[lbo-talk] To each according to work

[andie nachgeborenen]

OK, I've only been thinking about this for 32 years, but I don't get it. Maybe you're a dogmatic idiot. Or maybe we disagree. You believe in magic. I don't. We both want a better sort of society that counts as an advance on what we have. We differ on what would count as an advance and what;'s necessary and possible. We also differ on what's desirable. I think -- bear in my mind that I am writing from America, land of the free -- that modest extension of social democracy would be an advance. I certainly think that abolition of private property would be an advance. For reasons we've talked to death I do not think the elimination of authority, law, bureaucracy, government, and democratic enforcement of democratically accepted rules (coercion) would be either desirable or possible. You think any a society with such institutions would be a slave society ruled by a corrupt class of exploiting masters. I think you don't know a good thing when you see it, that

 your all-or-nothing philosophy shows that you don't get it, and that it's silly and counterproductive. We have been over this before. I don't think our discussion is very productive because we keep repeat ring the same points. You use invective and persuasive definitions, talk about how nice things would be if only, warn darkly about risks I am willing to accept and see no way to avoid. I'm not sure there is anything more to say. But do me a favor of not assuming that I'm a fool. I've been around the block. I just see things differently than you do. 

--- On Sat, 4/19/08, Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at aapt.net.au> wrote:


> From: Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at aapt.net.au>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] To each according to work
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Saturday, April 19, 2008, 8:02 PM
> At 12:41 AM -0700 19/4/08, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> 
> >There is nothing wrong with coercing people to work (by
> formal or 
> >perhaps, as JS Mill onserved in another context, even
> more effective 
> >informal) methods, any more than there is with coercing
> people to 
> >pay taxes to provide public goods --
> 
> Except that the social mechanisms necessary to coerce
> people corrupt 
> those whose function it is to do the coercing. In a social
> system 
> based on class rule, all those things are a necessary evil,
> but in a 
> socialist society such coercion, whether by brute force or
> economic 
> force, would be unnecessary.
> 
> >I'm not stuck un unequal incomes, if people can be
> coerced to do 
> >necessary work they don't want to do and
> wouldn't otherwise do by 
> >other other means that aren't even even more
> obnoxious, I have no 
> >objections. I also don't see any point in
> dicsussing that level of 
> >institutional design for a far-distinat future society
> that will 
> >make its own decisions.
> 
> Yes it is, and it isn't a question of whether to use
> economic 
> coercion, as under capitalism, or whether to revert to a
> more 
> primitive system of coercion. The whole point of socialism
> is to 
> advance. Socialism isn't conceived as a new and more
> sophisticated 
> form of class rule, but a whole new form of society. One
> without 
> classes, hence without class rule.
> 
> Those people who demand that such a society maintain some
> form of 
> coercion just don't get it. You can't have people
> being ruled over 
> without having rulers.
> 
> >As I said, I don't rule out that after several
> hundred years of a 
> >solidaristic society (where, however, coerces work from
> the lazy), 
> >that such coercion may not be necessary. I think the
> prospect barely 
> >worth contemplation.
> 
> On the contrary, it is the burning question.
> 
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tas
> 
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk

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