ABSTRACT
In a market economy, the worker's pay would decline due to lower productivity, but in parecon the worker's pay can remain the same because the worker is paid according to effort expended. The discovery of an information transmission mechanism that can rival the market mechanism is arguably the single most important task of the socialist movement. If the development of modern information technology can be demonstrated to be a primary attribute of socialist productive forces, then this obstacle should reduce the likelihood of establishing a parecon economy as long as advocates of parecon do not fully recognize its importance. The parecon experiments discussed in the chapter offer concrete examples of the internal dynamics of workplaces that have adopted a parecon approach. In South America, an idea slowly being implemented is to federate the co-ops, facilitating their interacting and exchanging via social rather than market norms. This is an effort to achieve a worker self-managed participatory economy.
