Episode 148 – Participatory Economics with Michael Albert

Macro N Cheese – Episode 148
Participatory Economics with Michael Albert
November 27, 2021

 

[00:00:02.810] – Michael Albert  [intro/music]

The reason why 80% are doing disempowering activity is not because they’re not capable of more. It’s because they are trained and repressed and restrained so that they won’t be able to do more. And so to a certain extent, they’ll believe they can’t do more.

[00:00:22.370] – Michael Albert  [intro/music]

People would say to leftists like ourselves: “Look, we get it. We know what you don’t like. We know you don’t like capitalism, we know you don’t like exploitation, we know you don’t like racism and on and on and on. But what the hell do you want?” And a great many of us took that as an attack, as an attempt to thwart us being active because we didn’t know what the future should be.

[00:01:35.130] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.050] – Steve Grumbine

All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. I have a great guest today. I’m bringing on Michael Albert, the author of “No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World,” and he’s one of the leading voices in the participatory economics field. He is an anarchist by definition.

Michael is a longtime activist, writer, and organizer, known primarily for his affiliation with Z Communications and his original writing on and support for participatory economics and participatory society. He has written hundreds of articles, over 20 books, one novel, one screenplay, and has initiated numerous institutions and projects. And without further ado, my guest, Michael Albert, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:02:31.610] – Albert

Well no, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

[00:02:34.680] – Grumbine

Absolutely. Full disclosure. I’ve gotten through the initial phases of your book, and I just absolutely love the synopsis and the overarching theme of it. But why don’t I ask you – can you tell us a little bit about what your book is about and why it matters?

[00:02:55.290] – Albert

Well, the title gives away the topic, I think. It’s about a new economy. So it’s about an economy instead of what we endure  – capitalism – but also instead of what has been posed in the past as an alternative, which is often called 20th century socialism. So this thing that we’re trying to conceive means to be other than those options.

And it’s not a detailed blueprint or a map of every nook and cranny or anything like that. It is instead the key institutions that we think are essential in order to have an economy which meets desires that people widely share, desires for control over our lives, desires for equitable distribution of burdens and benefits, desires for solidarity rather than antisociality, desire for diversity rather than homogenization.

And so it proposes a very few but very central institutional features that are very different from what we have, and also from what’s in that other world. So it starts by getting rid of ownership of productive property, productive assets, so people don’t own workplaces and don’t own the natural resources and don’t own the sky and the sea and so on and so forth.

But once you get rid of that, if you have a little problem inside of a workplace, if there’s no owner, who’s deciding things? And so again, going very quickly the next step is that there’d be workers councils and also consumers councils, and that that be the venue of decision-making, the main venue. And then how do you decide things? What’s the norm?

And in this new approach to economics, the norm becomes what we call self-management, which is basically that people should have a say in decisions in proportion to the degree they’re affected. And then you could imagine somebody saying, “Well, that all sounds nice, but we need good decisions and what’s to say that everybody participating won’t make decisions much less effective, much less efficient, much less valuable, much less insightful?”

And so you need a mechanism to undo what is commonly the case now, which is that about 80% of the people who work in a workplace and in the economy as a whole are, by virtue of their circumstances and their backgrounds and their situations, not particularly prepared to participate in an insightful and productive way in decisions.

Instead, they endure a kind of work that is fragmenting, that reduces skills and diminishes awareness of the overall circumstances, and reduces confidence. And about 20% are the opposite. They have jobs that are empowering. That, at least in a significant degree, put them in proximity of decision-making, give them information, give them confidence, give them connections to others, and so on.

So the next stage of this vision, called participatory economics, is to get rid of the old division of labor, corporate division of labor, and replace it. And the thing we replace it with is called balanced job complexes – and we can talk about that if you like. And then the next step is remuneration. What kind of income should people get? What’s the norm for that?

And what the new economy proposes is that people get income for how long they work, how hard they work, and the onerousness of the conditions under which they work. But of course not for property, not for bargaining power, which is typically the situation in market economies, and not even for output. Again, we could talk about that, it’s controversial.

And finally, you need a system of allocation to mediate and provide a mechanism for arriving at what’s produced in what quantities and to go where, to whom, and typically that’s central planning or it’s markets. But we reject both for reasons we can discuss if you like and replace it with something called participatory planning and that’s it.

Participatory planning, equitable renumeration, a new division of labor called balanced job complexes and workers and consumer self-management. That’s the scaffold around which we feel that a new economy can be built, which is without classes, which is without alienation, which is equitable, which is “solidaritous,” and so on. And so, that’s a quick overview.

[00:07:24.330] – Grumbine

It’s a great overview, too. I found myself as I’ve moved leftward, I have strayed into various libertarian areas, and I’ve gone further more towards socialism. And as I evaluate some of these things, wondering, could we survive without a benevolent dictator? Because you can see clearly  – and you’ve already stated this in your opening – not all people are ready to be meaningful players in a participatory sense.

They don’t have the skills, and so they’re not prepared for it. And so they use the limits that have been imposed on them previously, and they carry that forward with them.  And I’m curious, from the psychological standpoint and the nature of man, which I’m sure, as you’ve probably heard these kinds of questions many times,

[00:08:12.480] – Albert

Sure.

[00:08:12.940] – Grumbine

But how do you survive the growing pains of a society that has been intentionally kept dumbed down, alienated and oppressed, and has a lot of bad habits that have been baked into it from the gift of neoliberalism and the rest of the capitalist structure?

[00:08:32.430] – Albert

Well, the first thing that I think is critical to realize is that the concern you’re raising and the concerns some other people raise, which sound similar, are not the same. You’re saying “We’re in a bad place. We’ve gotten here as a result of our history. And how do we get beyond that?” Other people say “We’re in a bad place. We have to acknowledge that.

But we’re here because that’s the way the cookie crumbles, because that’s human nature, because that’s all that’s possible.” And so those two things are quite different. And I’m tempted to deal with the latter before dealing with the former. But let’s deal with the former, since it’s what you ask. Take the part of participatory economics, which I think would raise that most directly.

Participatory economics says that inside workplaces, we want the workforce to participate. And since we want the workforce to participate and we want the decisions to be intelligent, insightful, informed decisions, that means that the workforce has to be different than it is now. And what’s the difference?

The difference is, instead of 80% of the workforce doing things all day long which disempower them, which make them the opposite of prepared to participate in decision-making, everybody should be engaged in activities which comparably empower them. And that’s a big call. What does it say? It says that when we divide up jobs, when we define jobs by combining tasks – so in other words, a job is a combination of a lot of tasks.

The way it’s done now in the corporate division of labor is we combine a lot of empowering tasks into jobs, and a sector of people – about 20% of the workforce – gets those jobs. And we provide the disempowering tasks into jobs and the rest of the workforce – say about 80% – get those jobs.

If we’re going to have everybody comparably empowered by the work that they do, then what we need to do is to apportion those tasks among jobs differently, so that we’re each doing a mix of things that is suited to us and that we can do well, but that also empowers us comparably to others. This also leads to changing around many of the tasks, so they’re more empowering rather than, as now, designed to be disempowering.

So the criticism of this coming from what you suggested is, “Well, wait a minute. If we take a hospital and we say that the doctors have to, I don’t know, clean bed pans and answer the phone some of the time. And we say that the people who are currently doing all those other kinds of disempowering work have to do more empowering work sometimes, we’re going to get worse outcomes.

We’re going to get horrible outcomes.” That’s the formulation. And it’s just not true. It’s not true when we recognize that the reason why 80% are doing disempowering activity is not because they’re not capable of more. It’s because they are trained and repressed and restrained so that they won’t be able to do more. And so to a certain extent, they’ll believe they can’t do more.

And to see how plausible that is, just consider 50 or 60 years ago and consider women and Blacks in the United States. The same situation prevailed. Women did only certain kinds of tasks and certain kinds of jobs and certain kinds of activities which were quite limited in terms of their empowerment and their participation. The same for Blacks. And what we find now is that that’s no longer the case as much.

It’s still partly the case, but very much less. 51% of the people in medical schools are women, and the Blacks in medical schools also are higher than their statistics among the overall population. So what we discover is that the reason for those groups 50 or 60 years ago, being able to be thought of as incapable of more wasn’t because they were genetically incapable of more. It’s because they were denied the circumstances and the background to do more.

And that’s the same thing for the 80% of the working class now. So the answer to your question – that’s just the beginning of the answer to your question – the next part of your question is harder. What’s the transition like? That’s what you’re really asking. You’re saying if there’s this classless economy to go to, which we haven’t said too much about, but if there is and if we’re where we’re at now, which is way far from that, what’s the transition like?

Well, that’s not the topic of the book “No Bosses,” but it is the topic of the book that I’m currently writing, titled “In Transition.” And it is the right question. And the answer can’t be summarized in a single one or two steps. But if I can take a moment, let me just tell you a story. Is that okay?

[00:13:31.920] – Grumbine

Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:13:33.160] – Albert

So I’m in Argentina almost 20 years ago. The Argentine economy is in deep trouble. There’s a lot of chaos and disruption, and employers, capitalists, and a great many firms that are failing decide to punt, to simply walk away from the firms. And when they walk away, also what I call the coordinator class –  that’s that 20%, I keep talking about, the empowered workers, in this case, the accountants and the engineers and the financial officers and so on and so forth – go with them.

But the working class members of the community have no place to go. So they stay in those firms and they take over those firms and they try to make a success out of those firms, and they do. And what’s interesting is two things, I think. One is they immediately form basically what I’m calling workers councils, and they immediately Institute, if not precisely what I mean by self-management, a heavy dose of democracy in those organs of power.

People vote on decisions. They also pretty much equalize wages, not quite the equitable remuneration scheme I would favor, but basically very close to it. And over time, the situation devolves, let’s describe it as. So I’m in a meeting of about 50 such people, and they’re going around the room and they’re describing their circumstances, and at first they’re really excited.

They’re from all over Argentina, and they’re sharing their experiences. But after a while, it gets pretty maudlin because people are saying “You know, we took over, we took control, we instituted decisions, we made things equitable, and you know it’s all unraveling.” And one of them said, after a while, “I thought I’d never say this but maybe Margaret Thatcher was right.

Maybe it’s just the way it is.” And what I said to them is “When you took over and you made those changes, what did you do about jobs?” They didn’t quite get what I was saying. Who would, right? And so I said, “Well, what did you do about the various positions that existed before?” And they said, “Well, we filled them. We had people volunteer, or maybe they were suited to them or whatever.

But we filled those old positions.” And I said, “And now, the people who fill those positions, are they similar to the rest of you in their attitudes and taste?” They said, “No, they’re diverging.” And are they paying themselves more? “Yes.” And is the alienation that’s coming back a function of that split? “Yes.” And so it turned out that it wasn’t human nature that put the experiment – let’s call it – at risk and devolved it.

It was the fact that the experiment left over the old corporate division of labor. So that’s the first thing that I want to say from that example. But there’s a second thing. I’m talking to a woman in one of the workplaces. It was a glass factory and she had been working before this change at a glass furnace, probably a job that I would have lasted 15 minutes at, this incredibly hot environment in which she’s doing the same repetitive motions over and over.

But now she’s in charge of the finances and the bookkeeping of the firm. And so I asked her, “Please tell me what was the most difficult thing to learn?” This bears on your concern about transition. What was the most difficult thing to learn? And she didn’t want to answer. She was a little bit embarrassed by the situation, I don’t know.

And so I said, ‘Well, was it to learn how to use a spreadsheet to keep track of things?” “No.” “Was it to learn accounting concepts?” “No.” “Was it to learn how to organize that data and information to be useful?” “No”. I said, “Well, come on, please tell me what was the most difficult thing?” She said, “First, I had to learn to read.”

So the point here is that the transition – I’m not minimizing it. It’s a real thing. And there’s real training and real learning and real experience and real difficulties along the way. But people imagine them to be greater than they really are. For people to become a surgeon that takes time and is hard. For people to become a manager, even for people to become able to track the information about a firm, that takes a lot less.

And these firms basically were succeeding without their owners and without their coordinator class, all over Argentina. But slowly over time, the maintenance of the old division of labor and the maintenance of market competition sort of devolved them back into their old form.

[00:18:21.270] – Grumbine

We champion a federal job guarantee. I’m sure this is not completely in line, but one of the things that’s really interesting about this is the way that we talk about designing it. There’s a nonprofit model, but there’s another model that we had talked about, which is participatory and basically at the local level, your local communities deciding what they value and then providing jobs that are at not only a living wage but a thriving wage with a suite of different services to basically counter the impact of capital, to give a public option to labor.

And by doing that, people can assess whether they want to go back to work at capitalist jobs. So, the idea of being able to allow those councils to decide what kind of work is out there and what they value in the community and allow people to almost create their own jobs. And it seems radical given the way society is today.

And it’s not quite as radical as perhaps what you’re proposing, but as a bridge, a federal job guarantee – federally funded, locally administered – seems like it could be a step in the right direction towards self empowerment. I don’t know if I’m right, but it feels like it.

[00:19:35.420] – Albert

Absolutely. I think that you are right. It would be one of many things that we can imagine. So I wish at some point we’ll be a little more clear about what the vision is. But sticking to this period of time, the in-between time, many, many things are steps in the right direction. Anything, in fact, that betters the lot of those who are suffering is something positive, right?

It’s something with some virtues. But what makes something more than just a desirable reform is partly how we would fight for it, and, to an extent, what it is proposing. So, let me take the first and then the second. For how we fight for it, suppose that there’s a battle for a higher minimum wage, $20-$25 minimum wage.

If we fight for that in a way that’s basically “let’s win the minimum wage and go home,” that’s one thing. That’s called reformist. It’s not a bad thing. It would be good to win that. But what if we fight for it in a different way? What if we fight for it in a way which raises desires for, and clarifies the issues associated with actually just an equitable remuneration.

So we’re fighting for the $25 an hour but we’re talking about the fact that people should be remunerated for how long they work, how hard they work, and the onerousness of the conditions under which they work and that’s all. And so as a result, those in the most onerous situation should be earning more, not less than those in less onerous… and so on and so forth.

Then we’re organizing for it in a way, which when we win it, we don’t go home. We don’t stop. We don’t think that’s the end of the line. In fact, we have prepared ourselves to want still more. And if we’ve organized really well, we’ve created vehicles and institutions to demand it. And then there’s the example that you’re giving, which goes a step further.

It says, not only can we fight for something in a way… So can we fight for what you’re calling a locally administered jobs guarantee. So we’re going to fight for that, and we’re going to fight for it partly in a way which is preparing ourselves to fight for more. So it includes setting up, say, assemblies and neighborhoods.

And it includes raising the issue of self-management in workplaces and raising the issue of participation throughout society. So we’re raising aspirations. But you’re right also, that even better. It is creating vehicles, it is creating images of the future and the present, right? The idea of people gathering together, controlling their own circumstances, being responsible for the assets that you’re using, the equipment, the venues, the resources, and providing things that are socially valued.

So in a sense, you’re planting the seeds of the future in the present. And that’s good, too. So both these things are roads or steps that I think are desirable but it helps to have a vision to orient those steps and to keep moving toward.

[00:22:47.560] – Grumbine

I love it. One of the things in looking through your book – again, I’m very excited, I’ve read the first three chapters so far – and you’ve talked about the scaffolding. You start out with the values for a better world.

And I think that that’s a great place to start with, because even though I don’t know that I would call myself an anarchist, I’m sympathetic. I enjoy the framing. A little terrifying, I’m not going to lie, but at the same time, though, it’s definitely something that’s piqued my interest. So, lay out the values for this better world.

[00:23:21.740] – Albert

Okay, well, when we were thinking about this, the origination of participatory economics goes back a long way, and it emerges from the New Left and from the participation of myself and Robin Hahnel, who I developed it with within that period of time, if you will. And all our readings and so on. And when we started, basically, people would say to leftist like ourselves, look, we get it.

We know what you don’t like. We know you don’t like capitalism, we know you don’t like exploitation. We know you don’t like racism and on and on and on. But what the hell do you want? Right? And a great many of us took that as an attack, as an attempt to thwart us being active because we didn’t know what the future should be.

And so, many of us would just fight back against that by saying things like, you don’t have to know the alternative to slavery, to oppose slavery. Which is true. It’s valid. It’s objectively, right. It’s ethically, right. But it’s strategically not very smart, because you do need to have an alternative to reach people who doubt that there is an alternative.

So Robin and I thought – together – about an alternative. And we started, as you say, with values. And since we’re addressing the economy, we sort of addressed, well, what goes on in the economy? Decisions are made. So we need a value for decision-making. And what we came up with was self-management. It’s not particularly new.

We gave it maybe some new wrinkles, but that’s about all. And the idea is that people should have a say in decisions in proportion to the degree that they’re affected by them. So, for instance, if you’re choosing what color socks to wear to work, basically, you make that decision yourself, more or less like Stalin. But if you’re deciding whether or not to bring a boombox and set it on your desk and play it, you can’t make that decision by yourself because it affects other people.

And so, sometimes decisions should be decided by autocratic rule of the person who’s affected. And sometimes it should be decided by one person, one vote. Majority rule. Sometimes consensus makes sense. Sometimes another kind of algorithm makes sense. But the goal is self-management. So then the next thing we thought about – partly because we are highly attuned to the ills of markets – was some of the stuff that comes up in that context.

For instance, society should not cause us – reward us – for being antisocial. It should not put pressures on us to fragment humans from humans and to create a war of each against all. It should instead literally produce solidarity. So that was the second value. The third value was similar in its logic. It was diversity. Society should not homogenize everything and reduce everything. It should value diversity.

It should value difference for reasons of, well, diversity of variety in our lives, but also for reasons of not putting all our eggs in one basket. And then equity came along as another value because, after all, the economy produces stuff, and a big issue is who gets what? We thought about that long and hard and decided, well, look, rewarding people because they own the means of production – we’re ruling that out anyway – but clearly, that’s not something we want.

And we don’t want what we have, which is a situation not only of rewarding property but of rewarding bargaining power. So we don’t want a situation in which it’s basically a thugs’ economy. The famous criminal Al Capone was once asked, how do you feel about the United States? And Al said, “I love the United States because in the United States, you get what you can take.”

And he’s basically right. It’s a thugs’ economy. So we don’t want that. We also decided we didn’t like the idea that you should be rewarded because you were lucky in the genetic lottery. You happen to be born with LeBron James’s physique and reflexes, or you happen to be born with Adele’s voice, or you happen to be born with Chomsky’s brain.

Why, on top of luck in the genetic lottery, should you be rewarded? Why do you need more? Why isn’t it great that you got that endowment, but now put it to good use and there’s no reason to get enriched because of it. So what it came down to for us was that remuneration should be for duration, how long you work, intensity, how hard you work, and the onerousness of the conditions under which you work.

So that’s our value equity. So now we’ve got self-management, diversity, equity, solidarity. And then comes the timely value that exists now, which wouldn’t even probably have to be mentioned if we didn’t live in an economy which so grotesquely violates it, which is sustainability. And so that’s where we started with those values.

Now the task would become, if you’re serious about those values – or other ones that one might list – if you’re serious about your values, then the task is to look at a given economy or to propose an economy with institutions that fulfill those values. If the economy’s institutions violate those values, then you don’t like them and you don’t want them. And if you can replace them with something that fulfills the values, that’s the step you should take. And so that’s what we did. That’s exactly the step that we took, so to speak.

[00:29:03.970] – Intermission

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[00:29:52.950] – Grumbine

I am a project manager by trade, and I am very fond of a system called Agile or Scrum, and it’s as close to democratically led participatory project teams as you can get. The only difference is the priorities have been handed down in a hierarchical fashion, but you’re left to achieve these goals as the team sees fit and self-organizing. There’s a lot of good there.

I don’t know that it equals what you’re asking, but it seems like an opportunity for collaborative decision making, which brings us to the next part of your book, which is: who owns what and who decides what? These are some key things because you’re talking about eliminating the personal property, in terms of means of production, and self-management. So take us through that.

[00:30:41.550] – Albert

Okay. Just a quick comment on Agile. Okay?

[00:30:44.400] – Grumbine

Sure.

[00:30:45.180] – Albert

If you have a plant with 1000 people in it, then what I’m saying is about 800 of them are working class, and 200 of them are coordinator class–between labor and capital–the empowered part of the workforce. I’m guessing without any particular background that Agile is treating those 200 a little differently than many other approaches, but I doubt it’s treating the 800 differently at all. That’s just a guess.

[00:31:11.860] – Grumbine

It’s a little different than that, because basically the teams are very small and the belief is no one’s left behind. So in other words, if me and you were on the same team, ultimately, if you fell down, we’d be there to pick you up.

[00:31:25.630] – Albert

Yeah, but the teams are teams of empowered workers by and large.

[00:31:29.410] – Grumbine

That’s true. You’re absolutely correct.

[00:31:32.040] – Albert

And so what’s happening here is that upper level owners are basically saying to themselves, well, can we get more out of mid-level coordinator class without arousing lower-level working class to take over the workplace and to take over our circumstances etcetera, etcetara ?  And, that’s what they’re trying to do. And the issue here is will the coordinator class be satisfied with serving the interests of those above?

Or will the coordinator class if it’s unleashed to think for itself a bit more than in the past, begin to align with those below and begin to feel like things should be more equitable and more self-managing, et cetera, and we’ll see. I suspect that if any of that happens, Agile will be removed from the work place.

[00:32:22.390] – Grumbine

Immediately.

[00:32:22.390] – Albert

So we remove the owners. That is to say, we say, “Look, Bezos you no longer own Amazon”, whoever. The owning class  – about 2% of the population, roughly speaking – no longer owns all that. And that’s just a step that is common to virtually every left perspective once it thinks through things. Look, if you have people who own the means of production, who own the economy, they’re going to dominate, they’re going to determine the agenda, they’re going to aggrandize themselves.

Equity disappears, solidarity disappears, self-management disappears, and so on. So we get rid of that. Now we’re left with workplaces, and inside them we don’t want to just replace the old boss with a new boss. That is, we don’t want to replace the owner with a set of people who dominate in the workplace. This is what I think 20th-century socialism did.

So we don’t want to replace the owner with 20% of the workforce as the new ruling class. We want to replace it with the whole workforce. We want the whole workforce to make decisions. And so that’s where self-management comes in. And it’s not that complicated of a concept. It’s basically just saying that in a workplace – getting into details makes it a little difficult, I suppose.

Suppose you’ve got again, a workplace of 1000 people where you have a team of 20 people. So the team is going to decide its own activities in the context of activities that have been decided by the whole workers council. So the whole workers council is going to decide various policies and this, that, and the other thing, and then the team within that set of guides is going to do whatever its responsibility is.

And so you have people making decisions that bear upon them and that affect them with a degree of insight or degree of influence that’s a function of the extent to which they’re affected. And so, this part isn’t very complicated, I don’t really think. The thing about it that’s difficult is providing a context, a workplace that elevates not just 20% – one out of five workers – but all five out of five workers to a sense of confidence and a sense of awareness of information.

The critique that comes is A. (we dealt with partly already) four fifths are incapable of anything more. Okay, that’s just classist in the same way that racist is racist and sexist is sexist. It’s just wrong. It mistakes a condition that exists – four fifths not making decisions – as being a function of their intrinsic characteristics and not a function of the environment and the constraints on them.

Okay, well and good. But, at the same time, one can still make a case that we’ll lose productivity or we’ll lose effectivity because the genius won’t be making the decisions. And the way it’s often put is: “you’ll discount expertise.” Expertise doesn’t reside in everybody, partly due to training and partly due to capacities and inclinations. So expertise is not dispersed equally through the entire workforce.

So the experts making decisions is contrary to self management. And the answer to that is really trivially simple, except that it’s hard to think outside a box that we’re totally embedded in. The answer to that is: paying attention to expertise is different from letting experts govern you. So expert opinion, expert information, has to be accounted for.

But that doesn’t mean that we have to let the experts determine our lives. The doctor knows a lot, but ultimately the decision about what to do – and we even recognize this, in that case – is up to the patient. And the patient, of course, should take into account the expert opinions. Hopefully, expert. We won’t bother talking about, say, the opioid crisis.

But in any case, the task of self-management is to have means of deliberation and means of communication interchange inside the workplace that lets expert information be accounted for in decisions that are undertaken in a self-managing way by the whole workforce. So that’s the first thing that you’re raising. Who owns what?

Answer: we all own our personal stuff, nobody owns workplaces, natural resources, and the like. And who decides what? Answer: the workers council and over on the consumption side, the consumers council – and consumers individually and workers individually in the workplace – are what decides. There is no layer of decision-making control above the workers council.

[00:37:17.710] – Grumbine

I keep reminding myself that this is a capitalist system that they’re involved in.

[00:37:24.550] – Albert

Now, you mean?

[00:37:26.110] – Grumbine

Yes. They’re fighting against “the man” who owns the means of production. So the idea of unions almost becomes irrelevant because all is one giant union of individuals that are self-selecting, self-governing and self-organizing.

[00:37:41.830] – Albert

Ideally.

[00:37:43.010] – Grumbine

Well, obviously. Right?

[00:37:44.970] – Albert

No. But the reason I am saying that is because what has gone under the label of socialism is not what you are now envisioning as common sense and desirable. What’s gone under the label socialism is, at least in my belief, for the economy part – for the state part, it’s often been even worse, it’s been dictatorship, but set that aside.

For the economy part, what’s gone under the label of socialism in the 20th century, we have workers below 80%, coordinator class in between, empowered employees, about 20%, and 1% or 2% at the top of owners. So 20th century socialism eliminated the 1% or 2% at the top, but it didn’t eliminate class division.

It kept the rest of the class division, coordinators above workers, and it elevated workers to the ruling class. So there wasn’t one big workforce. That was rhetoric, right? That was “the worker feeds us, all celebrate the worker.” Yeah, great. Except for the fact that they were empowered and disempowered workers and the empowered workers dominated those economies.

So participatory economics is going the next step and is saying we not only need to get rid of the private ownership of the means of production, but we need to get rid of the monopolization of empowering circumstances and tasks into the hands of a class above the working class.

[00:39:08.350] – Grumbine

Very good. One of the things that jumps out at me is money. We focus heavily on money and macroeconomics in general. But in this particular arrangement – so much mystery around the creation of money, the operation and flows of money – and in this participatory environment, what is the purpose of money in this space?

[00:39:34.150] – Albert

Okay. So, society produces the workforce, produces stuff. Let’s call that stuff the social product: services, goods and so on and so forth; so social product. And let’s just, for the sake of discussion, there’s a giant stack of social production over the course of a year. So let’s call that society’s pie. It’s basically the product of society’s economy.

Now what we have to decide is who gets what? How much do you get? What kind of a slice do you get? Is it bigger or less large? And that’s a function of income, and it’s a function of valuation. And so money – and not just money, more importantly, prices, valuations, emerge in the task of assessing these kinds of questions. What’s produced? How much? Where does it go? Who gets it?

They facilitate that. And that’s all they do in this kind of economy. And so if you’re getting income for duration, intensity and onerousness, if you have average, let’s call that the average income. And if you work a little longer than average, you get a little more. And if you work a little less longer, why would you do that? Because you want more leisure.

That’s why you would do that. You get less income. More leisure, but less income and intensity, and onerousness of conditions. Okay, so what emerges from this is that the money per se, money as an entity with its own intrinsic attributes, is really not relevant in a participatory economy. What’s relevant is the share of the social product you’re entitled to, which is your budget from your income, and a mechanism for properly setting the values of things, the prices of things, for properly arriving at evaluation of society’s many products.

And that valuation should take into account much that it doesn’t now take into account. So it should take into account not only the impact of an item on the person who’s going to consume it, not only the impact of an item on the firm that produced it, but the impact of an item on the workers who produced it and the impact of an item on the collective circumstances of people in society – not just the individual consumer – and the impact of the item on the ecology.

If all that is taken account of, if we get sensible prices, which reflect the true social costs and benefits of things, then money is just a placeholder. There’s no issue that is like money being capital, earning profits, money being accumulated in a way that drives investment. All that’s just gone. It no longer exists in a participatory economy.

Now some economists would say, “You’re crazy. That’s impossible. You have to have central planning or you have to have markets. And we get that you don’t want central planning because it’s authoritarian. So you’re going to wind up with markets and with markets, what you’re describing is not the way the world works.” They’re right. With markets, it isn’t the way the world works.

Prices reflect by and large bargaining power. Prices don’t reflect the impact of the activity on the workforce. In other words, the oppressiveness of the activity – that just has nothing to do with it. The impact of consumption externalities external to the buyer – that is, for instance, pollution filling up the air – that just isn’t taking account of and so on and so forth.

And so as a result, you get the crap that we see all around us. But that’s gone If we can figure out an allocation mechanism that is much better than markets and/or central planning.

[00:43:27.910] – Grumbine

Within the Modern Monetary Theory space, which is where we specialize, the dollar, in the US case, currency issuing government, Federal Reserve notwithstanding, when Congress authorizes spending, spending happens. And that first dollar spent into the economy is based on the understanding that the dollar is a tax credit.

So the value from that dollar comes from the tax and position that drives your need for that currency. And by creating that tax, you in turn, create the first unemployed person that has to then in turn, go out and get that currency. In this case, this is a way of organizing centrally, of course, and it also provides a bit of a command economy to some extent. If you think about climate change, how would you organize such a thing for an existential crisis like that in a participatory environment?

[00:44:28.090] – Albert

Well, so there are two different questions. How do you do it now? And how would it happen if something came along?

[00:44:33.709] – Grumbine

Yes!

[00:44:34.330] – Albert

And if we had a participatory economy? I want to come back to how you do it now for a second. But as far as in a participatory economy, let’s think of something: the economy is operating, it’s been operating for a long time. It’s a participatory economy. And it turns out that an ingredient that we were using that we had no idea would have a harmful effect, is having a harmful effect. Right?

So that would be one way that a crisis might arrive. Another way that a crisis might arrive is: there’s some sort of natural disaster and it’s a crisis. It’s a big disaster. The big earthquake in California happens. Really big. I don’t think it poses an insurmountable problem. Of course, it’s a crisis, and it would require rapid response, et cetera.

But I don’t think that poses a problem for a truly self-managing workers and consumers council, federations of councils, which constitute industries, with a political system that exists at the same time. I honestly don’t think so, and I think that the answer is ultimately the same in any system. You would have to, for example, get rid of the bad ingredient that you hadn’t understood before.

Try and deal with the residual effects of it. You’d have to deal with the fact that California was splitting in two and send aid and move people. It’s the same in any system, it’s just that the way you would arrive at it is different. On the other hand, let’s say you live near the coastline and there’s a tsunami on the way.

And no, you don’t call for a town meeting that’s going to last three days and end when you’re drowned. People in the know who happen to be aware of these issues would exert considerable authority in such a situation, but only for a time-bound situation. But the bigger question, I think, which troubles me greatly, is the current situation.

So in the current situation, we have a limited timeline during which we have to engage with the economy and society. Something has to engage with the economy and society in such a way as to prevent, essentially Armageddon, an absolutely cataclysmic encroachment on civilization by ecological disasters. And very early in our discussion, you said something about can we get by without a benevolent dictator?

[00:47:12.910] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:47:12.910] – Albert

This is the most specific case I can think of where that question comes into play. During World War Two, they had the Manhattan Project. So we had the Manhattan Project that was ostensibly in a crisis. We needed to offset the possibility that the Germans would first develop the bomb. So this incredibly massive undertaking occurred – to research, engineer, produce, and deliver the atomic bomb.

Now set aside whether or not, in fact, it was actually needed, and whether or not it, in fact, did any good. There was that project introduced, and it was a project whose scale was major but not as big as what’s needed now. We probably need even just in the United States, two, three, ten Manhattan Project scaled endeavors to deal with the transformation that’s necessary just to save the planet.

And truth be told, if Bernie Sanders had become President and Bernie Sanders had issued very centrally directed mandates to create those kinds of projects, I would have celebrated it. Is it participatory economic informed? No. But we’re in a hole. We’re in a desperate place. And just one last point, there are advocates of socialism in many forms, and of anarchism in many forms – and of participatory economics or participatory socialism.

A subset of those make the following argument: you can’t have ecological sustainability and sanity with capitalism. You can’t have what we need and want and desire in the long haul with capitalism. We have to get rid of capitalism. And until we get rid of capitalism, we can’t deal with global warming and other ecological trends. And I think they’re horribly wrong.

I pray they’re horribly wrong because I don’t think we’re going to attain – let’s call it now participatory economics – on a time scale which is sufficient so that participatory economic citizens are going to decide to curb all of the violations of the ecology. I just don’t think it’s going to happen fast enough.

So it has to happen within the broad structures of current society, which is why movements that are forming and have formed and are developing and are pressing for environmental policies are incredibly important. Without them, not only no participatory economics, no participatory socialism, no participatory society, but without them, no fucking planet.

[00:49:59.080] – Grumbine

Yeah.

[00:50:00.370] – Albert

We do need those battles, those reforms. And it goes back to: you can fight for reductions in fossil fuel and for eliminating fossil fuel and for the enlargement of truly green formulations and energy sources and so on. You can do it in a way, which is reformist, which is saying basically, okay, shit, we’ve got to do this right? But we do it and then we’re done.

We’re back to the system that we have. Or you can do it in a way which is constantly raising the need for innovation, the need for new social relations, the need for a new system, but recognizes the need to get these things done now. And so one approach is reformist, the other approach is, I think, revolutionary. But both approaches try to get the job done now, not after we have a new world, which is too late.

[00:50:58.190] – Grumbine

Right. Rosa Luxembourg, “Reform or Revolution.” It’s very interesting. History is full of great tools that we can read and learn and bring into the present. The last thing I really want to talk to you about: it’s the winning a new economy between a rock and a hard place. You talk about vision and reforms, vision and organization and vision and winning. Take us through this chapter. Help me understand better what this vision is. Give that bold winning strategy.

[00:51:31.090] – Albert

Well, if I knew a winning strategy that was certain to win and I was very good at vocalizing it, I would! I honestly think that if we are clear about what we want and so I think that the big difference, maybe is… I don’t think self-management is that controversial as a concept. I don’t think getting rid of private ownership is that controversial on the left.

I think that the idea that there are three classes and that we have to be wary of removing the old boss and inserting a new one – that’s a little controversial. And the idea that we can’t have markets or central planning is controversial. And the idea that we can’t have the old corporate division of labor is controversial. But if we had movements that subscribe to the scaffold of a new economy, a participatory economy, then I think strategy is basically addressing current needs and desires.

That is, forming movements to raise social costs to win changes in circumstances now – that better people’s lives now – around all manner of issues that we can name. Doing it in a way, in each case, that tends to link the issues, that tends to create unity, that tends to create organizations that envision the future, that plant the seeds of the future in the present.

Organizations that don’t have a corporate division of labor, organizations that have self-management within them, organizations which don’t elevate a class above others, and so on. Then we would be building the infrastructure and the mechanisms to win a new society, and that’s what we need to do. But of course, if we don’t agree on the need for a new society, then we don’t need to do that.

Or if we think there is no new society, that’s the bulwark of, I think, existing relations, the idea that there is no alternative, as Margaret Thatcher put it, which is really not “there’s no alternative” but rather “there’s no better alternative.” That’s what she really meant, right? “There’s no better alternative. You silly radicals. If you have your way, you’re going to make things worse.

If you have your way, we’ll all be totally screwed because your system won’t work. It won’t deliver the goods, it won’t get the work done,” et cetera. So the purpose of “No Bosses: A New Economy for Better World,” that particular book, is to make the argument, wait a minute. There is a way.

There is a way that we can have productive economies which address people’s needs which meet people’s aspirations vastly better than now, without endangering the environment without subordinating the vast majority of your population, to taking orders and to obeying and to having no say over their lives. We can do better.

And the institutions that can enable that are described here. And so I guess I would say to your listeners, if you think it would be a good thing, even if you’re doubtful of its possibility or doubtful of the possibility of getting there. Two things. But if you think it would be a good thing to have a society and an economy which elevated people’s solidarity, their social instincts, their capacities for cooperation and their abilities to control their own lives and to take part in social circumstances without vast disparities in wealth or income or power.

If you think that would be a good thing, then here’s somebody who’s saying, okay, here, I think are some basic institutions that would, in fact, make that possible. That would facilitate that. Where the institutions would literally create solidarity. They wouldn’t block it, they would create it. They wouldn’t block diversity, they would enhance it.

They wouldn’t block equity, they would produce it. They wouldn’t demolish and destroy self-management, they would create it. Okay, if I’m wrong, all right. But what if I’m right? Not just I – what if people who are advocating participatory economics and participatory socialism do have a formulation that is worthy and implementable, then isn’t that worth taking a look at and deciding for yourself?

Isn’t it worth some time to determine whether or not you think, okay, I haven’t liked what’s gone under the label 20th century socialism, and I don’t like capitalism. I have felt like there’s no alternative, but maybe here is one and maybe I should take a look. That would be my plea. And when you do take a look, assess it and do it carefully and do it with the most critical eye that you can. And if you find a flaw, I hope you’ll let us know so that we can try and fix it because we do need a better future.

[00:56:23.650] – Grumbine

I think that’s fantastic. I really appreciate your words. This is all new territory for me. This is fantastic. So with that, tell us, where can we find more of your work? And you kind of hinted that you’re working on another book. Maybe you could lead us out with that as well.

[00:56:40.330] – Albert

Well, there’s a website called Znet which people could look at. You can find participatory economics with Google, you can find anything with Google, and you can certainly find participatory economics if you happen to be interested in it. In my own part in that you can look me up on there. For the book, there’s a site called “No Bosses Book.” Pretty straightforward nobossesbook.com.

The book just came out a couple of days ago, but there are already, I think, five or six reviews up and there are various testimonials and there is the table of contents and some other stuff. So if you don’t want to just leap in and get the book, that’s fine. Go to nobossesbook.com and what you see there should enable you to decide whether or not you want to take a look at a presentation of this vision called participatory economics.

As far as transition is concerned, just getting going. And your intuition is right. I think it is the more difficult question. I honestly think the vision – participatory economics – is not difficult. There are some parts of it that are a little bit demanding, but basically the hard part is thinking outside the box. The hard part is escaping from assumptions that are so prevalent.

It’s not hard the way math is hard or biochemistry is hard or something like that. It’s not intrinsically difficult. It’s just difficult because it’s contrary to our expectations and to an extent our beliefs.

[00:58:15.740] – Grumbine

The rewiring of our brains and the patterns in which we flow. Absolutely. All right with that, Michael, it has been an absolute pleasure. I am going to read this, and I’m going to look forward to your new book. And I’m really thankful and folks, I hope you enjoyed this podcast as much as I did. This is a great learning experience for me.

[00:58:37.360] – Albert

Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate the kind words. Thank you very much.

[00:58:42.490] – Grumbine

Absolutely. We’re a heterodox society. We’re not doing anything standard. Everything we’re trying to do is a little different. And your stuff fits right in there and I’m really excited about people exploring these ideas. And with that, I want to thank you one more time. My name is Steve Grumbine. I’m the host of Macro and Cheese. My guest, Michael Albert. Thank you so much for both of us. We’re out of here.

[00:59:12.110] – Ending Credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese please visit Patreon.com/realprogressives.