Parecon meeting
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The London chapter of PPS-UK would like to welcome you to an introductory event on Saturday 21st January at the bank of ideas starting at 3pm.We will present the core ideas around participatory vision for society including: Participatory Economy, Participatory Politics, Particpatory Kinship and Participatory Community. A 30 minute Q&A session will follow.There will be a social event in the evening.All are welcome.For more details see the event information on our website.
Went to this meeting yesterday but only participated in the sessions on Participatory Economy and Participatory Politics. They are not as radical as they seem on paper, seeming just to want to make life as it is today more “participatory”.We have already clashed with them over their views on the economy where they want to retain pay (related to effort) and to continue to restrict people’s consumption to their work effort and so have to put a price on goods and services too. They talk about abolishing money but only in favour of credits which one of them said he was prepared to call “consumer money”.They talk of a “vision” but in fact they offer a blueprint and not a very nice one at that, as one where everybody has to fill in a form at the beginning of the year setting out what they plan to consume in the year and which has to be scrutinised by neighbourhood councils. It’s the same at work: everybody has to fill in a form saying how much effort they will put in and which will be monitored not by management (as today) but by fellow workers (which surely would be worse). And their proposal for repeated revisions (at least 7) to a provisional plan so as to eventually bring supply and demand into balance must be a joke (we’d be spending all our time in meetings); not that it would work anyway.Having said that, their views on “participatory politics” based on ideas put forward by Stephen Shalom are more sensible and correspond more or less to the sort of participatory democracy that we envisage existing in socialism but in the context of a moneyless, wageless society of common ownership and free access.We are not the only ones to criticise “parecon”. Here’s two more, detailed criticisms:Can participatory economics tame marketplace relations?An anarchist society that wallows in regulationAnother critic has described it as “nonsense on stilts”.
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