[lbo-talk] Parecon Discussion...

Kelley the-squeeze at pulpculture.org
Wed Sep 24 06:51:51 PDT 2003


At 11:06 PM 9/24/03 +1000, Bill Bartlett wrote:
>At 5:52 AM -0400 24/9/03, Kelley wrote:
>
> >and even under your vision, there would be coercion. power is exercised
> through money, force, and solidarity. solidarity is most effective of the
> three.
>
>Solidarity is power, but it is not coercion.

power: getting people to do what they might not otherwise.

the best way to get people to do work for you is to give them a little bit of responsibility in the company. make them feel like they have a stake in the company. give up a little of your complete control over operations, let them have a little stake in how decisions get made, make them feel part of the social organization that undergirds work life. make them feel part of the team

voila!

great way to get people to work when they might not otherwise.

under your scenario, what would likely happen is that most people would have to buy into the system to get it off the ground to begin with. in the process, entire swaths of life would be built around rituals that reinforce the importance of this new economy, why we struggled for it and sacrificed for it, and why it is superior. part of struggling for something will require telling these stories to one another. it's called culture. and we'll be socialized into this new culture. our identities as adults and, indeed, as political citizens will probably be deeply attached to our identities as workers.

our identities will be deeply attached to participation in this new system we've struggled for. we'll create socialization rituals that will reinforce that attachment throughout generations. these aren't absolute social rituals. they can change. but their power is enormous. sure, people will reject them, but that doesn't mean their power is any less effective. after all, we can easily show how money and force are sometimes ineffective ways to wield power and yet we wouldn't say that, because they don't monolithically and uniformly make every behave the same way (doing things they might not otherwise want to do) that money and force aren't forms of power. they're just forms of power that work well under certain conditions and not others.

children will grow up to believe that adulthood means working in a parecon firm. citizenship will be seen as something one fulfills by participating in parecon decision making.

the majority who work, IOW, will need to tell themselves stories that explain why they go to work every day. they'll need to justify it to themselves, and it might not be so hard, if marx is right, and most people actually do find their humanity in non-alienated labor. the few shirkers around don't? then we'll commission studies to explain this odd behavior. and our social science will lable them as human outliers. medical researchers will look for brain disorders and chemical imablances for the shirking.

the shirkers who choose not to work, even if they have a good standard of living, will likely be shunned--defined as marginalized deviatns. their punishment is to be marginalized from mainstream society. and there will be just enough folk who will _want_ to be marginalized. which, counter-intuitively, actually builds solidarity. society, to have solidarity amongst its members, needs to marginalize an enemy other. In this case, the enemy other will be the deviant shirkers. Marginalized deviants are punished via informal norms. Just because they aren't punished by formal laws backed by the guns of the state, it doesn't follow that people don't experience social punishments.

and the workers will have an incentive to shun those "not like them" just because they're not like them. is it really just an effect of class society that we engage in this sort of behavior. will there always be bad guys? peolpe say that shirking today is only the result of class society. is it? you seem to say no: shirkers will be around after the parecon revo.

in any event, since it will take a large majority, if not dominant majority, to bring the new parecon society about, society will evolve cultural/political/economic/socialization practices that will encourage working and shun those who don't. in part, this might be because the shirkers make a mockery of workers' efforts. might also be based on real events--where large groups of people shirked, a group of large group or, indeed, great numbers of people suffered (were injured, died, starved, etc) because just too many people chose to shirk. Or there'd be an economic meltd0wn from too many shirkers, too few workers.

If those things happen, another round of cultural stories will emerge to tell the tale of what happens when the 'bad' shirkers shirk and to tell the stories of what happens when to 'good' heroic workers work!

solidarity: i'm a part of this group and this group defines itself against those bad Others.

kelley



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