A giant once walked here…

Although it will almost certainly never be regarded as such, I believe participatory economics is the greatest intellectual accomplishment in human history.

Decades ago, I thought that, if a parecon were ever to be won, it would not happen until at least 20 years after Michael Albert’s death. Now I think that parecon is unlikely to ever be won, because if people won’t stick together in the good times, then they won’t stick together in the bad times. And people won’t stick together in the good times.

That aside, I still consider myself and identify as a pareconist. I still talk about the theory to anyone who will listen, and I hand out copies of Parecon: Life After Capitalism to anyone who will take them. “Parecon” is literally on my license plate.

While it’s not accurate to say that the biggest impediment to winning parecon is Michael Albert himself, it is very accurate to say that Albert is a huge embarrassment to the economic theory he’s responsible for.

I can’t talk about parecon to anyone without making sure they understand that its principal author, like so many on the left, had his brain broken by Donald Trump. I have to make sure they assess the theory separately from the man who created it, because anyone who makes vote-blue-no-matter-who arguments like Mike does is going to be a dead weight on any effort to win anything positive in the United States, much less the overthrow of the capitalist system.

I’ve long maintained that, until pareconish theory is actually discussed and its implications grappled with, it will not be possible to win any substantive change in the United States. I still believe that; I’ve seen nothing to make me alter my theory of social change. The increased availability of information on the internet has threatened elite interests and caused them to change how they operate, but it hasn’t put fear in them sufficient to cause them to relent on, say, universal health care, which would be a change akin to the victories of Social Security in the 1930s or Medicare in the 1960s — the last time American elites felt truly threatened.

But pareconists of the future (if there are any) should not engage in any undue hagiography around Albert. Tell the truth about the giant he was when he wrote the criminally underrated What Is To Be Undone? (when he was only 27 years old), or the intentionally ignored Unorthodox Marxism (Marxism being the zombie that simply will never die, no matter how many times it’s shot in the head).

If The Poltical Economy of Participatory Economics isn’t the most important book ever written, then it’s its predecessor Quiet Revolution in Welfare Economics. Regardless, Parecon: Life After Capitalism is the last useful thing Albert wrote. Albert has spent the last several years a husk of what he once was — a man so dangerous that Hollywood A-lister Mark Wahlberg once used Mike’s website to make a political point — something unthinkable in 2024 as ZNet has long since devolved into pro-Democrat liberal claptrap, an online version of MSNBC.

Take up the inherent morality and strategy of participatory economics despite Michael Albert, not because of him.