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.
