I assume your question, Dymtri,
can you
> logically explain to
> > me, preferable in the language of classical
> economics, how an
> > exploitive
> > class can arise out of free exchange without
> resorting to force?
is a practical one. Theoretically, using the terms of neoclassical economics, John Roemer has given a mathematical proof of the proposition. Given an initial state of differential ownership of productive assets, Roemer shows that exploitation, defined as transfer of embodied labor from one class to another (he uses idealized agents as stand-ins for classes), follows. Roemer also thinks for several reasons that "exploitation" as he defines it is not a morally useful basis for critiquing class society because on with a slight tweak of the assumptions, it is possible to show a transfer of embodied labor (thus exploitation so understood) from the rich to the poor. Roemer thinks that "exploitation" is a poor proxy for inequality, is what he thinks Marxists, or socialists anyway, should care about.
I can set forth the argument in more detail if you like. It has been sharply criticized by various people (including me) for operating with unrealistic, ahistorical assumptions that are extremely misleading because they abstract from important facts that really matter practically and morally, for a question-begging definition of exploitation as mere transfer of surplus absent any of the conditions that make such a transfer problematic or objectionable, and for a narrow focus of inequality as the only objectionable feature of class society.
But I think you are asking not whether it can be mathematically proven that free exchange can generate exploitation, however defined, but a more rooted question. Your real question is whether markets by themselves, without capitalists, generate morally problematic results, including the problems (or some of them)associated with exploitation (of the poor by the rich) in capitalist society. Am I correct?
Although (as people here may know) I don't see any practicable alternative to large scale marketization and commodity exchange even under socialism (a proposition I am NOT going to debate), I agree with Mike B. that markets pose risks to any socialist project. A few points in plain language:
1. Markets involve winners and losers, that's how they work. The incentives are carrot and stick. Successful enterprises make profits, unsuccessful ones go bust. That means that markets tend, systematically, to create inequality. That inequality may be more limited if private ownership of productive property is prohibited, but it is real and there is no particular reason to think that without extra-market intervention, e.g., by progressive taxation, it could not lead to wide disparities in wealth.
2. Within enterprises, even the successful ones, there is a reason to think that sharp inequalities may emerge. First, some people have more managerial, entrepreneurial, innovative and other skill than others, some are just sharper operators. They are likely to be rewarded even in a democratic firm more than people who lack those skills, and firms will compete for those talented (or slicker) workers.
Second, there are serious "transaction costs" (in the economic jargon) involved in relatively democratic firm governance that can be minimized by giving a managerial group a lot of power to make decisions; it's costly in terms of time and quality of decisions to constantly get everybody's input. The most successful cooperatives have fairly dictatorial boards. There is a serious risk that the boards may reward themselves more highly than than ordinary workers and more highly than they are in fact worth on the market.
3. In even in a society without private property, disparities in wealth translate into disparities in political power. Richer firms or managerial groups can use their greater resources to influence the political process to entrench, extend, and expand their unequal wealth and power. As we saw in the former Yugoslavia this can also operate between resource poor and resource rich regions, with the firms in the richer regions being richer and giving those regions more political power to benefit themselves. In the extreme case, as indeed happened in the FY, those privileged groups may act to cement their advantages by actually privatizing the productive assets.
4. Then, as Mike says, markets do promote competition as much as they promote cooperation. They encourage individualism, zero-sum winner-loser mentalities, and reward, not to put to fine a point on it, greed. Of course they also encourage cooperation, since people have to work together to make profits, but which way the balance tips is a fine question.
The long and short of it is that any socialist who thinks that markets are likely to play a large role in any successful economic system has to recognize the hierarchical and centrifugal tendencies they create and think hard about how they might be counteracted institutionally.
Carrol will tell us we cannot even think about the shape of a future society, but this is a mistake. What we cannot do is imagine we can draw up a perfect plan and expect that it would be realized (contrary to the Parecon people, for example, whose vivid account of a future society is detailed at a level that would put Owen and Saint-Simon to shame). But we can think institutionally at the level of political theory about the potential problems posed by certain alternative (to existing) arrangements and broad ways of addressing them. Rhetorically this will help to persuade people that there might be something better than what there is now, because people will ask and raise objections. Practically thinking in this way might be useful to people who will ultimately (even Carrol hopes) be in a position to change the existing state of affairs and create new institutions.
--- Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 00:53 +0100, Dmytri Kleiner
> wrote:
> > As I have asked Tayssir, so I asked you, can you
> logically explain to
> > me, preferable in the language of classical
> economics, how an
> > exploitive
> > class can arise out of free exchange without
> resorting to force?
>
> Tim replied very well:
>
> Isn't this the wrong question, though? Maybe in some
> hypothetical world
> of free exchange and no force, there would be no
> exploitative class -
> but, getting a system of "free exchange" _in the
> first place_ requires
> force. One of the main things that Marx is trying to
> show in volume one
> of _Capital_ is that free exchange depends on
> approaching the world and
> other people in particular ways (seeing diverse
> things as being capable
> of exchange as equivalents), and that approaching
> the world in this way
> has certain material presuppositions (especially,
> making all human labor
> power equivalent and exchangeable).
>
> According to Marx's analysis, free exchange requires
> that workers be
> considered as separable from the means of production
> (otherwise, you
> couldn't have formally free labor, which underpins
> free exchange), and,
> furthermore, this separation has historically been
> accomplished by
> force. Hence free exchange has, as a precondition,
> the existence of an
> exploitative class.
>
> "The immediate producer, the labourer, could only
> dispose of his own
> person after he had ceased to be attached to the
> soil and ceased to be
> the slave, serf, or bondsman of another. To become a
> free seller of
> labour-power, who carries his commodity wherever he
> finds a market, he
> must further have escaped from the regime of the
> guilds, their rules for
> apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of
> their labour
> regulations. Hence, the historical movement which
> changes the producers
> into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as
> their emancipation from
> serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this
> side alone exists
> for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other
> hand, these new freedmen
> became sellers of themselves only after they had
> been robbed of all
> their own means of production, and of all the
> guarantees of existence
> afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the
> history of this, their
> expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind
> in letters of blood
> and fire." (Marx, _Capital_, ch. 26
>
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm
> )
>
>
> ******************
>
> Yes, it seems to me that the very existence of
> capitalist commodity production
> with a view to profit assumes alienation: the
> alienation of the means of
> production from the producers via private ownership
> and by extension, the
> alienation of humans from each other (aka: class
> society) by virtue of which
> commodity they own to sell or possibly
> alienate--capital (not the social
> relation Capital), land or skills over time. Under
> feudal arrangements, the
> alienation of a large portion of the product from
> the producers--agricultural
> surplus, turned over to the aristocrats, who are
> running a kind of protection
> racket, with the workers in guilds, giving away
> control over the product of
> their labour as apprentices to masters. And within
> slavery, the producers
> forced to work, getting bed and breakfast
> maintenance and some clothing (if
> they're lucky) for the parasitic ruling classes of
> aristos and other, smaller
> land owners. Alienation of human beings based on
> the alienation of what one
> owns or doesn't own for sale. Commodity production
> is corrosive to social
> solidarity of any kind. One only need read a few
> histories of the Kibbutz
> movement in Israel, the various utopian socialist
> experiements in the USA and
> Britain or even the attempts at creating communism
> in the former
> Marxist-Lenninst States to get an idea of just how
> corrosive the process of
> commodity production can be for the socialist
> project.
>
> Seems to me that history has shown that an
> exploitive class always emerges from
> forms of minority ownership of commodities produced
> for sale, no matter the
> good or bad intentions of those minorities who
> become rulers.
>
> For the end of pre-history,
> Mike B)
>
> http://happystiletto.blogspot.com/
>
> Skype mike.ballard66
>
>
>
>
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