If there was to be an award for the most vacuous gesture of the year, then it should land in the lap of the Norwegian Nobel committee. This month, they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus for developing the Grameen Bank and micro-credit. The latter, according to the good people on the Nobel committee, would allow “large population groups to find ways in which to break out of poverty”. While micro-credit has undoubtedly helped a few poor women “break out of poverty”, nonetheless, Bangladesh remains one of the poorest countries in the world.

About 80% of its people live on less than $2 a day, and nearly half the population struggles below the official poverty line. Micro-credit is so favoured by the elite (like the Nobel committee) because it allows the free market to redirect wealth bottom up, while pretending to care for the poor. Similarly, the apostles of neo-liberal economics can continue their savage attack on the welfare system, demanding less government intervention, as micro-credit will take care of poverty.

So much for Yunus, the new saviour of the world’s two billion poor. While prizes used to be awarded for ‘thinking outside the box’, the basis now seems to be to think within the elite consensus. Thus, those, who think that capitalism itself and its periodic crises are at the root of much poverty, inequality and ecological destruction, are denounced as fantasists. One such fantasist is Michael Albert, the co-founder of ZMag (www.zmag.org) and the South End Press, has come up with a workable alternative to the capitalist hegemony. He has called it parecon, short for participatory economics, with “equitable incomes, circumstances, opportunities, and responsibilities for all participants”.

The model he has designed does away with class in the workplace and ultimately in society. It dispenses with managerial levels, or what Albert terms the coordinator class. Owners are also eliminated from the equation. In that vision, “parecon also does away with markets, which pit each actor against all others, destroy solidarity, impose class division, mis-price all public goods, ignore collective effects beyond direct buyers and sellers, violate ecological balance and sustainability… In place of markets, parecon uses a system of workers and consumers, through their self-managing councils, cooperatively negotiating inputs and outputs for all firms and actors in accord with true and full social costs and benefits of economic activities.”

<B>How does it work? </B>

The structure of the modern workplace is organised around a hierarchical structure. Orders are passed from the top and those at the bottom have to execute, simple as that. A totalitarian institution in short. The workers are mere automatons, with no input into decisions that affect their day. Furthermore, the coordinator class usually occupies all the empowering jobs, the “knowledge sector” as it is sometimes called. This becomes a vicious circle with an impenetrable enclosure. It is based on a 20/80 distribution, where 20% do the empowering jobs, the decision-taking, while 80% are automatons, respecting orders and carrying out the same tasks repetitively. In parecon, this structure is subverted. The coordinator class is abolished, replaced by a workers’ council, where each worker contributes to decisions that affect them, with a voting process, based on consensus or simple majority depending on the situation.

Consumer councils</B>