Realizing Hope: Life beyond Capitalism
by Michael Albert
Book Summary Information
Author: Michael AlbertEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-04-04
ISBN: 1842777211
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Zed Books
Book Reviews of Realizing Hope: Life beyond Capitalism
Book Review: Skirts the issues
Summary: 3 Stars
Michael Albert's "Realizing Hope" builds on his earlier envisionings of Parecon, or Participatory Economics, a strongly egalitarian and democratic social structure (see: Parecon: Life After Capitalism). It is necessary to have read the above book before reading this one, since most of the argumentation and presentation concerning Parecon itself is missing here. Instead, Albert's book seems to be mainly aimed at refuting some critiques and dispelling some doubts about his vision, and in engaging other leftist currents, in particular Marxism and anarchism.
However, this book is rather disappointing on both fronts. Though I agree with a lot of the views of Parecon at least as a form of society to work towards, he gives absolutely no additional practical guidelines or information on how to achieve it, making the undertaking look rather more than less utopian after reading this work. The various chapters discuss how different aspects of our current society (sports, science, foreign policy) would look in a Parecon society, and these are aspects that are too often ignored by socialist theorists, so Albert does well to write about them specifically. But all he ever says is basically "under Parecon, we wouldn't have these problems, since Parecon would be egalitarian and democratic". That is not what we want to know - what we want to know is how to get there, and what specific measures in the short and even medium run would be a way to achieve such social relations.
Moreover, a lot of Parecon's weaknesses are not at all defended here, such as Albert's vision of having all production organized by workers' councils. While I agree with that basic idea, Albert in no way explains how this would work practically, in particular considering the absurd amount of information the different councils would have to work with and the huge amount of procedures necessary, because of Albert's stipulation that everyone in some way affected by something must have a say. What Albert does not seem to realize at all is that the combination of his totally bottom-up approach with the requirement of involving anyone in any way affected would lead either to a massive bureaucracy for every-day decisions and a lot of coordination failures, OR, and I think this is more likely, it would lead to a national or international level larger council making most of the economy-wide decisions top-down for coordination and efficiency's sake. In effect, this would end up precisely like the traditional Marxist view of social organization, which he refuses to admit.
Additionally, the chapter containing his critique of Marxism mostly consists of strawmen reasonings or refusing to take things in context, and is wholly unconvincing. His critique of class reasoning was refuted by Marx himself ages ago and adds nothing new to the discussion, whereas his pointing out of the negative effects of 'democratic centralism' in practice is fair, but much less significant than he makes it to be, in particular considering my above conclusions.
Overall, I do think Albert's view has a lot going for it, and his Parecon society is probably the kind of thing we as left radical people want to work towards. Also, his theory of the coordinator class, albeit not wholly as original as he seems to imply, is important to take into account and a quite useful tool for analysis. But Albert has not used the opportunity of this book to improve his defense of the practical issues with Pareconism as it stands, and I have issues with a lot of his theoretical analysis. It would be better if there could be a synthesis of views between Albert (and Hahnel)'s Pareconism and the traditional Marxist views (Leninist or otherwise), since a lot can be learned from both. But this book does not convince me to support Pareconism as it is now.
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