what does this mean for a "third way" in economic theory, neither capitalist nor Marxist?

The chief problem I think we encounter as 'anti-capitalist' people is actually deciding what it is about capitalism that we don't like. This is a real problem, especially in rhetoric, becausse what we think of as "bad" in capitalism are not necessarily what people tend to consider when they think of business in general. They think of hard work and creating quality goods consumers want, they think of labor-saving technology that reduces their drudgery, they think of exchanging goods and services for other goods and services using another medium (money) as an expedient. I really don't think we're fundamentally opposed to this. There are deep criticisms possible of the division of labor as we have it, and I will address these later. But generally speaking, I like not having to make everything I need myself. I think most of us do. The level of commodification capitalism promotes takes this much too far, and I also hope to address this in a moment. But when we say capitalism, there are basic qualities of the system that aren't really that odious. Here are some of the broad faults we seem to agree on regarding the modern economic world:
*exploitation of labor, in a host of ways
*destruction of local economies in favor of corporate economies
*incredible environmental devastation
*political and existential inequality that results from economic inequality and tends to create class division in society
*a tendency towards drudgery and regimentation of work
*mass production of lifeless crap over more diverse and diffuse production of high quality goods and services
*social and cultural homogenization tied to mass production and mass consumption
*a tendency towards promoting individualism as a cultural trait, and the repercussions of that (destruction of family and community, competition and suspicion over cooperation and trust, a dog eat dog world, every man for himself, etc)

I think that pretty much sums it up.

Now, my real question is if we can look at projects that don't embody these values and derive a general approach to economic understanding from those, that would allow us to construct real policy and real economic institutions that promote these better values?

I think we can, because I've noticed some odd similarities between various non-capitalist projects, and I think we can bring them together in a mutually reinforcing manner.

Let me begin by listing the "projects" I am considering:
*peasant economics, specifically that described by the Russian agronomist Chayanov
*labor-owned cooperatives (meaning worker coops)
*DIY, localized production
*small business that in some countries is labeled "artisanal" meaning owned and managed by a skilled worker who shares in the basic work of the firm
*skilled trades unions
*certain types of green business
*microenterprises of the informal economy

I think if we can find a common thread between these types of economic organization, we will have found a key to the grand mystery of transforming capitalism.

I also think I have begun to see this common thread, in studying a core similarity between labor-owned firms and the peasant economics of Chayanov...

The key lies in the way an organization will deal with chaos, specifically in the case of economic institutions, the chaos of the market, meaning unpredictable fluctuations in demand and supply. [this can't be right, it's too simple, but might be, somehow, it might be just this easy, just this undogmatic, just this intuitive]

Executive power.

Today I did the final lab in my solar cell installation class, wherein we actually practiced installing solar cells. Easier in some respects than you'd expect, harder in others. Then we went and looked at the city hall array, which produces 16,400 kWhrs a year. More of a showpiece than anything, but a swank little showpiece. One of the teachers mentioned how he likes the city hall for its design and feels very "austin" to him. Nice solar array, again more of a showpiece than anything, but a very effective showpiece- it covers the front steps where the city hosts free concerts every week, and myriad other events (everything in Austin happens outside, if you've never been here, even the freaking electronic shows). So whenever people coming to these events feel like taking a load off and sitting under the shade on the elegant (local) limestone steps, they take a gander up and notice they're under a giant solar cell array. There are no phallic elements that halls of power are known to embrace. Feels like a giant bungalow with a big porch area, and the front has lots of benches. There's a waterfall in the whole thing, and it flows out to little pools that descend in spirals and circulate the water back, and the benches are arranged around said pools; or around trees. The bottom floor has an open air coffee shop (locally owned, standard prices, the barrista who comped me a free cup of java this afternoon said the owner's a pretty chill guy). There's free parking underground, open to the public, no pay if you're out by 5pm, and lots of bike racks. The whole thing looks out over the river. The main conference table is made fromt he Treaty Oak, the tree the constitution of Texas was signed under? Something like that, any actual Texan seems to know these things. It died a few years back and they had to cut it down before it crushed whatever was next to it, but they used the pieces for memorials and plaques all over the city. I really love the city hall, if anyone ever visits I'll take you by it. Nice place to chill and see the bigwigs do their bigwigging.

Anyway, one of my teachers was talking off to the side about the national energy political situation, and he mentioned how amazing it was to him how corrupt and pathetic politics has gotten, how short-sighted. He's from a NASA family, and he referenced the Kennedy pronouncement of sending a man to the moon, from a sort of insider's perspective. He said that at the time, aerospace engineers were just looking at airplanes and seeing what they could get from them, and planning for squeezing an extra percentage of power every year to eventually get a plane 10% more efficient. And then Kennedy announced "we're sending a man to the moon and back within the decade" and they walked into work the next day, tore down their project sheets, and said "well, time to start over." The executive redefined the problem entirely, and they had been stuck in the same well-established set of problems, so they were thinking in these ossified lines and squeezing ever greater precision from them. But their entire way of constructing the problem was inadequate to the demand Kennedy made, well below the bar. So his executive pronouncement cleared their thinking so to speak, forced them to let go of the routinized problem and procedure, and to reinvent something else they hadn't even been considering. The teacher was comparing that to the incredible lethargy of politics and leadership today, when we know of looming ecological catastrophe and we also have the beginnings of ways to address it, but a total lack of leadership to change the scope of the problems, to get people genuinely working on these dramatic problems.

This struck me, as though it was the real reason I needed to be there today, to just hear that story. I think any democratic system, anarchism or whatever, has to think about this. This is the power of an executive, the function they can actually serve (at any level) that we have to consider if we are to replace their role with something different, something better.

If a democratic situation tends often and easily to lead to a sort of stalemate of action, through a balancing of interests and intentions across the spectrum of a community, how can we break through that ossification, that bureaucracy, to let something new come up? By what mechanism do we allow for a new problem to be generated and displace a weak or stalemated set of arrangements and desires?

This is really the problem of freedom, or reconciling the freedom of a citizen or a community member or participant with the freedom of power to create novelty, to adjust a social, economic and cultural situation? For this is the real meaning of the word "power"- it means power to create or deny change.

It's such a fascinating question - and I prefer to think of it as fascinating because otherwise it would just be tragic, because this core problem of agency and the meaning of freedom, when badly constructed and badly answered, has produced the greatest horrors imaginable. Nazism, armed and statist Communism, Neoliberalism (and its antecedents) and its bloody sweatshops, militarism.

I don't know what the answer to it is per se, what sort of prescription to offer for the democratic construction of novelty, the genuinely democratic exercise of power. I think anarchists have taken this question furthest, not so much in theoretical prescription but in attempted practice, through work in consensus and autonomist politics. The anarchists, the Quakers, assorted and sundry bands of populist across all time and tempers. They have attempted to answer the question of reconciling liberty and social justice, of the freedom of the individual and the freedom of power, through experimentation in in the concrete. In philosophy Deleuze and Guattari address the question, and we might following them rephrase it as "how can we construct macromolecular events?"

By this point I have some idea as to how this works theoretically, conceptually. But I'm not so sure how it works practically, concretely. It would make an interesting book- half theory, half practice. What, in a deep and powerful sense, what is freedom?

Towards a genuine libertarian movement.

We have reached a strange phase in American life, one characterized by overwhelming political apathy and general civic and economic disempowerment. The mainstream parties have failed. The minor parties and political groups remain marginal. The greens and socialists act as simple extremes of the Democrats. The libertarians and conservatives are extremes of the Republicans. Both major parties have reached a quiet consensus on the political and economic makeup of the world, and their fights over certain matters (how soon to leave Iraq, how to deal with health care costs) mask a deep congruity (visible clearly in the business press).

There must be a new configuration in American politics capable of presenting a semi-coherent alternative to the two parties that we know and their extreme versions. This must come through a new political movement, that finds common ground among a sizable portion of Americans across cemented ideological camps.

So the question is, on what can we agree, what can be the terms of this new coalition?

I will list a few themes that might make a solid core of a real "third way."

For the right:
*Opposition to big government.
*General, permanent reduction of federal income taxes.
*Reorganization of Social Security to encourage mixture of shared income guarantees and personal savings and investment accounts.
*Voucher programs for non-profit (including religious) schools.
*Reduction of foreign military and economic involvement.

For the left:
*Opposition to corporate power in government.
*Eliminating $100k income cap on Social Security taxation to stabilize program.
*Some form of guaranteed, cheap universal health insurance.
*Major reduction of funding of offensive capability of the military, and a far less interventionist military policy.
*Major investment in renewable energy research, paid for by redirecting subsidies away from fossil fuels and nuclear.

Nonpartisan planks:
*Major reorganization of farm subsidies, towards local, small-scale production and distribution.
*Rebuilding local manufacturing centers through preferential loans, etc.
*Reducing trade dependence upon authoritarian nations by enforcing basic levels of political and economic rights for trading partners.
*Promotion of localization of banking and investing.
*Promotion of employee ownership of firms.
*Addressing housing affordability through community land trusts and inclusionary zoning.
*Replacing environmental regulation with public trusts, with officers elected by the general populace.
*Stronger preferential tax mechanisms for small business against corporate business.
*Exploring stronger state requirements for corporate legal and financial privileges, such as employee ownership clauses.
*Gradual shifting of federal forestland towards locally owned and managed sustainable forestry programming.
*Major expansion of Americorps program, with each year of participation equaling a year of university room, board and tuition; or an equivalent fund for small business or nonprofit grants; or an equivalent fund towards purchase of a first home [in a CLT].
*Reorganization of military service towards reduction of active duty soldiers and expansion of National Guard. Major expansion of state rights in releasing and calling back guardsmen.
*Total elimination of political lobbying funded or undertaken by any group besides democratic, membership-based organizations of citizens. (flesh out) Major political corruption reform through constitutional amendment- IRV, elimination of concentrated lobbying, contribution limitations locked at one day's minimum wage per month, etc.
*Removing cabinet offices from the executive office and placing them under the direct control of Congress, besides State and Defense. [ahem. cough.]
*Creation of mechanism for national initiative and referendum.
*Citizens' panels [adapt from proposal in Democracy In Small Groups]
*Education reform (broad)
.......................................

Libertarian socialism.

“Libertarian” originally meant a general opposition to authority of all types. In the United States, the Libertarian Party has conditioned the reception of the idea as being exclusively aanti-statist. Classical libertarians opposed not only the power of centralized government, but of the centralized businesses and corporations that strove to dominat people and societies through the dollar (and often enough, the gun).

A phrase that often provokes confusion is the political moniker “libertarian socialist.” This is essentially a gussied up euphemism for “anarchist,” though one that illustrates the positive content of the concept. Libertarian socialist means one who promotes the decentralized, social ownership of the means of production of a society. So not only do they oppose centralized government power; they also oppose with equal ferocity corporate power, and promote as an ultimate ideal some means of direct, social ownership of economic factors.

What does this mean? The easiest and clearest example would be cooperatives. a libertarian socialist might promote employee and consumer cooperatives as an alternative to normal business organization. A worker-owned and managed firm gives full, democratic power to those that work in a firm, and entitles them to a fair and equal share of profits. In practice, worker cooperatives do wonderfully across many types of business. They generally exceed the productivity of a private firm or corporation in spades. This makes a certain degree of sense intuitively, doesn't it? Workers who share in profits have every incentive to work hard, and workers who participate in managing their firm feel that much more connected and empowered through their work. Study after study demonstrates the viability of cooperatives in terms of productivity relative to traditional business forms. Their chief impediments are access to finance and general education- people aren't taught that these are possible or viable, and they aren't taught the crucial skills of democratic and participatory management. But if we look at one form of employee ownership, the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), we see both the wide adoption of this model and an increasing incidence of ESOPs that involve high levels of employee participation in management and majority or 100% ownership of stock.

This example shows the potential of a libertarian socialist framework to address concrete experience in the modern world without selling out and compromising basic principles. Though most ESOPs and cooperatives don't mesh thoroughly with a libertarian socialist value system, they are often a positive step in that direction and prove by their own success the inherent potential of these principles.*

Another model for empowerment that fits this basic value system, the one with greatest historical presence, is anarcho-syndicalism. This is a movement of radical unionism, based around achieving worker control of the economy. Examples of syndicalism include the famous CNT, the anarchosyndicalist union of Spain that spearheaded the spanish Revolution of 1936, fighting off Franco's troops in egalitarian union militias from the factories and villages until displacement and repression by the Stalinist union. The tradition includes the French syndicalists, who strove to recreate an economy of small, democratic workshops of skilled artisans against the onslaught of deskilling and deadening factory work. It includes the IWW, the mostly American union that brought together militants from every job sector to fight for worker control of industry by any means necessary, popularized by folk singer and radical alike.

Americans bridle when they think of unions, perhaps frightened by the presumption of conflict that organized labor brings. They often rightfully cringe at the corruption of many major unions (though are usually more accepting of the institututionalized corruption of big business). Despite this, the vast majority of Americans are still working class, and they still derive most of their income from wages or salaries. Syndicalism sees unionism not as a thing in and of itself, an effort to simply raise wages or elect amenable political candidates. Syndicalism sees unions as the best tool possible for worker control of industry, once again embodying the values and ethos of libertarian socialism.

If we focus on the principles rather than the proper nouns of this movement, we can see evidence of its legitimacy as a tactic in major sectors of the economy. Labor unions in America in the past few years have begun to use their often large pension plans to influence business decisions and put pressure on major financiers. This has taken many forms: funding major workplace buyouts; launching union-funded cooperative start-ups; promoting investment in unionized firms through leveraging weight in major investment funds and bank holdings. In other countries, unions have contributed heavily to the worker-owned sector. Here in Austin, members of the IWW have successfully pressured several businesses to operate as worker-managed collectives.

Syndicalism is scarier than simple cooprativization, because syndicalism denies the right of capital to control the workplace or the profits produced by work. To many Americans this might appear strange and unjustified; investors and their managers invest in the machines and/or facilities necessary for work to happen, and why should they let workers get anything out of the affair besides their agreed upon wages? As I said, relative to actual production itself, there are good arguments that this type of arrangement actually maximizes productivity, or at least enhances it dramatically. There is the basic argument of workplace democracy, that work should be democratic in the same way that government should be democratic, as a basic right of human existence necessary for basic human dignity. I agree with these arguments whole-heartedly. but they do little to address a belief in private property rights of capitalists, banks, or landlords.

To answer the argument in favor of the rights of property is to reveal the fundamental disconnect between libertarian socialism and the libertarianism we generally encounter in the US. The libertarian socialist tends to accept the charge that all true value is created by labor or the natural world, and that owners of substantial capital got it by stealing the earned wealth of workers or the given wealth of nature, through systemic collusion with government forces. This is a similar to a labor theory of value, in which all value added to a good comes to it through the work done on it alongside its natural value. The great producer of wealth, the great producer of productivity increases that have made modern civilization possible, is intellectual and physical labor. Capital simply amasses labor value from previous ventures or through some instance of petty theft or profiteering, and then repeats the cycle in new business ventures. Think of the foundation of the centralized wealth in America, where did it really come from? Didn't the government give land to railroad companies at well below market rate? Didn't the major industrialists get their start as corrupt profiteers during the Civil War? This is a larger argument, a deeper argument that I can't address fully here, one that demands a different idea of property than the rights of accummulated wealth.

Finally, we can consider another current of libertarian socialism, that of communalism. This has taken many forms, qualititative distinct yet all sharing a basic characteristic. They all focus on community control of assets, and management of that control through democratic community organs. We can include in this any number of religious or utopian communes throughout American history, and even contemporary ecovillages organized socially. We can also include the well-developed school of thought called libertarian municipalism, promoted by the Institute for Social Ecology and its founder Murray Bookchin. This school focuses on a sort of town assembly model, in which a local governing body, directly democratic, owns and manages local property, both physical space and manufacturing or production facilities. The dangers of state control of industry are prevented by using local control instead of national or state ownership. This is a very communitarian philosophy, and maximizes the strengths and weaknesses of any communitarian vision. Again, we can see the possibilities of this line of thinking when we look at numerous successful experiments in community ownership across the country. These range from something as everyday as municipal utilities (for instance our own Austin Energy) or moderate as local ownership of a city sports teams (the Green Bay Packers); to more radical ecovillages and cooperative living projects.

These examples all express common themes. Decentralization, a focus on the local and immediate level of organization, the everyday world of experience- at work, in a union local, in the community and home. A major focus on the control of land and capital. (We might consider it the greatest triumph of mainstream politics it has convinced so many of us to seek power through government and the state instead of through direct ownership and control of capital, rooted in the communities of labor and valuation that create it.) A strong concern with the social ownership of the factors of the economy, either by purchase, creation ad hoc or seizure. A rejection, even disregard of conventional politics and economics. A focus on creating viable projects in the now, instead of planning and theorizing about the future. Political economic projects more experimental and constructive than antagonistic, even if some strategies are adversarial.These features characterize the libertarian socialist tendency, and hence a major theme within anarchist thought and practice as a whole.

Politics

Politics is always ultimately a question of who is allowed to speak to and as power, and who is excluded. Which singular voice or idea, which propositions are allowed to drown out the others, why, and from whom? We can see this in a lecture hall as easily as a federal election, at a concert or in a board meeting. Most of the actually existing rules of power are unwritten, codes of behavior, style and speech that are known implicitly or explicitly by insiders but are unknown to outsiders. Who can speak and how much will their opinion matter, how direct will be its influence on power, these are the core questions of politics. The political process is always analytic in a sense, it always cuts into a population. People are included and excluded to define a hierarchy of legitimate participation. Are you a citizen? Are you an immigrant? Are you rich? Are you an educated professional? Are you white, black, Latino, Asian? What music do you listen to? What language and idiom do you speak? The navigation of power is conditioned by a host of these questions. And the most important question of all, how close is your proposition to the major existing configurations of power? How are your acts and words aligned in regards to the acts and words of the already powerful, be they institutions or individuals?

We cannot hope for a world in which this subterranean calculus is absent. It "Power" is simply the ability to form semi-coherent organizations and events that sustain themselves and/or increase over time. Last night I went to a wonderful show at Enchanted Forest, known to many Austinites for their performances that mix the aesthetics of raves and jam band shows with more ambitious performance art. I had a great time, even though they had problems with the sound system. During one of these problems, someone whipped out a set of bongos and started playing, trying to get a drum circle going. The MC vied with him a bit, and it was entertaining. Eventually the MC drowned him out be blasting a hip-hop song. I'm using this as an example of power dynamics because it's fairly innocent. The drummer tried to participate in the event directly, through starting a drum circle. Functionally, this was an attempt to share int he power of this particular event, to bring the audience into the show. The MC put a stop to it, albeit humorously. He was able to because he had an instrument of power unavailable to the drummer- a set of giant speakers. There was a momentary contest of power within the event, and the MC won through superior technology.

Now, frankly, as an audience member, if the whole event had been derailed into a drum circle, I would have been pissed. I wanted to see skilled performers, not be in a drum circle. So I'm glad the MC won. My point is simply that power is exercised all the time, in every event, every organization, any cluster of people.

The point of political thought though should be to bring these power mechanisms to light as they happen, to point out the process of exclusion and inclusion that is occurring, to evaluate them. This is the constructive element of political thought, to question whether or not the particular processes of inclusion and exclusion are appropriate, "fair," etc. For a political movement, there must be some sort of focus, some sort of tendency to promote, but we should be aware that this process is occurring. We can then always be mindful of the possibility of doing otherwise, of modifying our politics, or of adapting them to the times without losing the core of values we want to promote. So we must note and critique inclusions and exclusions. We must evaluate this process as it occurs. And we must always be able to focus our attention beyond the particular political arrangement of the moment and towards the actual values that are guiding us.