If it hasn't been made obvious by this point, I subscribe to most of the ideas proposed by Michael Albert & Robin Hahnel, especially in terms of participatory economics. To put it shortly, I think its a sublime proposal for a post-capitalist economy and I haven't been convinced by criticisms of it, which usually end up strawmanning or misleading certain points of parecon.
An issue that I have noticed, however, is generally two-fold.
One, for the recent writings surrounding or about parecon, there seems to be no explicit mention of a political economy unique to parecon; Hahnel's The ABCs of Political Economy is certainly a great book, but other than complimentary holism (the framework of analysis parecon uses for societies), it relies on other schools of economics like the Sraffian or post-Keynesian schools instead of utilizing its ideas about humanity from complimentary holism to adapt political economy to.
Two, although his description of Sraffian price theory is not wrong, his interpretation of it is a bit skewed. Sraffa was at least familiar with Marxism, due to dealing with classical economics and his association with Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and his theories--like anyone else's--can be used for arguments against capitalism (even Austrian economics, as is used by Konkin). However, Hahnel misinterprets what the conclusions are for Sraffian prices and seems to mix in Marxist notions of analysis when it isn't directly compatible with Sraffa, especially in terms of exploitation. I can agree to a certain extent there's something certainly radical about the implications, which is why I'm inclined to call myself a radical Sraffian as he does for himself, but it might have to be something else than what Hahnel implies.
So if our problems are an unclear political economy and a revision of Sraffa, what are the solutions?
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The first book that Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel published together was Unorthodox Marxism, which was meant both as a criticism of orthodox Marxism and as a proposal inspired by the New Left of the 60s & 70s to replace it. The name they gave it, unorthodox Marxism, came around because they had thought it to be a proper continuation of Marxist thought; however, later during the development of participatory economics as a fully-fledged economic system, they seem to abandon this label and consider themselves proponents of parecon.
Although there doesn't seem to be much reviews of the book aside from what they list on the back cover, based off of what I can find it did seem to garner praise; Carl Boggs gave it a critical lens of acceptance, while also noting their version of Marxism didn't really line up even with the neo-Marxism of its day:
The idea of a complex, interwoven, four-fold dialectic actually recalls the more mature expressions of anarchism (Emma Goldmann, Peter Kropotkin, and, more recently, Murray Bookchin). To my knowledge, no marxist theorist or tendency has disavowed the ultimate primacy of production and class categories, whatever the theoretical or strategic orientation. In this sense, what takes Albert and Hahnel beyond marxism is a broadened and more intricate concept of social transformation more closely resembling Bookchin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism than anything contained in the neo-marxism the authors claim as their heritage.
And according to Michael Albert recounting a word from Ronald Meek (from Remembering Tomorrow):
Not long after our book... was published..., Robin and I got a message from a British economist, the world-famous Marxist Ronald Meek. Meek liked our book. Indeed, he found it very convincing. He agreed that we understood Marxism. More important, and rather astoundingly, he agreed with our critique of Marxism. This was incredible good news. Meek was arguably the dean of international Marxist economic scholarship, and a Meek review saying Unorthodox Marxism was compelling, much less that he agreed with it, would have profoundly boosted our arguments. Meek died, however, before he wrote the interview. Robin and I greatly mourned his passing even though we had never met the man.
For context on this quote, Unorthodox Marxism was published January 1978 while Meek died August of the same year. And as another quick fact about the book, apparently the explanation of Marxism given by Albert & Hahnel was also used within a few classes about Marxism!
In short, this book was something--but what did it offer? And how does this relate to the question I gave above?
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The main topic from that book is not only what are the shortcomings of Marxism, but what can we replace it with to properly understand society? They propose their own framework, entitling it a political economy of praxis, combining some insights of Marxism with what seems to be an early version of complimentary holism.
Our answers to the concerns raised before can soon be found in this conception of political economy; not only do we have political economy that is compatible with parecon's general framework, it also helps bypass some of the issues associated with the interpretations of Sraffa by providing not only an analysis of the wage-price vector that reaches the same conclusion as Sraffian analysis, but also helps elaborate on the bargaining powers of the sectors involved.
In fact, a criticism brought up to not only Marxists but to Sraffians also is the fact that they abstract from other, very obvious, struggles that happen within society; for the time being, since they focus on America, these other aspects are included under the broad terms of community, kinship, and political relations, along with economic relations. These can obviously affect the wages and profits, all under bargaining power, of a worker & capitalist respectively. While it may make things slightly more complicated in terms of calculation of prices, it makes up in a more realistic idea of prices under capitalism.
Aside from this, there's also some great ideas in it, some of which are also either repeated or are revealed in their other work, Marxism and Socialist Theory (chapter 4), including the idea of labor power having two use-values, one for the worker & one for the capitalist; the tension between these two then results in class conflict.
If I get my hands on a physical copy of Unorthodox Marxism soon, I might make various posts explaining various points that I think are cool for a participist political economy. It does make me wonder, though, what caused Hahnel to walk back on this school and instead focus on Sraffa. Guess time'll tell.
