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Paul comments on the events of 2014, the role of Zelenskyy, the deception of humanitarian intervention, and dying and killing for a nationalism that serves the oligarchs. Paul Jay is interviewed by Colin Bruce Anthes on theAnalysis.news.

• Transcript

Welcome back to theAnalysis.news. I’m Colin Bruce Anthes, and this is part two of my conversation with Paul Jay on the Russia-Ukraine war. Welcome back to our conversation with Paul Jay about the Russia-Ukraine crisis within the context of global capital and imperialism.

Something I wanted to talk to you about that you were mentioning in part one was [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy not necessarily being the angel figure that he has been presented as in a lot of the mainstream media. I wanted here to try and parse out the difference between being pro-war against Russia and being pro-Ukraine. My understanding is that a part of the reason Zelenskyy was elected in the first place was he had promised a peaceful negotiation with Russia and then was seen thereafter to be capitulating on some of those promises in order to appease some of the more right-wing and even far right-wing forces in Ukraine. Can you comment on where you see Zelenskyy’s position in all of this? What has his behavior been? What is a pro-Ukrainian citizen position at this moment?

Well, again, let me say I’m no expert on Ukrainian politics. I’ve talked to Ukrainian guests, and I’ve talked to Russian guests. I’ve been to Ukraine once, but it was years ago. In fact, part of my family comes from Ukraine. My great-grandparents emigrated from a little town outside of Kyiv, but that doesn’t mean I know anything particular.

Again, as someone who interviews people, I’ll tell you my understanding of it. First of all, the fact that this Jewish guy gets elected in Ukraine that has such a history of antisemitism says something positive about the Ukrainian people. I don’t think that should be diminished. I think, as I understand it, in the last elections, the Nazis who did run some candidates, not a single one, got elected. My understanding is they do play an outsized role in Ukrainian politics or at least did in alliance with the far-right sections of the Ukrainian oligarchy, including a TV channel that has outright racist, anti-Russian propaganda on it.

It’s my understanding that before the Russian Revolution, the far-right of Ukraine was actually quite pro-czar, and the far-right liked the Russian Orthodox Church and felt itself, to a large extent, connected to Russian nationalism but hated the Bolshevik Revolution. The Ukrainian Right went from being quite sympathetic to Russia under the Czar to then being very anti-Soviet, thus anti-Russian.

At any rate, the underlying issue, again, as I understand it, is that the area of Donbass and this section of the Eastern Ukraine industrial base was very dependent on cheap energy from Russia. I’m talking modern times here. So you have a split in the Ukrainian oligarchy. A section of the oligarchy wanted to be closer, and this is more represented in Western Ukraine, wanted to be closer to the E.U., wanted to be open to the West European markets, and sell cheap labor into the E.U. more easily. Whereas the East needed this cheap Russian energy, and you get this division.

As explained to me by Ukrainians, that’s an important factor in the split in the Ukrainian oligarchy. You’ve had this split, which is one section wants to exploit and plunder the Ukrainian people in alliance with the West, and one section wants to plunder and exploit the Ukrainian people and resources in alliance with Russia. Let’s never forget that this is all about a corrupt oligarchy that, in many ways, as we talked about in the previous segment, emerges out of the chaos of the ’90s and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Again, an oligarchy nurtured, supported, and given well wishes, money, arms, whatever, by the West and the United States, but also Western Europe gets very involved.

I have to also say, in the West’s support for the former Soviet republics, there’s also competition. I made a film in Albania in ’91, and I interviewed a guy who used to be the secretary⁠— not first secretary, a secretary to the Central Committee. He used to actually work directly with Ramiz Alia, who took over after Enver Hoxha. As things are starting to come apart in Albania because they lost their economic deal with East Germany, they used to have barter deals, and then it became cash, but they didn’t have any.

There’s a meeting between Ramiz Alia and the U.S. Ambassador. I think it is probably the Ambassador from Rome or an undersecretary. I’m not sure because I don’t think, at that point, there were diplomatic relations. At any rate, there’s a conversation with the American who says, we will help you. We will recognize the results of your elections. We’ll give you some economic support for transitioning to a more reformed open economy but on one condition⁠— only us and not the Germans. There was a big competition for who was going to carve up the spoils of what was left in the wreckage of the Soviet Union.

So none of this is straightforward. The only thing straightforward is that every capitalist class of every country does everything it can to enrich itself. That’s the only thing straightforward here. Then it gets more complicated.

So this very corrupt Ukrainian oligarchy, in 2014, the Russian section of the oligarchy had the presidency. The people grew to hate him because he represented this corrupt oligarchy. People had this dream that getting closer to the E.U. would bring heaven. It’s the same thing people used to believe when these places were socialist countries.

When I made this Albanian film, this would have been in 1990 or something; I interviewed a group of high school students, about 15-20 of them. The film is on my website, by the way. It’s called Albanian Journey: End of an Era in the documentary section. Anyway, I asked this group of about 10-15 students, and I said, what’s your vision of the West? One kid says, well, as far as we know it, we know it’s not paradise, but we don’t know what it lacks from paradise.

For decades, they believed the West was freedom, liberty, and richness. In fact, when the Albanians had this first open election, the guy who was running for president for the Democracy Party, the pro-American guy whose name escapes me right now. He was actually campaigning on television, saying, I’ve just been to Washington, and I’ve been given a blank check. He literally says this, if you vote for me against the communists, we will have whatever we want. I can fill in the number on the check. Well, people believed that. It’s easy to understand that in more recent times, a lot of people in the Western part of Ukraine, and not only the West, but there was certainly support for joining the E.U. In the East, too. Amongst the population, it wasn’t so straightforward. Lots of Russian-speaking people wanted to join the E.U. It’s not surprising, after decades and decades of dreaming about the West. Not only that, but if you were living in Ukraine, would you like to be in the E.U., imagining, of course, you’re going to be a Norway or Germany or something like that? They don’t want to look at Greece, where the European banks destroyed Greece. Or do you want to be in Russia under a Putin autocracy? I understand why lots of people want to be in the E.U. Whatever it is, whether they’re right or they’re wrong, it’s their decision.

At any rate, Zelenskyy, as far as I can make out, does represent a somewhat more democratic⁠— he is elected through a legitimate⁠— as any of these elections are legitimate; it’s legitimate. It’s certainly no less legitimate than the election that elects Putin. Are the American elections legitimate? I mean, it’s ridiculous when you can see that kind of money in play and gerrymandering. As much as any of these kinds of elections are legitimate, the Ukrainian one seemed to be, but I should back up one step.

So the Russian guy in 2014 is hated. There’s a popular uprising against him; that is the way I understand how this proceeds. There’s a right-wing coup within the uprising backed by the U.S. Embassy. The Ukrainians I talked to, progressive left-wing Ukrainians, say that the role of the U.S. Embassy is highly exaggerated by the outside Left. I don’t know if they’re right or wrong, but they say, of course, the Americans gave some confidence to the Ukrainian Right that the Americans would recognize them as legitimate. I don’t know that it goes more than that.

There’s this famous phone call where the American Ambassador is trying to choose who the next leader would be. It sounds legitimate, but the Ukrainians tell me this was a popular uprising, and it was hijacked by the far-right. Whatever it was, it was not the beginning of an American war against Russia. What the hell does that have to do with Russia? This is a Ukrainian event. This is a Ukrainian right-wing coup. This is a Ukrainian domestic issue. How is this a war against Russia because a pro-Russian Ukrainian leader is chased away? Hated and chased away.

In my role as an occasional challenger here, two things that should be said is that first off, we have the quote of talking about who the next leader should be. Second off, a lot of pro-Russians, I think, 39 of them in total, were burned alive by far-right forces in Odessa at that time.

Yeah.

Which was seen as and stirred up a lot of defensive sentiment from the pro-Russian side. And third off, that also accelerated the push again for NATO expansion, which we talked about in part one quite extensively. But that did up the ante in terms of Russia feeling the need for defense.

I think it was a union hall where those people were burnt. It seems the Ukrainian Nazis were responsible for that. It’s still a domestic Ukrainian event. Whether they’re Russian or not⁠— if it’s true what the Chinese are doing to the Uyghurs, do Saudi Arabia, should they⁠— they don’t have the military might, but if they did, or Turkey, for example, should Turkey invade China and save the Muslims? Do they have a right to do that? No. It’s a Chinese thing.

We’re living in a capitalist world, and horrible stuff happens. We have some norms in international law. It came out of the Nuremberg trials. It came out of the construction of the UN. If we as progressive people don’t stand up for these norms, who the hell will? So yes, it was a horrible thing that happened. I think it was in Odessa. Can you believe Mikheil Saakashvili, the most corrupt leader of Georgia, then gets hired to be Governor of Odessa? He’s got to be a CIA asset.

I remember a great thing Lewis Lapham said. I used to be the executive producer of this debate show on CBC in Canada. It was in the lead-up to the Iraq war, we had a debate show and Lapham was on. His magazine was Harper’s. We had an Iraqi who was in favor of a U.S. invasion⁠— the invasion had not yet taken place. The Iraqi was going on about all the crimes of Saddam Hussein, of which there were many. Saddam Hussein is the very definition of a vicious brutal dictator. At the political level, you can say other things because they actually had a coherent health care system. They had a coherent educational system. If you opened your mouth against Saddam Hussein, you could be tortured.

Lapham says to him; you know what, I know he’s a vicious, brutal dictator. But you know what else? That’s not my problem. You Iraqis want to get rid of that guy, get rid of him. You want to organize and overthrow him, do so. As an American, I’m against aggressive wars. I’m against the Americans trying to be the policeman of the world. I’m for international law. As long as Iraq is not an imminent threat to the United States, the United States has no right to go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein, and it makes absolutely no difference how terrible he is. I think that’s correct. The alternative is this bullshit of humanitarian intervention, which is always a cover and excuse for aggression.

So to get back to Zelenskyy, 2014 and the right-wing coup against this pro-Russian government is not an excuse. Now, between 2014 and 2016, there was a very vicious attack on Donbass. Donetsk and Luhansk have an almost; if I understand it correctly, I’ll keep saying that because I’m going based on what I hear from people I talk to. You have a kind of progressive-led independence struggle where the workers of Donetsk and Luhansk rise up against being ruled by this right-wing coup in Kyiv and declare independence. Its early stages have quite a progressive character, as I understand it. A lot of Russians, including the Russian Left, have a lot of sympathy for this declaration of independence against this right-wing government in Kyiv. The right-wing government in Kyiv promotes a virulent, toxic, anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism. There are even attempts to illegalize Russian as a language, which is insanity given the majority of the Ukrainian Army speaks Russian. The whole thing was so crazy.

Between 2014 and 2016, there was a lot of real vicious fighting when the Ukrainian government attacked Donetsk and Luhansk. There are a lot of civilians killed. I think, in that period, as many as 3,000 civilians were killed in the Donbass region. Although, more Ukrainian soldiers were killed, interestingly enough. I think about 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed. By 2018 and in the period⁠— this is according to the OSCE observers⁠— between 2018 and the end of 2021, there are very few deaths. I think the number of civilians killed is just over about 310 over that whole period of 2018 to 2021.

Yes, Zelensky⁠— something happens⁠— the tax on Donbass is reduced, at least from the 2014-2016 period. Yes, he’s elected to try to resolve these issues with Donbass peacefully and try to normalize relations with Russia in a more peaceful way. Yes, he doesn’t live up to that. As I understand it, because of the pressure of the far-right in the Ukrainian oligarchy and amongst the far-right fascist organizations, he compromises, conciliates, capitulates, and does not stand up to these forces the way he promised he would in the elections. He represents a section of the oligarchy. This is not a guy that emerged from⁠— because he was a comedian, and all this, he’s supposed to be a people’s hero. He may have emerged, but he emerged to become a member of the oligarchy. He wound up running a big media company. He was hiding money. I think that came out in the Panama Papers. So Zelenskyy never fulfilled, but it is interesting that that was the aspiration of the majority of the Ukrainian people. They voted for a guy who was supposed to diminish the antagonism, both with Donbass and with Russia.

Still, even as we get into 2022, there is no evidence either of⁠— and I’m quoting from Putin and [Sergey] Lavrov here, who claimed there was an imminent genocide that was going to take place against Donbass. I have not seen a shred of evidence. If there is, I can say I’ll change my mind. I don’t have a dog in that particular race. I have looked at the OSCE numbers. I’ve looked at all the reporting. I see no evidence that Ukraine was, in February, was about to invade Donbass.

Let’s put it in context. There were 150,000 Russian troops surrounding the Ukrainian-Russian border, and we’re to believe Ukraine is about to invade Donbass and give the Russians every excuse they ever could have wanted to invade? I mean, it really boggles the imagination. Sure, crazy stuff happens, so maybe. As I said, I’ll use this phrase again. I see no evidence of it other than claims by Putin, Lavrov, and others. Even Zelensky, a few days before, was saying he didn’t believe the Russians would invade. Well, if Ukraine were poised to attack Donbass, you would think he would have figured there was going to be a Russian response.

The short of all this is, yeah, Zelenskyy never lived up to his promises. On the other hand, again, I’ll say no imminent threat to Russia.

Well, I’d like to move into a little bit of the pragmatics of how we proceed from here. How do people who are looking to be pro-Ukrainian in this⁠— Ukrainian citizen, not Ukrainian nationalist, Ukrainian citizen, how they should proceed? How people should proceed if they find themselves in this situation? One of the things you said in the previous interview with me, and it’s the first time I had heard someone present, maybe we should roll over position. You said if the United States invaded Canada, you would not support fighting and getting lots of people killed in order to resist that takeover. You would start voting in the elections, start influencing the political system, and try and get independence through a referendum, but you wouldn’t insist on lots of people being killed, which you saw as a pro-oligarch position.

Let me just put another mark on that. If the Canadians elected a progressive government that had a serious climate change strategy, for example, started to phase out the Athabasca tar sands. If a Koch brother backed the United States, and the Koch brothers rely on the heavy crude from the Athabasca to feed their refineries in Texas, and I’m not sure the other one is in Idaho or somewhere. If we were talking about that situation it’d be a different situation. Fighting to defend a progressive Canadian government⁠— and the only thing I could imagine why the Americans would ever do this is over oil.

Imagine a Trump government with Koch, a Christian nationalist, far-right money, and Koch, apparently, himself is a Christian nationalist as far as I can make out. In general, his brother was a non-interventionist, but the other Koch died, and this guy is more aligned with the far-right than the other guy was. If they made a grab for invading the tar sands or trying to overthrow the Canadian government⁠— I mean, it’s pretty far-fetched, but if, that would be a different thing. It would partly depend on whether the Canadian government actually brought the Canadian Army to bear. Anyway, it’s a far-fetched scenario. I’m saying that I’m not a pacifist. There are certainly times I can understand where you have to fight and you have to wage an armed fight. I think I said in that previous interview if I was in France when the Germans invaded, yeah, I probably would have been a partisan. Blowing crap up assuming it was effective.

If I was a Ukrainian right now, and I say this in a somewhat guarded way because I’m not a Ukrainian and the nationalist feeling people have in Ukraine, I understand, but I wouldn’t fight to defend a Ukraine of the oligarchs. I wouldn’t fight so that the Donbass region— an actual invasion of Kyiv and overthrowing the government, I don’t know, but to defend Donbass or Crimea, absolutely not. There are enough people in Donbass that if they don’t want the Russians, then let them get organized to throw the Russians out, and let them demand a referendum. It doesn’t have to be done through this kind of fighting and destruction of city after city. It’s very possible that a majority of people of Donbass actually don’t want to be part of Russia. They want to be independent.

Who knows how Ukraine emerges from this? [Boris] Kagarlitsky made an interesting point. Now that the working class is so armed, you may have a different Ukrainian government emerge. This will be one of the biggest questions coming out of all this. Will the Ukrainians turn Ukraine back over to the oligarchs when this whole thing is over or are they going to demand a Ukraine without oligarchs? This is not a situation⁠— it is so chaotic. I mean, this is partly why you had the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. The Army was in tatters, and the economy was in tatters. In these kinds of chaotic situations with an armed working class, will a leadership emerge? I don’t know, we’ll see. It’s within the realm of possibility.

If I was a Ukrainian in that situation, yeah, I’d fight for that, but would I fight so that the Western Ukrainian oligarchs can regain control over Donbass? No. Why should anyone die for that? Do I think Donbass, Luhansk, and Donetsk, do they have a right to self-determination? Absolutely. Do they have to stay in Ukraine? No. This is the number two thing Ukraine should have done. They should have, one, declared no NATO before the invasion, and two, they should have announced a legitimate, internationally observed referendum in Donbass and asked the people what they wanted.

Now, of course, to do that, you’d actually have to have some democratic spirit. The Western Ukrainian oligarchs don’t have any real democratic spirit, so they just wanted to⁠— the other thing I think I said in the other interview, this kind of sovereignty, oh, we have to defend our sovereignty. Why? Well, if you’re part of the elites, it’s because you own stuff, and you have to defend your private property and your ownership because if you don’t defend your sovereignty, you’re not going to own that stuff anymore. If you’re a worker, you don’t own that stuff to begin with.

Now, again, if this was publicly owned and somebody was invading to take our public property away from us, yeah, I’d fight for that. Am I going to fight for which section of the oligarchs can control the resources and riches of Donbass? No. Now, I’m saying this⁠— now I know, at least, the section of the Left Ukrainians I’ve talked to, they’re not going to like what I just said. The nationalist fervor in Ukraine is very high, and people have lost their relatives, their sons, their daughters, their fathers, and so on. So many thousands of people have died. They say we’re not going to let them to have died for nothing. What if the truth is that they actually died for nothing? What if that’s the truth? I wouldn’t go all the way that way. If I’d been in Ukraine when this whole thing started, I would have said, don’t fight the Russians with small arms. Let us have hundreds of thousands of us block the highways and sit in front of those tanks and let the world see what we really want. Let’s have a general strike. Any place the Russians take over, everyone goes and strikes.

There were other ways to fight this and make it clear that the Russians claiming that the Ukrainian people want this was bullshit. People could have gone in the streets with signs that said, no to NATO, no to Russia, and Russians get out of our country in their hundreds of thousands. I don’t think tens of thousands of people should die for nothing. The kind of nationalism I’m hearing from the Ukrainian Left, they’re going to say, easy for you to say, sitting in the comfort of Toronto. They’re right. It is easy for me to say. So take it with a grain of salt, or if you’re a Ukrainian nationalist, call me full of shit, it’s okay. I think some of us have to say these things.

Yeah, I do not believe in workers, ordinary people fighting for a nationalism that simply serves the interests of the oligarchs, and that’s what the big fight was during the First World War. Are you going to fight to defend your own elites? To put it the way the Left put it, and Communists put it at that time, they said don’t fight for your own bourgeoisie. Yeah, well, let’s not. It doesn’t mean you don’t fight, but you don’t do it for that.

Well, I think, even though you are speaking from an outside perspective, I think it is important to bring these things up because it is possible that we could see those kinds of resistance down the road, and that does change the kind of things that outsiders are supporting. So it’s worth bringing up, and it’s worth mentioning. I do want to bring up a couple of challenges, though. Two that came from your own previous interviews. One with Boris Kagarlitsky. He said that he felt that Ukraine was winning the war. He felt that Russia was going to buckle, and he didn’t think it was necessarily that far off, in which case encouraging people to not resist in that way could be a big mistake. The other was from Yuliya Yurchenko, who is a Ukrainian activist, and her perspective was if they feel they are getting away with it, they will come back for more. The only way that she could see an end to the war and continuous plunder would be to push Russia out. That was the way she put it. How do you answer those challenges?

Well, if I was a progressive Russian, I might say the same thing Kagarlitsky said because I’m a Russian. How does a Russian tell Ukrainians to compromise and give in to Putin? Maybe a Left progressive Russian can’t say anything but that, maybe not, I don’t know. I said to Yulia, what I just said to you. I don’t think it’s worth fighting for. It’s not worth dying for. There are other ways to struggle. If you believe, you left-wing Ukrainians, if you believe that the majority of the people of Donbass don’t want to be part of Russia, if you believe, as she said she did, that the people of Donbass do have a right to self-determination, then make a deal. Let the Russians have, quote-unquote, so far all they’ve done is recognize it. Yeah, sure, they probably want to annex it, but if the people of Donbass don’t want that, then help them as a Ukrainian progressive, Left, whatever, help them to get organized against the Russian occupation, if you want to call it that. You don’t need to ally with the Russian oligarchy and Army to keep this, and the U.S, that certainly a section of the U.S. elite want this to go on forever, this war. You don’t have to be part of that.

Why don’t you help the people and say we, the Ukrainian Left, are in solidarity with the right of self-determination for Donbass. The way to get there is to have a compromise, make a deal to stop the killings, stop the war, and then we will support your struggle to assert either your independence from Russia or your independence from both Ukraine and Russia or whatever the hell you want. In other words, we will support a legitimate referendum but let the killing and destruction stop. To me, that’s a progressive position for Ukrainians to take. I also think it’s naive to think, okay, let’s say quote-unquote, Kagarlitsky is right, and the Ukrainians are going to win this. Two possibilities. Number one, Putin is going to blow up a small tactical nuclear weapon to make a point. I don’t know how legitimate a fear that is. It’s certainly being talked about a lot. The more likely scenario is assuming the Russians really are losing this, and I have no idea if they are. I mean, to me, I hear as many people say they’re losing it as people saying they’re winning it.

I have zero knowledge of what the truth of it is. Honestly, in some ways, it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other because I still think there needs to be a deal negotiated as quickly as possible, and then the people should continue their struggle from within that deal. Let’s assume Russia is about to lose, and they don’t blow up a nuclear bomb. Does anyone really believe they’re not going to come back again? They’re going to accept this? They’re not going to regroup and rearm and claim that this is all a horrible conspiracy of the West, and we Russians, we pull back just to stop the killing and death and then wait till they’re ready to do it again? I mean, it’s ridiculous. I mean, there is a point where real politics needs to kick in here, and Russia is too significant a power, military and economic, in spite of all the sanctions. Look at the ruble. It’s not doing so bad. As long as this is a fossil fuel world, you’re not going to weaken Russia the way you thought you were.

One, it’s ridiculous, I think, to think that they’re really going to win. Certainly, they’re not going to kick the Russians out of Crimea, and I can’t believe they’re going to kick them out of Donbass. Let’s say I’m wrong, it will still be, so what, because they’ll come back. The only, to me, democratic position to take is to stop the killing and insist on a legitimate referendum. If the Russians, and they probably won’t accept a legitimate referendum unless they’re absolutely sure they’re going to win it, and I don’t know that they would after all this. Then the people of Luhansk, Donetsk, and Donbass, they should fight, and organize. Fight against the occupation if that’s what they want. The same thing for Crimea. I hear the Ukrainians saying we’re even going to liberate Crimea. Number one, every poll that’s been taken in Crimea, in fact, says the majority of people actually do want to be part of Russia and if they don’t, then let them organize. They can have a general strike in Crimea, demanding they want to go back to Ukraine. People can fight. They’re not infants.

The answer may be exactly the same, but I was going to then raise a challenge from the other side, which is that⁠— especially the American public, but the Western public more generally, has perhaps been misled as to how easy a militaristic resolution can be found here. That there is a presentation that the entire world is against Russia on this one, and that’s not even close to the case. There is a sense that Russia is very weak militaristically, which it may be in some ways. I saw Colonel Doug Macgregor say that the West was spinning the fact that Russia wasn’t taking more land for a period of time as a remarkable spin, given that they had taken the land they had wanted to, or they had encroached as far as they wanted to. This is being spun as them being weak when they were in a very good position, he felt, and that Putin has consistently had about 70% support from the Russian people. I actually saw a poll that said in May, Russian support⁠— this is from the Levada Center, which is a pretty reliable outlet⁠— that it had actually increased to a very high, well over 70% rating among the Russian people. He’s got a lot of strength behind him. We have perhaps been misled to believe that militaristic resistance can resolve this in a short period of time when we’re looking at a forever war.

I don’t know. As I said, there are as many people saying the Russians are winning as losing. If I have to say what the consensus opinion is, it’s sort of a stalemate. The one guy I thought was interesting was this Russian Colonel, a General Colonel, a very high-level, retired military officer that was on one of the major Russian television shows about a month ago. He says the invasion was a debacle and that the Russian troops were not trained, the machinery and the whole invasion plan was chaos, and that the numbers of Ukrainian troops of at least 100,000 were and are getting fairly well trained. He said that the Russian weapons simply could not stand up to the modern weaponry that was being funneled into Ukraine. He said openly on the show, and it was very unusual because it’s virtually illegal to even call it a war. I’m not sure if he called it a war or not, but that kind of critique was certainly out of character, which the people I talked to say means that he must represent sections of the Russian military.

Kagarlitsky is saying that the Russian military and much of the apparatchik and others want this war to end. They all think both militarily on the ground and in terms of sanctions, it’s been a real disaster for Russia. Putin and his people are keeping this thing going. I have no idea what’s true or not true. Maybe there’s truth to all the different sides. I don’t know. All I know is tens of thousands of people continue to die, and that’s the center of the thing.

I am absolutely aghast at sections of the Left who defend the Russian invasion as defending legitimate security concerns. As if the tens of thousands of people⁠— and not just Ukrainians, but the Russian soldiers⁠— the tens of thousands of working people that are getting killed in this are all lost in some BS about⁠— what is it called? Multipolarity, a multipolar world. A bunch of geopolitical hokum. I’m telling you, and I won’t name any names, but I’m telling some of these people in this position that this is the position of a sociopath. America, Russia, these people are led by sociopaths. They don’t give a damn how many people are killed. Left-wingers aren’t supposed to be sociopaths. To talk about this war and simply dismiss the slaughter that’s going on, you’re into such abstract dogmatism. Maybe we should talk about this in another segment; to justify all this because a multipolar world is better, that’s insanity.

Well, why don’t we go onto another section then? We’ll end this one here for now. We’ll come to that next, as well as what should we all be supporting and how should we support it. How do we articulate the right goals and the right paths forward? So we’ll come back with Paul Jay in a third section.

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Long-time activist and author Michael Albert outlines his vision for a post-capitalist and classless economic system, known as participatory economics and based on his most recent book, No Bosses (Zer0 Books, 2021). In this first part, Paul Jay and Michael Albert talk about the importance of economic vision and the rationale behind re-organizing the workplace on the basis of self-management and a non-corporate division of labor.

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• Transcript

Hi, welcome to theAnalysis.news. I’m Paul Jay, and we’ll be back in a few seconds to talk about what a new, a different, a better society actually look like. I’m certainly one that’s convinced that to fight against the sort of distortion or depravity, as our next guest calls our current system, you also have to have a vision to fight for. So we’re going to be doing that discussion soon with Michael Albert and talk about his new book, No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World.

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In the preface to the book No Bosses by Michael Albert, Noam Chomsky writes the following.

“The chapters do not provide a complete blueprint, but rather the essentials, or what Albert calls a “scaffold,” for future experience to fill out. The scaffold describes and advocates a natural and built Commons, workers’ and consumers’ self-managing councils, a division of labor that balances empowering tasks among all workers, a norm that apportions income for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, and finally, not markets or essential planning, but instead participatory planning by workers and consumers of what is produced, by what means, to what ends. It makes a compelling case that these features can be brought together in a spirit of solidarity to establish a self-managing, equitable, sustainable, participatory, new economy, with a rich artistic and intellectual culture as well.”

Now join us to talk about this new book, No Bosses. Now joining us is Michael Albert. He’s a longtime activist, author of 20 books and hundreds of articles, and founder and staff at zcomm.org/znet. For our purposes today, most relevant, the co-author of a vision called Participatory Economics, sometimes Participatory Socialism, and as I said, his new book, No Bosses. Thanks for joining us, Michael.

Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it.

So, first of all, I have to admit something which most hosts, I don’t think, like to admit, but I’m going to admit it. I haven’t read the whole book yet. I’ve read, I think, significant pieces of it. I get a sense of the argument, but it’s really quite an in-depth analysis of what a new, different kind of society could look like. So we’re going to talk about some of the features of it.

Before I get you to lay out the very broad vision of what the scaffold is, why, at this point in history, did you decide this was the book you needed to write?

I suppose the honest answer is I didn’t. This vision emerged at the end of the ’60s during that period of upheaval. So the impetus to talk about vision came then. I guess the easiest way to describe how that happened was that myself and Robin Hahnel, who was my partner in developing this vision, constantly ran into the question, sort of put this way, we get what you don’t like. We understand what you don’t like, but what are you for?

Oftentimes it felt like the person who was asking that, and sometimes it was true, was basically saying, if you don’t have an answer to that question, shut up. You have no right being so critical. It’s the kind of thing that a parent might say to you, but you could also run into it in organizing, and we did.

Our response was basically, you don’t have to have a full alternative to slavery in order to be an abolitionist. I don’t have to understand everything about what a new economy is going to look like to oppose capitalism. After a while, we began to feel like that was a justified answer. It was sort of an accurate, true answer, but it was strategically dumb because a lot of the people who were asking really meant it. They really meant, okay, yeah, this sucks. This is terrible, but is there anything better? What are you for? So that kicked off the experience of trying to come up with an economic vision that was viable and worthy. Then we come to the present, and it’s not the first offering on that, but it’s an attempt that I hope is more succinct, tightly argued, and maybe better over this period of time. So I wrote it now to do something better than in the past.

Well, as I said in the intro, I’m a big believer that one needs a vision to fight for, not just against. In the 1930s, in the ’40s, even to some extent in the ’50s, but less so, the Soviet Union was that model for millions and millions of people. Rightly or wrongly, whether they really understood what was going on there, the state was at least a workers’ state. It certainly had full employment, health care and a very good educational system. It turned out that a lot of the accusations against it that it had become more or less a kind of centralized police state turned out to be true. A lot of people didn’t want to believe it.

That didn’t mean that one, that vision wasn’t something to fight for, at least in a broad sense. When that vision collapsed, it left a real gaping hole in the progressive movement around the world. Okay, now, sort of what you just said, we know what we don’t like, but what are we actually fighting for? I think this is a critical question in terms of organizing and the movement. The thing, too, is people wonder what’s going on with the support for [Donald] Trump and this kind of right-wing politics because, in some ways, it’s filling a void. The traditional American narrative is espoused either by corporate Democrats, or old-styled Republicans is quite discredited, and it’s not a vision that people will fight for.

So I think it’s very important to have this debate and discussion. It’s one of the things I’ve always wanted to do with theAnalysis.news. I’m glad we’re doing it, and I’m going to do a lot more of it, and of course, there isn’t one vision of what we’re going to fight for, but it’s sort of in the same ballpark. So give us a sense of what that scaffolding is.

I’ll do that in a second. Let me just say that I agree with you completely about the importance of it, and I’d even like to add an element. If you’re fighting against something that’s good, if the thing you’re fighting against is horrible as it is, how do you fight? How do you know what to do? How do you know what to reveal and what to argue for? How do you plant the seeds of the future in the present? So that’s one reason why vision matters. It’s because strategy isn’t rooted only at one end in the present. It also has to lead to where you want to go.

The other reason is the reason I think you were driving at, which is you could almost say psychological, but I think it’s more than that, which is that absent the positive, we’re entirely negative. Negativity has a kind of a tone, dynamic and culture associated with it, which is very off-putting. So we don’t attract people because they feel like, well, I’m supposed to make sacrifices, struggle and reorient myself, and you won’t even tell me what for? They also feel like, well, I’m supposed to do all those things, and the sort of vibes that you give off is so negative, and I don’t want to do it. So we need vision in order to grow now, not just because it would be nice to have it down the road when there’s something to implement.

Okay, so what’s the scaffold, you asked? Well, first of all, what’s the logic of it? It’s those things which we can say confidently now are needed, are necessary, if the future— and this is an economy we’re talking about in the book, No Bosses. Other things are also important: kinship, the political system, community, and culture, but the book is about the economy mostly.

What things can we say are needed and essential if this future economy is going to have the attributes we want it to have? Not a full blueprint for the reasons Noam gives and one more. One, we don’t know enough to do a blueprint. We’re going to learn all sorts of new things as time passes. You can’t blueprint them in advance. That’s a point that Noam makes when he makes this argument.

But there’s another reason, I think that I feel, which is not our place. It’s not our place to tell future citizens the details of how they’re going to function. The only thing that is our place to do is to try to hand them a world in which they can function the way they want to, in which they can manage their own lives, in which they do have equity, in which they do have solidarity, and so on. So the scaffold is those components of a new society which are essential and without which you’re not going to have that. 

The most obvious one is the one that has been pronounced or argued for forever, for a long time, which is that you can’t have private ownership of the means of production. You can’t have capitalists. You can’t have 1% who own everything and who therefore administer everything and determine the outcomes for everything. In place of that, participatory economics says, let’s have a Commons of productive assets.

It really sets aside ownership completely. It’s not capitalists who own it. It’s not anybody who owns it. It’s this Commons of productive assets. The question then becomes, well, how do you get to use it? How does a workplace get to use the resources and the tools and so on? The idea is productive Commons.

So what you’re about to describe, the scaffolding, is a building that’s going to get erected after there’s been a transition, we don’t know for how long, from existing capitalism to essentially the abolition of private ownership to ownership by the Commons. So there’s quite a transition that’s going to have to take place, but that’s not what the book is about. The book is about what this might look like once you have had this transition. Am I right in that?

Basically, yes. Over on the side here, there’s a file called Transition. It’s the next project. Yes, we now have what we have. We now have what? Private ownership, the means of production; we have what we call a corporate division of labour. That’s a division of labour in which about 20% of the workforce does empowering tasks, and 80% does disempowering tasks. We have remuneration income for property, for bargaining power, and to an extent, for output, and we have markets and or central planning. We really do have both in the United States. Amazon is essentially planned, and Amazon is as big as many economies. So we do have central planning, and we do have markets and a combination. Each of those key components annihilate things that I feel— and this is a value question— things that I feel that Robin and I felt at the beginning characterize a good economy. We characterize a good economy as people controlling their own lives. We call it self-management, diversity rather than homogenization. Solidarity, people actually being concerned with one another’s wellbeing, instead of a rat race in which you get ahead at the expense of somebody else, and instead of remuneration for power and property, remuneration for how long you work, how hard you work, and the onerousness of the conditions under which you work during socially valued labour and then participatory planning.

Those are the scaffold things. So the scaffold isn’t the whole building. The whole building is even longer in the future. You describe transition and then a situation where you’re creating the new society or creating the new economy and other elements of the society. Okay, the scaffold is really the key component that you have to get so that that thing that you’re creating, that whole new society, is going to have the attributes you want it to have. In the case of the economy, it’s going to be classless, and it’s going to be self-managing, et cetera.

Well, if it’s classless, then in terms of [Karl] Marx, Engelism, essentially what does communism look like? What Marx and [Friedrich] Engels envisioned after this period of socialism, where you still have classes, a state, and you still have laws and cops and armies, you’re envisioning, what does it look like after that?

Well, yeah, but you just lined up a bunch of things, cops and state and so on, and those are additional discussions. I don’t think that a good society doesn’t have a political system. If you don’t want to call that a state because the word state implies fierce hierarchy, okay, but a political system I think it does have.

I even think it’s probably not something good to go off on, but in a good economy, planes would fly, let’s say, let’s assume that’s the case. You wouldn’t have random people as pilots. You would have the people who are piloting the plane have to be trained and able to pilot the plane. Well, now there’s more that you would have in a good economy. They would be remunerated like everybody else, and they would have a balanced job. They would do disempowering as well as empowering work. But part of what they would do is fly the plane. You wouldn’t say, well, the pilot has a lot of power while flying, which is true. The pilot has the lives of 500 people in his hands or her hands.

Yeah, I hope they’re not going to have a big discussion about how to fly the plane while they’re 3,000 ft up in the air.

No, so you want a good pilot who’s capable of—

I don’t know about participatory—

No, the participatory part will get to, but it’s not that, clearly, and it shouldn’t be that about policing either. That is to say, the idea that everybody is going to deal with the kinds of violations that occur. We don’t assume all of a sudden that everybody is Mother Teresa. People are still people. There will still be drunkenness. There will still be abuse. There will still be less of everything, but it doesn’t disappear. So, if it doesn’t disappear, the way that society deals with it has to be skilled, it has to be learned, it has to be capable, and it has to be under control.

So lots of things that exist now, for example, there are some people who would say, look, factories pollute. They are undignified in what they do, so let’s get rid of them. Okay, that’s just silly, I think. You’re going to have workplaces. You’re going to have places where people come together and do work. What you want to do is make it humane, self-managed and all the other things.

So back to the pilot. The pilot in a participatory economy pilots, does it well, is trained and is capable, but also does, at other points in time while not piloting other activities. Let’s say tending to the people on the plane, going up and down the aisles and helping people out or maybe tending to cleaning up the airport. I don’t know, but a mixed combination of tasks.

Why? Well, one of the key themes of participatory economics is that between labor and capital, there’s another class, a coordinator class. People who, by virtue of their circumstances in the economy— so in that sense, it’s a sort of a Marxist argument— by virtue of the circumstances in the economy have more empowering work. Their work gives them a degree of knowledge, awareness, confidence, connections to other people, and access to decision-making levers, and 80% are the opposite. Their work deadens, exhausts, reduces skills, and disconnects. So you get a situation where the 20% become a new ruling class over the 80%.

The solution to that in participatory economics, or part of the solution to that, is that you don’t give 20% of the workforce all the empowering work. You instead define jobs. This is the new division of labour. Define jobs in such a way that everybody has a mix of responsibilities and tasks which are comparably empowering. So everybody is prepared to participate in the workers’ Council and also in the consumers’ Council in a self-managing way, rather than 80% being so exhausted, deadened, devoid of information about what’s going on and lacking confidence that they don’t want to participate and after a while don’t. Twenty percent who set the agendas, do the debating, the arguing and make all the decisions and rules. That’s a piece of participatory economics which is connected to and motivated by the desire to get rid of not just an owning class on top but to get rid of a class of empowered employees on top by having that empowerment spread out. So that’s one of the key scaffolding features. 

The argument is if you don’t do that, if you keep the old corporate division of labor, no matter what people’s will is, no matter what people’s inclinations and their heartfelt desires are, that’s not the issue. The structure will impose a class division and class rule. So you need to change the corporate division of labour to balance job complexes.

Well, they kind of route this in where we are and might be. The world you’re describing only comes into being if there’s, as I said before, a kind of transition from a primarily privately owned economy to a socially owned economy, whatever form that might take. To some extent, it’s a different discussion because you still have classes, and you still have probably a mix of public ownership and private ownership.

To get where you’re at, and I don’t know if, in the book, I’m not sure it goes there, but assuming humanity survives our current circumstances of the climate threat and nuclear threat and so on, you’re at a whole other stage of human society. At this point, aren’t you into artificial intelligence and robotics? The whole nature of work is going to have changed. I don’t know if there are any brain-dead menial jobs anymore.

Yeah, I have to admit, I’m not too impressed with that kind of formulation. But let’s go 20 years into the past.

No, what do you mean you’re not impressed with that? What aren’t you impressed by?

I am not impressed with what’s attributed to artificial intelligence and what it’s going to be able to do. I’m not impressed with the notion that there’ll be no onerous work. There will be, and it will have to be shared. But if there isn’t, great. Let me go 20 years into the past because I think what we’re talking about here is relevant now.

In Argentina, when there was an economic crisis and tons of factories were taken over by the workforce, they actually weren’t taken over by the workforce in the way we think of it. What happened was the capitalist punted. The capitalist decided this thing was no longer working for me, and they left. The coordinator class inside those workplaces said to themselves it was already failing without the owner, it sure as hell going to fail, I’m going too. They left also.

So you had all these workplaces of diverse kinds that were void of their ownership sector and void of their coordinator class sector, but the workers couldn’t go anyplace, so they took over. That was a remarkable kind of situation. When the workers took over, interestingly, they formed workers assemblies or workers councils, I like to call them, and instituted a kind of democratic decision-making voting. Not exactly what we call self-management in participatory economics, but effectively a long ways toward it. They also pretty much levelled the wages. So they went a long ways toward equitable incomes. They even, in some cases, took into account people’s personal circumstances. So they did that, too.

I was in a room with about 50 representatives from around Argentina, from occupied workplaces, and I’ve told this story before because, to me, it’s so powerful. Before the sort of formal section, I was there to speak. Before the formal section, people are just chatting and talking with each other, and it was very light and upbeat. People from across the country are meeting other people, and they are all members of this small group of people who have taken over factories.

We start, and I say, let’s go around the room, and we start doing that with a little bit of reporting on their circumstances. By the time the 7th person, and it was literally the 7th person, they’re making this brief report, not only was the room no longer upbeat, but it was maudlin, and some people were crying. They literally have tears in their eyes. The 7th person said this, I would never have thought. I could never imagine that I would say maybe Margaret Thatcher was right. We took over the workplace, we instituted democracy, we made our wages fair, and we began to work and not only that, we made the workplace succeed. We got it back on track, but now all the old crap is coming back. And that’s what one through seven said, also in various ways.

At that point, I interrupted and said when you took over, what did you do about the various jobs? What did you do to deal with the fact that the engineers and the finance people had left? They said, well, obviously we had to do the jobs. So people took responsibility for doing the jobs. So I said, so you had a new person who was, for example, doing the accounting and the financial officer. They said yes. They didn’t really understand the question because it seemed like it was the only possible thing you could do. Then I argued, and I think it’s the case that what happened was not what they thought, and they admitted that what they thought was human nature was destroying their experiment, that human nature was at fault for bringing back all the alienation and bringing back the hierarchy against their desires.

I argued that, no, that’s not what happened. What happened was you maintained the old division of labor, and even though you populated those jobs with working people whose backgrounds were the same as everybody else’s backgrounds, nonetheless, over time and not very long, those people filling those jobs by virtue of what they were doing and the responsibility that they saw themselves as having begun to see themselves as more worthy, as deserving, more. They also came to the meetings with more information and knowledge, and confidence. They started doing the agendas, and they just kept nodding. Then they said, yeah, that’s exactly it. I don’t even go to the meeting anymore, one of them said, and that’s an institution at work.

That’s what it means to talk about an institution mattering. This institution, the corporate division of labor, was overthrowing the will of the workplace. They really wanted justice. They really wanted equity. They really wanted their experiment to be different, and all the old crap was coming back. So participatory economics mattered right then. In other words, what would they have done differently? Is that what you’re going to ask?

Well, first of all, let’s parse this out for a second. This kind of worker’s ownership, worker’s collective in this day and age, it happens. You have an enormous one in Spain called Mondragon, and there are smaller experiments, but they’re still operating within essentially a capitalist world, and they don’t change the nature of that. Even though Mondragon in Spain is enormous, it’s one of the larger companies, I think, in Spain. It has not changed the fundamental character of Spanish capitalism. Although that being said, it’s far more democratic for the workers. They’re much more careful if they have layoffs. They keep paying people and so on. So it’s better, but it’s not where your book is at by any means.

Now, that being said, whether it’s now or later, how do you deal with the fact that someone’s going to have to keep the books and know something about bookkeeping? So what are you going to change about the division of labor?

So it’s true that somebody has to know something about bookkeeping, but it’s not true that somebody has to do only bookkeeping and somebody else has to do only cleaning the floors. It could be the case that we essentially, it’s what we did at South End press years and years and years ago. It could be the case that the workforce says, here are our tasks. These tasks all have to get done, that’s true. Here’s how we’re going to divide them up. We’re going to divide them up in such a way that each person has a mix of tasks and responsibilities such that their work conveys to them comparable empowerment to the other workers. You can look at it in their case or in a hospital. It means, okay, the surgeon no longer does only surgery. I mean, it’s clear what it means. It’s sort of contrary to our expectations that people should do a mix of things, and some of them are empowering, and some of them are not. Some of them are disempowering even.

Yeah, but hang on here. A surgeon can go clean floors. I don’t think it’s a particularly good use of all those years of training, but somebody who has been trained to clean floors can’t go do surgery.

Correct, so that’s your transition. I want to address both of those things. Is it a good use of the surgeon’s time to do something other than surgery? If you look at just the surgeon and you look at just the patience of that one surgeon, the answer is no. It’s idiotic. I agree with you. But if you look at the whole economic system, no, it is a good use of time.

Why? Because the surgeon, and that is to say, everybody who does empowered work, also doing disempowering work means that the 80% of the population whose upbringing, circumstances, schooling and situation at work deny their capacity to do anything empowering and thus gets no empowering work out of them is undone, and we unleash the capabilities of those people.

The society you’re talking about, anyone with the skill and inclination to go to medical school can go. You’re not going to have the barriers to medical school we have now.

What you’re not going to have is, you go to medical school, and you become a doctor, but you’re not just a doctor. You’re also a nurse or custodian or whatever. You’re doing a mix of things. You say to yourself— I’ll let you off the hook for being the foil here. Margaret Thatcher would say, Michael, you’re crazy.

The doctor, let’s say the surgeon is doing 40 hours of surgery, and you’re telling me it makes sense to have a situation in which that talented individual, instead of doing 40 hours of surgery, does, let’s make it simple, 20 hours and does 20 hours of nursing, cleaning and whatever else. I say back, yes, and she says to me, but we lose half of our surgery, and I say back, yeah. You’d be right if the reason why the people who aren’t doing empowering work aren’t doing it is that they are genetically incapable of doing it, which is what you think, Margaret, but that’s not the case.

To make this argument in front of, say, an audience speaking or something, I say, think back 50 years and put all the surgeons in a stadium. It’s a big stadium. Put all the surgeons in the stadium and look around. What do you see? Right away, somebody says, well, they’re almost all white men. I say, yes, why do those surgeons say that they are in the stadium and the rest of us aren’t? The women aren’t in particular, and the Blacks aren’t, Latinos aren’t. What do they give as their answer? They say it’s because we’re good at it, and they’re not. We’re capable of it, and they’re not. Of course, that was nonsense. It’s nonsense now that the coordinator class is good at empowering tasks and capable of empowering tasks, and the working class isn’t. The working class is downtrodden and prevented in the same way that women and Blacks were, of different dynamics, but to the same degree as women and Blacks were before.

Let me just say one last story.

I think you’re mixing up time periods here.

Well, I certainly am. I’m comparing now and then.

No, but in imagining this future, it would be more like if you’re talking would stay within hospitals and doctors, it’d be more like what the Cubans have done where you have way more doctors and way more accessibility to medical school. In fact, being a doctor is practically an ordinary job because it’s so easy to get a medical education. You don’t need to tell those doctors to go wash some floors. You open up the doors of the medical school, so anyone that has the inclination and ability becomes a doctor. It doesn’t have to be a special privilege job.

That last step there was if everybody. Not everybody has the capacity. I couldn’t be a doctor. Not everybody can be a doctor.

I don’t want to be a doctor. Nor could I. I’m terrible at math.

But there’s 80% of the population that’s not doing empowering work, and there’s 20% that is. If it’s the case, as I think it is, that in the 80%, I don’t know what to call it, the spectrum, the spread, the distribution of capacities is marginally different from the distribution of capacities in the 20%. Then if you open the doors to them doing the empowering tasks they’re capable of, there is nobody available to do disempowering work.

Well, we don’t have too much time in this segment. We are going to do more segments because we’re going to keep talking and even increasingly fighting, I hope. What do you mean by empowering work? What does that mean? Like I used to work on the railroad, I worked on the railroad for five years. I fixed freight cars. Is that empowering work? Fixing a freight car?

I don’t know. Here’s the answer, though.

Because I loved it. I loved doing it, but I don’t know what’s empowering about it.

Well, here’s the answer.

I’ll tell you one thing it was because we had a union and because we fought for our rights.

It was better than if you didn’t.

It was dignified because we made it so.

If we have a workplace and we have a whole lot of tasks that have to get done, the empowering tasks are the ones that convey to the person doing it, attributes which contribute to being able to express their will and their desire, argue for it, participate and have the inclination to do so. The disempowered tasks have the opposite implications for the people doing them.

So in the Argentine example, I gave you, the subset of the workforce and the workers were from the same backgrounds. The subset of the workforce doing those empowering tasks became elevated. It began to dominate the meetings. It set the agendas. It was the one doing the talking, and the disempowered workers were the ones who basically had to choose among them who they would support or something. It sounds a little like U.S. elections. Then they would stop doing it, they would back off, and the empowered workers would start paying themselves more.

Coordinated class consciousness and working-class consciousness are maybe important to talk about. You brought up one other thing that I just want to address for a second because a lot of people might feel like, come on, Michael. You’re saying here that everybody can do a set of empowering tasks efficiently to have an overall balanced job. Isn’t that a big assumption?

Back to Argentina. I’m talking to a woman in a glass factory. Remember, they kept the old division of labour. She was now essentially the Chief Financial Officer. She was doing the accounting, and she was keeping the books. So I asked her what she had been doing before, and she had been functioning at this glass furnace, and she showed it to me. I would have lasted maybe one day, probably two hours. Incredible heat, just ridiculous. Doing the same motions over and over again. Then the owner left. The accountants left. The engineers left, and she became the accountant.

How did you do that? I asked, what was the hardest thing to learn? It was your question in a very narrow time frame and in a very precise case. I said, what was the hardest thing to learn? She didn’t want to tell me. She didn’t want to talk about that. So I said, well, was it learning accounting concepts? No. Was it learning how to use the computer? No. Was it learning how to use a spreadsheet? No. Well, was it learning how to present the case? No. So I said, well, please tell me. So she said, first, I had to learn to read.

So this person went from being a working-class person doing the same rote movements over and over in front of a furnace, which is probably taking years off her life, to being the person who was doing the accounting, the books and reporting on it in a period of a few months while having to learn to read on the way.

Now, I admit it was much for me to believe, but it was there. The capacity of people is a lot greater than we let on. You and I couldn’t be a doctor or surgeons for a lot of reasons. Not wanting to, probably not having the dexterity, not having the, whatever, but everybody can do empowering tasks. Everybody can do empowering tasks. The number of people who work on assembly lines—

I think you’re putting too much onus, too much emphasis on the job as opposed to the relationship to power in the enterprise.

That’s just because it’s what we’re talking about.

Well, no, maybe you are, but I wasn’t. I’m saying that you could be the person in charge of picking up garbage cans, but you could also be a member of the management committee. At the same time, you could be a member of the HR committee.

That’s a balanced job complex.

That’s what?

In other words, what participatory economics is saying is that—

I don’t have to be a part-time accountant. I need to be on a decision-making body that has power, and I can still have my job picking up garbage cans.

Fine, absolutely, just like the doctor can be a surgeon and pick up garbage cans, agreed?

No, I’m not saying that. The surgeon should be a surgeon, but the cleaner should also be on the management committee, not just picking up garbage cans. I’d frankly be quite happy if the surgeon just kept doing surgery.

Yeah, most of the nurses wouldn’t be happy. Did you notice the strikes that are going on right now in the hospitals? One of the most notable things is that doctors—

It’s not collectively owned. The power starts from the ownership and then the structure of how that ownership is managed and that powers executed.

This is our dispute.

Not the nature of the job description.

This is our dispute. Our dispute seems to be— correct me if I’m wrong. On the one hand, power flows from ownership, explicit control, et cetera, which is true in existing firms. It’s not true in, say, Soviet factories under the prior system; there was no owner. So it didn’t flow from ownership; it flowed from something else. I’m saying it flowed from the distribution of circumstances, and we’re talking about this entirely. There’s also the allocation system to talk about, and there’s also the fact that there is no ownership anymore. There are also self-managed decision-making procedures by the Council inside the workplace.

All I’m saying is that all that can be subverted by private ownership. You’re saying that, and I’m agreeing with you. I’m saying it can additionally be subverted by a distribution of tasks, a division of labour, which causes some people to be in a position to make decisions, inclined to make decisions and have the information to make decisions, and other people not. You’re saying back to me, okay, wait a second. If somebody is doing some rote task, a repetitive task and picking up garbage, whatever it is, they could be on the decision-making board or whatever. You had a name for it. I forget what you called it.

A management committee, leadership committee, whatever you want to call it.

So they could be on the leadership committee. Alright, so here’s the problem with that, I think. On the one hand, you’re saying the same thing as me. If the person has a mix of responsibilities that caused them to be prepared to participate and make good decisions and make them well, or at least to participate in making good decisions, they’re not [Joesph] Stalin, to participate in making good decisions well, then that’s a balanced job complex, but what you’re describing, I don’t think, does that.

First of all, it has this management committee, which apparently has a lot of power over everybody else but second of all, it has somebody who is doing this rote stuff all the time, then making decisions about the workplace. They have to have information about the whole workplace. They have to have the confidence to access that information, et cetera, et cetera. If you just take somebody and you invite them to a meeting at which there are 14 lawyers and 14 engineers and accountants and so on, and then there’s somebody sitting there who spends all day doing stuff that gives them no particular knowledge relevant to the decision making, and you say, okay, you can attend. It does nothing.

Actually, I don’t agree with that. We’re getting long here now. You should watch these interviews I did with Jane McAlevey on how she does bargaining now, not in the future. Where when she meets with the employer, and she’s either advising or in the leadership of the negotiations on behalf of the union, she invites the entire workplace.

Which is fine. I would, too.

In the end, there are representatives to get elected, and they do choose who’s going to speak. There is going to be a certain level of practicality where you need some kind of decision-making that isn’t going to involve everybody.

Well, wait a minute. What do you mean decision-making isn’t going to involve everybody?

Well, let’s say should we hire so and so. You’re not going to have a factory of 5,000 people where 5,000 people meet to decide if you’re going to hire somebody.

Exactly right, and who would hire? The people who are most affected would be the ones who would be most involved in that decision. For instance, we’re hiring to be on a team that you and I are on. Well, then you and I are going to have a lot of say because if we don’t like that guy, the team is going to pop.

Of course, but you also have to have an overview of the entire enterprise. So you’re going to have to have an elected body that has an overview of the whole enterprise.

Maybe everybody should have a significant overview of the whole enterprise. Let’s say we’re going to have a decision about the hours of work. What time work starts, what times it ends, how the workplace, et cetera, et cetera. Some decisions affect overwhelmingly just everybody. Those are the kinds of decisions that everybody is involved in. Those are big policies. Then there are decisions that affect a relatively small; this is self-management. There are decisions that affect overwhelmingly a smaller group subject to those prior decisions. So they’re working within those globally made decisions, and they’re making decisions that affect themselves much more. So they do that, that’s fine. The point is—

Before we get more granular about this, because it’s a little bit of one foot in today and one foot in tomorrow, as part of the argument here, we’re going to do another segment about this because we are going to have a fight about how you have a modern economy without some kind of planning. I know you’re saying you don’t need—

It’s called participatory planning. Absolutely you do need planning.

Okay, well, let’s find out in the next segment what that’s going to look like.

Okay.

Anyway, write in, send us your questions and comments, and pick up Michael’s book. It’s called No Bosses. And where do they get your book?

As far as I’m aware, I’m so isolated because of COVID. It’s in stores, and it’s online, on Amazon, all the various online purchase places. It’s available everywhere. I know what you’re pointing to. Let me point them to one thing. There’s a site called nobossesbook.com, and all the reviews are there that have come out so far. The book has only been out two months, basically, exactly. There are, I think, about 15-16 reviews there. There are a lot of interviews. There are all sorts of stuff there. So people could look there and get a feeling for, well, do I really want to read this book or not? Then if you do, you get it, and if you don’t, you don’t.

Okay, cool. Alright, thanks, Michael. Thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news.

Thank you. 

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“Michael Albert is an American economist, speaker, writer, and political critic. Since the late 1970s, he has published books, articles, and other contributions on a wide array of subjects. He has also set up his own media outfits, magazines, and podcasts.”