By Tom Wetzel
[This is the text of a talk given at the Anarchist Activists and Academics Conference at Pitzer College, April 15th.]
I'm going to talk today about the sort of revolutionary program or vision we should have for liberation of the working class from the system of class oppression. For the past century the main vision that anarchists have adhered to is called libertarian communism (which I will sometimes abbreviate as libcom). One of my purposes today is to point out a number of the serious deficiencies in libcom and suggest solutions. I don't assume that the class system is the only component of the system of oppression we live under. In fact white supremacy and gender inequality are additional structures of oppression that are interwoven with the class system. But I don't have three hours here, so I'm going to focus just on the class system.
We all have the ability to foresee possible courses of action into the future, to think out steps to realize our purposes, to develop skills to carry out actions needed to realize our purposes, to create plans of action, and to carry out those plans under our own control. This is self-management. In fact our ability to ensure that our own actions serves our aspirations presupposes self-management. To be self-managing is to be self-determining. This is what freedom is in the positive sense of the word "freedom." To be self-managing is a basic need that human beings have. Self-management has always been a central idea on which the thinking of the libertarian Left.
In developing plans for action, inspired by our own aspirations, there are many situations where fulfilling our own aims requires common action with others. Through the use of language and the back and forth process of giving each other reasons for action, we have the capacity to plan together, to engage in cooperative action, to realize common aims. This is to say we have the ability and need for collective self-management.
But in both the capitalist and Communist countries working people are forced to work to fulfill the plans of others, exploited for the benefit of elites. This is the denial of our human need for self-management. To be denied self-determination, to be subordinated to the plans and aims of others, is oppression. When I speak of workers' liberation I mean liberation from this condition of subjugation to elite classes.
But in order to have a program or vision for how the working class could be liberated from the class system, we first need to have an understanding of what the basis of the class system is. When we talk about class, we're talking about a structure of power over social production, that is, the making of goods and services for each other and their distribution in the social economy. Production isn't just manufacturing but also services, transportation, communication, and distribution. What we're interested in are structures that stratify the society into groups with antagonistic interests. Why do we suppose there are classes? We posit classes because this helps us to explain why similar interests, behaviors, struggles and consciousness tends to be shared within certain groups.
What, then, are the structures that divide contemporary American society into classes? When we talk about class we are talking about the power that people have in society in virtue of their position in the economy. This is power that affects their situation at work, the prospects they have in life, what neighborhood they live in, the sort of consciousness they have about politics and other things in the society.
The property system in capitalism is a big part of class system. A small investor class owns buildings, land, equipment, and companies. This gives them a monopoly over the means of producing the things that we all depend on in order to live our lives. The rest of the population are forced to rent the use of our working capacities to their companies, to work under hierarchical decision-making structures that are set up to ensure profits to the owners.
From Marx's point of view, this division in society created by the property system is the main class division in capitalism. Marx viewed capitalism as mainly a two-sided struggle between capital and labor. If you accept this view that there are only two main classes in capitalism, then you may reach the conclusion that all that needs to happen to eliminate the class system is to eliminate private ownership of the means of production. This view has a hard time explaining why the class system then continued to exist in the old Soviet Union after the private owning class was expropriated.
In reality there is a second structural basis for class division that emerged in mature capitalism, generating a third major class. At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, the widening scope of markets and increasing concentration of capital led to the large corporation becoming the dominant type of capitalist enterprise. These firms had sufficient resources that they could undertake the systematic redesign of jobs and production processes. This enabled them to attack the autonomy and job control that had been exercised by workers under the traditional craft methods that had survived in 19th century capitalism. Under these traditional craft methods the technology remains, to a large extent, a possession of the workers, who trained new generations of workers through apprentice systems. Between the 1890s and 1920s, "efficiency experts" like Frederick Taylor advocated systematic analysis of the tasks contained in jobs, and redesign of jobs to concentrate conceptual and decision-making in a newly elaborated hierarchy, while a different group of people are expected to obediently execute the orders handed down.
This period saw the huge growth of a new class of professional managers, engineers and other professional advisors to management. I call this new class the coordinator class. This is just a technical term. I don't mean that things like expertise or coordination are inherently bad or oppressive. The point is to notice that re-organization of jobs and elaboration of job hierarchies were concentrating the empowering or controlling work more into the hands of a few people who were, like other workers, hired labor. The empowering conditions -- control over planning, conceptualization, decision-making, coordination of the labor of others was being concentrated into the hands of a few.
Anarchists sometimes think that it is only a formal order-giving position, a boss, that defines a class division. But this is a mistake. Effective control over production requires various forms of expert knowledge and conceptualization and planning work. It is not only managers who are part of the coordinator class. Engineers participate in the control of workers when they design equipment or software in ways that enhance management control and supervision of workers. Lawyers help to maintain labor subordination when they help break unions, elaborate labor contracts that limit the autonomy and rights of workers, or defend the interests of management and owners in other ways.
The idea of a meritocracy, that the people with the most education and expertise should make the decisions, is an ideology characteristic of the coordinator class. Their education and position in society is likely to give them more of a sense of entitlement to a privileged position.
Thus the ability of the capitalists to appropriate wealth through their ownership of means of production is not the only systematic rip-off of the working class under capitalism. Capitalism also systematically under-develops the skills of workers and the realization of their potential to control production and their own lives. Decision-making, crucial pieces of expertise, and control over the conditions of work of others are accumulated as the possession of the coordinator class.
The major investors who own the big concentrations of capital — the plutocracy — are estimated to be about 2 percent of the population in the USA. Their ownership of capital gives them tremendous power to determine the shape of the society, through their control over investment. Their capital is their power to command labor and resources in the market so as to produce things to make a profit, that is, to increase their economic power.
There are also many small to medium-sized businesses where the owner also does some of the coordinator work, that is, is directly involved in the managing of the business. These smaller business owners are about 6 percent of the population in the USA (according to Howard Sherman, "An Approach to Class Analysis" in Radical Political Economy). These are also capitalists but they have much less power than the plutocracy. I estimate the size of the coordinator class in the USA at about 17 percent of the population. (Managers alone are 12 percent according to Howard Sherman.)
The subordinated working class -- the proletarian class, to use the traditional Left terminology — is about 60 percent of the population in the USA (based on data in Michael Zweig's book The Working Class Majority). The structure of power in the economy allows them very little power of decision-making or authority, little control over the pace or content of their work. They don't control other people — they aren't part of the class I call coordinators — but are subject to the control of others. This includes people who work on assembly lines in factories, drive forklifts in warehouses, stock items on shelves in stores, check out customers at the cash register. This includes the people who drive, clean and repair buses and trains, directory assistance operators and phone installers. And many other occupations.
The boundary line between the coordinator class and the working class is fuzzy. There are people whose position is sort of in between. There is a significant difference in the position of high school teachers and tenured professors at elite universities, or between system architects who advise management in software companies versus a programmer who simply codes some small piece of a software application.
Teachers and registered nurses, for example, work in fields that typically require a four-year college degree nowadays. Teachers have some autonomy in terms of control over their work with their students. The formal education of the lower-level professional segment — school teachers, RNs, application programmers, commercial artists, and the like — and the respect they receive in society may also encourage a certain sense of craft elitism. These groups are more likely to run in social circles with members of the coordinator class.
On the other hand, they also are subject to management power, and often organize unions and fight back, which may encourage them to look for solidarity with other groups of workers. These groups are the more proletarianized segment of the college-educated professionals. As such, they are potential allies of the working class. However, we shouldn't ignore the differences between the college-educated lower-level professionals and the working class. The lower-level professional segment are not a separate class but a group that has some of the features of the working class and some of the features of the coordinator class. They're a boundary group.
I would estimate that the working class and the lower-level professional segment together make up at least three-fourths of the population of the USA. The big and small capitalists and the coordinator class together make up the other fourth of the population.
The phrase "middle class" sometimes seems to be used to refer to the small business segment, the coordinator class, and the lower-level professional segment. But the economic position of these three segments is significantly different. It's not clear they have sufficient common interests to make a single class. The phrase "middle class" itself is not very clear because it doesn't tell us anything about the role or position of this alleged class in social production.
An important point for us to notice is that the coordinator class has the ability to be a ruling class. This is the historic meaning of the Leninist revolutions. These revolutions eliminated the capitalists and created systems of public ownership of the means of production. But they created a new class system, based on the relative monopolization of decision-making and other empowering conditions in the hands of an elite. I call these Leninist systems a coordinatorist mode of production because the coordinator class is the dominant class.
The Leninist practice of "vanguard party leadership" is one thing that tends to prefigure this outcome in the period leading up to these social changes. The Leninist party is supposed to accumulate expertise and decision-making control in popular movements into the hands of the party cadres. The party "manages" the movement for social change and aims to implement its program through the hierarchical apparatus of a state. This implies a relationship between the party and the mass of the people that is analogous to that between the coordinator class and the working class in social production.
One way of conceiving of the anarchist approach to a post-capitalist society is the proposal that self-management is to be generalized in all spheres of life, including the economy. The mode of production proposed by the libertarian Left can thus be called generalized self-management.
But there are different ways of conceiving of, or specifying, generalized self-management. The most popular variant among anarchists since the time of Kropotkin is libertarian communism. However, libcom has various weaknesses. In what follows I'm going to try to show how participatory economics (which I will sometimes abbreviate as parecon) is an alternative way of specifying generalized self-management which improves upon libcom in certain ways.
Let's begin by considering a very basic anarchist proposal for workers' liberation from class subordination. This is the idea that the power of decision-making in workplaces be in the hands of face-to-face assemblies of the workers, assemblies that make their decisions by direct, participatory democracy. For example, the hundreds of recuperated factories in Argentina have this sort of assembly-based system of worker decision-making in the workplace. Historically many, although not all, advocates of libcom have advocated direct workers' management of production.
But a purely formal system of direct democracy is not sufficient to ensure the liberation of the working class from class subordination. People also need to have the preparation, training, and information to participate effectively in the making of decisions. We need to ensure the development in everyone of their human potential for self-management.
The skills and knowledge that people have is shaped by the kinds of activities they do day after day. If a person simply puts bolts on a product in an assembly operation 40 hours a week, or spends their days simply sweeping the floors and cleaning toilets, will they have the knowledge and skills to evaluate proposals put forward by professional analysts and engineers who continually build skills and expertise for overall design and planning through years of education and their day to day work? When will ordinary workers have the opportunity to develop their analytical abilities and acquire broad knowledge about the industry?
An authoritarian chain-of-command hierarchy in industry in capitalist and Communist countries is not the only thing that dis-empowers workers. There are also differences in the way that information, preparation, and expertise are developed in two different groups of workers. The professionals and managers do jobs, and experience forms of education, that prepare them for effective decision-making. This will enable them to dominate even if they do their work in the context of a formally democratic system.
In the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain, for example, there are annual general assemblies that have the official decision-making power to control the enterprises and all workers have a formally equal say. But if a worker works in production all day throughout the year, they won't have the opportunity to learn things that might enable them to effectively question and challenge the plans and proposals put forward by professionals who work on analysis and design issues all year. And the Mondragon cooperatives also have a rule that ordinary workers are prohibited from hiring outside consultants to advise them on plans developed by the professional and managerial staff (according to The Myth of Mondragon, by Sharryn Kasmir). In fact the Mondragon cooperatives, despite their formal assembly democracy, are coordinator-class dominated structures.
The advocates of participatory economics have come up with a proposal to solve this problem, which is called job balancing. The idea of job balancing is that we redesign all the jobs so that the conceptual, decision-making and skilled tasks are integrated with the physical doing of the work. The idea is to ensure that workers have the education and work tasks that empower them to be masters of production. Conceptualizing the work to be done is no longer separated out into a different group of people from the people who carry out the actual work.
This proposal goes beyond anything that had been proposed by libcom in the past due mainly to the fact that libcom never developed a theory of the coordinator class, and therefore never really addressed the question of how the power of the coordinator class over the working class could be dissolved. Libertarian communists sometimes reply that they have a concept of the division between intellectual and manual labor, and that this division would be overcome (somehow) in libcom. But this is not the same thing. Any kind of labor involves thinking and discretion to some degree. Employers rely on workers using their brains. It's misleading to refer to the professional/managerial strata of the population as "the intellectuals" because there are members of the working class who also have their own ideas, read, and are "intellectuals" in that sense, even if they don't have the same level of formal education. Rather than talking about "intellectual" and "manual" labor, it is necessary to look at is how certain kinds of tasks are empowering to the people who do them. When these tasks are concentrated or relatively monopolized into an elite, that is the basis of coordinator class power.
So far I've been dealing only with the issue of control of social production, that is, production of goods and services for each other. However, another issue that any revolutionary program for the economy must deal with is allocation of work time and resources in social production. A method of allocation will determine how much work time and other resources like land, space in buildings, tools and so on is to be allocated to produce different products.
Pro-capitalist and Marxist economists typically agree that markets and central planning are the only alternatives for allocation of worker time and other resources in social production. Libcom and most anarchists have opposed markets as the method of allocation.
If there is no social plan, governance of the economy by the market would be inevitable. Some anarchists say that each workplace or other component of the economy should be autonomous. But if anarchists favor truly autonomous production units not governed by a social plan, they are advocating a market economy whether they realize it or not.
Let's suppose that in a revolution a group of workers seize control of a coal mine and power plant that supplies electricity for the surrounding region. If production of electricity is not governed by a social plan, what is to stop this group of workers from using their effective possession of this facility to demand a larger share of the total social product in exchange for production of electric power? If this power plant group uses its unilateral control over the plant to demand more of society's product in exchange for electric power, that is already a market relationship.
The same problem arises if we suppose that workers in each workplace have actual private ownership over their means of production. Private ownership secures a unilateral decision-making power that implies a bargaining power relationship to their customers.
A market economy is an economy that allocates labor time and resources in social production by virtue of bargaining power, with autonomous firms, not governed by a social plan. This means that firms will be able to generate very different levels of income depending on their particular bargaining power. Things like market share and plant technology may affect their ability to generate income. Competition between firms is likely to lead to bankruptcy of some firms, generating unemployment.
Individuals can use acquisition of different levels of skill and expertise to secure bargaining power to compete in the labor market. Firms that want to hire people with scarce talents and skills will be forced to pay more or give more in the way of perks. Workers would be dependent on professionals with needed expertise. This environment would tend to generate internal hierarchies in firms, with a coordinator class of professionals and managers consolidating control, as in the Mondragon coops.
Class division is inevitable within a market-governed economy.
This suggests that the secure liberation of the working class from class oppression requires two additional conditions:
Although generalized self-management needs to be a planned economy, we need to avoid central planning. Under central planning, a planning agency acquires information about consumer demand and about the production capacity of various facilities. The professional planners than craft the plan and issue marching orders to the production groups.
This tends to generate a class hierarchy for two reasons. First of all, the system concentrates expertise, information and decision-making into the hands of a planning elite. Secondly, the planning elite will want to have managers in charge in the various production facilities to make sure that their plans are carried out. In Russia after the October revolution of 1917, for example, we see the creation in November, 1917, of the Supreme Council of National Economy (which eventually became Gosplan), appointed top-down by the government leaders with a mandate to create national plans, followed in March, 1918 with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders beginning to talk up "one-man management" — appointment of industry managers from above.
But if we don't want either the market or central planning as the method of allocation, what is left? In the past the libertarian Left has vaguely suggested that there is an alternative to both the market and central planning, but without specifying what this is. The failure to specify a plausible method of allocation is one of the weaknesses of libertarian communism.
In the 1970s a number of radical economists developed an alternative to both the market and central planning for allocation of labor time and resources in production: participatory planning. In the particular version of participatory planning advocated by parecon, the entire society would "self-manage" the creation of a social plan for production, "from below." There is no central planning elite.
To understand participatory planning, we first need to understand that for self-management to be generalized in the economy it needs to be applied to decisions about consumption and not only to decisions of workers about their work. In order for people to have control over the decisions that affect them, they need to have institutions through which they can self-manage decisions about their consumption.
Anything that we consume is a consumption good. There are two basic types of consumption goods: private and public. If I want to have a fruit salad for lunch, this is not a matter of common consumption but only my own consumption. So, I should be able to make this decision, what I am going to eat, for myself. That fruit salad, since it is consumed by me, is a private consumption good.
A self-managing economy needs to be able to allow individuals the freedom to decide on what private consumption goods that will make up their share of the social product. This means that the institutions of participatory planning must have a channel for individuals to make private consumption requests without this being being veto'd by some larger collectivity, as long the requests conform to some basic community norms - for example, I assume that individuals would not be allowed to demand a nuclear bomb. That wouldn't just affect that individual, and is therefore not a legitimate item of private consumption.
Not all the benefits derived from the system of social production are from items of private consumption. We all benefit from the existence of sidewalks, fire-fighting services, the availability of books in libraries, prevention of water pollution. These are all examples of public goods.
To articulate requests for public goods we need to add another institution to our list of the elements of generalized self-management: assemblies of residents in neighborhoods, and federations of these over broader and broader geographic scope — throughout a city, a region, a nation, and so on.
I can now summarize the institutional structure for generalized management that implements participatory planning.
Except for the proposals for job-balancing and individual consumption planning, the proposed structure doesn't differ much from the libertarian communist program of the Spanish CNT in the 1930s, as articulated at its Congress in Zaragoza in May 1936. That program envisioned assemblies and federations of both workers and residents, and stated that the resident assemblies would be the channel for consumer input. However, the CNT's program had no clear idea of how the consumption and production halves of the economy would relate in order to work out an effective social plan. This is because traditional anarchism didn't have a concept of participatory planning.
In the parecon version of participatory planning, individuals and resident assemblies and federations of resident assemblies put forward proposals for what they want produced, both for individual and public consumption goods. Production groups put forward their proposals for what they will produce and for what improvements they want in their work situation.
It's very likely that the initial set of proposals will not add up to a do-able and effective plan. For example, what if people decide they want bigger houses so a lot of requests for construction of new housing has been put in? At the same time, let's suppose that people also want the construction of health clinics and schools. Well, the construction worker time and building materials used to build houses won't be available to build clinics and schools. What if the total initial set of requests couldn't be realized because of lack of resources or what if they would force everyone to work 14-hour days to get it done?
What is needed at that point is that some group or groups aggregate the proposals and figure out their total consequences and then publish this. In light of this information, people can then revise their proposals to take account of information about production capacity and what everyone else has demanded. Through a series of back-and-forth sessions like this, the entire society constructs the plan directly, through the direct participation of people as workers and consumers.
The ecosystem itself — clean air and water for example — is a major public consumption good. When a power plant pollutes the air in the capitalist framework, the power company saves money by not buying equipment to prevent the pollution or by not using a more expensive but less polluting form of power production. The cost of the pollution is then externalized onto the residents of the region surrounding the power plant. The damage to the health of the residents is a cost to them. Corporations are externalization machines. They profit by systematically shifting costs onto others. What is missing here is an association of the people through which the people could effectively prevent the systematic plunder of the ecosystem.
Parecon's participatory planning systematically encourages the production and protection of public goods. The neighborhood assemblies and federations of these are a key institution for this. Collective decision-making in the resident assemblies and federations of residents over larger regions would be the vehicle for input to the economic system for proposals about public goods, including environmental defense. The federations of neighborhood assemblies would have the power to exert guardianship over the ecosystem. They could deny production groups the right to pollute or to destroy habitat. Production groups would be forced to internalize their ecological costs, as the federations of residents could force entry of these costs onto the balance sheets of the production groups during the back-and-forth participatory planning process.
Some, though not all, libertarian communists say that people should be allowed to consume what others have labored to produce without any requirement that they do socially necessary work. This is particularly unlikely in a period when society has just emerged from capitalism. If the working class has fought to take away the ability of the capitalist elite to live off our labor, how likely is it that people would look favorably on the emergence of a new group of social parasites?
This is what Isaac Puente says about this in his pamphlet Libertarian Communism:
"Libertarian communism is.the most rational of all solutions to the economic question in that it corresponds to an equitable sharing out of production and labor required to achieve a solution. No one must shirk this necessity to join in the cooperative effort of production.We recognize the right to be lazy provided that those who seek to exercise that right agree to get along without help from others."
Some libertarian communists propose the abolition of money. The problem with this is that it isn't possible to have an effective economy without prices as a measure of social cost.
To see this, let's look at the concept that economists call social opportunity cost. If groups of construction workers are building houses, the time they spend working on that project is time they cannot be spending building schools or other things they might have done. The building materials put into those houses cannot be used to build schools or other things. All of the potential products that we have had to give up to have the houses is the social opportunity cost of building the houses.
An economy is effective when it gives us the maximum satisfaction of human wants and needs -- the maximum benefit -- for the lowest social opportunity cost. In other words, we want to make sure that the things we put our time and resources into making are the things that are most desired by people. If the things that we had to give up to build the houses would be more highly valued to us right now than the houses, then building the houses was not an effective use of our time and materials.
This suggests that we need a way of measuring the strength of desire of people for things that could be produced. The only way to get this information is for people to make choices about what they want produced in a situation where they have only a finite entitlement to consume expressed as a quantity of a monetary unit. Let us suppose that in the planning process there are increased requests for construction of buildings requiring concrete. The federation of workers in the building materials industry has not increased its proposal for concrete production this year, let us suppose. In that case, the increased scarcity value to us of the concrete would be expressed by raising its price. Now, there are two possibilities. Some of the groups that requested buildings requiring concrete might back off because they don't want to pay more for concrete. It busts their budgets. If that happens, maybe the requests for concrete decline in the next round in the negotiations and the price retreats to what it was before. The second scenario is that the groups that want the concrete stick to their guns, reflecting a strong desire for these construction projects. In that case, the higher price might stick, unless the community decides to invest in an increase in capacity for making concrete. This higher price then measures the strength of desire for the projects requiring the concrete.
A monetary unit provides a common scale on which to measure the value to us of the time and resources expended to produce things, and also the value to us of the things produced. We can also use the prices of benefits and costs to measure how effective the various production groups are in their use of the socially owned production facilities.
Parecon proposes that we measure the effectiveness of production groups by looking at the ratio between costs and benefits as revealed by the evaluations of the inputs and outputs in the participatory planning process. If a production group falls below the social average by some threshold, a case needs to be made why it shouldn't be disbanded and its resources allocated elsewhere.
Within a participatory economy, there is the possibility that a production group could be disbanded, and in that case the people working there would have to seek jobs elsewhere. Faced with an under-performing group, we would want to investigate. Have we failed to provide the people in this group with adequate education? Are they using obsolete equipment? One way that a production group could get a bad score is if it is using highly polluting equipment. In that case, investment in less polluting equipment might be the best course of action.
We want to avoid a society based on the power of money as capital. Money exists as capital when it can command labor and resources to produce things that are sold to make a profit. Capital is a social power relationship. Although prices are needed as a form of accounting, money can't exist in the form of capital in planned participatory economy because the capitalist social framework is missing. Labor time and other resources can only be allocated in production through the social plan, and only to self-managing production groups where job-balancing is in force.
Parecon proposes that able-bodied adults are to be remunerated in proportion to their effort and sacrifice in socially useful work. With job-balancing in force, the effort and sacrifice that jobs require would tend to be equalized. This would tend to equalize the rate at which people would be remunerated. Remunerating people for their effort and sacrifice is needed in order to provide people with a motivation to work effectively. Remuneration for effort is an equitable principle for earning a share of the social product because effort is the one thing that each person has in their own power. How can we tell what effort people have put in? One way that society can tell this is by looking at what a group produces. If factory A and factory B are producing the same product, have the same level of education among the workforce and the same level of technology available to them, but A produces less per unit of social investment than B, we can reasonably infer that the workers in factory A are expending less effort.
Some libertarian communists object to the principle of remuneration for work effort on the grounds that this would be a system of "wage-labor." But wage labor is the other side of the wage-labor/capital relationship. That is, under a system of wage labor, people with capital pay people a wage to produce things for sale so that the capitalists can make a profit. But under the parecon version of generalized self-management, there are no bosses, nobody is appropriating a profit off our labor. If there is no dominating class forcing people to work for them to get a wage, there is no exploitative system of "wage labor." In effect, under parecon the entire society is employing the workforce to make things for itself. We simply agree as a society to pay each other for the work effort and sacrifice expended in doing work useful for each other. Given that payment for work effort and sacrifice in the form of an entitlement to consume expressed as a monetary quantity doesn't presuppose a class system, eliminating monetary payment for work effort is not necessary for workers' liberation. Why, then, should eliminating payment for work effort be part of our revolutionary program?
Local assemblies of residents are an important institution within the parecon version of generalized self-management. Some libertarian communists, however, seem to think that the direct democracy of the community assemblies is sufficient for the unilateral creation of an entire social plan, at least for a local economy. This One Big Meeting idea violates self-management in at least three ways:
First, a general assembly of community residents is only an appropriate venue for making decisions about collective or public goods, things that are shared by people in the community. But this leaves out individual choice about matters of private consumption. If I have earned a certain share of the social product through my efforts in socially useful work, why shouldn't I be able to distribute this entitlement among possible goods or services any way I want? Parecon solves this problem by specifying a separate channel for individual input of preferences to the planning process, apart from the preferences for public goods decided by the community assemblies and federations of these.
A second problem with the One Big Meeting idea is that it violates the self-management of workers. Many decisions do not have the same degree of impact on everyone. There are many decisions in a workplace that have a big affect on the people working there but do not affect other people in the community who don't work there to any significant degree. Suppose you work at a bicycle factory. Decisions about how to organize the work or when to start work in the morning may have little or no impact on others in the community. This is why we need separate institutions for workers' self-management, apart from community assemblies.
There is a third way that the One Big Meeting idea violates self-management. There are many decisions about consumption and production in your community that will affect other communities. Let's say your bicycle factory ships its bicycles to many other communities. If your community makes decisions about bicycle production unilaterally, this fails to accord any say to these people in other communities who will be affected by these decisions.
One solution would be to invoke a federal congress of delegates to develop a social plan for the entire national economy, say. But this congress could only realistically deal with a small number of decisions. To deal with the vast complexity of an economy with millions of residents and tens of thousands of products the industrial federations would need to have a large planning staff to assist the federal congress in putting together the plan. This is in effect a democratic form of central planning. There are two problems with this:
First, how would this avoid the authoritarian dynamics of central planning, with the tendency to concentration expertise and decision-making in a coordinator elite?
Second, how would they get accurate information about the relative preferences of consumers for outcomes? To obtain this information, a social, interactive process is needed where people reveal their preferences by making hard choices in a context where they have a finite, quantitative entitlement to consume. Central planning has no way to obtain this information.
To get around the problems of central planning, some libcom advocates have proposed that local communities be "self-sufficient." Unilateral construction of a social plan by the One Big Meeting doesn't violate self-management of people outside that community, they tell us, if the community doesn't depend on those people in other communities.
Does this mean you drink no wine if your community's land and climate don't lend themselves to wine-making? Does this mean a community has to make all its tools? Does this mean that every community that wants to make sure of metal products has to have its own steel mill? If this idea of self-sufficiency were really taken seriously, it would lead to horrible duplication and waste.
Advocates of local self-sufficiency reply by saying they only mean a partial self-sufficiency. This means some things produced in your town would be consumed in other towns and you could consume some things made elsewhere. But how would the various communities decide just how much geographic division of labor to have? In Murray Bookchin's version of this approach, no community could be required to have any more geographic division of labor than it wants. It logically follows that the community that wants the least exchange with other communities could enforce its will on every other community.
In reality this concept of local self-sufficiency is really quite arbitrary. There is no reason to deny communities the benefit of the work of people in other communities.
However, within the structure of generalized self-management that I have described there is a significant scope for local decision-making. The system is rooted in the direct democracy of local assemblies in workplaces and neighborhoods. These assemblies can control the decisions that mainly impact just the people in those workplaces or communities. But a plausible proposal for new economic institutions needs to scale up to an economy of tens of millions of people.
Parecon's solution to this question is to look at how decisions affect people. People are given a say in proportion to how much they are affected by a decision. A local community wouldn't be frozen out of decisions by production groups in distant communities if those decisions affect them. Workers would have control over the immediate production decisions that affect mainly them, but the surrounding community wouldn't be frozen out of decisions that would affect them such as pollution or the type of products that are to be produced.
In the version of generalized self-management that I have sketched here there is a role for federal congresses of delegates. Worker delegates to congresses of industrial federations can develop proposals that affect workers in general or whole industries. Federal congresses of delegates from the neighborhood assemblies throughout a region or throughout a nation could develop proposals on issues that affect everyone throughout the region or nation — such as how to deal with external threats.
But these decisions at federal congresses would cover only a small proportion of the issues that would make up a total social plan. That's because relatively few questions affect everyone in society equally. As such it would be a violation of self-management for all decisions to be made at the level of a national congress. In the parecon version of generalized self-management, most of the elements of the social plan are worked out through interaction between worker groups, on the one hand, and local community assemblies and individual consumers, with everyone making proposals and then revising them in light of what everyone else has proposed.