A three-part interview of Michael Albert on ‘No Bosses’ | video+text

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A three-part interview of Michael Albert to Paul Jay and Greg Wilpert on his book, ‘No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World’.

Part 1:

Long-time activist and author Michael Albert outlines his vision for a post-capitalist and classless economic system, known as participatory economics and based on his most recent book, No Bosses (Zer0 Books, 2021). In this first part, Paul Jay and Michael Albert talk about the importance of economic vision and the rationale behind re-organizing the workplace on the basis of self-management and a non-corporate division of labor.

Part 2:

How would remuneration and the allocation of goods and services look like in a post-capitalist participatory economic system? In this second part of our discussion with Michael Albert, the author of the book, No Bosses (Zer0 Books, 2021), he talks to Greg Wilpert about the contours of an economic vision that fulfills the values of self-management, solidarity, diversity, equity, sustainability, and participation.

Part 3:

Michael Albert responds to some common objections and concerns that Greg Wilpert raises about his vision for a participatory economy, such as how to avoid the spontaneous formation of black markets, whether his proposal should be considered socialist or anarchist, and whether his proposal can be a considered a blueprint.

TRANSCRIPT / Part 1:

Paul Jay

Hi, welcome to theAnalysis.news. I’m Paul Jay, and we’ll be back in a few seconds to talk about what a new, a different, a better society actually look like. I’m certainly one that’s convinced that to fight against the sort of distortion or depravity, as our next guest calls our current system, you also have to have a vision to fight for. So we’re going to be doing that discussion soon with Michael Albert and talk about his new book, No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World.

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In the preface to the book No Bosses by Michael Albert, Noam Chomsky writes the following.

Excerpt

“The chapters do not provide a complete blueprint, but rather the essentials, or what Albert calls a “scaffold,” for future experience to fill out. The scaffold describes and advocates a natural and built Commons, workers’ and consumers’ self-managing councils, a division of labor that balances empowering tasks among all workers, a norm that apportions income for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, and finally, not markets or essential planning, but instead participatory planning by workers and consumers of what is produced, by what means, to what ends. It makes a compelling case that these features can be brought together in a spirit of solidarity to establish a self-managing, equitable, sustainable, participatory, new economy, with a rich artistic and intellectual culture as well.”

Paul Jay

Now join us to talk about this new book, No Bosses. Now joining us is Michael Albert. He’s a longtime activist, author of 20 books and hundreds of articles, and founder and staff at zcomm.org/znet. For our purposes today, most relevant, the co-author of a vision called Participatory Economics, sometimes Participatory Socialism, and as I said, his new book, No Bosses. Thanks for joining us, Michael.

Michael Albert

Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Paul Jay

So, first of all, I have to admit something which most hosts, I don’t think, like to admit, but I’m going to admit it. I haven’t read the whole book yet. I’ve read, I think, significant pieces of it. I get a sense of the argument, but it’s really quite an in-depth analysis of what a new, different kind of society could look like. So we’re going to talk about some of the features of it.

Before I get you to lay out the very broad vision of what the scaffold is, why, at this point in history, did you decide this was the book you needed to write?

Michael Albert

I suppose the honest answer is I didn’t. This vision emerged at the end of the ’60s during that period of upheaval. So the impetus to talk about vision came then. I guess the easiest way to describe how that happened was that myself and Robin Hahnel, who was my partner in developing this vision, constantly ran into the question, sort of put this way, we get what you don’t like. We understand what you don’t like, but what are you for?

Oftentimes it felt like the person who was asking that, and sometimes it was true, was basically saying, if you don’t have an answer to that question, shut up. You have no right being so critical. It’s the kind of thing that a parent might say to you, but you could also run into it in organizing, and we did.

Our response was basically, you don’t have to have a full alternative to slavery in order to be an abolitionist. I don’t have to understand everything about what a new economy is going to look like to oppose capitalism. After a while, we began to feel like that was a justified answer. It was sort of an accurate, true answer, but it was strategically dumb because a lot of the people who were asking really meant it. They really meant, okay, yeah, this sucks. This is terrible, but is there anything better? What are you for? So that kicked off the experience of trying to come up with an economic vision that was viable and worthy. Then we come to the present, and it’s not the first offering on that, but it’s an attempt that I hope is more succinct, tightly argued, and maybe better over this period of time. So I wrote it now to do something better than in the past.

Paul Jay

Well, as I said in the intro, I’m a big believer that one needs a vision to fight for, not just against. In the 1930s, in the ’40s, even to some extent in the ’50s, but less so, the Soviet Union was that model for millions and millions of people. Rightly or wrongly, whether they really understood what was going on there, the state was at least a workers’ state. It certainly had full employment, health care and a very good educational system. It turned out that a lot of the accusations against it that it had become more or less a kind of centralized police state turned out to be true. A lot of people didn’t want to believe it.

That didn’t mean that one, that vision wasn’t something to fight for, at least in a broad sense. When that vision collapsed, it left a real gaping hole in the progressive movement around the world. Okay, now, sort of what you just said, we know what we don’t like, but what are we actually fighting for? I think this is a critical question in terms of organizing and the movement. The thing, too, is people wonder what’s going on with the support for [Donald] Trump and this kind of right-wing politics because, in some ways, it’s filling a void. The traditional American narrative is espoused either by corporate Democrats, or old-styled Republicans is quite discredited, and it’s not a vision that people will fight for.

So I think it’s very important to have this debate and discussion. It’s one of the things I’ve always wanted to do with theAnalysis.news. I’m glad we’re doing it, and I’m going to do a lot more of it, and of course, there isn’t one vision of what we’re going to fight for, but it’s sort of in the same ballpark. So give us a sense of what that scaffolding is.

Michael Albert

I’ll do that in a second. Let me just say that I agree with you completely about the importance of it, and I’d even like to add an element. If you’re fighting against something that’s good, if the thing you’re fighting against is horrible as it is, how do you fight? How do you know what to do? How do you know what to reveal and what to argue for? How do you plant the seeds of the future in the present? So that’s one reason why vision matters. It’s because strategy isn’t rooted only at one end in the present. It also has to lead to where you want to go.

The other reason is the reason I think you were driving at, which is you could almost say psychological, but I think it’s more than that, which is that absent the positive, we’re entirely negative. Negativity has a kind of a tone, dynamic and culture associated with it, which is very off-putting. So we don’t attract people because they feel like, well, I’m supposed to make sacrifices, struggle and reorient myself, and you won’t even tell me what for? They also feel like, well, I’m supposed to do all those things, and the sort of vibes that you give off is so negative, and I don’t want to do it. So we need vision in order to grow now, not just because it would be nice to have it down the road when there’s something to implement.

Okay, so what’s the scaffold, you asked? Well, first of all, what’s the logic of it? It’s those things which we can say confidently now are needed, are necessary, if the future— and this is an economy we’re talking about in the book, No Bosses. Other things are also important: kinship, the political system, community, and culture, but the book is about the economy mostly.

What things can we say are needed and essential if this future economy is going to have the attributes we want it to have? Not a full blueprint for the reasons Noam gives and one more. One, we don’t know enough to do a blueprint. We’re going to learn all sorts of new things as time passes. You can’t blueprint them in advance. That’s a point that Noam makes when he makes this argument.

But there’s another reason, I think that I feel, which is not our place. It’s not our place to tell future citizens the details of how they’re going to function. The only thing that is our place to do is to try to hand them a world in which they can function the way they want to, in which they can manage their own lives, in which they do have equity, in which they do have solidarity, and so on. So the scaffold is those components of a new society which are essential and without which you’re not going to have that. 

The most obvious one is the one that has been pronounced or argued for forever, for a long time, which is that you can’t have private ownership of the means of production. You can’t have capitalists. You can’t have 1% who own everything and who therefore administer everything and determine the outcomes for everything. In place of that, participatory economics says, let’s have a Commons of productive assets.

It really sets aside ownership completely. It’s not capitalists who own it. It’s not anybody who owns it. It’s this Commons of productive assets. The question then becomes, well, how do you get to use it? How does a workplace get to use the resources and the tools and so on? The idea is productive Commons.

Paul Jay

So what you’re about to describe, the scaffolding, is a building that’s going to get erected after there’s been a transition, we don’t know for how long, from existing capitalism to essentially the abolition of private ownership to ownership by the Commons. So there’s quite a transition that’s going to have to take place, but that’s not what the book is about. The book is about what this might look like once you have had this transition. Am I right in that?

Michael Albert

Basically, yes. Over on the side here, there’s a file called Transition. It’s the next project. Yes, we now have what we have. We now have what? Private ownership, the means of production; we have what we call a corporate division of labour. That’s a division of labour in which about 20% of the workforce does empowering tasks, and 80% does disempowering tasks. We have remuneration income for property, for bargaining power, and to an extent, for output, and we have markets and or central planning. We really do have both in the United States. Amazon is essentially planned, and Amazon is as big as many economies. So we do have central planning, and we do have markets and a combination. Each of those key components annihilate things that I feel— and this is a value question— things that I feel that Robin and I felt at the beginning characterize a good economy. We characterize a good economy as people controlling their own lives. We call it self-management, diversity rather than homogenization. Solidarity, people actually being concerned with one another’s wellbeing, instead of a rat race in which you get ahead at the expense of somebody else, and instead of remuneration for power and property, remuneration for how long you work, how hard you work, and the onerousness of the conditions under which you work during socially valued labour and then participatory planning.

Those are the scaffold things. So the scaffold isn’t the whole building. The whole building is even longer in the future. You describe transition and then a situation where you’re creating the new society or creating the new economy and other elements of the society. Okay, the scaffold is really the key component that you have to get so that that thing that you’re creating, that whole new society, is going to have the attributes you want it to have. In the case of the economy, it’s going to be classless, and it’s going to be self-managing, et cetera.

Paul Jay

Well, if it’s classless, then in terms of [Karl] Marx, Engelism, essentially what does communism look like? What Marx and [Friedrich] Engels envisioned after this period of socialism, where you still have classes, a state, and you still have laws and cops and armies, you’re envisioning, what does it look like after that?

Michael Albert

Well, yeah, but you just lined up a bunch of things, cops and state and so on, and those are additional discussions. I don’t think that a good society doesn’t have a political system. If you don’t want to call that a state because the word state implies fierce hierarchy, okay, but a political system I think it does have.

I even think it’s probably not something good to go off on, but in a good economy, planes would fly, let’s say, let’s assume that’s the case. You wouldn’t have random people as pilots. You would have the people who are piloting the plane have to be trained and able to pilot the plane. Well, now there’s more that you would have in a good economy. They would be remunerated like everybody else, and they would have a balanced job. They would do disempowering as well as empowering work. But part of what they would do is fly the plane. You wouldn’t say, well, the pilot has a lot of power while flying, which is true. The pilot has the lives of 500 people in his hands or her hands.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I hope they’re not going to have a big discussion about how to fly the plane while they’re 3,000 ft up in the air.

Michael Albert

No, so you want a good pilot who’s capable of—

Paul Jay

I don’t know about participatory—

Michael Albert

No, the participatory part will get to, but it’s not that, clearly, and it shouldn’t be that about policing either. That is to say, the idea that everybody is going to deal with the kinds of violations that occur. We don’t assume all of a sudden that everybody is Mother Teresa. People are still people. There will still be drunkenness. There will still be abuse. There will still be less of everything, but it doesn’t disappear. So, if it doesn’t disappear, the way that society deals with it has to be skilled, it has to be learned, it has to be capable, and it has to be under control.

So lots of things that exist now, for example, there are some people who would say, look, factories pollute. They are undignified in what they do, so let’s get rid of them. Okay, that’s just silly, I think. You’re going to have workplaces. You’re going to have places where people come together and do work. What you want to do is make it humane, self-managed and all the other things.

So back to the pilot. The pilot in a participatory economy pilots, does it well, is trained and is capable, but also does, at other points in time while not piloting other activities. Let’s say tending to the people on the plane, going up and down the aisles and helping people out or maybe tending to cleaning up the airport. I don’t know, but a mixed combination of tasks.

Why? Well, one of the key themes of participatory economics is that between labor and capital, there’s another class, a coordinator class. People who, by virtue of their circumstances in the economy— so in that sense, it’s a sort of a Marxist argument— by virtue of the circumstances in the economy have more empowering work. Their work gives them a degree of knowledge, awareness, confidence, connections to other people, and access to decision-making levers, and 80% are the opposite. Their work deadens, exhausts, reduces skills, and disconnects. So you get a situation where the 20% become a new ruling class over the 80%.

The solution to that in participatory economics, or part of the solution to that, is that you don’t give 20% of the workforce all the empowering work. You instead define jobs. This is the new division of labour. Define jobs in such a way that everybody has a mix of responsibilities and tasks which are comparably empowering. So everybody is prepared to participate in the workers’ Council and also in the consumers’ Council in a self-managing way, rather than 80% being so exhausted, deadened, devoid of information about what’s going on and lacking confidence that they don’t want to participate and after a while don’t. Twenty percent who set the agendas, do the debating, the arguing and make all the decisions and rules. That’s a piece of participatory economics which is connected to and motivated by the desire to get rid of not just an owning class on top but to get rid of a class of empowered employees on top by having that empowerment spread out. So that’s one of the key scaffolding features. 

The argument is if you don’t do that, if you keep the old corporate division of labor, no matter what people’s will is, no matter what people’s inclinations and their heartfelt desires are, that’s not the issue. The structure will impose a class division and class rule. So you need to change the corporate division of labour to balance job complexes.

Paul Jay

Well, they kind of route this in where we are and might be. The world you’re describing only comes into being if there’s, as I said before, a kind of transition from a primarily privately owned economy to a socially owned economy, whatever form that might take. To some extent, it’s a different discussion because you still have classes, and you still have probably a mix of public ownership and private ownership.

To get where you’re at, and I don’t know if, in the book, I’m not sure it goes there, but assuming humanity survives our current circumstances of the climate threat and nuclear threat and so on, you’re at a whole other stage of human society. At this point, aren’t you into artificial intelligence and robotics? The whole nature of work is going to have changed. I don’t know if there are any brain-dead menial jobs anymore.

Michael Albert

Yeah, I have to admit, I’m not too impressed with that kind of formulation. But let’s go 20 years into the past.

Paul Jay

No, what do you mean you’re not impressed with that? What aren’t you impressed by?

Michael Albert

I am not impressed with what’s attributed to artificial intelligence and what it’s going to be able to do. I’m not impressed with the notion that there’ll be no onerous work. There will be, and it will have to be shared. But if there isn’t, great. Let me go 20 years into the past because I think what we’re talking about here is relevant now.

In Argentina, when there was an economic crisis and tons of factories were taken over by the workforce, they actually weren’t taken over by the workforce in the way we think of it. What happened was the capitalist punted. The capitalist decided this thing was no longer working for me, and they left. The coordinator class inside those workplaces said to themselves it was already failing without the owner, it sure as hell going to fail, I’m going too. They left also.

So you had all these workplaces of diverse kinds that were void of their ownership sector and void of their coordinator class sector, but the workers couldn’t go anyplace, so they took over. That was a remarkable kind of situation. When the workers took over, interestingly, they formed workers assemblies or workers councils, I like to call them, and instituted a kind of democratic decision-making voting. Not exactly what we call self-management in participatory economics, but effectively a long ways toward it. They also pretty much levelled the wages. So they went a long ways toward equitable incomes. They even, in some cases, took into account people’s personal circumstances. So they did that, too.

I was in a room with about 50 representatives from around Argentina, from occupied workplaces, and I’ve told this story before because, to me, it’s so powerful. Before the sort of formal section, I was there to speak. Before the formal section, people are just chatting and talking with each other, and it was very light and upbeat. People from across the country are meeting other people, and they are all members of this small group of people who have taken over factories.

We start, and I say, let’s go around the room, and we start doing that with a little bit of reporting on their circumstances. By the time the 7th person, and it was literally the 7th person, they’re making this brief report, not only was the room no longer upbeat, but it was maudlin, and some people were crying. They literally have tears in their eyes. The 7th person said this, I would never have thought. I could never imagine that I would say maybe Margaret Thatcher was right. We took over the workplace, we instituted democracy, we made our wages fair, and we began to work and not only that, we made the workplace succeed. We got it back on track, but now all the old crap is coming back. And that’s what one through seven said, also in various ways.

At that point, I interrupted and said when you took over, what did you do about the various jobs? What did you do to deal with the fact that the engineers and the finance people had left? They said, well, obviously we had to do the jobs. So people took responsibility for doing the jobs. So I said, so you had a new person who was, for example, doing the accounting and the financial officer. They said yes. They didn’t really understand the question because it seemed like it was the only possible thing you could do. Then I argued, and I think it’s the case that what happened was not what they thought, and they admitted that what they thought was human nature was destroying their experiment, that human nature was at fault for bringing back all the alienation and bringing back the hierarchy against their desires.

I argued that, no, that’s not what happened. What happened was you maintained the old division of labor, and even though you populated those jobs with working people whose backgrounds were the same as everybody else’s backgrounds, nonetheless, over time and not very long, those people filling those jobs by virtue of what they were doing and the responsibility that they saw themselves as having begun to see themselves as more worthy, as deserving, more. They also came to the meetings with more information and knowledge, and confidence. They started doing the agendas, and they just kept nodding. Then they said, yeah, that’s exactly it. I don’t even go to the meeting anymore, one of them said, and that’s an institution at work.

That’s what it means to talk about an institution mattering. This institution, the corporate division of labor, was overthrowing the will of the workplace. They really wanted justice. They really wanted equity. They really wanted their experiment to be different, and all the old crap was coming back. So participatory economics mattered right then. In other words, what would they have done differently? Is that what you’re going to ask?

Paul Jay

Well, first of all, let’s parse this out for a second. This kind of worker’s ownership, worker’s collective in this day and age, it happens. You have an enormous one in Spain called Mondragon, and there are smaller experiments, but they’re still operating within essentially a capitalist world, and they don’t change the nature of that. Even though Mondragon in Spain is enormous, it’s one of the larger companies, I think, in Spain. It has not changed the fundamental character of Spanish capitalism. Although that being said, it’s far more democratic for the workers. They’re much more careful if they have layoffs. They keep paying people and so on. So it’s better, but it’s not where your book is at by any means.

Now, that being said, whether it’s now or later, how do you deal with the fact that someone’s going to have to keep the books and know something about bookkeeping? So what are you going to change about the division of labor?

Michael Albert

So it’s true that somebody has to know something about bookkeeping, but it’s not true that somebody has to do only bookkeeping and somebody else has to do only cleaning the floors. It could be the case that we essentially, it’s what we did at South End press years and years and years ago. It could be the case that the workforce says, here are our tasks. These tasks all have to get done, that’s true. Here’s how we’re going to divide them up. We’re going to divide them up in such a way that each person has a mix of tasks and responsibilities such that their work conveys to them comparable empowerment to the other workers. You can look at it in their case or in a hospital. It means, okay, the surgeon no longer does only surgery. I mean, it’s clear what it means. It’s sort of contrary to our expectations that people should do a mix of things, and some of them are empowering, and some of them are not. Some of them are disempowering even.

Paul Jay

Yeah, but hang on here. A surgeon can go clean floors. I don’t think it’s a particularly good use of all those years of training, but somebody who has been trained to clean floors can’t go do surgery.

Michael Albert

Correct, so that’s your transition. I want to address both of those things. Is it a good use of the surgeon’s time to do something other than surgery? If you look at just the surgeon and you look at just the patience of that one surgeon, the answer is no. It’s idiotic. I agree with you. But if you look at the whole economic system, no, it is a good use of time.

Why? Because the surgeon, and that is to say, everybody who does empowered work, also doing disempowering work means that the 80% of the population whose upbringing, circumstances, schooling and situation at work deny their capacity to do anything empowering and thus gets no empowering work out of them is undone, and we unleash the capabilities of those people.

Paul Jay

The society you’re talking about, anyone with the skill and inclination to go to medical school can go. You’re not going to have the barriers to medical school we have now.

Michael Albert

What you’re not going to have is, you go to medical school, and you become a doctor, but you’re not just a doctor. You’re also a nurse or custodian or whatever. You’re doing a mix of things. You say to yourself— I’ll let you off the hook for being the foil here. Margaret Thatcher would say, Michael, you’re crazy.

The doctor, let’s say the surgeon is doing 40 hours of surgery, and you’re telling me it makes sense to have a situation in which that talented individual, instead of doing 40 hours of surgery, does, let’s make it simple, 20 hours and does 20 hours of nursing, cleaning and whatever else. I say back, yes, and she says to me, but we lose half of our surgery, and I say back, yeah. You’d be right if the reason why the people who aren’t doing empowering work aren’t doing it is that they are genetically incapable of doing it, which is what you think, Margaret, but that’s not the case.

To make this argument in front of, say, an audience speaking or something, I say, think back 50 years and put all the surgeons in a stadium. It’s a big stadium. Put all the surgeons in the stadium and look around. What do you see? Right away, somebody says, well, they’re almost all white men. I say, yes, why do those surgeons say that they are in the stadium and the rest of us aren’t? The women aren’t in particular, and the Blacks aren’t, Latinos aren’t. What do they give as their answer? They say it’s because we’re good at it, and they’re not. We’re capable of it, and they’re not. Of course, that was nonsense. It’s nonsense now that the coordinator class is good at empowering tasks and capable of empowering tasks, and the working class isn’t. The working class is downtrodden and prevented in the same way that women and Blacks were, of different dynamics, but to the same degree as women and Blacks were before.

Let me just say one last story.

Paul Jay

I think you’re mixing up time periods here.

Michael Albert

Well, I certainly am. I’m comparing now and then.

Paul Jay

No, but in imagining this future, it would be more like if you’re talking would stay within hospitals and doctors, it’d be more like what the Cubans have done where you have way more doctors and way more accessibility to medical school. In fact, being a doctor is practically an ordinary job because it’s so easy to get a medical education. You don’t need to tell those doctors to go wash some floors. You open up the doors of the medical school, so anyone that has the inclination and ability becomes a doctor. It doesn’t have to be a special privilege job.

Michael Albert

That last step there was if everybody. Not everybody has the capacity. I couldn’t be a doctor. Not everybody can be a doctor.

Paul Jay

I don’t want to be a doctor. Nor could I. I’m terrible at math.

Michael Albert

But there’s 80% of the population that’s not doing empowering work, and there’s 20% that is. If it’s the case, as I think it is, that in the 80%, I don’t know what to call it, the spectrum, the spread, the distribution of capacities is marginally different from the distribution of capacities in the 20%. Then if you open the doors to them doing the empowering tasks they’re capable of, there is nobody available to do disempowering work.

Paul Jay

Well, we don’t have too much time in this segment. We are going to do more segments because we’re going to keep talking and even increasingly fighting, I hope. What do you mean by empowering work? What does that mean? Like I used to work on the railroad, I worked on the railroad for five years. I fixed freight cars. Is that empowering work? Fixing a freight car?

Michael Albert

I don’t know. Here’s the answer, though.

Paul Jay

Because I loved it. I loved doing it, but I don’t know what’s empowering about it.

Michael Albert

Well, here’s the answer.

Paul Jay

I’ll tell you one thing it was because we had a union and because we fought for our rights.

Michael Albert

It was better than if you didn’t.

Paul Jay

It was dignified because we made it so.

Michael Albert

If we have a workplace and we have a whole lot of tasks that have to get done, the empowering tasks are the ones that convey to the person doing it, attributes which contribute to being able to express their will and their desire, argue for it, participate and have the inclination to do so. The disempowered tasks have the opposite implications for the people doing them.

So in the Argentine example, I gave you, the subset of the workforce and the workers were from the same backgrounds. The subset of the workforce doing those empowering tasks became elevated. It began to dominate the meetings. It set the agendas. It was the one doing the talking, and the disempowered workers were the ones who basically had to choose among them who they would support or something. It sounds a little like U.S. elections. Then they would stop doing it, they would back off, and the empowered workers would start paying themselves more.

Coordinated class consciousness and working-class consciousness are maybe important to talk about. You brought up one other thing that I just want to address for a second because a lot of people might feel like, come on, Michael. You’re saying here that everybody can do a set of empowering tasks efficiently to have an overall balanced job. Isn’t that a big assumption?

Back to Argentina. I’m talking to a woman in a glass factory. Remember, they kept the old division of labour. She was now essentially the Chief Financial Officer. She was doing the accounting, and she was keeping the books. So I asked her what she had been doing before, and she had been functioning at this glass furnace, and she showed it to me. I would have lasted maybe one day, probably two hours. Incredible heat, just ridiculous. Doing the same motions over and over again. Then the owner left. The accountants left. The engineers left, and she became the accountant.

How did you do that? I asked, what was the hardest thing to learn? It was your question in a very narrow time frame and in a very precise case. I said, what was the hardest thing to learn? She didn’t want to tell me. She didn’t want to talk about that. So I said, well, was it learning accounting concepts? No. Was it learning how to use the computer? No. Was it learning how to use a spreadsheet? No. Well, was it learning how to present the case? No. So I said, well, please tell me. So she said, first, I had to learn to read.

So this person went from being a working-class person doing the same rote movements over and over in front of a furnace, which is probably taking years off her life, to being the person who was doing the accounting, the books and reporting on it in a period of a few months while having to learn to read on the way.

Now, I admit it was much for me to believe, but it was there. The capacity of people is a lot greater than we let on. You and I couldn’t be a doctor or surgeons for a lot of reasons. Not wanting to, probably not having the dexterity, not having the, whatever, but everybody can do empowering tasks. Everybody can do empowering tasks. The number of people who work on assembly lines—

Paul Jay

I think you’re putting too much onus, too much emphasis on the job as opposed to the relationship to power in the enterprise.

Michael Albert

That’s just because it’s what we’re talking about.

Paul Jay

Well, no, maybe you are, but I wasn’t. I’m saying that you could be the person in charge of picking up garbage cans, but you could also be a member of the management committee. At the same time, you could be a member of the HR committee.

Michael Albert

That’s a balanced job complex.

Paul Jay

That’s what?

Michael Albert

In other words, what participatory economics is saying is that—

Paul Jay

I don’t have to be a part-time accountant. I need to be on a decision-making body that has power, and I can still have my job picking up garbage cans.

Michael Albert

Fine, absolutely, just like the doctor can be a surgeon and pick up garbage cans, agreed?

Paul Jay

No, I’m not saying that. The surgeon should be a surgeon, but the cleaner should also be on the management committee, not just picking up garbage cans. I’d frankly be quite happy if the surgeon just kept doing surgery.

Michael Albert

Yeah, most of the nurses wouldn’t be happy. Did you notice the strikes that are going on right now in the hospitals? One of the most notable things is that doctors—

Paul Jay

It’s not collectively owned. The power starts from the ownership and then the structure of how that ownership is managed and that powers executed.

Michael Albert

This is our dispute.

Paul Jay

Not the nature of the job description.

Michael Albert

This is our dispute. Our dispute seems to be— correct me if I’m wrong. On the one hand, power flows from ownership, explicit control, et cetera, which is true in existing firms. It’s not true in, say, Soviet factories under the prior system; there was no owner. So it didn’t flow from ownership; it flowed from something else. I’m saying it flowed from the distribution of circumstances, and we’re talking about this entirely. There’s also the allocation system to talk about, and there’s also the fact that there is no ownership anymore. There are also self-managed decision-making procedures by the Council inside the workplace.

All I’m saying is that all that can be subverted by private ownership. You’re saying that, and I’m agreeing with you. I’m saying it can additionally be subverted by a distribution of tasks, a division of labour, which causes some people to be in a position to make decisions, inclined to make decisions and have the information to make decisions, and other people not. You’re saying back to me, okay, wait a second. If somebody is doing some rote task, a repetitive task and picking up garbage, whatever it is, they could be on the decision-making board or whatever. You had a name for it. I forget what you called it.

Paul Jay

A management committee, leadership committee, whatever you want to call it.

Michael Albert

So they could be on the leadership committee. Alright, so here’s the problem with that, I think. On the one hand, you’re saying the same thing as me. If the person has a mix of responsibilities that caused them to be prepared to participate and make good decisions and make them well, or at least to participate in making good decisions, they’re not [Joesph] Stalin, to participate in making good decisions well, then that’s a balanced job complex, but what you’re describing, I don’t think, does that.

First of all, it has this management committee, which apparently has a lot of power over everybody else but second of all, it has somebody who is doing this rote stuff all the time, then making decisions about the workplace. They have to have information about the whole workplace. They have to have the confidence to access that information, et cetera, et cetera. If you just take somebody and you invite them to a meeting at which there are 14 lawyers and 14 engineers and accountants and so on, and then there’s somebody sitting there who spends all day doing stuff that gives them no particular knowledge relevant to the decision making, and you say, okay, you can attend. It does nothing.

Paul Jay

Actually, I don’t agree with that. We’re getting long here now. You should watch these interviews I did with Jane McAlevey on how she does bargaining now, not in the future. Where when she meets with the employer, and she’s either advising or in the leadership of the negotiations on behalf of the union, she invites the entire workplace.

Michael Albert

Which is fine. I would, too.

Paul Jay

In the end, there are representatives to get elected, and they do choose who’s going to speak. There is going to be a certain level of practicality where you need some kind of decision-making that isn’t going to involve everybody.

Michael Albert

Well, wait a minute. What do you mean decision-making isn’t going to involve everybody?

Paul Jay

Well, let’s say should we hire so and so. You’re not going to have a factory of 5,000 people where 5,000 people meet to decide if you’re going to hire somebody.

Michael Albert

Exactly right, and who would hire? The people who are most affected would be the ones who would be most involved in that decision. For instance, we’re hiring to be on a team that you and I are on. Well, then you and I are going to have a lot of say because if we don’t like that guy, the team is going to pop.

Paul Jay

Of course, but you also have to have an overview of the entire enterprise. So you’re going to have to have an elected body that has an overview of the whole enterprise.

Michael Albert

Maybe everybody should have a significant overview of the whole enterprise. Let’s say we’re going to have a decision about the hours of work. What time work starts, what times it ends, how the workplace, et cetera, et cetera. Some decisions affect overwhelmingly just everybody. Those are the kinds of decisions that everybody is involved in. Those are big policies. Then there are decisions that affect a relatively small; this is self-management. There are decisions that affect overwhelmingly a smaller group subject to those prior decisions. So they’re working within those globally made decisions, and they’re making decisions that affect themselves much more. So they do that, that’s fine. The point is—

Paul Jay

Before we get more granular about this, because it’s a little bit of one foot in today and one foot in tomorrow, as part of the argument here, we’re going to do another segment about this because we are going to have a fight about how you have a modern economy without some kind of planning. I know you’re saying you don’t need—

Michael Albert

It’s called participatory planning. Absolutely you do need planning.

Paul Jay

Okay, well, let’s find out in the next segment what that’s going to look like.

Michael Albert

Okay.

Paul Jay

Anyway, write in, send us your questions and comments, and pick up Michael’s book. It’s called No Bosses. And where do they get your book?

Michael Albert

As far as I’m aware, I’m so isolated because of COVID. It’s in stores, and it’s online, on Amazon, all the various online purchase places. It’s available everywhere. I know what you’re pointing to. Let me point them to one thing. There’s a site called nobossesbook.com, and all the reviews are there that have come out so far. The book has only been out two months, basically, exactly. There are, I think, about 15-16 reviews there. There are a lot of interviews. There are all sorts of stuff there. So people could look there and get a feeling for, well, do I really want to read this book or not? Then if you do, you get it, and if you don’t, you don’t.

Paul Jay

Okay, cool. Alright, thanks, Michael. Thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news.

Michael Albert

Thank you. 

TRANSCRIPT: Part 2

Greg Wilpert

Welcome to theAnalysis.news. I’m Greg Wilpert. Today we’re going to take a look at a vision of what a better society might look like. This is actually a continuation of a conversation that Paul Jay started with Michael Albert. So I’m going to urge our audience to take a look at that first segment with the two of them because this one will continue where that previous conversation left off.

The book we’re going to discuss today is called No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World by Michael Albert and published by Zero Books at the end of last year in 2021. Again, I highly recommend that people check out our first interview with Michael. As a reminder, the book outlines what a post-capitalist and classless economy would look like, one that is based on worker and consumer councils, remuneration based on duration, intensity, and onerous of socially valued labor, balanced job complexes, and participatory economic planning.

Michael is a longtime activist, author of 20 books and hundreds of articles, cofounder of ZNet and Z magazine, and also of many other media projects. Also, he’s the co-author of a vision called Participatory Economics, or Parecon for short.

Thanks for joining me today, Michael.

Michael Albert

Thank you for having me, Greg.

Greg Wilpert

So in the previous segment, when you and Paul discussed your book, he went over the issue of balanced job complexes, which is a central feature of participatory economics. I’d like to move on from there to look at other aspects of the vision. Let’s take a closer look, first at remuneration and then at participatory planning. We’ll close off with a variety of miscellaneous questions that I have. So now, just to continue basically on this vision that you outlined in No Bosses, why is the issue of remuneration so central? That is, assuming we achieve a society in which no one is rewarded simply for owning productive property, and I think most people on the Left, at least, would agree with that idea that you shouldn’t be rewarded just for owning property. What’s wrong with rewarding people or remunerating people on the basis of supply and demand market forces? How do you propose to determine remuneration or income differently?

Michael Albert

It’s a big question, especially since it takes us into allocation, and I think maybe you wanted to save that for a little bit later. So let me start off with the sort of; I suppose you could almost call it a value question. If you get rid of income for property, isn’t it sort of simple? Don’t you have to come up with something in place of it? You do have to have something in place of it, clearly. I mean, you and I are working in the economy, and we go home, and we consume stuff. Our budget or our income is what governs how much we can consume. What determines how much we earn? How much do we get from the economy, assuming that we work? If we didn’t work, then that’s a whole different story. It’s going to be some kind of generalized income for everybody. We can get to that later. Okay, so we work. And if we’re not going to get paid for our property, and we’re not going to get paid the way a market pays us, which is really for bargaining power. The way a market system works is, and everybody has experienced it; if you have more bargaining power, you can take more. If you have less bargaining power, you wind up taking less. So that’s another thing we could reward.

It’s arguably a stance we could have. Let’s reward bargaining power. Most people on the Left, and actually, I think most people, period, are going to recognize that’s despicable. I mean, that’s basically saying that we should all be thugs, try and take as much as we can, and if we’re stronger, we get more, and if we’re weaker, we get less. If you’re not going to do that, then what?

Socialists, a lot of them have historically said, well, okay, there’s an obvious and simple answer to that question. The answer is let’s have people get back in proportion to what they put in. So, in other words, if I produce a certain amount, I should get back— I mean, maybe society puts a certain amount of the social output to investment, puts a certain amount to free goods, but whatever is the amount that’s going to go to personal consumption or collective consumption, group consumption, my income for that should be a function of how much I produce. On the face of it, that sounds perfectly reasonable because, after all, if I’m getting less than that, somebody else is getting some of what I did. If I get more than that, I’m getting some of what somebody else did. So it seems fair, but it’s not. Why isn’t it?

Well, it isn’t because what determines, let’s say, you and I are working in the economy, what determines how much we make? How much we add to the social product relative to one another? Well, it can depend on a lot of variables. It may be that you were born with certain genetic endowments, certain characteristics which are very productive. Or it may be that I am using some tools, some equipment that you don’t have access to that’s very productive. Or it may be that one of us has workmates who are more productive. It may be that just one of us is producing an item that’s more valuable. In any of these cases, you and I work, let’s say, the same number of hours. So we put in four hours of work. One of us is going to be producing a greater amount of output by value in that four hours. Okay, so the socialist who favors this might say, yeah, sure, that’s sort of warranted, and it’s not such a big deal anyway.

Well, so there are two questions. Is it warranted? Is it ethically fine? The second question is, is it a big deal? Does it make such big differences that those differences are going to matter throughout the whole society? The third question is, does it work well regarding allocation, which you want to get to eventually? So take the first two. I don’t think it’s ethically warranted. I don’t think it should be the case. These are values, so I can’t say this is the reality. I can only say this is a value that I favor. I don’t think that it ought to be the case that if I’m lucky in the genetic lottery, if I have LeBron James’s body or Adele’s voice or Chomsky’s brain, and I’m born with this stuff, I should then have, on top of that, great income. I should be showered with wealth on top of that. To me, that makes no ethical sense whatsoever. Similarly, I don’t think it makes ethical sense if I have better tools or if I have if I’m lucky. That’s basically what it is. Does it matter? Is the difference very much?

When some socialists would say that to me, I would say back, well, okay, do you think that it’s proper for, let’s say, LeBron James, Steph Curry, or whoever, the right to earn 40 or $50 million a year? They would say, no, of course not. I would say, why not? They would say, well, it’s too much, and they would have various reasons. I would say, yeah, but they’re underpaid. They’re not overpaid. They’re underpaid by your standard because your standard says, let’s remunerate, let’s provide income in proportion to the degree of the value of what they contribute to society. The public— you may not like it if you’re a socialist— the public likes watching LeBron James play basketball a whole lot, so much that he’s being underpaid because Nike is taking some of it, and the owner of his team is taking some of it.

I think that rules out that norm also. If that norm is ruled out, then we need a different one. What participatory economics proposes is that we should get income for how hard we work, for how long we work, and for the onerousness of the conditions under which we work. If the work we do is socially valuable, and that’s a norm, that applies to everybody. It applies to everybody in the same way. It doesn’t generate huge disparities, and it’s ethically sound. I also think it’s economically sound, but we can come to that when you ask about it.

Greg Wilpert

Yeah, I actually have a couple of follow-up questions on that, but I think maybe I should leave those until after we discuss the issue of allocation. Actually, I do want to have one follow-up question, which is, of course, the process by which, and this might lead to the question of allocation and planning, that is, how do you determine these kinds of very intangible factors of onerousness and intensity and things like that? Who gets to decide that? What’s the process?

Michael Albert

First off, the last phrase, who gets to decide that? The answer to that is always the same in participatory economics because participatory economics is an economy which purports to generate self-management. So if we work in the workplace, the workers’ council is the ultimate arbiter of everything. It’s the decision-making body. So the workers’ council inside of a workplace is doing that. How? That question remains, obviously. How is it doing it? Well, what did I say were the variables? How long do you work? That’s easy. I don’t think there’s a big issue with that. How hard do you work? Well, the answer to that is, (A), the people you work with know how hard you work, and (B), there is an indicator. So while you’re not remunerated for your output, that doesn’t mean your output has no bearing. Your output indicates whether or not you have worked long, hard, et cetera. As far as the onerousness of conditions, again, the workers’ council has to go along.

If you and I work in a workplace and we each put in, let’s say the work week is 30 hours, so we each put in 30 hours a week, and we’re working. I say to the group, I think I should be remunerated more, or you say you think I should be remunerated less. The workplace is responsible for how it does this. So that means that workplace one— maybe I would want to be in this workplace— says we’re going to be pretty lax about this. We’re going to have average remuneration one level above, maybe a second level above, one level below, maybe a second level below. Another workplace might decide, and it’s up to the workplace and the workers’ council that they’re going to operate somewhat differently. They’re going to operate with ten levels much more highly refined above, ten levels more highly refined below. So you can see the second one has a much more exacting task to determine where one is on that spectrum. The first workplace is pretty simple. The second workplace might favor that precision over the amount of time that is lost doing it. The first workplace prefers saving the time.

I don’t think honestly that— this is why I favored the first one, I guess. I don’t think that there’s a real problem here at this level. There’s a different question to ask, which then starts to be more difficult. At this level, I think we work on work teams, we have a plan for the workplace, and we’re trying to fulfill that plan. The workforce is basically dividing up the income that is allotted to the workplace. So the workplace is allotted an income, a total income, to apportion to its workers. The workforce now apportions that income. So if somebody is going to get more, somebody else is going to get less because the total is for the workplace, and the workers are then deciding whether or not somebody has worked less time or less effort. I like to sing while I work, I don’t know, something and so on.

Is it perfect? No. Of course, it’s not perfect. Nothing social is perfect. Can one do it acceptably to all the workers? Can one have a procedure that the workers agree on? Can one then enact that in a manner that the workers like, especially when the workers have chosen the procedure? I think the answer to that is yes. The question that arises, I mean if you want to ask something else first, the question that arises is, well, what determines that amount that goes to the workplace as a whole? What determines the total amount?

Greg Wilpert

Well, maybe that gets us to participatory planning, which is actually the largest chapter in your book. I think it actually opens up a whole bunch of related questions not only to the process of production of goods and services but also to the remuneration issue. So let’s focus on that, and then I have some follow-up questions on remuneration as well. How would you outline how participatory planning would work and what would make it better than markets or central planning? Now that’s a huge question and let’s see if we can—

Michael Albert

Let me start from where we were, and then maybe we can hone in on other parts if that’s okay. So we’ve got this workplace. You and I work there, and I don’t know, 100 or 1,000 other people work there. We now know, internally, we have workers’ self-management. We make decisions via the workers’ council. Sometimes it allots the decisions to a team because it mostly affects the team. Sometimes it’s the whole workplace. We have the balance jobs that we talked about earlier. That’s a big deal. That makes a difference in all of this, simplifying things. Then we’re apportioning that allotted income.

So what determines that allotted income? Why is that allotted income higher or lower? Well, participatory economics says that productive assets— that’s the thing that capitalists own, basically. Productive assets are not owned by individuals. They are part of a commons. Our workplace, let’s say we make bicycles, whatever, our workplace is basically saying to the society we would like to use a certain share, a certain part of the productive assets in the commons. That’s a part of our plan. We’re saying let us use those productive assets, and we will produce these bicycles. Let’s say that the plan is accepted. We haven’t talked about that at all but let’s say that it is. We have a socially accepted, a socially responsible amount of output to produce. That’s what we’ve agreed on. In terms of bicycles, given the equipment we have to make bicycles, the number of workers that we have who are working, and so on.

Let’s suppose, for a minute, what do we want our allocation system to do? Let’s suppose for a minute that our workforce, the 100 or 1,000 of us, or whatever it is, produces at a socially responsible average level, average duration, average intensity, average onerousness, because that’s the nature of our workplace, let’s say. So then our workplace would be allotted 100 or 1,000, the number of workers times what is allotted to be the average income. Let’s say that we don’t. Let’s say that, in fact, this is how it happens, in other words. A subset of us are working less hard. A subset of us are working less hard. So as a result, our workplace is not, in fact, producing commensurate to the productive assets that we’re utilizing. We’re producing less.

What does that mean when you look at people? It means somebody is exerting, but it’s not socially responsible, or they’re not exerting, and therefore it’s less work. So, in other words, the total duration, intensity, and onerousness that the workplace is generating, which is what’s remunerated, is less than the total number of workers times the average. Some of us are not working up to capacity. We’re not working well, or we’re literally not working for the duration, et cetera. Somehow the allocation system has to apportion the right total bundle of income to the workplace. It’s a two-step deal. The allocation system says to our workplace, here’s your income for your workforce. Then our workers’ council says, Greg, here’s your income. Michael, here’s your income to everybody in the place. The simplest solution, maybe we even decide that we all trust each other and everybody gets the same, but we don’t have to decide that. The total that’s allotted to the workplace should be the total that’s warranted. The total duration, intensity, and onerousness. That’s a high demand on the allocation system, only one of many high demands that are placed on a good allocation system as compared to markets or central planning, which just don’t— they generate results, but the results don’t correspond to any kind of positive, virtuous values that we might have. They just generate results that are distorted relative to equity and self-management.

So it’s not that it gets technical, but it gets detailed. So the allocation system has to sort of ascertain well, in the case of a workplace, is it living up to its proposal or is it falling short regarding the social responsibility aspect? Obviously, it pays attention to output to do that. You’re not remunerating for output, but that doesn’t mean output doesn’t matter. Output matters. It’s just that you don’t get income for it. You get income for this other thing, but output matters to determining whether or not you’re doing socially valued labor, whether or not you’re using the equipment and using your own talents and your capacities consistent with getting an average income or more than an average income.

Greg Wilpert

So how would the participatory planning aspect work? Who gets to decide whether or not how many assets are allocated or remunerated to the workplace?

Michael Albert

Participatory planning says something like this. It says the workplace has a workers’ council. The neighborhood has a consumer council. So the consumer council is basically all the people who consume in the neighborhood, and it does partly collective consumption and partly individual consumption.

What is allocation? Allocation is a process by which what people are consuming and what people are producing are brought into proximity of each other. If they’re not in proximity, if much more is being produced than consumed, you got all this waste. It’s not being done. If you are short, well, then the consumers are being inadequately fulfilled, I suppose you could say. So you want these things to be in proximity to each other. You don’t want waste, you don’t want surplus, and you don’t want shortage. So that’s part of what allocation does, and you can accomplish that.

One way to accomplish that is with central planning. Ostensibly very smart or well-equipped people decide the outcome and instruct people what to do. That’s the essence of it. So that’s one option.

Another option is markets in which this can have many sorts of wrinkles, but in which the consumers and the producers are competing and which they’re all trying to get the best that they can. They try to arrive at outcomes that they prefer by applying the power that they have at their disposal. So, that’s another option. 

So participatory economics says there is a third option. There’s a way to do this which is cooperative, not competitive, and which has no top and no bottom, no center, no elite imposing its will upon the process. So what’s the process? The process is the consumer councils are making proposals. What are they proposing? They’re proposing collective consumption and individual consumption, the sum of it. All told, they’re proposing what society wants to consume, but each individual is proposing for its constituency, and the producer councils are proposing what society wants to produce in light of the productive assets that are available. Each workplace is proposing that, and you sum it all up in an industry, and you get the proposal for all total bicycles, not just our workplaces bicycles, and then for the whole economy.

If you just did that, they wouldn’t match. So that’s the allocation problem. There’s no particular reason to think that the sum total of what everybody was proposing to produce and everybody’s proposing to consume would be in proximity of each other. Why should that be? It wouldn’t be. So what you have to have is a process that brings them into proximity.

The process is that there are what the economists call iterations. There are rounds of planning. So the workers’ councils make a proposal, and the consumers’ councils make a proposal. What are they making it based upon? Well, they’re making it based upon prices. If I’m a consumer, I know that ultimately I can consume consistent with my budget. In other words, my income in light of prices. If I was only consuming bicycles, I could consume 47 bicycles or $400— because it sums up to my income. I know what my income is. This is not unfamiliar. This is true in any economy. I know what my income is, or I know what it’s likely to be at the end of the planning process. I know what prices are or are likely to be at the end of the planning process. So we’ll come to how I know them in a minute. So I make a proposal based upon that. On the producers’ side, it’s rather similar. I know what my workplace is utilizing, I know again what the costs are, and I know what the price of my output is.

Now it’s a little different than being within my budget on the consumer side. On the producer side, I have to have the value of my product commensurate to the cost of everything that I’m putting into it. That’s what’s socially responsible. It’s not socially responsible for me as a workplace to be using lots of equipment and have lots of workers and produce nothing. That’s socially irresponsible in the same way as it would be socially irresponsible for me as a consumer to consume a ton and not have done anything to warrant it.

The planning process has a second component. It has workers councils and consumers councils, and now it has something that’s called an iteration facilitation board. What’s that? That’s a bunch of people, or it could be a bunch of equipment that looks at prior activity and proposes a guess; that’s what it is. It’s called indicative prices. It proposes a guess as to what prices are going to wind up. So when we make our first proposal, when I sit down to say, to make my first consumption proposal, I know what I did last year, I know what my expected income is, I know what my expected prices are, and I make a proposal. At the workers’ council side, it’s pretty much the same thing. I know what prices are, I know what costs are, I know what I did last year. I have all these sorts of— so I make a proposal for what to do this year. My workers’ council makes a proposal. They don’t match. 

In the first iteration, we don’t have a plan; we have some information. That’s what we have. I get some information that the thing I’m producing is in undersupply. People want more of it, let’s say. I get a new set of prices for the second iteration. For the second round of planning, I get updated prices and guesses at what the final price is going to be. Same thing on the consumer side. This goes on for a number of rounds, not 200, ballpark seven-six in about there, and we arrive at a plan.

Now, why is this any good? Well, if the prices are drastically weird and wrong then it’s not good. If the prices are a reflection of what we could call full social costs and benefits, personal, collective, and ecological, so it takes into account what are called externalities. If the prices do that and if the producers are arriving at a responsible proposal, they’re properly utilizing their assets to provide what’s socially desired, and the consumers are arriving at a socially responsible proposal, a proper level of consumption, then we have a good plan.

In fact, economists have various ways of figuring out whether something is desirable or not. Honestly, mostly I’m not particularly partisan to those things. If you use those approaches, then this does as well as the idealized market system, except much better because the prices are actually real. Now, this would introduce new problems. How do you get that ecological thing in there? We still have this question of where in this came the determination of the amount of income that each workplace gets.

Greg Wilpert

Well, I wanted to follow up on the question of how this is actually different from markets. Aren’t markets an iteration process between supply and demand? How is what you’re proposing actually different? Of course, you end up with a plan, but that’s kind of like you could say, well, the company that’s making the widgets has a plan for making x number of widgets based on the information they got from the market.

There’s a sense in which— one way to extrapolate from that question is to say what do we have to do to markets to make them an acceptable mechanism process, allocation mechanism for getting consumption and production to be in proximity to each other and to fulfill our values. Remember what our values were? Self-management, solidarity, diversity, equity, and so on.

Well, you’d have to do quite a lot to markets. In fact, I think you’d have to turn it into participatory planning. That’s what would wind up happening if God could come down and, step by step, tinker with markets and make them fairer and fairer and fairer. Why? Well, this gets us into markets, but I guess you want to do that. What’s wrong with markets is multiple things. So one thing that’s wrong with markets is that they are a system in which my benefit is your loss and vice versa. When I’m selling or buying, I’m trying to— what is it? Sell cheap and buy dear. In other words, each participant is trying to do the best they can for themselves in a manner, so it produces a kind of individuality. It’s producing a kind of competitiveness.

Now, that might sound abstract, and who cares? But look around, look at society and ask yourself, this is a big deal. This is a fundamentally important institution in society, causing people to be narrow, to be individualist, to not give a damn about the other person. Not because they’re evil, but because that’s the way the system works. That’s the way markets work. They don’t work if you behave otherwise. Nice guys finish last, basically. So that’s one feature.

Another feature in markets is that markets don’t— in markets, there’s a buyer and a seller. The buyer and the seller are entering into the transaction. The will of the buyer and the will of the seller are entering into the transaction. So one problem is that they’re out for themselves in a narrow, individualist way, but that’s not the only problem. Another problem is that it’s not the case that the buyer and the seller are the only people who are affected by a transaction. When we do a transaction, and I don’t know, you get a car, okay, so you’re affected, and you get the car. The producers are affected; they sell the car. Everybody who breathes the pollution that your car spits out is also affected. That is not the only way people are affected. They’re also affected because, for instance, the steel that went into the car didn’t go into something else. So now, let’s assume that we collectively consume guided missiles. The guided-missile steel didn’t go into building transit or whatever. It’s partly external, what are called externalities, implications for those beyond the immediate transaction. It’s partly that, even more than that, every transaction in some sense affects everyone. In any transaction, in any producing and then consuming stuff is being used. It’s put to a certain purpose, and it’s not put to another purpose. So everybody is sort of impacted by this choice. We want self-management. So we want people to have a say in decisions in proportion to the degree they’re affected. Again, an outrageously, seemingly too demanding demand to put on the institution. We believe in it.

So what we’re saying is that the process of these workers and consumers councils making proposals; you’re proposing your consumption, you’re proposing your production. I’m not dictating it. Nobody is. Then mediating that and refining that in light of information that returns is, in fact, taking into account other people’s inclinations and other people’s desires. It’s not arriving at it by the amount of power that you have. It’s not arriving at it by ignoring the environmental effects. It’s taking all this stuff into account, and it’s all sort of playing back into your choice as you modify your choice.

If you say a market is just people producing stuff and getting stuff with a budget and with attention to impact, then every allocation system is a market. That’s what people in society say to us. So it removes the issue of are markets good or bad. Can we do better than markets? Well, there’s no such thing. If that’s what a market is, then every economy is going to have that. A market is not that. A market is buyers and sellers competing, trying to get ahead at the expense of the other, all based on short-term valuations, all based on prices that are a product of bargaining power. As a result, it has various negative effects, which we can see all around us.

Does participatory planning do better? Well, that’s an open question, I suppose until maybe it exists. Its advocates argue that, yes, participatory planning manages to create an allocation process that’s consistent with the other institutions.

Let me just go on one second more to give an example of what it means for an allocation process to not be consistent. In the earlier session that was done, we talked about balanced jobs. The purpose of that was to get rid of a class division between those who monopolize empowering circumstances and those who are doing the opposite. They’re in work roles that are disempowering. The claim is that that’s not just any old class division, but it can become a fundamental class division, where one class, the empowered classes, is the ruling class, and the other class, disempowered classes, subordinate class, let’s say 20 over 80. Okay, so we don’t want that, so we have balanced job complexes so that our activity in the economy does not distinguish us into two groups, one that’s empowered and one that isn’t empowered. It instead leaves us all comparably empowered.

Let’s say on top of that we put central planning or we put markets. If we put these kinds of allocation on top of balanced job complexes, there’s a contradiction. This is not compatible. Why not? Well, with central planning, it’s sort of obvious. The central planners don’t want to negotiate with the workforce. They want to impose on the workforce. The whole logic of the thing is that the central planners are authorities and that they want authorities inside the workplace to negotiate with because they sure as hell don’t want to negotiate with a whole workers council. They’re sending instructions, and they want the instructions to be met.

So we know historically that’s sort of what happens. The more interesting one is the market. Why would markets be inconsistent with balanced job complexes? I think it goes something like this. If you have markets, then you have competition. If we produce bicycles and somebody else produces bicycles, we’re competing for market share. We’re competing to become the larger bicycle firm, the firm that can generate more income. Remember, income with markets is a function not of duration, intensity, and onerousness but basically of what you can take. If the bicycle firm can engineer its way into getting more gross revenues and essentially surplus, then it does better. So its workforce wants to do that.

How do you do that? Well, a workplace across town is producing bicycles, and your workplace is producing bicycles. You do things that let you get ahead. What kind of thing lets you get ahead? Dumping your waste on your neighborhood, speeding up, not having child care, not having air conditioning for anybody except maybe a few, and so on. I’m not sure everybody agrees with me about this, but I think that what happens in this kind of circumstance is that the workplace— let’s say we even have workers councils. So we have markets and workers councils and balanced job complexes. Still in all, my workplace has to compete because of its markets. So it has to make these sort of horrible decisions, decisions that hurt the workforce.

Well, who’s going to make those decisions? Who’s good at making those decisions, and who’s going to make them? If we don’t make them and somebody else does, we get screwed. If we do make them, we screw ourselves. I think what happens is we have to find people who are well adjusted and who are poorly adjusted, I suppose I should say, who are of a mindset and of a skill set to make those kinds of choices, to cut costs, to increase output regardless of the impact on the workforce.

So we hire people like that. So we go to the—nowadays, we would go to the Wharton School or the Harvard Business School or something, and we hire somebody who has been socialized into not caring about fucking other people over. We hire them, we put them in offices, and we say, okay, screw us because it’s in our interest. Screw us at work to get us more income and to keep us alive and competing with other firms, so we don’t go under. The logic of markets disrupts the equity of income, but it also disrupts the classlessness of self-management. That’s how an allocation system can screw up your aspirations.

Greg Wilpert

Let me get back to the question of how you incorporate values at this point because I could imagine a situation where, let’s say, you’re a bicycle factory or whatever. You mentioned earlier that you wouldn’t want them to dump their waste in the community. Obviously, the community has an interest in preventing that. In the process of coming up with a plan, presumably, they would take that into account. What if, let’s say, that factory just dumps it in a different community, shifts it abroad or who knows? How do you then take the ecological value, for example, into account?

Michael Albert

Why is the fact that—

Greg Wilpert

 Presumably to offer a lower price and to perhaps get more income?

Michael Albert

Why?

Greg Wilpert

Because everybody wants to have more stuff.

Michael Albert

But they’re not going to get more stuff. This is one of the peculiarities, I suppose you could say, of participatory planning or of participatory economics. There are these two things. There’s your productivity, and there’s your duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor. They’re not the same. So let’s say that you have a balance job complex, but a part of that is, I don’t know, doing brain surgery. I have a balanced job complex, and a part of it is, I don’t know, inside of a workplace, being involved in planning the allocation of stuff during the workday or making something that is empowering but in no way as socially valuable as brain surgery. So you’re going to get, in some systems, you’re going to get a higher income because your brain surgery is so valuable, and I’m going to get a lower income because the violins that I’m working on are less valuable. In participatory economics, that isn’t the case. I’m going to get income for the duration, intensity, and onerous. You’re going to get income for the duration, intensity, and onerous.

Greg Wilpert

Wait, isn’t that allocated by the workplace? In other words, depending on how much income that workplace generates, on the whole, isn’t it?

Michael Albert

That was the thing in the last little section that we did, and I left for last. There is no such thing as me getting twice as much for the similar duration, intensity, and onerousness, or at least that’s the claim. In other words, there’s no way to aggrandize self. There’s no way to enlarge one’s income beyond the norm that is stipulated.

Now, you’re right. If society misallocates to a workplace, if society were to allocate— I’m in one bicycle factory, and you’re in another bicycle factory. So your bicycle factory dumps its crap on the neighborhood, or maybe it takes it around the corner and dumps it, and mine doesn’t. The idea here is your factory is in a position to get a greater income allotment from the allocation system than mine is. The answer is no. First of all, this gets us to another step, but we probably shouldn’t have used dumping. In any case, in the guise of dumping, you get charged for the dumping. So, in other words, that’s part of your cost. In the same way, you use some input steel. So your workplace is charged for the steel that you use that you get from someplace else. Your workplace generates some pollution. Your workplace is charged for that also. It’s not like a product where you’re benefiting from the product. It’s a product of pollution. The product is a negative thing, and you’re charged for that. Indeed, the income goes to the people who are suffering the pollution. It’s a little bit difficult. The idea is the planning process arrives at— let’s look at it now as a whole. So the planning process arrives at a plan. That means it’s arrived at essentially an average income. It now has to apportion, say to the bicycle industry as compared to some other industries. Well, if everything is just level, then the bicycle industry gets the total number of people in the bicycle industry times the average income, and so does the violin industry. If it’s not level, let’s say the bicycle industry is more onerous than you’d get an added element to your income, to your industry income. Or let’s say that during the course of the year, the bicycle industry fails to fulfill its plan. So it’s not doing the socially valued amount of labor that was the average; it’s doing less. So then it gets less again. It’s not that you, Greg, did less; it’s the whole damn industry that did less. So now the industry, so the society is basically, in a sense, you could say the planned society is apportioning to industries income allotment. That has to all add up to the total for the whole society.

Michael Albert

Now, inside your industry, there’s an industry federation of councils. Inside your industry, again, there’s an apportionment. To what? To all the factories in the industry. Once again, now the industry has a certain amount that’s allotted to it. And let’s just, for the sake of discussion, say it’s average or whatever. It’s a total amount. Now, the industry is allotting to every factory inside the industry or every workplace inside the industry. Again, if some workplaces are under producing, are under utilizing the productive assets of the social commons, then they’re going to get less income on the grounds that they’re not fully doing socially valued labor. They’re either not working or they’re working poorly, one or the other. So they would get less.

Then the next step is— it’s a similar kind of step at the total level, there’s an apportionment to industries, and the total level has to have some notion. None of this is perfect, but it can’t be. The total level has some notion if some of the industries are more onerous or less onerous.

Now, at the industry level, there might be that too. Maybe there’s a bicycle factory in, I don’t know, Alabama where the temperature is really hot, and there’s a bicycle factory in Ohio where the temperature isn’t that hot, and maybe that’s a real issue. The one is more onerous than the other. Anyway, the industry has to apportion among workplaces, and then the workplace apportions among its workforce. At every step, it’s the same criteria: remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor.

You don’t have a situation where as an individual— now let’s look at the individual level. You want to aggrandize yourself. So how do you do that? Well, you can claim to do stuff that you didn’t do. So you can cheat. Try and cheat somehow, or you can do a whole lot. Well, you can’t do a whole lot unless your workmates agree because it affects them. You can’t take on all the work in the workplace. You can’t do that. You have to get an agreement. You can’t cheat because your workplace is going to know. Maybe you can cheat a little bit, I don’t know, but the workplace is going to know if you’re just exaggerating. You’re saying, I did 60 hours, you all did 30 hours, and everybody can see you didn’t do 60 hours. Not only that, even if you did do 60 hours, you didn’t generate double the output of everybody else.

So there are a lot of indicators that preclude, and this presumes that just solidarity wouldn’t preclude it, which I think it would. These kinds of behaviors, it’s a little like it’s a whole different thing. What if you’re a tennis player and you’re as good as Roger Federer? So you look around, and you say to yourself, well, this is nice, but let’s get real. I’m special, and I want more income, so I’m going to set up a black market. I’m going to sell my tennis capacity on the side, and I’m going to try and aggrandize myself.

Well, what happens in a participatory economy? First of all, you have to have tennis courts, you have to have tennis balls, you have to have, et cetera, not so simple because all work is done in a workers council. You’re going to do it on the side, on the sly. The next thing that’s the problem is how do you get this income? Where is it coming from? Notice income was coming from the plan. It’s not coming from a bunch of people who are coming and paying you. So you say to a bunch of people, pay me, and you can play with me. There are a lot of people who want to play, and they want to play with Roger Federer because you’re so damn good. So they’re willing to give you stuff. So they give you chickens and whatever.

Greg Wilpert

But don’t they also have their own money that they get?

Michael Albert

Not particularly, not in the modern version. In other words, they have an income. Everybody has an income. So I have an income, let’s call it 100, and I can spend my 100 on stuff, and I’ve planned on what to spend on. Another feature is that that changes over the course of the year. So the system has to be able to accommodate that, but it does. So I have that amount of spending capacity, but it’s probably just on a computer. It’s not like a credit card. So I can’t pay you with a credit card, but it doesn’t really matter, even if I can transfer to you, which I don’t think I’d be able to, but let’s say I can transfer to you a piece of my bargaining, I mean, a piece of my income. So now you, Roger, have a big income. You don’t have Roger’s capitalist world income, but let’s say you have twice what you would have had, or three times what you would have had even. Now, what do you do?

Well, in our current society, being rich is no big deal. That is to say, you can do whatever you want with that income because when you drive around in your Ferrari or whatever it is that you’re doing, it’s no big deal. Lots of people do that. In a participatory economy, that’s not true. If you spend a really high income publicly, everybody knows you cheated. Everybody knows you did something wrong. I don’t even think you could get to that point. If you got to that point, it’s still hard. You have to enjoy it in your basement because it’s clearly a violation. So there are things like that. For instance, we didn’t put that in participatory economics. We just discovered that after we had this picture of what this thing was in our head, we discovered this peculiar and interesting attribute. It sort of makes it hard to cheat. It isn’t just that it’s oriented against that. It isn’t just that it sort of tries to create social relations and solidarity. Contrary to that, it even makes it hard to do. It’s true inside the workplace also. So you and your fellow workers, I mean, if you’re going to be an asshole, how do you get away with that? It’s not obvious. These are all minuscule— just as a sidebar— these are all small negatives compared to what’s normal and commonplace in existing allocation systems and economies. Even these small negatives are very hard to implement and have—

Greg Wilpert

I want to ask a whole bunch of follow-up questions, but we’ve gone on for pretty long now. So I want to conclude this part, and we’ll do another segment where we cover the follow-up questions that I have. So, first of all, I just want to remind people to take a look at the first part that was done with Paul Jay. This is part two. We’re going to conclude that now. I’m speaking to Michael Albert, author of the book No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World. Thanks again, Michael, for having joined me today. I urge you to tune in, everybody, for the third part, which is going to follow right after this one.

Michael Albert

Thank you.

Greg Wilpert

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