By Brian Carnell

Monday, August 19, 2002

I've spent the past few weeks whining and moaning on the couch with some nasty virus. To pass the time during my few coherent moments, I had my wife pick me up some magazines at the local megachain bookstore and happened to run across one of the best summaries of Michael Albert's bizarre Participatory Economics idea.

A couple years ago I actually read through one of Albert's books planning a serious rebuttal that I never got around to, but the good folks at Punk Planet (who knew manufacturing consent involved B&N selling such subersive literature) managed to do it far better than I could in a practically glowing review of Albert's latest book, Moving Forward: Program for a Participatory Economy.

Summarizing parecon, the anonymous reviewer writes (emphasis in the original),

Albert argues 1) that we should pay people according to their effort, sacrifice, and need and not according to actual contribution to the economy . . . Obviously, Albert's arguments are more sophisticated than I can present here, but this should give you a good idea of his approach.

Actually, I don't think Albert's ideas are any more sophisticated than that absurd view about how people should be compensated. His entire system is to start from essentially flawed ideas such as this and then build layer upon layer of complexity with groups of workers doing participatory planning, limiting specialization and the division of labor, etc. making it look like there's some complicated edifice beyond his absurd economics.

Source:

Moving Forward: Program for a Participatory Economy -- Book Review. Punk Planet, July and August 2002, p. 136.

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