Inclusive Democracy and Participatory Economics

Although Michael Albert is well aware of the existence of the Inclusive Democracy (ID) project, still, in his new book Parecon, Life After Capitalism he prefers to ignore its existence and follows the trouble-free path to compare Parecon with the disastrous central planning system and the narrowly ecological bio-regionalism, (or, elsewhere, with social ecology’s libertarian municipalism, which, in fact, offers no mechanism at all for the allocation of resources as it is based on a post-scarcity moral economy). However, even if it is may be a good tactic to demonstrate the ‘superiority’ of a proposal by avoiding a comparison with alternative viable proposals, it certainly does not help the advancement of the discussion, urgently needed today, on alternative proposals of social organisation. It is therefore the aim of this paper to fill this gap and compare and contrast the ID project with Parecon, which I consider to be the main systematic proposals of an alternative economic system recently advanced, so that readers can make up their own minds about the pros and cons of each project. I will begin with a discussion of the general nature of the two proposals and I will continue with the main characteristics of Parecon, which I will then discuss in detail in the rest of the paper, comparing them with the corresponding characteristics of the ID project.