Parecon--Page 3 (Cond) Yet Again

This is the last part of part of the planning stage of Parecon.

What is Participatory Planning?

Okay, so what’s the alternative? We say that the alternative is to have the entire population directly create the plan themselves. We say everyone should be able to be planners, and participate directly in the formation of the plan. We say the education system and the availability of information should be such as to facilitate this.

This leads to what we call participatory planning. Participatory Economics has a particular suggestion or proposal for how this could work. This doesn’t mean that all decisions are to be made in big meetings. Actually, on the participatory economics proposal, many inputs to the planning process are made directly by individuals, and do not require meetings. In particular, we make a distinction between collective consumption and private consumption.

Capitalism tends to underproduce collective goods and services, and tends to overproduce collective “bads” like pollution. Our solution to this is the neighborhood councils and federations of these, which deal with collective consumption proposals. But individuals are also allowed to make inputs about what they prefer for their personal consumption.

Workers also make proposals for what they are prepared to produce and for enhancements they want to the work environment.

Through a process of social communication and interaction, which enables people to become aware of the social and environmental consequences of their consumption and production proposals, a process of society-wide negotiation then ensues. There is a back and forth process and the plan itself ends up simply as the aggregation of the proposals from the base, from consumers and producers, once agreement is reached.

There is no construction of a plan by a separate planning body or hierarchy, though of course there would be research and development groups, which are just workplace groups, who could make proposals and give their evaluations of the options. There also need to be groups to aggregate the result of all the inputs from everyone and publish the results.

Participatory planning is the way that we ensure that production is responsive to both the human and environmental costs of production, and also the way that we avoid wanton waste, because it ensures that the system does respond to what people’s consumption and work preferences are.