The Glasgow School of Art

Michael Albert
'Realizing Hope: Life Beyond Capitalism' - listen to audio recording

What do we want for our lives - our economy, our polity, our ways of bringing up new generations, our art, science, and education, our culture, in sum, for our society - instead of the emotionally alienating, intellectually degrading, materially impoverishing, class divided, racially archaic, sexually confused and repressed, war promoting, hypocritical and just plain venal surroundings we now endure? Can we together raise some proposals and even come to some tentative conclusions about all this? Perhaps it is a lot to ask from a brief time together - but it will be the aim of Albert's talk - to clarify possible agreements and to discover possible differences about attaining a better world, and to explore both.

Michael Albert is a long-time activist, speaker, and writer. He is co-editor of ZNet, and co-editor and co-founder of Z Magazine. He also co-founded South End Press and has written numerous books and articles on political and economic theory. He developed, along with Robin Hahnel, the economic vision called participatory economics, or 'parecon' for short. Put forward as an alternative to contemporary capitalist market economies and also to centrally planned socialism or coordinatorism, 'parecon' is an economic system that uses what Albert calls participatory planning, balanced job complexes, workers and consumers self managed councils, and equitable remuneration as economic means to guide the production, allocation, and consumption of society. It is an anti-capitalist, classless vision of economics for a new society.

Hosted by The School of Fine Art, The Friday Event Lecture Series is The Glasgow School of Art's flagship public lecture series, and brings major international speakers (including artists, architects, designers, historians and cultural theorists) to the city of Glasgow.