"Justin Schwartz" wrote:
>
>
> This sort of personalization,a long with the imputations about my immaturity
> and geekiness, as well as my general stupidity and ideological
> blinkeredness, is unconstructive. If I were to respond in kind, I would say
> that it says something about you that you can't respond to a serious problem
> for a small-l-libertarian society without disparaging the messenger.
>
No Justin, I didnt claim you were 'immature' or 'stupid' -- I said you were 'anal'.
But I was only bustin' your chops there, and being a wise-ass.
OK Justin maybe we should be clear about something right of -- Im not arguing Chuck's technophobic primativist utopia. No serious person aside from perhaps Chuck or certain reactionary "anarchist" currents, imagines society as an amalgam of primitive individuals totally bereft of any form of discipline or compulsion. Distasteful work will still have to be done and peoples' social obligations will still have to be met. But discipline can exist in institutionalized and noninstitutionalized forms, embedded in social pressures and conditioning and in material rewards/incentives. In an extremely technologically advanced society the point of social transformation is to minimize or make as light as possible such obligations -- that is to make it as easy for people to fulfil their obligations with the least recourse to external discipline or compulsion. That is, to attempt to come as close as is *materially possible* to the ideal of labour arising spontaneously and freely of one's own volition. Like ive said before, the potential for such a social and economic reorganization presupposes an extremely advanced technological/industrial base. If the social wealth and productivity of the economy is high enough to radically reduce the work day I'm sure, as many have said on this list, that fulfilling their labour obligations in order to still enjoy a relatively high quality of life(which, yes, would include cd players, computers and insulin) would not be something that required severe forms of external discipline. Would there still be forms of discipline --however benign- in the form of social pressures and even perhaps forms of economic compulsion?--possibly yes. Would this need to be a central problem in any libertarian/communist society?-- Most likely no, since as I've said the proper startingpoint of any true communist/anarchist society is the development of a sufficiently advanced material culture with lbour productivity high enough to minimize the compulsion required to ensure things keep running. This doesnt necesarrily apply to a transitional period or an underdeveloped economy where, despite the severe disciplining effect of the market being removed, some other form of economic 'compulsion' may be required in its place--such as a more marked differential reward system based on effort-- something along the lines of "from each according to her ability, to each according to his effort" as it were. Would there still be the occasional goof-off, layabouts and malibu surfer?-- of course! Look you're never going to get a society with no 'deviance' -- they're will always be perpetually stoned fuck-ups who, despite all the gentle proddings of the Revolutionary Propaganda Committee, will never mend their erring ways - the question is whether these saboteurs' refusal to contribute will effect the sustainability of our Workers' Utopia -- no it wont. And this here has been the real issue: --'why you're continued obsession over this pt.?' Indeed you're "free rider" arguement makes more sense as an arguement against 'welfare' or 'minimum garunteed income schemes' *today*, where such entitlements could more plausibly be seen as undermining the strict discipline of the labour market in forcing people to work at jobs with far less appealing work regimens and under more onerous conditions than would exist in our glorious workers' utopia. Yet even within mainstream economics its only the more right wing wags that constantly fret over the inevitable collapse that will result if such entitlements are expanded and made more generous -- an obsession remarkably similar to your "free rider" problem.
Again, of course therewill be problems -- the question is whether the objective material conditions are sufficient to ensure that such problems remain marginal and not are not destabilizing enough to undermine the more ethical social arrangements we envision. No perfect 'Utopia' is actually being advanced here. I have never been one to see social revolution as leading to some sort quasi-mystical repose from alienation, pain and conflict.
> , and that
> >a less developed economy with a lower technological and
> >material base and marked by conditions of severe material scarcity, would
> >probably require a greater amount of external discipline to be exerted on
> >labour(preferably in the form of greater differential
> >rewards based on effort) and would probably require a culture fostering a
> >more intense 'internal' discipline -- expressed in the form of a more
> >puritanical culture -- than one would expect in a post
> >revolutionary society in the West.
> >
>
> History is against you on this one. Early modern Europe had far less
> external discipline, despite futile attempts to impose it by law with
> vagabondage laws and the like. People in the 1500s worked maybe 150 days a
> year, "St. Monday" was regularly observed, feast daysd were frequent, the
> level of effort--and technological development and productivity--was low.
> You help yourself to the high technology and high productivity created by
> the impositiona nd internalizatioon of labor discipline created by markets,a
> nd then suppose,w ithout good reason that I can see, that this would
> continue without the conditions that createdit.
>
No history is with me, and quite unambigously so. I figure that you must have misread or misunderstood what I was trying to say. A social revolution in an isolated underdeveloped economy faces the task, not of developing a socialist, let alone a libertarian society, but of developing the material pre-conditions for socialism. Capital accumulation in Western Europe (spanning several centuries), Germany, Japan(late 19th early20th), Russia, China etc (20th century-21st) entailed both lengthening and intensification of work under conditions of *extreme* economic compulsion and coercion and all at terrible human costs. Any social revolution in a 'backward' society that is not rolled back completely by bureaucratic counter-revolution will still have to face the same problems of capital accumulation and industrialization faced elsewhere-- extracting the needed surpluses and in sufficient quantities to ensure expanded reproduction and growth of labour productivity. And so long as some meaningful form of democratic control of the means of production persists, do all this without recourse to terror. Its here, much, much more so than in an advanced economy that you're insistence on labour discipline/coercion and a solution to the "free rider problem" becomes indispensible.
-pradeep