Solidarity Economics & Participatory Economics

Ethan Miller’s overview of solidarity economics in the July/August issue of Dollars & Sense has started a good discussion of the potential of Miller’s decentralized, action-oriented approach to transforming our economy and Michael Albert’s more fully theorized Participatory Economics model—essentially a model for participatory planning of a whole economy’s production.

Miller asks:

Can thousands of diverse, locally-rooted, grassroots economic projects form the basis for a viable democratic alternative to capitalism? It might seem unlikely that a motley array of initiatives such as worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives, community currencies, urban gardens, fair trade organizations, intentional communities, and neighborhood self-help associations could hold a candle to the pervasive and seemingly all-powerful capitalist economy.

Miller sees solidarity economics’ rejection of “one-size-fits-all solutions and singular economic blueprints,” as a strength, because it encourages the involvement of “those who are most affected” in the solutions to their economic problems. Which facilitates the organizing that Miller believes the movement needs if it is to fulfill its potential.

In a response on ZNet, Michael Albert counters that Miller doesn’t pay enough attention to the larger economy and its effects on the solidarity economy.

An economy of the future will have an allocation system. All economies do. If it is markets or central planning, then that economy will not be a solidarity or participatory economy.

An economy of the future will have a division of labor. All economies do. And if this includes sequestering empowering work into the hands of a few while most do only rote and obedient work, the future economy will not be a solidarity or a participatory economy.

To have solidarity requires classlessness. Solidarity won’t be extensive if some own the economy and others only labor in it. It won’t be extensive if some rule the economy and others only obey in it.

So yes, we need an economy which is the product of the will of its members, of course. And we need an economy that is created by an open and hugely democratic process, of course. But we also need an economy that arrives at institutions that attain its stated aims—or else the aims will only be nice rhetoric, disappearing once contrary institutions push them aside.

Parecon, Albert would contend, presents a model for creating such institutions.

Meanwhile, at SolidarityEconomy.net, David Schweickart reviews Michael Albert’s latest book, Parecon: Life after Capitalism and details the ways in which he believes Parecon to be too complicated to be practical.