Good point about the separation of production and consumption. I do agree with you that a system where everyone produces exactly what they consume isn’t a very attractive conception of socialism. I guess what I was thinking of by aboliting the distinction between production and consumption is something like Marx’s “realm of freedom,” where we don’t carry out productive activities in order to produce something else, which is then, in some separate activity, consumed; rather, activity, whether it produces some output or consumes some resource, is done for its own sake. So it’s not so much that productive and consuming activities should be combined, but that the distinction should be rendered irrelevant. I can certainly see how it might make sense to think about that in terms of an absolute separation of the means-end relationship between production and consumption.

And I’m actually a bit unfair to Albert about the balanced job complexes; I think he does talk about how this might lead to developing different roles, as well as combining currently existing roles in new ways. But the reorganization of production does seem to me to be the much more important part.

Good to see you revisiting these themes. I agree with much of the gist here, though to be fair, it seems that workers and consumers in Albert’s Parecon have a great deal more influence/say, through direct democracy, on what gets produced or consumed than in European corporatism (at least the Mussolini kind, no?). But his reliance upon the household as the fundamental unit is problematic. I’m not sure whether personal (as opposed to private) property of some kind is incommensurate with socialized property, in the end. But there should be more emphasis on socialization–beyond households–of wealth. I’m also not sure ultimately that this is a market economy, because there is this feedback from the consumer that doesn’t entirely depend upon pure numericality (as with the price-system). I don’t think the market could do what he wants Parecon to do, but the problem of competition between collectives under the abstraction of this particular value form is key.

The most important point here, though, has to do with production/consumption. Perhaps this is merely a semantic point but in my view his problem, and it’s a big one, is not that he keeps p. and c. separate but that he doesn’t satisfactorily separate them completely. I can only imagine their union in a system in which every producer makes what he or she needs to consume, some kind of anarcho-primitivism, then, or a kind of Thoreauvian libertarianism. Instead, communism and socialism in my book should completely separate production and consumption such that one’s contribution as worker has no bearing on one’s rights to social wealth. “From each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs” but with no linking of needs to abilities whatsoever. This could only happen in the event of massive surplusses, I suppose, but it should be the goal.

I take your point, too, about div. of labor. He could have imagined a world in which not only were the existing jobs apportioned differently but the actual jobs themselves were transformed. I’m still unsure about what degree of specialization a communist society would require. It’s clear that not every person could do every single thing. But certainly instead of keeping the division doctors/nurses/orderlies, one could imagine hospitals and clinics, where health professionals did all of these tasks. . .