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The highly prolific American economist Michael Albert is the author of a bold, innovative economic theory aimed at replacing self-serving competition in the economic field with egalitarian cooperation.

Together with his co-author Robin Hahnel, Professor of Economics at American University, Washington D.C., he has developed and popularised a radical economic model, known as Participatory Economics, which constitutes an alternative both to capitalism and to what used to be the Soviet-style model of Real Socialism.

In Participatory Economics, solidarity takes the place of competition and remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of work replaces remuneration for property, power, or output. Likewise, methods of self management replace authoritarian decision making and a new method of allocation called participatory planning replaces markets.

To realise his project of radically changing a private-enterprise production system that generates economic inefficiency, Michael Albert counts on workers and consumers operating in councils according to the principle of participatory self-management.

The Pio Manzù Centre recognises that this American economist’s radical new theory constitutes the most powerful and fully articulated challenge to the current models of socio-economic thought and that Albert’s outstanding merit lies in the fact that he has indicated a new major highway in economic organisation as a feasible proposition.


Signed
Mikhail Gorbachev, President
Rimini, 17 October 2004

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The citation for the Award of the President of the Italian Republicthat I was graciously given yesterday, said that parecon is the "the most powerful and fully articulated challenge to the current models of socio-economic thought" providing "a new major highway in economic organization as a feasible proposition."

Anyone who believes that about parecon, it seems to me, ought to fight like the dickens not only to ameliorate the current ills produced by capitalism, but to usher in the benefits of this new type economy.

When we all go to movies and see courageous souls of the past represented on the screen, fighting against slavery, or against the subordination of women, or against colonialism, or for peace and justice and against dictatorships, we rightly feel sympathy and admiration for these acts.

The abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor union organizers, the anti apartheid activists, all the seekers of freedom and dignity are heroes for us.

It seems to me we should not admire something and then avoid doing that same thing.

If we admire standing up against injustice, we ought to ourselves stand up against injustice.

If we admire seeking a better world, we should ourselves seek a better world.

If we admire rejecting exploitation, alienation, domination, and its violent maintenance, we should ourselves advocate and fight for an economic model and societal structure that will eliminate these horrors.

I believe that participatory economics is such an economy and should be part of such a new society.

Thank you

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What are additional or deeper properties of parecon or of possible extensions and variations of it?

In exploring and refining parecon as an economic vision, however, we won’t want to make either of two mistakes: 1) thinking that all parecons will be alike and that by naming/describing a possible feature of a parecon we are naming/describing an actual feature that must always be present in all parecons. Or 2) thinking that we have the means and information to closely read the future, or, for that matter, that there is good reason to want to try to closely read the future. In other words, we don’t need blueprints. The details of future economies and societies will of course emerge from the unpredictable and often very varied choices their citizens will make, not from prognostications much less instructions developed in advance. People will do what they want to do. But of course rightly avoiding over-reaching into excessive details should not prevent us from discussing what we are usefully capable of addressing now.

So even while avoiding mistaking possibilities for inevitabilities or over-reaching into excessive details, we can certainly usefully further explore the logic and implications of the key broad defining institutions of parecon, both intellectually and in practical experiments, and use the resulting insights to both improve the vision (without over-specifying the future) and to refine our comprehension of it and thus our ability to advocate and seek it effectively.

So, for example, what more can we say about the specifically economic implications of workers and consumers councils, of self managed decision making, of balanced job complexes, of remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and of participatory planning?

The issue isn’t trying to foresee tenth order or even third or perhaps even second order impact. The issue is to further elaborate and comprehend the main broad defining implications of these structural choices for liberating people’s options, behaviors, views, and fulfillment and development in order to test and investigate the worthiness and the viability of the vision. Likewise, what about demonstrating the mechanisms that would facilitate information exchange and preference tallying, in theory and experiment? That too would enhance the case being made. One could imagine not only practical experiments at various scales – such as workplaces or groups of them, and neighborhoods or groups of them, but also perhaps a larger scale simulation, whether in fictitious but carefully constructed computer form, or perhaps in a kind of parallel economic activity in the real world.

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