Search results for ""Author Michael Albert""

Life under capitalism. Rampant debilitating denial for the many next to vile enrichment of the few. Material deprivation, denial, and denigration. Dignity defiled. Michael Albert's book No Bosses advocates for the conception and then organization of a new economy. The vision offered is called participatory economics. It elevates self-management, equity, solidarity, diversity, and sustainability. It eliminates elitist, arrogant, dismissive, authoritarian, exploitation, competition, and homogenization. No Bosses proposes a built and natural productive commons, self-management by all who work, income for how long, how hard, and the onerousness of conditions of socially valued work, jobs that give all economic actors comparable means and inclination to participate in decisions that affect them, and a process called participatory planning in which caring behavior and solidarity are the currency of collective and individual success.

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Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Michael Albert would disagree. Realizing Hope offers a speculative vision of a future beyond capitalism - an alternative to the exploitation of human labour, the unchecked destruction of the earth, and the oppression of all for the benefit of the few. Participatory economics - parecon for short - is Albert’s concrete proposal for a classless economy, developed from anarchist principles first introduced by Kropotkin, Bakunin, Pannekoek and others. In this classic text, Albert takes the insights and hopes of parecon and enlarges them to address all key aspects of social life and society - gender, culture, politics, science, technology, journalism, ecology, and others. Realizing Hope provides vision to help us all together conceive a world that might be just over the horizon, a world we can begin building today.

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This ambitious work presents a critique of traditional welfare theory and proposes a new approach to it. Radical economists Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert argue that an improved theory of social welfare can consolidate and extend recent advances in microeconomic theory, and generate exciting new results as well. The authors show that once the traditional "welfare paradigm" is appropriately modified, a revitalized welfare theory can clarify the relationship between individual and social rationalitya task that continues to be of interest to mainstream and nonmainstream economists alike. Hahnel and Albert show how recent work in the theory of the labor process, externalities, public goods, and endogenous preferences can advance research in welfare theory. In a series of important theorems, the authors extend the concept of Pareto optimality to dynamic contexts with changing preferences and thus highlight the importance of institutional bias. This discussion provides the basis for further analysis of the properties and consequences of private and public enterprise and of markets and central planning. Not surprisingly, Hahnel and Albert reach a number of conclusions at odds with conventional wisdom. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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Communism has collapsed. Capitalism has rid itself of the competition on which it thrives. But though now victorious, capitalism has become a threat. The future of us all may be shaped by the outcome of the conflict between capitalism as victor and capitalism as threat. Not only in Europe, but also in the US and Japan - and no doubt shortly in the Eastern countries too - the great debate is capitalism versus capitalism. On the one hand is the "neo-American" model based on individual achievement and short-term profits. On the other is the Rhine model practices in Switzerland, Germany, Benelux, Northern Europe and, partly, in Japan. In the Rhine model collective achievement and public concensus are seen as the keys to long-term success. The first is more seductive, the second more effective. These two opposing forms of capitalism are engaged in a war which, like all internal conflicts, involves both secrecy and even hypocrisy. The outcome of this struggle could affect the quality of life on all levels of society. The author of this book aims to provide a synthesis which will force the reader to consider the political and economic issues at stake towards the end of the century.

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