Parecon--Page 2

Participatory Economy consists of 4 basic categories. they are:

1--Worker and Consumer self-management

2--Participatory planning for allocation

3--Balanced jobs

4--Consumption shares

I will elaborate these catagories separately and will begin at the beginning, #1

1. Worker and Consumer Self-management

First, any economic program must answer the question,

How is the economy run? What is the economic governance structure?

The answer that Participatory Economics proposes is that the basic building blocks for economic decision-making be directly democratic worker councils, and federations of these, as the means to implement self-management in production, and directly democratic neighborhood councils, and federations of these, to implement self-management in regard to consumption.

If there is a hierarchy or class that controls your work in production, if you are subordinated to their aims, this violates the human need for self-management, to have one’s productive activity reflect one’s own plans and goals. Participatory Economics defines self-management in terms of the following principle:

Each person is to have a say over decisions that affect them, and each person is to have a degree of say in proportion to the degree they are affected by them.

There are many decisions about work that primarily affect the people in that workplace, the people doing the work, and this is why it is necessary to have vehicles of self-management over work. These are the worker councils, based on face-to-face workplace assemblies.

But there are also decisions that affect people primarily in areas of consumption, such as what kind of housing we want to live in. We therefore need to have vehicles of self-management in the sphere of consumption. The building blocks for self-management in the sphere of consumption are neighborhood councils – geographic bodies based on face-to-face assemblies of residents.

Participatory Economics, however, does not assume that all decisions are necessarily collective. The decision about how to arrange the furniture in my dwelling or what style of shirt I prefer is nobody else’s business but my own. I get to have control over those decisions.

More explanations to follow. Same bat channel!