We've seen a great email discussion going on after Charles Yee gave his presentation of parecon in Tübingen in early August.

Most of the questions and comments seemed to focus on the validity of parecon. I didn't want to get too much into the specific details of how well the council structure, for example, could encourage innovation or how well parecon addresses the concept of work or money. I have read most of Michael Albert's book and I most of these ideas are addressed there. Certainly it's important to get into the details, think through the possibilities and argue about the merits. I don't think parecon represents a blueprint for the correct way to organize a future society. I do think, though, that we can use it to focus our struggle towards a better society. It's not really possible for someone to now know the best way to organize a totally new society based on cooperation, solidarity and equality.

For me a basic statement in parecon is that people need to get together and solve problems together. To say that we already know what this "utopia" looks like contradicts this basic tenet. The realization of this future society is going to be an evolutionary process done by the people. I guess it's a "Gratwanderung" between letting the process evolve and kind of guiding it in the direction one imagines.

For me now it would be important to focus more on how parecon can help us move specifically towards a more just and democratic society. Can we use it's theoretical framework to judge the value of, for example, a small-mart revolution or local currencies? What I particularly appreciate about parecon is its critique of capitalism and Soviet socialism (or whatever you wanna call it). Albert sets up a number of basic questions and values about how a pareconist views society. Charles did a good job of presenting these: solidarity, diversity, equality, self-management (and a couple others I forgot). He names these as basic values which should guide a discussion about creating a better world.

By asking the question: does this activity or project or proposal conform to these basic principles? we can better judge the virtue of our activities.

I've been enjoying Chomsky's book and thinking about institutions and all that.

Do you think there's a sort of pluralistic institutionalism going on? I mean we have all these institutions that our using and abusing their power over society. There's a bunch of them, though, and they must have conflicting interests. That's not always the case. The Communist Party in Russia didn't really have any competing organizations.

Even within the government you've got competing institutions. ABC competes against CBS. I don't know if this is a valid or important point. But it seems important to mention. So if these institutions are the players in the political arena, they don't all share the same interests and are not all working towards exactly the same goal. There must be conflicts.

I'm not much for conspiracy theories and I don't think Chomsky is a conspiracy kind of guy. But I he is arguing that all these institutions or power brokers are holding all the chips, is he also saying that they are all working towards the same goal? That would then seem kinda conspiritorial.

We should get this in the blog.