labor markets (was Re: upcoming talk)

[JKSCHW at aol.com]

I was talking about some stuff in Michael's proposal. I don't have the energy to get into defending market socialism right now. However, I will say that labor markets operate quite differently when workers have self-management and labor is not a cost. There is a problem with maintaining full employment because cooperatives tend to hire up to the point where hiring more people would reduce the profir shares that go to each cooperataor. That is, market socialist firms don't have the tendencies towards endless growth that capitalist firms do. That is why we need government to take up the slack either by creating incentives for workers to create new coops or acting as an employer of last resort. 

It is true that a market economy with full employment has less labor discipline than one without, but since there is no market labor discipline in a planned economy, that is not a point of negative comparison. That only means that in that respect market socialis is not that much better than planned socialism in comparison to capitalism.

Oh, yes, I know that in this audience the concept of "labor discipline" is satanic evil incarnate, but that just will confirm your belief that I am a petty bourgeous crypto capitalist neoliberal, which you had anyway. Note, however, that MS and PS come out pretty much the same on this: labor discipline will have to be internal to the firm and democratic in nature. it is only in cases of bankrupty that the market would operate to impose labor discipline directly on an inefficient firm. Oops, there I go again, using concepts like "efficient." How bourgeois of me.

The advantages of markets for market socialism are therefore other than in the area of labor discipline. basically I advocate using rather than abolsihing markets because, for all their evils, they have no equal nor any plausible replacement in the allocation of most resources. Their failures need to be corrected, but authoritative allocation, democratic or otherwise, will not work. However, I don't want to get into this further.

--jks

In a message dated Mon, 13 Mar 2000  4:06:42 PM Eastern Standard Time, Sam Pawlett <rsp at uniserve.com> writes:


> 
> 
> JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
> 
> > In any case I would not hold up high hopes for enforcing a right to employment through the courtts even if the US had by some oversight in fact signed a treaty that purported to offer such rights.
> > 
> 
> How do you square full employment with market socialism? Full employment
> and especially a constitutional right to a job really taked the bite out
> of labor markets and what labor markets do-- 'discipline' labor through
> fear of poverty ultimately leading to higher productivity and a hard
> budget constraint. Full employment leads to the 'principal-agent'
> problem, management has problems getting labor to carry out the
> necessary tasks. Wouldn't it just be better to abolish the venal labor
> market altogther?
> 
> Sam Pawlett