Participism
Encyclopedia
Participism is a libertarian socialist political philosophy consisting of two independently created economic and political systems: participatory economics
or "parecon" and participatory politics
or "parpolity". Participism is intended as an alternative to both capitalism
and centrally-planned state socialism
.
society
from the bottom up according to principles of direct participatory democracy
and replacing economic and social competition with cooperation. Supporters of what is termed a "participatory society" support the eventual dissolution of the centralized state
, markets, and money
(in its current form) placing it in the tradition of anti-authoritarian libertarian socialism. To elucidate their vision for a new society, advocates of participism categorize their aspirations into what they term a "liberating theory".
Liberating theory is a holistic framework for understanding society that looks at the whole of society and the interrelations among different parts of people's social lives. Participism groups human society into four primary "spheres", all of which are set within an international and ecological context, and each of which has a set of defining functions:
Within each sphere there are two components. The first component is the Human Centre, the collection of people living within a society. Each person has needs, desires, personalities, characteristics, skills, capacities, and consciousness. The second component is the Institutional Boundary, all of society’s social institutions that come together to form interconnected roles, relationships, and commonly held expectations and patterns of behaviour, that produce and reproduce societal outcomes. Through theses institutions come together to help shape who people are as individuals.
at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Shalom has stated that Parpolity is meant as a long range vision of where social justice
should reach its apex within the field of politics and should complement the level of participation in the economy with an equal degree of participation in policy and administrative matters.
The values on which parpolity is based are:
The goal, according to Shalom, is to create a political system that will allow people to participate, as much as possible in a direct and face to face manner. The proposed decision-making principle is that every person should have say in a decision proportionate to the degree to which she or he is affected by that decision.
The vision is critical of aspects of modern representative democracies arguing that the level of political control by the people isn't sufficient. To address this problem parpolity suggests a system of Nested Councils, which would include every adult member of a given society.
In a country or society run according to participism, there would be local councils of voting citizens consisting of 25-50 members. These local councils would be able to pass any law that affected only the local council. No higher council would be able to override the decisions of a lower council, only a council court would be able to challenge a local law on human rights
grounds. The councils would be based on consensus, though majority votes are allowed when issues cannot be agreed upon.
Each local council would send a delegate to a higher level council, until that council fills with 25-50 members. These second level councils would pass laws on matters that effect the 625 to 2500 citizens that it represents. A delegate to a higher level council is bound to communicate the views of her or his sending council, but is not bound to vote as the sending council might wish. Otherwise, Shalom points out that there is no point in having nested councils, and everyone might as well vote on everything. A delegate is recallable at any time by her or his sending council. Rotation of delegates would be mandatory, and delegates would be required to return to their sending councils frequently.
The second level council sends a delegate to a third level council, the third level councils send delegates to a fourth level and so on until all citizens are represented. Five levels with 50 people on every council would represent 312,500,000 voters (around the population of the United States). However, the actual number of people represented would be even higher, given that young children would not be voting. Thus, with a further sixth level nested council, the entire human population could be represented. This would not however be equatable to a global world state, but rather would involve the dissolution of all existing nation-states and their replacement with a worldwide confederal "coordinating body" made of delegates immediately recallable by the nested council below them.
Lower level councils have the opportunity to hold referendums at any time to challenge the decisions of a higher level council. This would theoretically be an easy procedure, as when a threshold of lower level councils call for a referendum, one would then be held. Shalom points out that sending every issue to lower level councils is a waste of time, as it is equivalent to referendum
democracy.
There would be staff employed to help manage council affairs. Their duties would perhaps include minute taking and researching issues for the council. These council staff would work in a balanced job complex defined by a participatory economy.
and radical economist Robin Hahnel
, among others. It uses participatory decision making as an economic mechanism to guide the production
, consumption
and allocation
of resources in a given society. Proposed as an alternative to contemporary capitalist market economies and also an alternative to centrally planned socialism or coordinatorism
, it is described as "an anarchistic economic vision", and a form of socialism
as under parecon, the means of production are owned by the workers.
The underlying values that parecon seeks to implement are equity, solidarity, diversity, workers' self-management
and efficiency. (Efficiency here means accomplishing goals without wasting valued assets.) It proposes to attain these ends mainly through the following principles and institutions:
In place of money parecon would have a form of currency in which personal vouchers
or "credits" would be awarded for work done to purchase goods and services. Unlike money, credits would disappear upon purchase, and would be non-transferable between individuals, making bribery and monetary theft impossible. Also, the only items or services with a price attached would most likely be those considered wants or non-essentials and anything deemed a need would be completely free of charge (e.g.: health care, public transportation).
Albert and Hahnel have stressed that parecon is only meant to address an alternative economic theory and must be accompanied by equally important alternative visions in the fields of politics, culture and kinship. The authors have also discussed elements of Social anarchism
in the field of politics, polyculturalism
in the field of culture, and feminism
in the field of family/kinship and gender relations as being possible foundations for future alternative visions in these other spheres of society. Since the publication of Albert's book "Parecon", other thinkers have come forward and incorporated these concepts which have rounded Participism into a more fully formed political and social ideology.
Participism holds that a participatory society must be respectful on an individual’s nature, inclinations, and choices and all people must be provided with the means to pursue the lives they want regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, or age. Feminist kinship relations are dependent on the liberation of women, LGBT
persons, youth, the elderly, transgender, and inter-sex individuals.
To extend liberation into daily home life, a participatory society aims to provide the means for traditional couples, single parents, lesbian
, gay
, bisexual, transgender
, and inter-sex parents, communal parenting, and multiple parenting arrangements to develop and flourish. It is believed that within the home and the community, the task of raising children must be elevated in status. Highly personalised interaction between children and adults, should be encouraged, and responsibilities for these interactions must be distributed equitably throughout society without segregating tasks by gender. A participatory society would provide parents with access to high quality day-care, flexible work hours, and parental leave options allowing them to play a more active role in the lives of their children.
The liberation of women and society requires reproductive freedom. Society must provide all with the right to family planning without fear of sterilization or economic deprivation, the right to have children through unhindered access to birth control
and abortion
, and the right to sexual education and healthcare that provides every citizen with information and resources to live a healthy and fulfilling sexual life.
In a participatory society the full exploration of human sexuality would be accepted and encouraged. Participism would encourage the exercise of and experimentation of different forms of sexuality by consenting partners.
, genocide
, and slavery which cannot be transcended easily. To begin the step-by-step process of building a new historical legacy and set of behavioural expectations between communities
, a participatory society would construct intercommunalist institutions to provide communities with the means to assure the preservation of their diverse cultural traditions and to allow for their continual development. With polycultural
intercommunalism, all material and psychological privileges that are currently granted to a section of the population at the expense of the dignity and standards of living for oppressed communities, as well as the division of communities into subservient positions according to culture, ethnicity, nationality, and religion, will be dissolved.
The multiplicity of cultural communities and the historical contributions of different communities would be respected, valued, and preserved by guaranteeing each sufficient material and communicative means to reproduce, self-define, develop their own cultural traditions, and represent their culture to all other communities. Through construction of intercommunalist relations and institutions that guarantee each community the means necessary to carry on and develop their traditions, a pariticipatory society assists eliminating negative inter-community relations and encourages positive interaction between communities that can enhance the internal characteristics of each.
In a participatory society, individuals would be free to choose the cultural communities they prefer and members of every community would have the right of dissent and to leave. Intervention would not be permitted except to preserve this right for all. Those outside a community would also be free to criticize cultural practices that they believe violate acceptable social norms, but the majority would not have the power to impose its will on a vulnerable minority.
of the libcom community (an internet community of libertarian communists) have criticized the parpolity aspect of participism for deciding beforehand the scale and scope of the councils whilst only practice, they argue, can accurately indicate the size and scale of anarchist confederations and other organizational platforms, especially since each region is unique with unique residents and unique solutions and unique wants. Anarchists argue that such blueprints containing detailed information are either dangerous or pointless. Furthermore, some anarchists have criticized the potential use of referendums to challenge decisions taken by higher councils as this implies both a top-down structure and an absence of vis-à-vis democracy
as they argue that referendums are not participatory.
They have also criticized the enforcement of laws passed by councils rather than the use of supposed voluntary custom or customary law which develops through mutual recognition rather than being enforced by an external authority, as they argue the laws passed by such councils would need to be.
in a hypothetical participatory society. However, in a debate with David Horowitz, Michael Albert argued that those criticisms could not apply to parecon, as it was especially designed to take them into account. New specific criticisms should then be formulated. For instance, in an answer to the comments of David Kotz and John O'Neill about one of their articles on the subject, Albert and Hahnel assert that they designed parecon understanding "that knowledge is distributed unequally throughout society", hypothetically answering to the famous criticisms of Friedrich Von Hayek on the possibility of planning.
Participatory economics
Participatory economics, often abbreviated parecon, is an economic system proposed primarily by activist and political theorist Michael Albert and radical economist Robin Hahnel, among others. It uses participatory decision making as an economic mechanism to guide the production, consumption and...
or "parecon" and participatory politics
Participatory politics
Participatory politics or parpolity is a theoretical political system proposed by Stephen R. Shalom, professor of political science at William Paterson University in New Jersey....
or "parpolity". Participism is intended as an alternative to both capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
and centrally-planned state socialism
State socialism
State socialism is an economic system with limited socialist characteristics, such as public ownership of major industries, remedial measures to benefit the working class, and a gradual process of developing socialism through government policy...
.
Overview
Advocates of participism envision remaking all of humanHuman
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...
society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
from the bottom up according to principles of direct participatory democracy
Radical democracy
Radical democracy as an ideology was articulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, written in 1985. They argue that social movements which attempt to create social and political change need a strategy which...
and replacing economic and social competition with cooperation. Supporters of what is termed a "participatory society" support the eventual dissolution of the centralized state
Sovereign state
A sovereign state, or simply, state, is a state with a defined territory on which it exercises internal and external sovereignty, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. It is also normally understood to be a state which is neither...
, markets, and money
Money
Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past,...
(in its current form) placing it in the tradition of anti-authoritarian libertarian socialism. To elucidate their vision for a new society, advocates of participism categorize their aspirations into what they term a "liberating theory".
Liberating theory is a holistic framework for understanding society that looks at the whole of society and the interrelations among different parts of people's social lives. Participism groups human society into four primary "spheres", all of which are set within an international and ecological context, and each of which has a set of defining functions:
- The politicalParticipatory politicsParticipatory politics or parpolity is a theoretical political system proposed by Stephen R. Shalom, professor of political science at William Paterson University in New Jersey....
sphere: policy-making, administration, and collective implementation. - The economicParticipatory economicsParticipatory economics, often abbreviated parecon, is an economic system proposed primarily by activist and political theorist Michael Albert and radical economist Robin Hahnel, among others. It uses participatory decision making as an economic mechanism to guide the production, consumption and...
sphere: production, consumption, and allocation of the material means of life. - The kinship sphere: procreation, nurturance, socialisation, gender, sexuality, and organisation of daily home life.
- The communityPolyculturalism"Polyculturalism" is a term for an assertion that all of the world's cultures are inter-related. It is thus opposed to the concept of multiculturalism, which its supporters argue is divisive. Polyculturalism was the subject of the 2001 book Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and...
sphere: development of collectively shared historical identities, culture, religion, spirituality, linguistic relations, lifestyles, and social celebrations.
Within each sphere there are two components. The first component is the Human Centre, the collection of people living within a society. Each person has needs, desires, personalities, characteristics, skills, capacities, and consciousness. The second component is the Institutional Boundary, all of society’s social institutions that come together to form interconnected roles, relationships, and commonly held expectations and patterns of behaviour, that produce and reproduce societal outcomes. Through theses institutions come together to help shape who people are as individuals.
Participatory politics
Parpolity is the political system first proposed by Stephen R. Shalom, professor of political sciencePolitical science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Shalom has stated that Parpolity is meant as a long range vision of where social justice
Social justice
Social justice generally refers to the idea of creating a society or institution that is based on the principles of equality and solidarity, that understands and values human rights, and that recognizes the dignity of every human being. The term and modern concept of "social justice" was coined by...
should reach its apex within the field of politics and should complement the level of participation in the economy with an equal degree of participation in policy and administrative matters.
The values on which parpolity is based are:
- freedomFreedom-Philosophy:* Free will, the ability to make choices* Political freedom, in the context of the relationship of the individual to the state* Economic freedom-Computing:...
- self-managementSelf-managementSelf-management means different things in different fields:* In business, education, and psychology, self-management refers to methods, skills, and strategies by which individuals can effectively direct their own activities toward the achievement of objectives, and includes goal setting, decision...
- justiceJusticeJustice is a concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law, religion, or equity, along with the punishment of the breach of said ethics; justice is the act of being just and/or fair.-Concept of justice:...
- solidaritySolidaritySolidarity is a Polish trade union federation that emerged on August 31, 1980 at the Gdańsk Shipyard under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. It was the first non-communist party-controlled trade union in a Warsaw Pact country. Solidarity reached 9.5 million members before its September 1981 congress...
- and toleranceTolerationToleration is "the practice of deliberately allowing or permitting a thing of which one disapproves. One can meaningfully speak of tolerating, ie of allowing or permitting, only if one is in a position to disallow”. It has also been defined as "to bear or endure" or "to nourish, sustain or preserve"...
.
The goal, according to Shalom, is to create a political system that will allow people to participate, as much as possible in a direct and face to face manner. The proposed decision-making principle is that every person should have say in a decision proportionate to the degree to which she or he is affected by that decision.
The vision is critical of aspects of modern representative democracies arguing that the level of political control by the people isn't sufficient. To address this problem parpolity suggests a system of Nested Councils, which would include every adult member of a given society.
In a country or society run according to participism, there would be local councils of voting citizens consisting of 25-50 members. These local councils would be able to pass any law that affected only the local council. No higher council would be able to override the decisions of a lower council, only a council court would be able to challenge a local law on human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
grounds. The councils would be based on consensus, though majority votes are allowed when issues cannot be agreed upon.
Each local council would send a delegate to a higher level council, until that council fills with 25-50 members. These second level councils would pass laws on matters that effect the 625 to 2500 citizens that it represents. A delegate to a higher level council is bound to communicate the views of her or his sending council, but is not bound to vote as the sending council might wish. Otherwise, Shalom points out that there is no point in having nested councils, and everyone might as well vote on everything. A delegate is recallable at any time by her or his sending council. Rotation of delegates would be mandatory, and delegates would be required to return to their sending councils frequently.
The second level council sends a delegate to a third level council, the third level councils send delegates to a fourth level and so on until all citizens are represented. Five levels with 50 people on every council would represent 312,500,000 voters (around the population of the United States). However, the actual number of people represented would be even higher, given that young children would not be voting. Thus, with a further sixth level nested council, the entire human population could be represented. This would not however be equatable to a global world state, but rather would involve the dissolution of all existing nation-states and their replacement with a worldwide confederal "coordinating body" made of delegates immediately recallable by the nested council below them.
Lower level councils have the opportunity to hold referendums at any time to challenge the decisions of a higher level council. This would theoretically be an easy procedure, as when a threshold of lower level councils call for a referendum, one would then be held. Shalom points out that sending every issue to lower level councils is a waste of time, as it is equivalent to referendum
Referendum
A referendum is a direct vote in which an entire electorate is asked to either accept or reject a particular proposal. This may result in the adoption of a new constitution, a constitutional amendment, a law, the recall of an elected official or simply a specific government policy. It is a form of...
democracy.
There would be staff employed to help manage council affairs. Their duties would perhaps include minute taking and researching issues for the council. These council staff would work in a balanced job complex defined by a participatory economy.
Participatory economics
Parecon is an economic system proposed primarily by activist and political theorist Michael AlbertMichael Albert
Michael Albert is an American activist, economist, speaker, and writer. He is co-editor of ZNet, and co-editor and co-founder of Z Magazine. He also co-founded South End Press and has written numerous books and articles...
and radical economist Robin Hahnel
Robin Hahnel
Robin Hahnel is a Professor of Economics at Portland State University. He is best known for his work on participatory economics with Z Magazine editor Michael Albert. He is currently a visiting professor at Lewis & Clark College....
, among others. It uses participatory decision making as an economic mechanism to guide the production
Production (economics)
In economics, production is the act of creating 'use' value or 'utility' that can satisfy a want or need. The act may or may not include factors of production other than labor...
, consumption
Consumption (economics)
Consumption is a common concept in economics, and gives rise to derived concepts such as consumer debt. Generally, consumption is defined in part by comparison to production. But the precise definition can vary because different schools of economists define production quite differently...
and allocation
Resource allocation
Resource allocation is used to assign the available resources in an economic way. It is part of resource management. In project management, resource allocation is the scheduling of activities and the resources required by those activities while taking into consideration both the resource...
of resources in a given society. Proposed as an alternative to contemporary capitalist market economies and also an alternative to centrally planned socialism or coordinatorism
Corporate Statism
Corporate statism or state corporatism is a political culture and a form of corporatism whose adherents hold that the corporate group is the basis of society and the state. The corporate group is typically comprised by political-economic power elites, for example those represented by the U.S....
, it is described as "an anarchistic economic vision", and a form of socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
as under parecon, the means of production are owned by the workers.
The underlying values that parecon seeks to implement are equity, solidarity, diversity, workers' self-management
Workers' self-management
Worker self-management is a form of workplace decision-making in which the workers themselves agree on choices instead of an owner or traditional supervisor telling workers what to do, how to do it and where to do it...
and efficiency. (Efficiency here means accomplishing goals without wasting valued assets.) It proposes to attain these ends mainly through the following principles and institutions:
- workers' and consumers' councils utilizing self-managerial methods for making decisions,
- balanced job complexes,
- remuneration according to effort and sacrifice, and
- participatory planningEconomic democracyEconomic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that suggests a shift in decision-making power from a small minority of corporate shareholders to a larger majority of public stakeholders...
.
In place of money parecon would have a form of currency in which personal vouchers
Labour voucher
Labour vouchers are a device proposed to govern demand for goods in some models of socialism, much as money does under capitalism.-Outline:...
or "credits" would be awarded for work done to purchase goods and services. Unlike money, credits would disappear upon purchase, and would be non-transferable between individuals, making bribery and monetary theft impossible. Also, the only items or services with a price attached would most likely be those considered wants or non-essentials and anything deemed a need would be completely free of charge (e.g.: health care, public transportation).
Albert and Hahnel have stressed that parecon is only meant to address an alternative economic theory and must be accompanied by equally important alternative visions in the fields of politics, culture and kinship. The authors have also discussed elements of Social anarchism
Social anarchism
Social anarchism is a term originally used in 1971 by Giovanni Baldelli as the title of his book where he discusses the organization of an ethical society from an anarchist point of view...
in the field of politics, polyculturalism
Polyculturalism
"Polyculturalism" is a term for an assertion that all of the world's cultures are inter-related. It is thus opposed to the concept of multiculturalism, which its supporters argue is divisive. Polyculturalism was the subject of the 2001 book Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and...
in the field of culture, and feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
in the field of family/kinship and gender relations as being possible foundations for future alternative visions in these other spheres of society. Since the publication of Albert's book "Parecon", other thinkers have come forward and incorporated these concepts which have rounded Participism into a more fully formed political and social ideology.
Feminist kinship
Outside of both political and economic relations there still exists the sphere of human kinship. Participism sees this as a vital component in a liberated society and applies feminist principles to this aspect of human relations. Feminist kinship relations are seen to seek to free people from oppressive definitions that have been socially imposed and to abolish all sexual divisions of labour and sexist and heterosexist demarcation of individuals according to gender and sexuality.Participism holds that a participatory society must be respectful on an individual’s nature, inclinations, and choices and all people must be provided with the means to pursue the lives they want regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, or age. Feminist kinship relations are dependent on the liberation of women, LGBT
LGBT
LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...
persons, youth, the elderly, transgender, and inter-sex individuals.
To extend liberation into daily home life, a participatory society aims to provide the means for traditional couples, single parents, lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
, gay
Gay
Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....
, bisexual, transgender
Transgender
Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles....
, and inter-sex parents, communal parenting, and multiple parenting arrangements to develop and flourish. It is believed that within the home and the community, the task of raising children must be elevated in status. Highly personalised interaction between children and adults, should be encouraged, and responsibilities for these interactions must be distributed equitably throughout society without segregating tasks by gender. A participatory society would provide parents with access to high quality day-care, flexible work hours, and parental leave options allowing them to play a more active role in the lives of their children.
The liberation of women and society requires reproductive freedom. Society must provide all with the right to family planning without fear of sterilization or economic deprivation, the right to have children through unhindered access to birth control
Birth control
Birth control is an umbrella term for several techniques and methods used to prevent fertilization or to interrupt pregnancy at various stages. Birth control techniques and methods include contraception , contragestion and abortion...
and abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...
, and the right to sexual education and healthcare that provides every citizen with information and resources to live a healthy and fulfilling sexual life.
In a participatory society the full exploration of human sexuality would be accepted and encouraged. Participism would encourage the exercise of and experimentation of different forms of sexuality by consenting partners.
Polycultural community
Human society is held to have long and brutal history of conquest, colonisationColonisation
Colonization occurs whenever any one or more species populate an area. The term, which is derived from the Latin colere, "to inhabit, cultivate, frequent, practice, tend, guard, respect", originally related to humans. However, 19th century biogeographers dominated the term to describe the...
, genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
, and slavery which cannot be transcended easily. To begin the step-by-step process of building a new historical legacy and set of behavioural expectations between communities
Community
The term community has two distinct meanings:*a group of interacting people, possibly living in close proximity, and often refers to a group that shares some common values, and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household...
, a participatory society would construct intercommunalist institutions to provide communities with the means to assure the preservation of their diverse cultural traditions and to allow for their continual development. With polycultural
Polyculturalism
"Polyculturalism" is a term for an assertion that all of the world's cultures are inter-related. It is thus opposed to the concept of multiculturalism, which its supporters argue is divisive. Polyculturalism was the subject of the 2001 book Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and...
intercommunalism, all material and psychological privileges that are currently granted to a section of the population at the expense of the dignity and standards of living for oppressed communities, as well as the division of communities into subservient positions according to culture, ethnicity, nationality, and religion, will be dissolved.
The multiplicity of cultural communities and the historical contributions of different communities would be respected, valued, and preserved by guaranteeing each sufficient material and communicative means to reproduce, self-define, develop their own cultural traditions, and represent their culture to all other communities. Through construction of intercommunalist relations and institutions that guarantee each community the means necessary to carry on and develop their traditions, a pariticipatory society assists eliminating negative inter-community relations and encourages positive interaction between communities that can enhance the internal characteristics of each.
In a participatory society, individuals would be free to choose the cultural communities they prefer and members of every community would have the right of dissent and to leave. Intervention would not be permitted except to preserve this right for all. Those outside a community would also be free to criticize cultural practices that they believe violate acceptable social norms, but the majority would not have the power to impose its will on a vulnerable minority.
Anarchism
Certain anarchistsAnarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
of the libcom community (an internet community of libertarian communists) have criticized the parpolity aspect of participism for deciding beforehand the scale and scope of the councils whilst only practice, they argue, can accurately indicate the size and scale of anarchist confederations and other organizational platforms, especially since each region is unique with unique residents and unique solutions and unique wants. Anarchists argue that such blueprints containing detailed information are either dangerous or pointless. Furthermore, some anarchists have criticized the potential use of referendums to challenge decisions taken by higher councils as this implies both a top-down structure and an absence of vis-à-vis democracy
Participatory democracy
Participatory Democracy, also known as Deliberative Democracy, Direct Democracy and Real Democracy , is a process where political decisions are made directly by regular people...
as they argue that referendums are not participatory.
They have also criticized the enforcement of laws passed by councils rather than the use of supposed voluntary custom or customary law which develops through mutual recognition rather than being enforced by an external authority, as they argue the laws passed by such councils would need to be.
Capitalism
The criticism of socialism could be applied to participism as well, as advocates of capitalism object to the absence of a market and private propertyPrivate property
Private property is the right of persons and firms to obtain, own, control, employ, dispose of, and bequeath land, capital, and other forms of property. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which refers to assets owned by a state, community or government rather than by...
in a hypothetical participatory society. However, in a debate with David Horowitz, Michael Albert argued that those criticisms could not apply to parecon, as it was especially designed to take them into account. New specific criticisms should then be formulated. For instance, in an answer to the comments of David Kotz and John O'Neill about one of their articles on the subject, Albert and Hahnel assert that they designed parecon understanding "that knowledge is distributed unequally throughout society", hypothetically answering to the famous criticisms of Friedrich Von Hayek on the possibility of planning.
External links and references
- Participatory economics website
- Vancouver Participatory Economics Collective
- Old Market Autonomous Zone (Winnipeg)
- Article about Parpolity: Political Vision for a Good Society by Stephen R. Shalom
- Stephen Shalom interviewed about Parpolity by Vancouver COOP Radio
- MP3 Audio of above interview with Stephen Shalom
- Projects for a Participatory Society web site