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 (Par) 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 Bioregionalism, or with social ecology 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 may be a good tactics to demonstrate the “superiority” of a proposal by avoiding the dialogue 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 economy recently advanced, so that readers could make their own minds about the pros and cons of each project.