File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0111, message 116


From: "Harald Beyer-Arnesen" <haraldba-AT-online.no>
Subject: AUT: Re: Particpatory Economics
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 23:15:40 +0100



Gra wrote:

    On another [UK based] list I subscribe to, there has
    been some [not a lot]  of discussion about Participatory
    Economics. Some of the people, many  calling them-
    selves anarchist of one kind or another, seem to think
    that this is a kind of solution. I have been referred to
    Micheal Albert's site where there is a sort of lecture
    series on the topic and after working my way  thru' three
    or four of his folksy, chatty musings, I am left very 
    underwhelmed at the depth and poverty of thought there
    and the quite deliberate, it seems to me, mixing up of
    categories and concepts to the point where it
    becomes a struggle to continue with it.
            Is there anyone who has done/knows of a critique
    of this stuff?



There was a discussion on the Organise list a year or two back.
There was critiques made by several, among others by Ilan, Paul
Bowman, I think, and myself. I might have these posts somewhere,
I am not sure. But they were not fully worked out critiques, nor do I
personally know of such a systematic critique. I remember there
was a critical review in Libertarian Labor Review (now renamed
Anarcho-Syndicalist Review) years ago. Personally I am inclined
to think that the most damaging critique of Participatory Economics,
apart from everything else that I find wrong with it, is that it
sounds terrible boring. I guess it is easy to end up there when you
see "producers" and "consumers" as two worlds apart. and you
start out with some mathematical model. I don't doubt Micheal
Albert's sincerity though.
        . 
This said, I see it as positive that people try to put on print their
thoughts about a world beyond capitalism, even when as I think
is the case with Participatory Economics, they enter into blind
alleys.

>and isn't communism the 'real movement that aims to change
>the existing  order of things' ...

"the real movement" defintion has never convinced me much. Not
that I will suggest the opposite, a movement that is not real, just
that I find the phrase wholly meaningless. What makes one move-
ment more "real" than another?  And have there ever existed a
"real movement " without any ideas about its means and ends?

Harald






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