[This is part of an debate regarding parecon and peercommony between Michael Albert and me. It is a repy to Michael Albert’s Peercommony Doubts Parecon? All articles can be found on the debate overview page – more will follow.]
Parecon, like capitalism, is based on paid labor, apparently based on the reasoning that people wouldn’t otherwise work enough. In my preceding reply I had doubted that assumption. When defending payment for work, you, Michael, seem to consider money as mere “information,” guiding people’s choices about how much they need to work and how much they can consume. You also seem to imagine a very impoverished model of social interaction where no other information that could influence such choices is available:
As I wrote in the original piece, “[the gap between consumption and production arises] not because people are either greedy, lazy, or irresponsible, but because people have no way to know what is responsible and moral.”
It must be a very sad society indeed where payment is the only thing that makes people “responsible and moral.” That’s not the kind of society I want.
The following excerpt is part of the longer essay 
