Thoughts on Parecon

a.k.a. A Defense of Socialist Planning

I’ve been reading Mike Albert’s book Parecon: Life after Capitalism. That I sympathize with any effort to envision something better than this global anti-people system of capitalism-imperialism goes without saying. I also definitely see where he’s coming from with his discussion of “balanced job complexes” and his concern with preventing the rise of a “coordinator class” in a post-capitalist society, even though I think the Marxist idea of “breaking down the contradiction between mental and manual labor” is a much richer treatment of the same problem.

Good stuff aside, I gotta take issue with Albert’s condemnation of socialist or “central” planning. Although the book is focused on economics, his rejection of socialist economic planning is closely related to a flawed political vision, popular on the Left, that simply expanding democracy, making it more participatory, will lead to a better world. That vision rejects: 1) the need for the formerly oppressed and exploited to wield state power (“the dictatorship of the proletariat” in Marxist terms) and 2) the need for a revolutionary vanguard to lead them.

In order to get to a world where exploitation, oppression, and inequality no longer exist, socialist planning, the use of state power by the oppressed, and a vanguard party are all necessary (but, it should be emphasized, not sufficient -- political line is key). Anyway, the fact that each of those things can be transformed into its opposite -- into state-capitalist planning, into the use of state power over the oppressed, into a revisionist party -- is not a reason to give them up. That fact only highlights the difficulty and dangers involved in transitioning to a classless, stateless society and the need to fight capitalist restoration every step of the way. There’s no easy fix. Continuous revolution is the word. Giving up the plan, the DotP, and the vanguard means giving up any hope of making revolution. It means settling for merely re-arranging oppressive social relations (until they come back in full force), instead of moving towards abolishing them.

Two things expose, especially sharply, the need for socialist planning: regional inequalities inside the US and, even more so, the wealth gap between rich and poor countries. In April, there was a front-page story in the Times about rising infant mortality rates in the southern Black Belt counties, with Black infant mortality in the region more than double that of whites in the same states. The reason is that the region remains deeply impoverished, an enduring legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. If economic resources were allocated and production/consumption carried out according to “participatory planning,” with people making decisions in proportion to how they’re affected by the outcomes (the Parecon value of “self-management”), there would be no way to eliminate (rapidly or at all) the poverty of the Black Belt south [a footnote: which is not to say forms of "self-management" are unimportant -- they are important -- only that they must be considered secondary to the overall social plan]. In order to put the political goal of ending the oppression of Black people in command of the economy, which has to include raising up the Black Belt south even at the immediate economic expense of other regions, socialist planning is a must.

The huge inequalities between rich and poor countries reveal even more clearly the necessity of socialist planning in a liberating economy. This is particularly important in an imperialist country like the US, the home base of an international system of exploitation and oppression, the final link in countless capital circuits, where the labor of hundreds of millions in the Third World is transformed into superprofits through direct investment, loans, and other forms of capital export. If the US economy became a parecon, it would only end up, at best, redistributing the loot from imperialist plunder more evenly among the people living in this country.

Socialist planning is needed in order to carry out production, consumption, and allocation according to the *highest interests of humanity* (which correspond to the class interests of the international proletariat). The overall quality of life would certainly improve for the great majority living in the imperialist citadels after the revolution, but that improvement in living standards has to coincide with a massive transfer of wealth from the imperialist countries back to the colonial/semicolonial countries, to make up for the past several hundred years of ruthless parasitism. If you’ve ever seen one of those photos of the world at night, where huge portions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are completely dark -- a reflection of the lack of electricity, the intense poverty, and most of all the history and present-day reality of imperialism in those regions -- you know what I’m talking about.

Thus, there’s a vast difference between the parecon view that a liberating economy means participatory decision-making carried out by people in a certain country in their own interests and the revolutionary communist view that a liberating economy means putting the highest interests of humanity as a whole in command. Like a lot of other issues, I think it comes down to whether or not to look towards the farthest and most radical horizon: the complete worldwide emancipation of humanity.