Hello, As always, you can add or remove addresses to our free updates list at ZNet's top page...which is at www.zmag.org/weluser.htm
And also as usual we have many new articles since our last update, including essays about this weekend's tumultuously successful events from Robert Jensen, William Blum, Judy Rebick, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, and myself, among others. ---- But the bulk of this update has a different focus. It continues our policy of introducing ZNet Update Recipients to new books by ZNet Commentators. Howard Zinn comments: "I can't count the number of times when serious critics of our social system would say to me: 'Why can't we come up with a vision of what a good society would be like?' This is what Mike Albert boldly does in Parecon: Life After Capitalism, and the result is an imaginative, carefully reasoned description, persistently provocative, of how we might live free from economic injustice." And this time the new book we are introducing is by me. It is called Parecon: Life After Capitalism (author Michael Albert, publisher Verso Books -- http://www.zmag.org/pelac.htm.) This is uncomfortable, me sending a mailing about my own book, but, I have steeled myself to do it for weeks now, and so here goes. Noam Chomsky comments: "There is enormous dissatisfaction, worldwide, with prevailing socioeconomic conditions and the choices imposed by the reigning institutions. Calls for change range from patchwork reform to more far-reaching changes. Michael Albert's work on participatory economics outlines in substantial detail a program of radical reconstruction, presenting a vision that draws from a rich tradition of thought and practice of the libertarian left and popular movements, but adding novel critical analysis and specific ideas and modes of implementation for constructive alternatives. It merits close attention, debate, and action." Bookstore buyers, particularly in the U.S. and England, aren't exactly afficianados of visionary economic radicalism, much less of books that wish to replace capitalism. The World Social Forum has as its slogan "Another World Is Possible." Barnes and Noble doesn't. Unless ZNet's users help generate online momentum for Parecon: Life After Capitalism, its American and British sales will likely be modest. Without online momentum very few copies will even enter stores in the U.S. and Britain for people to assess. On the other hand, if ZNet users do generate considerable online momentum, stores and media outlets may take note, and this may win the book a chance to reach out widely. Cynthia Peters comments" "As an organizer, writer, and union-based educator, there is a certain refrain I hear over and over again. That is, `Why bother struggling for social change? We can't really do any better than this.' Too often our reply is simply that `another world is possible.' But we don't say what might this world look like. How would we design institutions? How would we structure society? These are reasonable questions, and progressives lose credibility when we have no real answers. Michael Albert's (and Robin Hahnel's) conception of a participatory economy (parecon) offers a detailed vision of how we might organize production, consumption, remuneration and distribution in ways that foster the values we believe in, such as justice and solidarity. Albert gives us what we need to imagine and debate what another world would look like. Albert's writing is clear, and his case for parecon is fine-tuned. This is an important book, not just because it does economic vision so well and so credibly, but because it is a model for all the vision work that needs to be done. Parecon is the most serious effort I have seen to date to shift our thinking towards asking and answering the question: What would a better world look like?" To give some evidence of long-run potential, I want to let you know that versions of the book Parecon: Life After Capitalism are already contracted and being pursued in eleven languages and being negotiated in sixteen more languages. There is therefore plenty of reason for international optimism, but, ironically, in English, my home language and also the initial publisher's language, the battle for visbility will be most difficult because it is exceptionally hard to get English language radical titles noticed in the American and British media and available in our stores. Carl Boggs comments: "In Parecon, Michael Albert has built extensively and creatively upon his earlier work on participatory economics and democratic politics understood in the most radical, transformative sense. What he provides is nothing less than an urgent agenda for the twenty-first century, one that would move us toward the kind of collective empowerment, deep citizenship, and civic engagement needed to reverse the present slide toward barbarism. The model Albert proposes and so convincingly articulates goes well beyond failed systems of the past - market capitalism, the command economy, social democracy - while also pointing toward a much needed alternative to the present-day ravages of capitalist globalization. More than a discourse on economics, the book offers a broad vision of radical transformation grounded in the very best elements of previous emancipatory theories and movements. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in fundamental social change." The online page for the new book is at http://www.zmag.org/pelac.htm. There are links on that page to purchase the book, as well as a table of contents and some excerpts. Ezequiel Adamovsky comments: "I believe the Argentinean social movements I am part of that are trying to build alternatives to capitalist irrationality --such as the barter markets, piquetero productive projects, workers self-managed factories, independent distribution centers, etc.-- will surely find inspiration in Michael Albert's book. Will the future be exactly as he envisions it? That's not the question. What matters is that Parecon helps us imagine how we can organize society after we get rid of capitalism. Parecon makes utopia look feasible." There are also many more pre-publication quotes online at http://www.zmag.org/pelac.htm, very much like those I took the liberty of interspercing in this email. Can they all be wrong? I hope not. The book has just gone onto the Amazon.com site for purchase. Today the book is 2,423,754th in sales on Amazon. That's not so good, I have to admit, but then no one knew the book was there until you got this message, so I guess that is how many books they have for sale, and that Parecon is dead last. Getting online momentum that impacts store and media response requires climbing up Amazon's charts. Can we get a book on economic vision into their top 100,000, top 10,000, top 1,000, top 100, top 10? Here is the author interview for Parecon: Life After Capitalism. After the interview, to give it substance relating to current events this ZNet free update concludes with an article about current movement trends and prospects called Showdown. ----- Can you tell ZNet, please, what your new book, Parecon: Life After Capitalism, is about? What is it trying to communicate? Parecon: Life After Capitalism is about an economic system called Participatory Economics that seeks to accomplish production, consumption, and allocation to efficiently meet needs consistent with the guiding values: equity, diversity, solidarity, and self-management. When people ask what do you want for the economy, I answer: parecon. Parecon features workplace and consumer councils, self-managing decision-making norms and methods, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and participatory planning. This is a set of institutions very different from those of capitalism as well as from what has been called market socialism. The book, Parecon: Life After Capitalism, first briefly examines existing systems, revealing their incompatibility with guiding values we hold dear. Then the book presents defining institutions for the new economy. It describes new institutions for workplaces, consumption, and allocation. Next the book details the daily life implications of the proposed new institutions. Finally, the book deals with a host of broad concerns people have registered on first hearing about this new vision: Would it really further our aspirations and values? Would it be productive? Would it violate privacy or subvert individuality? Is it efficient, flexible, creative, meritorious? And so on. Can you tell ZNet users something about writing the book? Where does the content come from? What went into making the book what it is? Participatory economics has been around as a model for a little over ten years. Robin Hahnel and I developed it and have written about it in various venues. This new book is my best effort to motivate, describe, elaborate, and defend the vision. In that sense, Parecon: Life After Capitalism emerges from many engagements over the years and reflects lessons from actual experience with work life in mainstream and alternative institutions, teaching, organizing, public speaking, dealing with questions in online forums on ZNet, and of course trying to work through the model in new ways as new insights, questions, and explorations arise. Regarding the writing, I and many people who helped me have prioritized making this book as accessible and compelling as we could. I am not the world's best writer, nor even in the top 600 million or so, but I plug away, and I did a lot of plugging on this book. What are your hopes for the book? What do you hope it will contribute or achieve, politically? Given the effort and aspirations you have for the book, what will you deem to be a success? What would leave you happy about the whole undertaking? What would leave you wondering if it was worth all the time and effort? If everyone who reads this interview and all their friends and relatives and workmates don't go out and buy the book, soon - I will be wondering what I did wrong. This book tries to answer the question "What do we want?", seriously, compellingly, and accessibly. So naturally I would hope all people concerned about a better world, and particularly a better economy, would read it. As mentioned, I have been hard at work on developing and trying to make known participatory economics for over a decade, and the work is finally beginning to have impact. Parecon: Life After Capitalism in some ways climaxes that effort, and will hopefully bring it further along. The book will be published in twenty or more languages and has attracted considerable attention even before publication. There is diverse interest from many quarters. There is growing momentum for this economic vision, it seems. In addition, times have changed quite a bit in the past decade. We have progressed from the heyday of market mania and Margaret Thatcher's famous claim that "There Is No Alternative," to a new time of deep travail and wondering about all things economic. Among progressives the World Social Forum inspired watchword has become "Another World Is Possible." Anti-globalization movements have taken the wind out of market complacency and are scrutinizing everything economic. People want to know from all kinds of activists, what is your alternative - and participatory economics is, I hope, a very good answer regarding at least the economy. So, I hope the book Parecon: Life After Capitalism is going to propel this economic vision into much greater visibility than it has previously enjoyed. Of course, I hope the model will prove compelling and worthy, and thus be adopted widely. I have very high hopes indeed and I admit that I will be quite let down, in the sense of the question, if the book doesn't garner attention and provoke discussion leading to either support for parecon, or, if not, then in lieu of that to development of some other better vision. I also hope the book will inspire people to address matters of kinship and gender, culture and community, political organization, ecology, and international relations, trying to generate vision in these realms as well. Life is not just economics, by any means. The fact that we need serious, worthy, defensible, and comprehensible economic (and other) goals seems indisputable. That now is a good time to offer visionary aims for assessment, also seems indisputable. So of course I'd like to see Parecon: Life After Capitalism travel the world's roads and subways in the hands of the world's working populations. More realistically, I'd happily celebrate the book worming its way into wide enough visibility so that someone far more eloquent than myself writes a much better book that reaches still more widely, into those roads and subways, putting new vision into widespread left consciousness. So go visit Amazon online, please... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/185984698X/qid=1045077155/sr=11-1 /ref=sr_11_1/104-6511185-6592709 ... or your local independent book store, and get the momentum going...books aren't cheap, nor is the time needed to seriously read them in over supply, as I well know. But--well, I have to say that I think this one will repay people's attention very positively. That's my hope, anyhow. And I hope people will give that sentiment a chance. ---- And here is the more timely essay disscussing some implications of this weekend's events. Showdown By Michael Albert Even the New York Times was forced to admit it, after the mammoth Feb. 15-16 demonstrations: "there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion." But as all activists and indeed all people of good will justifiably celebrate this weekend's tumultuous successes, we must also begin the next round of the struggle. On one side we have governments and corporate elites. Their shared agenda is what it has always been. They universally seek to protect and enlarge their advantages over the overwhelming majority of the world's population. Their shared means are two-fold. First, they want to rewrite the rules of international exchange to tilt even more toward their own aggrandizement. This is called corporate globalization. Second, they want to steadily erode popular protections and rights won in long-standing struggle around the globe. They want to assault affirmative action, immigrant rights, welfare programs, and broader social spending. They want to entrench new methods of repression. They call all this patriotism. Beyond this broad consensus, however, elites are split. Since 9/11 the most central and powerful elite sector has felt that it could dramatically enlarge its control by concocting a war on terrorism. This overwhelmingly U.S.-based contingent of the world's elites is seeking to scare and cajole publics all over the planet, hoping to propel all kinds of otherwise impossible redistribution and repression. Bush Blair and Co. now seem to think that turning the clock back a hundred years to reinstate brute force in international relations promises them even more control and power. Bombing Iraq to bones and then colonially occupying it is not the climax of their intentions but instead only a stepping stone to more war and colonization to come. Next stop Iran, Syria, Korea, Venezuela - especially Venezuela -- Colombia, and perhaps even China. They intend perpetual war in pursuit of perpetual power. They seek a spiral of violence whose very logic will propel those who control most of the world's weapons into ruling most of the world. Bush becomes Caesar. Others at the top of the pile of detritus that rules the planet are perfectly content with business as it had been the past couple of decades. They want some tweaks here and there, but they think that seeking overt empire risks too great a dissident reaction and/or they fear that too much of the benefit may accrue to a too narrow a sector at the top. They worry Washington will benefit, but not Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. Thus French, German, and Russian elites rail against war in Iraq - but Chirac is not simultaneously rushing to reverse his racist assaults on immigrants, Schroeder is not calling off his incursions against German social supports for the poor, and Putin is not denouncing his war in Chechnya--much less will any of them sincerely advocate justice plus equitable redistribution at home, now or anytime soon. Against the haves who want more wealth and power but who aren't quite sure of the best path to pursue it, stands our growing world-spanning movement of movements. The shared agenda of our movements is no war in Iraq, reverse corporate globalization, and more justice for all. Our shared means are to utilize a wide range of disobedience extending from day to day organizing to teach-ins and rallies, to disseminating information by drama and media, to marching, to civil disobedience, and beyond. But our side of the great struggle also has divisions. Among us there are different ways of understanding what we are doing, as well as differences in approach. Regarding understanding, the big variation is that some of us think we are only trying to win various proximate gains such as preventing war in Iraq or blocking some new trade agreement. Others of us think instead that we are doing that, of course, but that we are also trying to ensure that these victories persist and grow by challenging and ultimately replacing the underlying institutions that create the injustices we oppose. At the level of understanding, therefore, the division in our ranks is ultimately one between reform and revolution. At the level of methods and tactics, there is also a major divide. Are we mostly trying to make a statement and manifest the feelings that we ourselves have percolating through our nervous systems at any given moment - or are we trying to build a movement aimed at winning massive change over the longer haul? In the first case, as situations unfold we make decisions about what to do by consulting primarily our own feelings: how angry are we, how much do we wish to do this or that action based on our mood and desires and in light of what is called for from us and how we will look and feel in the aftermath? In the second case, we make decisions instead by primarily consulting our best judgment as to what will enlarge our movements and best increase our insight and commitment. The second approach also has to pay attention to how we feel and what we are capable of, to be sure, but it prioritizes what is needed to win and not just to feel fine. It may sound harsh, but I do think this is a real and serious difference, even if it appears here in words a bit more stark than it often appears in practice. In short, are we building an activist community that preserves itself against incursions from without, creating an identity for ourselves as dissidents which we protect from dissolving, sometimes even becoming more concerned about persisting unchanged in all our formulations and processes than we are concerned about growing and diversifying? Or are we developing a movement whose intention is to constantly grow and alter, and in which we must constantly adapt our personal proclivities as we attract new constituencies and incorporate new agendas? Are we eager to empower others thereby reducing our own level of power and our own impact on how things proceed, though seeing the overall power of the movement enlarge? What next? (1) Success is not a single "all or nothing" affair. Of course we want to prevent war in Iraq. And of course doing so would be a world transforming, historic achievement. But, should war proceed, it would not mean that we are failing, but only that we have a little less power than we hoped to have at this point yet far more than most people were willing to even dream about just a year ago. Whether this war occurs or not, our on-going task is unchanged. We must grow larger, more conscious, more militant, more organized - to try to prevent this war and the next one, to reverse globalization, and to continually challenge and eventually replace basic defining institutions. None of this will happen overnight. But we are on a path toward all of it, and we need to realize that's our trajectory, to take it seriously, and to work tirelessly toward it. (2) The anti-war demonstrations this past weekend were perhaps the largest such outpouring in modern history. Were there two million or one and half million in London? Were there two or three million in Rome? Two or three million in cities across Spain? Five hundred or seven hundred and fifty thousand in NYC? The point is, there was an incredible mobilization and, far more important, our opposition is growing very rapidly. Indeed, it is the growth rate of dissent that is utterly extraordinary and that communicates the true threat our movements represent. And this has occurred without an international organization overseeing it. And it has occurred without single organizations inside each country overseeing it. There should be no rush to impose on our emerging massively entwined but hugely diverse international movement of movements any kind of central authority or identity. Things are going well. In fact, things are going stupendously. We need more of what we have been doing, not a dramatic change in what we have been doing - except that we need to reach out even more aggressively to new and wider constituencies, and except that we need to work patiently, respecting differences, to ensure a widening comprehension and commitment. (3) We must not in the flush of growth set our short-term goals so high that they are unattainable, making ourselves depressed about our efforts when we inevitably don't attain them. We must instead see what we are doing as a process. We should exult in the growth of this process and see that growth as a tremendous achievement - but as an achievement that paves the way for more to come. The growth of our opposition brings a responsibility: more growth. We should not become enchanted with our current size and breadth whether it is on a single campus, or in a town, or a city, or a country, or internationally. The trick is not to celebrate ourselves but to celebrate our potential. The task is to reach out, reach out, reach out - precisely to constituencies we think we cannot reach out to - because we can. On a campus we need to do it in the dorms and the fraternities, seeking not only the dissidents but also the footballers - yes, the athletes, by all means! Put a leaflet under every door. And then do it again. And then knock on the doors and talk. And then do that again. In our neighborhoods and workplaces, give materials to and then talk with our fellow citizens over and over. Reach out to mail deliverers, public school teachers, short order cooks, flight attendants, assemblers, truck drivers, hospital orderlies, coal miners, and even the military and police, yes even and arguably most importantly the military and the police. On one side there is Bush, Blair, and other political masters and mullahs, plus owners and CEOs galore. On the other side we have a movement of movements - and a massive worldwide constituency that we need to reach. If movements for social change unswervingly seek diversity, solidarity, equity, and self-management - peace and justice - and if they do it in a manner and with a tone and with tactics all of which seek to empower the weak and to meet the needs of the poor, they/we can win this struggle - and the struggle I have in mind to win, the one I think we are all in, is not just over a reform here or there - and it is not just over peace now and then -- it is a struggle over who will decide the future and who the future will serve. Showdown indeed. We have reason to celebrate. But we must have courage. And we must have stamina. Our struggle will require much time and tremendous perseverance. But the day for the ship of equity, for the ship of self-management, for the ship of solidarity, for the ship of diversity, and for the ship of justice and peace to dock is coming. Row! History is not over. It is, instead, ours to make. ===================================This message has been brought to you by ZNet (http://www.zmag.org). Visit our site for subscription options.
