A Participatory Economy

Robin Hahnel provides us with a wonderful and useful handbook on the Participatory Economy that “demonstrates concretely how to reconcile comprehensive democratic planning with worker and consumer autonomy.” I found it incredibly useful to see a detailed approach to how this post-capitalist approach might work. I did not necessarily agree with everything, but it is so helpful to have the key questions framed up with proposed solutions for one to consider. The research is extensive and the analysis is comprehensive and thoughtful. Bravo!

Let’s look at some of the key ideas.

He strongly moves away from central planning to participatory planning. Economic decisions are made by self- governing worker councils, neighborhood consumer councils, and federations of consumer and worker councils. They participate in an iterative participatory annual planning procedure that is laid out in detail. The goal is to have decision-making power allocated in proportion to the degree one is affected by a decision.

He takes on the hard question of how to allocate resources to individuals (today done mostly by jobs), suggesting four guiding maxims:  

• Maxim 1 : To each according to the social value of the contribution of their human and physical capital.
• Maxim 2 : To each according to the social value of the contribution of only their human capital.
• Maxim 3 : To each according to their effort or personal sacrifice.
• Maxim 4 : To each according to their need.

There is a relationship between one’s contribution and what they get back, but much more attention is paid to equity and economic justice. He notes that people will not agree about many things and the new system must be equipped to embrace and handle disagreement rather than unrealistically assume differences of opinion will magically vanish via discussion.

He is also pretty tough on markets, but I’m totally with him:

• Contrary to what most economists would have people believe, markets do not allocate scarce productive resources efficiently.
• Markets undermine rather than promote the kinds of human traits critical to the democratic process.
• Markets undermine solidarity and promote egotistical attitudes and behavior

He is practical and realistic. While he has been researching the ideas for this work for many years, he admits that “it is not possible to point to any example where something like the participatory planning system we espouse ever functioned long enough for its ‘practicality’ to be unquestionable.” We’re in mostly uncharted territory, particularly at any type of large scale.

My main critique is that I feel his approach to the future would have benefited from some futurist thinking.

• I feel he over-estimates the abilities of the worker and consumer councils to identify preferences, new products, and areas to invest for the future.
• I feel the planning approach relies too much on historical precedents, i.e., “while past performance is not a perfect predictor of future performance nonetheless these calculations would provide a useful guide … “
• Finally, he suggests that his strategy for getting to post-capitalism “is a much more complicated and nuanced ‘kettle of fish’ than describing where it is we want to go.” I suppose we can agree to disagree here. The After Capitalism work is an effort to address the absence of a positive guiding image of the future, which goes back to Polak’s work in the 1950s!

Along the lines of guiding images of the future, I find the principles in the participatory economy to be useful to all three AC guiding images. Interestingly, his work did not align tightly with any of the three:

• Re: Circular Commons, his approach is growth-based, which is at direct odds with the degrowth approach of this image.
• Re: Non-Workers Paradise, he doesn’t have post-work as a goal, although this is the image his work is closest to.
• Re: Tech-Led Abundance, he briskly dismisses the “post-scarcity” society.

These disagreements do not detract from the usefulness of the book. It really helped my thinking and is valuable for those who really want to dig into the details of what a post-capitalist economy might look like. We need more excellent work like this! – Andy Hines.