This is precisely the reason for incorporating balanced job complexes and remuneration for effort and sacrifice...it removes the differentials that are exploitable in such fashion.
If you look at the hwole system, you will see, I think -- or perhaps reveal to me a flaw -- why I say that in parecon the structure is such that people can't utilize their position to undo advantages...
> I think it is both - and that is an essential feature of
> capitalist (or any other _existing_ as opposed to proposed
> economic system) which you seem to miss.
What do I miss? That it is good to have useful outputs -- that is what parecon is structured to attain, consistent with values that are held dear, as well, of course.
> Virtually no
> system, no matter how oppressive, merely fleeces people
> without providing anything in return.
Correct...
> Most of them provide
> something - stability, security, basic needs, fulfillment of
> wants etc. which legitimate the surplus that the leadership
> extracts for these "services." And capitalism provides quite
> a lot in that respect, comparing to other known alternatives.
Which is why, if we want to transcend it due to its horrible aspects, we have to offer an economic vision which can accomplish economic aims -- even better but certainly as well -- while also not only not trampling values we hold dear, but actually advancing them. I quite agree.
> This is precisely what makes any existing system, but
> especially capitalism, so attractive to most people
> - it gives them what they think they need and want, and that
> is what really matters to them. They do not particularly
> care that someone somewhere is making a profit.
Well, I think we can differe about this -- I think people in large proportions hate the system we endure, the alienated labor, the ineuality, and so on -- but think it is the best of all possibilities. The alternative is chaos or total supression, etc. etc.
Of they feel other, better, might be plausible, but unattainable...
> What I meant by that is that utopianism is something assumed
> apriori rather than derived from empirical observations.
Parecon assumes nothing unusual about people or institutions, in fact. It contructs a logic and context in which to advance one's interests one has to be social, rather than antisocial.
Now, if you grow up a caring person, you enter the economy and to get ahead you must step on others...in a horribly anti solidaritious manner.
In a parecon it is the opposite. Even if you are an anti social individual, for whatever reasons, in the economy pursuing your own interest entails acting in concert with the intersts of others, as well, socially.
> Specifically, your argument seem to assume that in a new
> economy built on parecon blueprints people will behave
> differently than under the existing alienated system.
This is like saying that it is an assumption that people will have differently in fuedalism than in capitalism or as slave owners or slaves than as business owners or wage slaves. But I don't assume how people will act -- I make a case based on the roles and incentives and contexts thrown up by the institutions of the different economies.
> Otherwise, what would be the guarantee that the new economy
> would not be hijacked to someone's personal benefit, just as
> the market system or the planned economy have been?
Those economies aren't hijacked. In fact, they have worked precisely as their structure entails, benefitting a coordinator class elite -- and others due to other social hierarhcies -- as one would predict and as conditions make logical in the flow of the social institutions.
In parecon, the claim is that the ebb and flow of life is different because the institutions and their roles, incentives, contexts, are different. This is not assumed apriori -- it is the heart of the whole case. I recommend one of the longer presentations.
> If, otoh, one takes an empirical approach and observe how
> people behave in different social and institutional settings
> (some of them more egalitarian and less oppressive than
> other), one usually discovers that how people actually behave
> and what motivates their behavior is very much different from
> what theoretical models and institutional logic suggests.
Yes, I quite agree, but since this model makes very very few assertions about how people will behave. It instead removes pressures to behave in certain ways, and introduces benefits from behaving in other ways.
> To use an example on which we both can probably agree.
> Milton Friedman argues that the market system would eliminate
> all racial discrimination in employment, because people who
> discriminate would be forced to pay a higher price for labor,
> and the logic of self interest would force them to abandon
> that practice.
Milton fails to realize that racism has roots that are quite strong in non economic dynamics, and that given its existence a capitalist economy will, face a situation somewhat different than he envisioned. It will actually be unprofitable to promote a very capable black person to positions of power over whites, due to the white resistance it will induce. So even if the employer is antiracist, unless racism is generally on the wan, the dictates of the market pursuit of profit, imposed on this owner, will push toward behavior that reproduces racism rather than behavior that overcomes it.
> You can easily see that the same logic can be applied to any
> theoretical model that posits, in one way or another, that
> the institutional order it proposes will produce a
> motivational/behavioral system that is assumed or required by
> that order. I simply find it too unrealistic - as I firmly
> believe that people use and misuse institutions to meet their
> however illusory, whimsical, situation-induced and otherwise
> irrational wants and need. Or as our guru Doug Henwood
> succinctly put it - there will always be bad guys. And it is
> very likely that there will be enough of them or they will
> have enough skill and determination to hijack any
> institutional system - now matter how beautifully designed.
Fine. Given that you think this -- a horribly cynical viewpoint, I think -- but, okay -- what follows?
It seems to me you would still want to opt for an economy that minimizes opportunities for antisocial benefit and maximizes likelihood of sociliatiy and so on -- and you might perhaps think that a political system, including adjudication and enforcement -- would be busier than I think...
> This is, of course, not to say that social structure does not
> affect individual thinking and behavior. Au contraire, being
> determines consciousness, as they used to say. Structures do
> matter, but consciousness is determined to a much, much
> greater extent by micro-structures than by the macro- ones,
> and that the micro-structures are not always in line with the
> macro-ones.
Okay, it is micro structures that cause the broad typical shared interests and pursuits and behaviors we see in modern societies -- I think here we going to have to agree to disagree.
Micro structures are infinitely varied -- what actually impose, even against the diversity of human taste, preference, and potential, plus the infinity of possible immediate and micro choices individuals can make -- a tremendous almost inconceviable degree of collective similarity of condition and behavior, is broader shared institutional situations.
> I would thus prefer a much smaller task of implementing
> safeguards against abuses into the existing system (just like
> social democrats did it in Sweden, for example),
Only to see them (a) never challenge basic defining inequities and (b) largely wiped out with a swing in balance of power because they conflict with underlying institutional pressures...
> than a more
> ambitious system of scrapping the existing system altogether
> and building a new one. I think that the latter is way too
> much work and there is no guarantee that, when the dust
> settles, we will get anything much better from what can
> attain under the good and tried social democracy (whose track
> records has been proved).
Okay, fair enough. You will then be a serious and caring social democrat...and I will be what we can call a pareconist -- seeking not only reforms, but revolution -- and we will find ourselves for quite some time agreeing on many many things that are worth winning in the present.