What are Holla Forumss opinions on Parecon? Also...

What are Holla Forumss opinions on Parecon? Also, in what ways are Parecon similar or different from other Anarchist theories of praxis, like Anarcho-Communism, Syndicalism, and Communalism?

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wsj.com/video/will-computers-replace-money-managers/865C9DCB-1597-4D05-B009-7A9DAC88EC33.html
participatoryeconomics.info/institutions/participatory-planning/
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I accidentally put the subject in the name bar, please excuse my newfaggotry.

Utopian and the planning process doesn't work (requires too much time and effort from individuals). Even Jacobin was able to lambast it and posit market socialism as the realistic alternative, which says something.

I actually find that pretty damning, it's also consistent with the impression I get from how people describe it. It sounds like one big Town Hall meeting that just never ends. But in what way is this different from what most Ancoms advocate? Wouldn't Anarcho-Communism involve just as much direct participation from the general population?

Mind you, this is assuming one actually wants to reject Central Planning, personally I'm partial to Cockshott's vision of cybernetics, as well as Srnicek's more Cybersyn-like idea of planned economy, but assuming one doesn't go that direction how feasible is Parecon, and how is it any different from what other Anarchists believe, who I assume wish to avoid the over centralization of planning?

Classic ancom (think Kropotkin) is actually more decentralized. Instead of everyone deciding for everyone else through an in-practice centralized plan (as everyone's demands are factored into a single table managed by a bureaucracy), people just give each other what they need. If it's not bothering you, it's not your business. There is no money, people take what they need. Distribution structures arise organically according to popular needs and demands. In ansyn (which develops a praxis and general industrial structure for it and is otherwise the same), it works the same but via delegates from industries and stuff is a little bit more reciprocal (as you can't feasibly coordinate a truly industrial economy on the basis of just mutual aid). Cybersyndicalism (which is what I'm naming what I'm working on, heavily influenced by Cockshott's works and can be considered a synthesis of what they offer with broadly syndicalist structures and praxis) is much the same overall, although it takes a closer look at scarcity, achieving communist relations with products where manufacturing capacity far exceeds demand and maintaining a system of social insurances and bonuses to distribute scarce products. Basically, you do what you need to do for yourself. Imagine going to a supermarket and just taking what you needed, maybe showing up to a town hall once every 2 months to decide on larger issues. Much simpler.

On the other hand, Parecon demands that everyone constantly participates in town halls, that people can only take what they have worked for, and generally fetishizes direct democracy as an absolute necessity in everything (don't get me wrong, ancoms support direct democracy, but they don't make it into a god). Moreover, it has an obsession with eliminating a strict division of labor, something of which Kropotkin is guilty as well but doesn't elaborate on too much. It's central to parecon that people rotate jobs. Yes, society should strive to imbue people with multiple skills in an equitable manner so that they're not doing repetitive, uncreative, humanity-stripping jobs their whole lives, but you can't expect a janitor to switch with a surgeon if he's not trained for it. It's the "feels > reals" of economic systems. Wishful thinking.

Thank you for such a thorough response! Also, I have to admit, the way you've described Paracon here it sounds a bit horrifying.

This sounds extremely interesting user, you should share some of this in a new thread.

Already done, it's the cybernetics thread you're looking for:

Also have a look at the /leftytech/ thread if you think you might want to get involved:

It's fascinating, and a much more realistic approach than just about any else that the Left currently has. But I get the sense that there is just too much bureaucracy for it to be fully functional without drastically simplifying it.

It's not quite as bad as this user describes. The "town halls" are entirely voluntary, nobody is forced to participate in them. The rest of the critique is pretty accurate though.

Parecon is central planning in the sense that the data is centrally processed. Since the Parecon writers associate central planning with a distinct co-ordinator class, they don't call it central planning.

>it has an obsession with eliminating a strict division of labor (…) but you can't expect a janitor to switch with a surgeon if he's not trained for it.
They never proposed such nonsense. The sort of division they are talking about is between empowering work and the rest, and the obsession with dividing that up has something to do with preventing the rise of a co-ordinator class. Normal people must get involved in managing and planning things, you cannot permanently delegate it away to experts or class society will be re-instated.


Do you know how their supply-and-demand algorithm always terminates, whatever the inputs? Because I don't see what makes them believe that. Have they developed a useful algorithm yet for any part of what they propose?

I'm not a Parecon guy, so I can't speak to this authoritatively. I'm also unsure of what you mean by "supply-and-demand" algorithm. I don't think there is a universally accepted algorithm fitting that description in Parecon. There are formulas that address necessary labor vis-a-vis desired production though, if that's what you're asking.
Maybe "much more realistic" is overselling it. I should have simply said "more detailed". The only systems that will get you comparable depth (in current libertarian socialist theory) are the cybernetics guys and mutualists.
Yes, of course they do. It seems pretty silly to judge a theory of political economy based on the number of "algorithms" they have but if you want algorithms, Parecon certainly has them.

The iterative procedure they propose. Things are listed with prices, people submit lists of what they want at these prices, nothing happens yet in the real world, the prices are updated and people submit their updated lists of what they want, this is repeated a couple of times, until the algorithm terminates (but why would it).
Link?

And this is precisely what I think is so insidious about it - you aren't forced to work under capitalism de jure, but you are de facto. Nobody was ever forced to participate in OWS's assemblies, but if they didn't, they would get outmaneuvered and kicked out in short order. I don't see how this system is anything other than "OWS: the economic system", with massive potential for bureaucratic corruption unless you force people to regularly switch out of it at gunpoint. Who does that?

I remember once reading a critique of them on similar grounds as to what I said. So that was a straw man? Fair enough, then. I still don't see why I shouldn't be jaded about purist-democratic systems after OWS.

It still exists ? It's only modern (>1990) attempt to define a "leftist" economy. The absolute lack of interest for it by leftists especially the anarchists, shown me how much they became degenerate

I wouldn't say this was the case. Look up parecon pretty much anywhere and for every paper and article written by Hahnel and Albert you'll see three or four well-reasoned response articles ripping the system to shreds. It's yet another utopian project with no clear sense of what tasks are required to get from here to there - that is, praxis.

Read the cybernetics thread for some good discussion on what utopianism is and how we seek to avoid it.

Well, the alternative is just trusting whoever does participate in the planning to have your best interests in mind. I see plenty of socialists who have no problem placing their trust in planning committees that are even less accessible. Your overall critique though, is valid, and I agree with it. I just don't think it's greatly worse than other committee-based strategies, at least i regards to this particular issue.
No, it's a valid critique. I assumed you were exaggerating for rhetorical effect but there is a phobia of "division of labor" present within Parecon (imo). Jobs are rotated, albeit not to the extent that a janitor would be expected to perform surgery.

There are quite a few "useful algorithms" throughout Albert and Hahnel's work. See pic.

It's not really "utopian" in the Marxist sense of the word though, it's just very cumbersome. I feel like "utopian" is one of the most overused insults on this board.

Utopianism, as originally defined by contrast with the work of Proudhon (he was the first to call for a scientific socialism, see pg 264 of "What Is Property?"), is any system which seeks to establish an a priori-decided state of affairs without regard to existing material conditions. I don't see how the project of Parecon, lacking as it is in both a praxis developed beforehand and in one which could lead to it, is any more realistic than Fourierism. What do we do? Do we create committees right now to act as the seed of it? What is their mechanism for spreading as a mode of organization? What use can they be right now? It's good that people are once again starting from the utopian ground zero of socialism, but we need to once again extend our development of it beyond a retreat to the start and see where, if at all, the original project went wrong.
Not necessarily. What if, in every workplace, in every community, you had computers hooked up to a network, a big information aggregating network which put in all values of supply and demand in material terms into a sparse matrix to optimize the outputs to meet an objective function of driving all scarcity-based prices for goods to 0 (so everyone can take what they need) in a manner which factors environmental concerns and difficulty of work into the price system? This would replace almost all of the coordinating class in effect, to the extent that what few are still needed could be elected as either localized revocable delegates or even be selected by sortition.

The entire discussion of how to select the (temporary) membership of the coordinating class is dead on arrival when you consider that computers are already replacing middle men and can do so to a hitherto-unseen extent under socialism.
wsj.com/video/will-computers-replace-money-managers/865C9DCB-1597-4D05-B009-7A9DAC88EC33.html

That's a bit of a simplified take but working within that definition Parecon is still not utopian. They do have regard for material conditions and they do have a praxis.
From what I understand it's the typical "establish dual-power political economy" spiel.
I meant, specifically, within Parecon (which is highly flawed) those are your only two options. I am well aware that there are other forms of socialism that exist outside of Parecon.

As for your computer thing - you're essentially talking about cybernetics right? That's a completely different topic, but one that brings up a million new concerns.

>wsj.com/video/will-computers-replace-money-managers/865C9DCB-1597-4D05-B009-7A9DAC88EC33.html
You know, people everywhere go on and on and on about how automation is going to put everyone out of a job, and there are two things wrong with that.

1) People ignore the fact that increasing automation reduces the organic composition of capital and exacerbates the tendency of the rate of profit to fall - capitalism is more likely to enter crisis and destroy its own productive capacity to restore profitability long before it ever collapses.

2) Focusing on workers totally ignores the much more pronounced and faster-moving trend of the bourgeoisie automating themselves out of a job. A globe-spanning information network regulating all of humanity's productive surplus is the greatest starting point for global communism possible. IT practically defines the 'socially regulated general production' Marx refers to in The German Ideology. The bosses are literally creating the tools we will need to actually implement communism for us- yet nobody on the Left seems to want to talk about that, instead focusing on their pointless little cults or squats or sexual practices. We could and should be putting all of the effort our theoreticians and activists can muster into understanding and preparing these systems for the switch to the communist mode of production. What are we doing instead? Selling newspapers and hurling insults at other newspaper sellers.


Setting up communes that run on your pet system is practically the definition of utopian. And I think you misunderstand the point about 'material conditions'. What trends in modern capitalist production suggest that parecon might be the way forward? Where is parecon appearing in embryonic form under capitalism? All I've seen from parecon advocates on this front are the boilerplate nonsense defending the construction of communes. It might be praxis, but when we ask for praxis we are usually referring to the kind that wasn't utterly BTFO before the 1800s had finished.

It's a bit more complex than that though. Setting up communes expecting everyone to flock to them just because is utopian. Setting up model society and making concerted effort to expand it isn't necessarily utopian provided you have empirical evidence to suggest that your project's growth is sustainable is not necessarily utopian. Several major socialist projects began using the latter method. Again, I don't think Parecon would be successful in this way but it's not necessarily utopian just because we think it wouldn't work.
According to their analysis capitalism is doomed to begin with and they believe their system is the logical replacement people will turn to. At least I think that's the gist of it.
I have no idea honestly, I'm not that deep into their theory. I don't think it would be too hard for them to come up with examples though or say that "it hasn't happened yet but it will".
Like I've been trying to say: just because it's shitty praxis doesn't make it utopian. Utopian, in Marx's original definition, essentially meant theory that has no empirical basis at all. Not even an attempt. It was a belief that people would embrace socialism because of some immaterial aspect (ie. because socialism is 'absolute truth') without any materialist analysis. Marx has had such an influence that there are very few surviving socialist theories today that could rightly be called utopian. I would say the big two being certain Anarcho-Communists and the "Fully Automated Communism NOW" people.

Read the Bread Book, you dipshit

I have. Note that I said "certain" ancoms not Kropotkin or Kropotkinists.

I'm going to need to know what you're referring to before I can respond to that point.

And this is exactly what I'm accusing parecon of doing. When parecon advocates say that their system is a 'logical replacement', they only mean that they believe it is a workable economic system. If someone is claiming that everyone will turn to embrace your new system because 'it is logical to do so', you are being utopian. It doesn't suffice that your system is a 'logical alternative' - practically every alternative system is more reasonable than capitalism in one way or another. The problem with utopian models is that they fail to adequately explain why their 'logical replacement for capitalism' will be chosen over all the other 'logical replacements for capitalism'.

The main 2 i'm thinking of are rojava and anarchist spain.
I don't think that's the entirety of their argument though. They also make critiques of Marxism. Essentially they think their system (or something similar) is the only viable one. At least from what I can tell. Materialism isn't completely divorced from this idea of "logical self-interest". It would be different if we were talking about a vacuum like with the utopian socialists where nobody, in materialist terms, had any reason to believe that socialism was viable or better than capitalism. But as capitalism decays people will be forced into choosing an alternative and the Parecon people believe their system is the only realistic option essentially.

I could be totally wrong about this, I'm paraphrasing based on stuff I can barely remember. To be honest, people are getting way too buttmad in this thread and I don't have the interest to continue this conversation. It's fine if you want to call Parecon utopian, I was just complaining about how overused the term is in general.

We're not buttmad, you just happened to catch two of the most prolific posters in the cybernetics thread in a discussion about utopianism. Because we're trying to design some part of a post-capitalist economic framework ourselves, we're very careful about the line between 'effective (maybe prefigurative) praxis' and 'utopianism'. Nobody wants to be stuck trying to start up doomed utopian commune #153,792, so we want to be absolutely clear on where the line sits.

IIRC all the rotation they propose is that tasks are evaluated according to how empowering there are and then everybody is supposed to get a task mix that roughly sum to an equal score.

That's not a picture of an algorithm. Maybe it is the beginning of a description of one. Can you or anybody else describe in plain language an actual algorithm that those guys proposed?


>People ignore the fact that increasing automation reduces the organic composition of capital
Increases, you mean surely. (In Marxo-speak a firm has high org. composition if the amount of past work that went into producing the machinery is huge relative to the freshly applied work when they are put to use).

replying to myself. The only thing I have found is this:
participatoryeconomics.info/institutions/participatory-planning/
They don't have a proof that this actually balances at some point. And why would it? It's just a common belief that people tend to react to higher prices by asking for a smaller amount and vice versa for higher prices, but why would you bet the basic functioning of society on that happening? Consider this: When your income increases, do you really only buy more of everything? Do you not, to a great extent, rather start buying other things, such as better quality products that roughly serve the same purpose? And if that's the case, consider that how much budget you have left for affording this or that is not just a matter of what you get for your job, it's also a consequence of how prices change. So, what I'm saying is, stuff getting cheaper doesn't mean you won't buy less of it, as other stuff serving a similar purpose might get even more cheaper, or other stuff that is very important to you gets very expensive and so on, so if that is what their "algorithm" amounts to, I'll say they are irresponsible.

Are there any pro-Parecon programmers? Did really nobody try to specify an algorithm?

Can parecon be used strictly municipally? Is it bookchinite approved?

Absolutely! Parecon is the economic system of choice for all the libertarian municipalities that have sprung up at the foot of the Big Rock Candy Mountain.