Please not my argument is not based on on greed or on the denial that human nature is capable of cooperation and even uncoerced cooperation. I do not deny (or assert) that human nature is "good," I think people are capable of goodness. Be that as it may. All you need to get my argument going are two things:
1) A little bit of self-interested laziness that induces enough people to free ride so that public goods will not be produced spontaneously
entirely independently
2) Serious disagreements about what is correct public policy or who bears the costs of public (or indeed private) choices that cannot be resolved by consensus.
Here, even if the abolition of classes and exploitation abolishes all self-regard and laziness -- I don't see why it should, but grant the point for the sake of argument -- we will have sharp disagreements about what is the right thing to do among public spirited people that will require institutional mechanisms for making and enforcing decisions.
In fact this problem will be _worse_ if people are not self-interested -- selfish people can be bribed or bought or horse-tradeed with to get an agreement. Principled public-spirited people acting on moral grounds are not going to bend from their conception of the good and their idae of the right.
Just a question, I want to know from Charles and any other Marxist or former Marxist -- have you ever persuaded an ordinary working person who has a question about how to get the mail delivered or some such under socialism that it will happen because human nature is good and we can be taught to be unselfish? In my 20 some years as a Marxist (so I thought) and 26 as a socialist, that line never worked for me or anyone I knew. (Well, I only toyed with it briefly in my very early days as a red.)
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