This sums up one of my major concerns with parecon and relates back to my experience with Socialist Self-Management in Yugoslavia. Under the 1974 constitution and the 1976 law on associated labour, participatory mechanism were legislated for production and social consumption. They did work and public opinion polling of the workers in Slovenia indicated that workers prefered the social, self-management sector. However, they objected to the detailed participatory bodies as wasting too much of their time and as being inefficient. In a number of enterprises, workers voted to get rid of participatory bodies simply because they were inefficient in terms of their own labour time and their desire for family and leisure time. It should be noted that at that time, if I remember the figures correctly, 1/6 of the adult population was involved as delegates to various participatory bodies and there was a certain resentment against the time demands. Further, the effect of this was that many people just didn't participate and it allowed members of the League of Communists to control the delegate elections and set up a form of party control within the state that the legislation was designed to "wither away" in favour of participatory mechanisms of parecon.
The second is that, even if A&H had such an
alternative, their proposal does not strike me as
desirable because it would involve far too much of an
imposition on people's time, both in terms of
involvement in planning, and in terms of micromanaging
their working activity -- I mean here the "balanced
job complexes," which strike me as both nightmareish
and impractical. In addition, the proposal is
undesirable because it does not respect the privacy of
people's choices -- it improperly politicizes all
preferences.
jks
This raises a second concern that I have with the concept -- though I am basing it upon my reading of their earlier work, Looking Forwards, and to a talk Albert gave in Winnipeg several years ago that I attended. The idea that all jobs can be broken into parts that can be equitably meted out, and that workers actually want that to happen, is I think a falacy. But that is another matter entirely. Like Justin, I am a fan of market socialism (which Louis objects to) for developed economies but here I would break with late Yugoslav practice/theory to incorporate post Keynesian insights. Macroeconomic policy/planning can not be participatory at the local/individual level (it was a disaster in Yugoslavia). There are social consumption (and investment) decisions that must be made at the macro level through some form of delegative representative mechanism backed by appropriate technical expertise. Within this policy framework there is ample scope to develop participatory mechanisms that do not undermine economic (in the larger context of the word economic) efficiency and stifle individual initiative.
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba
