SZCZBlog

“Every economy has prices.” I remember Robin Hahnel saying those words in one of the Shed Sessions produced by the folks at Z Magazine on participatory economics. What those prices reflect, and how those prices are calculated, can vary from economy to economy.

The prices in contemporary capitalism reflect mainly two things: (1) supply and demand, taken as a single entity, and (2) bargaining power. Bargaining power can reflect power relations between buyers and sellers, or between capital and labor, or even between sellers in a market (ask any small-town merchant about Wal-Mart and about the bargaining power of its prices).

Markets make primal the interaction between buyer and seller, but clearly a lot is missed in the price, mainly because markets tend to ignore anything that doesn’t immediately reflect the immediate interaction between buyer and seller. It ignores, among other things:

1. The labor costs related to the exchange. Ask Foxconn and Apple (irony: I’m typing these words on an Apple computer). Ask Nike and sweatshop shoes (heck, Nike has a chronic allergy to even acknowledging its labor practices). Ask Wal-Mart and its labor force (motto: “There’s a reason we’re the world’s most profitable company.We pay our employees peanuts. Wal-Mart: Always low wages. Always”).

2. The social costs stemming from the purchase. I used to posit a hypothetical example in discussions about parecon by using firearms as an example. It’s not a hypothetical anymore, at least not in the minds of most of the American public.

3. The environmental impacts connected to the purchase. This might be the kicker — the thing that might be most closely pinned to the destruction of the human species if we don’t change course. The purchase price of oil in its doesn’t reflect the pollution that’s emitted, the harm to breathing and to animals, the destructive impacts of a warming planet by burning fossil fuels (The Onion’s “Man on the street” once described it as follows: “The health of the economy demands that we destroy the planet.”) I used to have a poster that listed the revised sticker price for a standard automobile IF the costs of wars connected to oil were taken into account — in the ballpark of $150,000 for a car that would otherwise cost $8,000. (War is a hell of an externality.)

Why are such numbers ignored? Presumably because market economists want to make their model simple and manageable. I can understand the willingness to make a simple model for analysis. After all, if you don’t strive for simplification, you could be chasing will-o’-the-wisps all day, spending all the time hunting down numbers and avoiding having to make a decision. But while simplicity is sought for, so is accuracy, and the fact remains that while market economists stick their head in the sand, the ignored labor, social, and especially the environmental costs are kicking their elevated behinds.

In contrast, in a participatory economy, the prices that are used are what are termed “indicative prices” — meaning that they strive to indicate the various impacts of one or another choice. Markets ignore the effects beyond the immediate market exchange, and in fact there’s a name for these outside effects: externalities. They are clearly external — outside — the immediate exchange, and markets therefore ignore them. To their and our detriment.

This isn’t a call to skirt decision-making. Far from it. Of course, we could seek, but we should base indiciative prices on best available knowledge at the time. Indeed, in one of the very first articulations of the model of participatory economics, “prices are ‘indicative’ during the planning process in the sense of indicating the best current estimates of final valuations. They are not binding but flexible in the sense that qualitative information provides important additional guidance.”

But the model, and future articulations of the model, don’t specify what should go into an indicative. Based on what’s discussed here, let me offer the following four-component model of indicative prices in participatory economics:

1. Supply and demand
2. Known labor impacts
3. Known environmental impact
4. Known social impacts

The greater the negative impact of each component, the higher the component price and the overall price. How is negative impact determined? One way using current technology would be to use a cellphone app for people to add in their vote regarding the impact (positive or negative) for a given good. The results can then be aggregated and calculated to an indicative price component and ultimately affect an indicative price. (I have a set-up like this that’s used in my — cross your fingers! — forthcoming participatory economics simulacrum.) In the event technology could be considered a hurdle, there’s no reason other means could be used in a similar fashion to contribute to an indicative price.

The New York Times (in a long-delayed follow-up from Mother Jones magazine) finally reported on a story of recent relevance that would have made an impact, on the same day that anything resembling meaningful gun control reform in the United States got squelched by the U.S. Senate. When president Obama called for a vote, he wound up getting nine votes in the the U.S. Senate this week, only to see them all go down in flames.

The New York Times reported on the vibrant and massively secretive market for firearms purchased online. The Times found that 94 percent of the 170,000 gun ads posted on an online buying forum called Armslist were made by “private parties”. Such a classification didn’t require background checks or the keeping of records, and purchases can be made in cash. To quote from a post from Daily Kos:

The Times found many of those private parties seemed to be acting instead as gun dealers without licenses, selling significant numbers of firearms. They do so without running background checks on any of the people they sell do. Nor do they keep records of their sales. As the newspaper points out, where the line is drawn about what makes a dealer and what makes a private seller is blurry. How many guns can someone sell before becoming what the law calls “person who devotes time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit.”

And Armslist is one of many, many such online buying forums for guns, the majority of purchases would fail elementary checks for checking backgrounds and record-keeping.

I’d like to make two points:

1. This is a critical example of the fallacy of ignoring market externalities. Market theory considers only the buyer and the seller in a purchase of a good, like guns. (Maybe it should be called a “bad” rather than a “good” in this case?) But there can be, and probably will be, serious externalities paid for by people who had nothing to do with the immediate purchase. Not to put too light a point on it, but twenty-six dead people at Sandy Hook Elementary School for a single purchase is a serious externality, even if the purchase was ostensibly legal. In markets, such externalities are ignored, to the detriment of everyone. In contrast, in a participatory economy, the metric of indicative prices would include the immediate predictable consequences of a good, like guns. In the case of someone getting killed by a gun that someone bought secretly online, those indicative prices would include a metric of “social cost”, which would understandably escalate the cost of the good, dramatically so. Hopefully, the rising cost would reach the point where many “buyers” in a participatory economy would decline to “purchase” the good on the grounds of the cost being too expensive to afford, to the benefit of those affected by the exchange but not taking part in the exchange. If anyone should consider a turn away from markets and towards a participatory economy, this stands as an enormously powerful reason why.

2. In light of the report, I can understand why some people sell guns. With little oversight otherwise either on legal or economic grounds, selling guns can be a quick way to earn some cash, and without the typical constraints of a standard job — no boss to worry about, no punch card to check in, just sell your guns online and enjoy your cash and/or pay your rent. In some circumstances, it’s probably the only way some people can to earn some cash, especially given the lousy economy and eroding position of the middle and working-class. So people sell guns. The situation reminds me of a quote from the extraordinary movie Bulworth, and a scene near the end of the film where a drug dealer explains why some people go into the risky but lucrative role of selling drugs:

I’m giving them entry-level positions into the only growth-sector occupation that’s truly open to them right now. That’s the substance supply industry. They gonna run this shit someday. They gonna have the whole empire. Man, y’all don’t give a fuck about it. You greedy-ass politicians. That’s what you tell me every time that y’all vote to cut them school programs; every time y’all vote to cut them funds to the job programs. What the fuck; how a… how a young man gonna take care of his financial responsibilities workin’ at motherfuckin’ Burger King? He ain’t. He ain’t, and please don’t even start with the school shit. They ain’t no education goin’ on up in that motherfucker. ‘Cause y’all motherfuckin’ politicians done fucked the shit up. So what they gonna do? What’s a young man supposed to do then, right? What’s he gonna do? He gonna come to me, that’s what he’s gonna do.

I help produce a monthly television show — Chicago Independent Television, the monthly TV series of the Chicago Independent Media Center (“Chicago Indymedia”). In the most recent episode of the show, we had a segment about a corrupt Chicago politician — Alderman James Cappleman — who decided to crack down on “unapproved” efforts to feed hungry people in his ward (neighborhood). Citizens in his ward then staged a protest of Cappelman’s aldermanic office in defiance. That protest included a public “feeding”: one of the Chicago “branches” of the anti-hunger group Food Not Bombs offered food at the protest for anyone, homeless or not, hungry or not.

In watching this segment, I was set thinking: “Wow. These volunteer activists are defying the local political system for what they believe with just the resources they have at hand. If there was a way that they could get other volunteers and other activists to help contribute, with resources and assistance… They could engage in socially-valued labor, and maybe even earn credit for their effort and sacrifice, and track the tasks that they do, make sure that they’re balanced for desirability and empowerment, and coordinate larger requests with other groups, and — HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!”

That was what inspired me to want to create a participatory economics simularity, and hopefully help bridge a variant of C. P. Snow’s famous “two cultures” argument. But instead of bridging the sciences and the humanities, who too often don’t connect with one another much to their (and our) respective, detriment, I’m talking about another cultural divide that I’ve seen among activists — those who “talk” versus those who “do”.

Some activists who are engaged in “getting their hands dirty” — feeding hungry people (like Food Not Bombs), defending unjust foreclosurers (like Occupy Our Homes), trying to build a trauma center on Chicago’s south side (like Fearless Leading by the Youth) — will critique other activists who don’t get involved for not getting involved. Such criticism is often justified, but I feel that, a lot of the time, the nose-to-the-grindstone activism that does take place fulfill its potential. People much of the time don’t know about it, or efforts fizzle out over time or after a big event (e.g., the biennial WTO Ministerials or the 2012 NATO Summit), or the campaign doesn’t get enough in the way of resources to keep going, or isn’t part of a larger cohesive whole and feels like just another random act.

This, I think, is the highest calling of “armchair” activism — to help provide that support, in getting wider attention, providing resources, offering strategic advice, any of the sundry “abstract” tools that can help in any and every way with those efforts. I just wonder aloud if we can go beyond, so that the activism involved in, say, helping to provide food for Food Not Bombs can be somehow incentivized more effectively, but in solidarity fashion. So that those who want to help can be incentivized _to_ plug in, offer help.

Here’s where I state my personal bias yet again: I saw the videos of an online course on Gamification, and if anything it got me thinking: I wonder if political activism can be “gamified” in a constructive manner, or maybe even an entire participatory economy can be “gamified”, to help provide incentives that might help spur the action that we sorely need to address pressing problems and ultimately to transform society for the better.

People could find out about the protest at Cappleman’s office and get a reward of credit for providing food, cooking some of the food, providing it to protesters or to the hungry. That credit could then be offered to those who are also participants in activism, to do or get — what exactly? Exchange to provide others? How is that different from a credit market? I suppose the credit earned would need to be balanced for desirability and empowerment with effort and sacrifice at some other tasks, and the credit could be offered to those who agree to be part of this economy, who themselves provide goods and services that are balanced for desirability and empowerment. Maybe start out with some smaller subset of work tasks for desirability and empowerment, rather than a whole new economy?

It might go somewhere, but I think I need to think through the details a bit further.

(Note to self: Next time you write a blog post, be sure to have some overall point or structure in mind _before_ starting to write.)

I’m currently reading Bob McChesney‘s most recent book “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy“. I’m lucky to have gotten an advance copy of the book, and I have interviewed Professor McChesney many times on my radio program, with another interview forthcoming.  Moreover, I own and have read nearly all of Professor McChesney’s books, which I count as invaluable and inspiring in my own work on activism, particularly on media and media policy.  A speech Professor McChesney gave in 1998 (which I have an audio copy of) proved influential in my own evolution from observer to activist.  So, it surprises me that I read something in a recent adaptation of “Digital Disconnect” (published in In These Times, and reposted on ZNet) which I disagreed with.  In particular, this passage:

[B]eneath the surface, there has been a rise in new kinds of economic ventures. In distressed communities like Cleveland, they are a source of promise for the future. We are beginning to develop some experience about what a democratic, post-capitalist economy might look like and how it could function. There will be markets, there will be for-profit enterprises, but under the overarching logic of the system, the surplus will be mostly under nonprofit community control.

In particular still, four words:

“There will be markets”.

Now I can understand the apprehension many people feel with regards to non-capitalist economies, and the fear of thinking that,
as bad as things are, yes they can get much worse.  And I can understand further why Professor McChesney didn’t go as far as
market abolition and/or market replacement in this article, though I think he certainly can.  He was arguably pushing the envelope
plenty in his article and in his assessment, he also didn’t want to push his luck and perhaps _lose_ what ground he gained with
potential readers.

It happens in everyday conversation too.  You sometimes have LOTS to say, but you reasonably hold off because it’s not appropriate to
to say everything you want to say.  Because the audience might not be ready yet.  Because the audience has a lot to digest already
and you don’t want to overwhelm them.  But I have to admit I’m a tad disappointed that Professor McChesney didn’t go the full
monty at challenging the primacy of markets, particularly since markets — I would argue — is critical to spawning the powerful
corporations who threaten the democratic potential of the internet that Professor McChesney has made the central focus of his book,
“Digital Disconnect”.

The negative consequences of markets — the effects of the “invisible foot” as some call it — are well known.  Markets weaken
the social ties that bind us all through its incessant focus on competition.  Markets don’t consider things like love and honor
and respect and justice that can’t be bought and sold, but which are still mightily important (this is called “commodity fetishism”).
Markets lead to unaccountable destruction of the environment by its misjudging and ignoring of external effects (what are termed
“externalities”).  Markets spawn the most destructive creation ever wrought on the face of the Earth — the limited-liability corporation –
which is threatening our planet via its escalation of the climate crisis (burning fossil fuels, escalating greenhouse gases,
threatening superheated feedback loops that would change Earth into a scorching planet like Venus).  And corporations also threatening
those media outlets and resources — the internet key among them — that through its democratic potential and
ability to connect our disparately divided societies, grant us some hope for a better future (or any future).

McChesney somehow glosses over these concerns over markets by saying “the surplus will be mostly under nonprofit community control.”
I don’t know that such handwaving is reassuring.  Markets under local control still leaves out the potential for markets under
the control of massive unaccountble corporations.  This concern regarding the potential of rollback, when it was raised to me during
a _media-democracy_ tabling I was at, is one big reason why I don’t buy the hype about markets, and so I am calling for something deeper.

I can understand, finally, that there’s simply not enough room within the confines of a 1500-word magazine article to squeeze out
all the words to express what you want to say.  Take what you can get, I suppose.  I’ve been there myself.  But at the same time, time is short, and we don’t have time to mince words.  It’s why I’ve taken to blogging on a daily basis, and why we need to push our luck before our collective luck runs out.

My apologies in advance for being more vague than usual in this blog post. The names have been scrubbed to protect the innocent and not-so innocent.

Some years back, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who would be described as “left of center” and who has been active in political efforts. In this conversation, we talked about the role that vision plays in political activism. Then as now, I
consider it a necessary guide to activism — a map, a compass, whatever metaphor you choose, you need a destination in order to avoid the risk of running in circles. This friend I was speaking with, with whom I would agree otherwise on nearly everything political, disagreed with me on this point to my surprise, saying that work on vision should be postponed until after the revolution (those words weren’t used, but that’s my paraphrase for what was meant). The objection that was raised was: You wouldn’t want to muddy the waters for letting people decide about the society they want by trying to suggest it to them in advance. (My attempts to try to convince this friend otherwise didn’t work.)

Some years after this conversation, I had a conversation with another person whom I would characterize as a passing acquaintance. I only met this person once, but we did have the chance to talk at length, and in this conversation the topic of vision in political activism came up. The main difference this time was that this other person might be best characterized as “right of center”, but curiously the rationale for political vision was rejected, and for the same reason: activists in the here and now shouldn’t color the potential of imposing the workings of a societal structure until the status quo has been abolished and a new societal blank slate has been won. “After the revolution”, in other words.

I quite agree that dogmatism, whether on the “left”, “right”, or “center”, has no place in political vision. If ideas turn out to be bad, then those ideas shouldn’t be pursued. And I think it is better to find that out sooner than later by putting those ideas to
critical scrutiny and (where possible) experimental verification. Likewise, vision should not be imposed on anyone, but rather brought for consideration and allowed to convince adherents and advocates on their merits. If a vision is found lacking or shown to have problems, by scrutiny and/or experiment, then by all means, that vision should be ignored.

But to dispense with pursuing vision altogether is irrational, ridiculous, and counterproductive. If you don’t have a destination, you stand the reasonable chance of going in circles, wasting time and energy and effort that we frankly don’t have anymore. It’s probably a big reason why activism has been (justly) accused of what we might call “randomism” — that is, positive actions of activism aren’t the result of a coherent plan with a goal, strategy, and tactics, and so they seem to outsiders as random, with little overall coherence and little actual follow-up.

One can understand why vision remains a largely taboo topic, across both the political right and the political left. Many times in history, those who did have a coherent vision and chose to articulate it have been repressed. Indeed, many of those with a vision still today are considered persona non grata in many fora and in many communities, even in those with a dissident bent. I can personally relate, in that my review of the book ~Parecon: Life After Capitalism~ went unpublished despite my attempts to get the review published in various “dissident” fora.

Vision can sometimes be thought of as restricting and dogmatic (the proverb “To a hammer, everything’s a nail” can apply), and yes, some visions can be exceedingly harmful. There’s no question about that. But some positive visions can also be a threat, not only to those in unquestioned power but also in “dissident” communities. I suspect that my review was squelched because my review may have opened a can of worms that they don’t want to have to address because they may not like what they see in the mirror.

I guess this would be a call for common sense on vision. Yes, we need vision to provide positive goals to work through, lest we flail away randomly forever. Yes, we should not be dogmatic about our vision, but judge its merits carefully and refine as needed. And some of us have more freedom in this day and age; the purges of ages past and years past are less of a threat. If all that’s standing in the way is a taboo, then we have no excuses to act. Even if it means blogging about it every day.

Let me share two quotes:

Quote one: Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google, once gave the commencement address at his (and my) alma mater, the University of Michigan. He said: “I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition.”

Quote two: PHP is a very common programming language that’s used for development on the web, but on which in recent years has been derided for its many technical flaws. Even so, PHP remains staggeringly popular, being used by such websites and platforms like Facebook, WordPress, Drupal, and my very own website. You would figure that a language that’s widely derided for its flaws wouldn’t merit such wide use, but intertia is a powerful thing. In response, one commenter offered this advice: “The best way to combat something as pervasively and institutionally awful as PHP is not to point out all its (many, many, many) faults, but to build compelling alternatives and make sure these alternatives are equally pervasive, as easy to set up and use as possible.”

I mention these two quotes because they are connected in one project I’m thinking of building. Folks who follow my work know that I’ve long been an advocate of the model of economics known as participatory economics (parecon). But it hasn’t been as tested in the here-and-now real world as much as I would like (though it has been implemented; there’s even a book, which I contributed to, called “Real Utopia” about some of its implementations). If we want to make progress against the existing economic order, we do more than just point out the flaws of the existing economic order, we build a compelling alternative. I think we _have_ a compelling alternative; now we need to work on implementing it, or at the very least testing it in some wide fashion to confirm that it’s worth implementing more widely. But how?

Here’s where the mega-ambitious-dream part comes in: Let’s build our own worldwide participatory economy on the internet, for people to join in and contribute. (This isn’t a new idea; indeed, similar ideas can be found the very first articulations of parecon, but technically speaking this is far more feasible to implement now than ever before.) Say for the sake of argument that we make a website to implement a participatory economy. A person can visit the website, login to a secure, private account, and see (among other things) the following:

* A list of the tasks they have
* A list of the tasks they can choose, or build new tasks if they so choose
* A list of the jobs and work those tasks are a part of
* The desirability ratings and empowerment ratings for those tasks, to ensure that they’re balanced for desirability and empowerment
* The effort scores and sacrifice scores for those tasks, to calculate payment
* The payment penalties that are applied and automatically computed if the tasks are not balanced for desirability and empowerment (providing an incentive to ensure jobs are balanced for desirability and empowerment)
* The credits earned for socially-valued labor
* The consumption proposals relevant to one’s current circumstances, with the ability to view other proposals at any scale
* The indicative prices (and rationale for those prices) for goods and services in the economy
* The connecting of one’s work efforts in socially valued labor to fulfill needs in the participatory economy, completing the loop

This might be closer to an endgame situation rather than an opening move — what it looks like after the revolution rather than before it. But I think that there won’t _be_ a revolution without providing an alternative that I think will work, or if it won’t work, learn why and build from that. After all, “[l]earning is a feedback loop. You take an action, see the result, learn a lesson. The smaller the loop, the less time from action to result: the quicker you learn, the faster you advance.”

We could use this online participatory economy not just to connect folks who, frankly, are already reasonably affluent, but to connect folks who aren’t so AND who can tap into a system like this. (Yes, I know that there’s a digital divide that blocks many people to online, but let me imagine this for the time being.) People who have tangible needs on feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, conserving resources, brought in contact with folks who can cook food, provide shelter, build energy-efficient tools. Those who do the work would be credited for the effort and sacrifice for their labor, and can use the credits in the participatory economy as part of a participatory plan. Over time and over a wide enough scale, we might just abolish markets, corporations, capitalism — by making them obsolete.

So, that’s my mega-ambitious dream. What do you think?

The models for a participatory society are grounded in an ethos of solidarity rather than rivarly. We believe it is better for ourselves and our planet to explicitly help one another rather than harm one another. And we believe we have some concrete models of our values in order to put our values into some kind of tangible, everyday practice.

The models in our present society — those of racism; patriarchy, sexism, and heterosexism; the state; and the retentionist economies of capitalism, markets, and command planning — are all grounded in an ethos of rivalry. Every person for oneself (every man for himself?), to hell with the rest. Upon examination or actual practice, these models of rivalry often result in destructive ends, which are claimed to be necessary or the best options currently available.

Here’s a question: If they are the best options currently available, why not seek out better options? And if better options are found why not try them out to see if they’re worthy of our time and attention?

The answer is ironic in multiple ways, and what follows could be a bit confusing so stay with me here. Advocates for a participatory society, which use models based on solidarity, are effectively calling for a competition between their models of solidarity and the current models built on rivalry. But it appears advocates of the systems of rivalry don’t want a competition between their models based on rivalry and the models based on solidarity because, one would surmise, their models would lose in any fair assessment.

Put more succinctly: The solidarity folks want a rivalry with the rivalry folks because they (the solidarity folks) think they can win, but the rivalry folks don’t want a rivalry with the solidarity folks because they (the rivalry folks) think they would lose.

More succinctly still: The “non-competition people” want a competition, but the “competition people” don’t.

When the “competition people” complain about those who don’t want to play their game of competition (at least when it comes to economics), they would howl loud complaints of “protectionism”. But when it pitting their supposedly vaunted models and values against other more positive models, the “competition people” shy behind the very same protectionist cloak.

So, those of us who strive for a more participatory society, and believe we have the models to put theory into practice, we want to compete, curiously enough, because we think we can win. And not only would we win, so would the planet and its peoples and future untold generations.