[Van-Parecon] Participatory Economics & the Environment (Pt. 3)

[vancouverparecon at resist.ca]

Hello,

Here is Pt. 3 of our latest feature, "Participatory Economics & the
Environment": an interview with Robin Hahnel. This is a four part series;
four questions and four answers. For this series we e-mail one part each
week over the next two weeks. Or, you can skip ahead and visit the series
on our web site. See links at the bottom of this e-mail.


The Vancouver ParEcon Collective interviews Robin Hahnel (Pt. 3)

Robin Hahnel has taught political economy at American University for over
25 years. He has co-authored, along with Michael Albert, numerous books on
participatory economics. His forthcoming book is "Economic Justice and
Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation" published by Routledge. Chris
Spannos is a member of the Vancouver Parecon Collective.


Spannos: Radical environmentalists and movements seeking ecological
balance have proposed small scale, self-reliant, community based
economics; even 'bioregonialism'. How does environmental sustainability
fit into these proposals and why do you think many people find them
appealing?


Hahnel: Some who reject capitalism, authoritarian planning, and market
socialism, offer a vision of largely self-reliant, local economies
governed by the kind of direct democracy once used in New England town
meetings. A growing number of radical environmentalists and young
anarchists argue that only reducing the scale of economic institutions,
and increasing the self-sufficiency of local communities can satisfy
libertarian goals, reduce alienation, and promote ecological balance. They
seek to avoid the negative repercussions of both markets and planning by
eliminating the "problem" these allocative mechanisms address --
coordinating a division of labor among geographically dispersed groups. By
decentralizing large, national economies into small, autonomous economic
communities they also hope to promote face-to-face democratic decision
making and create incentives for local communities to take the
environmental effects of their activities into account. They argue that
while participatory democracy doesn't work in large groups where people do
not known one another and cannot discuss things in person, it can work in
small communities. They also reason that once the consequences of choices
all fall "in my back yard," the IMBY principle will force local
communities to protect their environment. Of course, just as there are
different models of market socialism and democratic planning,
community-based economics comes in different flavors: Social ecology and
libertarian municipalism (see Murray Bookchin, Post Scarcity Anarchism,
Black Rose Books, 1986, original 1970, Murry Bookchin with Janet Biehl,
The Politics of Social Ecology, Black Rose Books, 1998, and Howard
Hawkins, "Community Control, Workers' Controls, and the Cooperative
Commonwealth" in Society and Nature, Vol. 1 no. 3, 1993); an ecological
society through democratic pluralism (See David Korten, The Post-Corporate
World: Life After Capitalism, Kumarian Press, 1999, and Paul Hawken, The
Ecology of Commerce, Harper Collins, 1993); Buddhist economics (E.F.
Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Harper and Row, 1973); bioregionalism
(Kirkpatrick Sale, "Principles of Bioregionalism" in J. Mander and E.
Goldsmith eds., The Case Against the Global Economy, Sierra Club Books,
1996); ecological economics, (Herman Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological
Economics, Island Press, 2004); and ecosocialism (Joel Kovel, The Enemy of
Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? Zed Books, 2002,
and Roy Morrison, Ecological Democracy, South End Press, 1995) are some of
the versions, and they all differ from one another in significant ways.
While I  sympathize with the participatory and ecological goals of
radicals who propose small scale, democratic autarky, all versions of
community-based economics suffer from a major problem. Unlike many
versions of market socialism and democratic planning, no "model" of
community-based economics is a real model in the sense that it specifies
rules and procedures for how to make all the decisions that must be made
in any economy. For this reason all versions of community-based economics
are really "visions," not coherent "models."


Sometimes proponents are blissfully unaware that they have failed to
address important issues that will inevitably arise. Sometimes proponents
refer to the lack of specific, concrete answers regarding how something
would be decided, as a virtue compared to what they criticize as
"deterministic" models of market socialism and democratic planning. But
this response misses the point. It is impossible to evaluate a proposal
for how to run the economy until it is a full and complete proposal. This
failure should not be confused with the problem of explaining how to move
from today's capitalist system to a community-based economy. Advocates of
community-based economics often address this issue more extensively than
they answer exactly how they propose particular issues be decided once we
get to a community-based economy. Nor should the failure be confused with
lack of speculation about what kinds of decisions they imagine people will
make in a community-based economy. Since proponents of community-based
economics are motivated by strong convictions that people need to choose
radically different technologies and products, need to change their
priorities regarding leisure versus work, and need to accept the necessity
of zero growth of "material throughput," authors usually write at length
about the differences between the decisions they believe will be made in
their community-based economy and the decisions made in today's capitalist
economies. The problem is that any professional economist knows there are
certain categories of decisions that must be made in any economy, and
until a proposal is comprehensive enough to specify how a proponent
suggests these necessary decisions be made -- i.e. until we have what
economists call a formal model -- it is literally impossible to evaluate
whether or not the economy would do what its proponents claim it would.


One manifestation of this problem is that when push comes to shove, no
version of community-based economics proposes that communities be entirely
self-sufficient -- for understandable reasons. In other words, it turns
out that autonomous communities are only semi-autonomous. And when it
comes down to explaining precisely how the "semi" part be handled, we
invariably find no answer beyond hand waving, and declarations of faith
that democratic communities can work this out between themselves
satisfactorily. Of course if communities were completely self-sufficient
there would be inefficient duplication of efforts and inequities. But in
the likely event that communities rediscovered the advantages of some
division of labor, no proposal in this literature -- precisely because
they are not truly models -- provides an answer to the question how
communities which are no longer completely autonomous should arrange their
division of labor. How do communities decide how much of a division of
labor they want to engage in? What if one community wants a greater
division of labor than another community wants? For example, a careful
reading of Bookchin's vision of libertarian municipalism reveals that no
community must acquiesce to a greater division of labor than it wants to.
While this is a specific rule, it is a problematic one. This rule means
the community that wants the least division of labor among communities can
impose its preference over the preferences of all other communities. Why a
community that is better endowed with natural, human, and/or physical
capital would not be tempted -- even if unconsciously -- to take unfair
advantage of this veto right is unclear.


Even if communities can agree on a division of labor with other
communities, how do they go about deciding how to distribute the burdens
and benefits of this division of labor? How do they jointly manage the
division of labor? Should goods and services not produced by every
community be traded in free markets? If so, why would this not lead to the
usual litany of inequities, instabilities, and inefficiencies that
advocates of community-based economics criticize in capitalism and market
socialism? Should communities attempt to plan mutually beneficial economic
relations? If so, how would they go about it, and how would the
authoritarian dynamics of central planning be avoided? Simply asserting
that the communities will decide all this "democratically" is not a good
enough answer.


Joel Kovel's "model" of ecosocialism, defined as an expanding network of
"ecological ensembles," is in many ways even more opaque than other
so-called models in this literature. In truth it is more an interesting
and insightful proposal about movement strategy than a coherent
post-capitalist economic model. But Kovel provides an excellent critique
of the disadvantages of extreme localism: "A pure community, or even
'bioregional' economy is a fantasy. Strict localism belongs to the
aboriginal stages of society: it cannot be reproduced today, and even if
it could, it would be an ecological nightmare at present population
levels. Imagine the heat losses from a multitude of dispersed sites, the
squandering of scarce resources, the needless reproduction of effort...
This is by no means to be interpreted as a denial of the great value of
small-scale and local endeavors... It is rather an insistence that the
local and particular exists in and through the global whole; that there
needs to be, in any economy, an interdependence whose walls are not
confinable to any township or bioregion; and that, fundamentally, the
issue is the relationship of parts to the whole." (Joel Kovel, The Enemy
of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World, (Zed Books,
2003): 156.)


Proposals for community-based economics simply fail to address this
fundamental issue. In the end, the problem of devising desirable
allocative mechanisms to coordinate the division of labor between
communities that are not completely self-sufficient won't go away, and
advocates of autonomous economic communities provide no coherent or
satisfactory answer to how they would coordinate cooperation between
communities that always turn out to be only "semi-autonomous" under
careful cross examination.


Advocates of community-based economics also fail to provide concrete
answers to crucial questions about how communities would make different
kinds of internal decisions. Even in a community of several thousand
people there will be different groups of workers and consumers. There will
be different kinds of economic decisions to make. It is impractical for
the whole community to vote on each and every economic question that comes
up. What would the agenda for such a meeting look like? Who would be
responsible for setting this agenda? Moreover, a democratic vote of a
community does not provide its citizens with decision making power in
proportion to the degree they are affected in cases where not all members
of the community are equally affected by a particular economic choice. Nor
can all decisions be left to the work groups who form within these
communities. Many of the decisions groups of workers  make affect other
groups of workers and must be coordinated with consumers in the community
as well. Proponents of community-based economics unfortunately have
precious little to say about how these internal decision making problems
should be solved. Saying that the ultimate power over all economic
decisions resides in the community assembly where all have voice and one
vote is not a good enough answer.


Not all proponents of community-based economics reject private enterprise
and markets altogether. Some whose vision includes space for private firms
along side producer cooperatives, and for markets when "properly
socialized," seem to do so because they confuse what we must tolerate
during the transition from competition and greed with economic relations
that are truly consistent with equitable cooperation itself. Others seem
to mistakenly believe that private enterprise and markets are compatible
with equitable cooperation. They fail to realize, in the words of Joel
Kovel, that combining private enterprise and market forces with people
seeking to practice equitable cooperation is like trying to raise weasels
and chickens in the same pen. More radical visions of community-based
economics do reject private enterprise and markets entirely. Like those of
us who support participatory economics, advocates of libertarian
municipalism, ecosocialism, and communitarian anarchism all argue that
there is no place for either private enterprise or markets in a truly
desirable economy. However, all who espouse community-based economics --
whether inclined to abolish or to retain markets and private enterprise to
some degree -- are staunchly democratic, egalitarian, and pro-environment.
Because advocates of community-based economics and supporters of
participatory economics share these same values, I believe as discussion
continues we will become even closer allies than many of us already are. I
see nothing in a participatory economy that I believe should displease
proponents of community-based economics. In fact, I think those attracted
to community-based economics will find that many problems for which they
lack solutions are nicely resolved by some features of a participatory
economy. In my opinion there is little if any disagreement over values,
and much of the criticism of participatory economics voiced by advocates
of one or another version of community based economics is based on a
misreading and misinterpretation of participatory economics. In other
words, I regard most modern, libertarian communalist visionaries as allies
-- like our council communist, syndicalist, anarchist, and guild socialist
forebears -- and ask them to consider the procedures of participatory
planning when they think further about how they would coordinate economic
relations among semi-autonomous communities, and how they would propose
communities comprised of different groups of workers and consumers
apportion decision making authority internally as well.


Skip ahead!
Pt. 1: http://vanparecon.resist.ca/parecon_files/pareconenvironmentone.html
Pt. 2: http://vanparecon.resist.ca/parecon_files/pareconenvironmenttwo.html
Pt. 3: http://vanparecon.resist.ca/parecon_files/pareconenvironmentthree.html
Pt. 4: http://vanparecon.resist.ca/parecon_files/pareconenvironmentfour.html


Robin Hahnel has taught political economy at American University for over
25 years. He has co-authored, along with Michael Albert, numerous books on
participatory economics. His forthcoming book is Economic Justice and
Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation published by Routledge
(http://www.routledge-ny.com).