I think talk of alternatives to capitalism, along with guiding moral principles, is useful for limited purposes, to help us answer questions real people pose about what we on the left have that's better, and furthermore modeling exercises have a certain limited point at the appropriate level of abstraction to show the assumptions, possibilities, and problems of different kinds of alternatives, e.g., market socialism, nonmarket socialism. I'm glad some people do that, and I may someday finish a paper I have in this area on the Henry Hansmann's anti-cooperative views of the ownership of the enterprise.
I do think that its necessary to come clean on different views of human nature, which we all have, and stop pretending we don't.
I presume no one here means by HN an unalterable whatsit that can never be changed no matter the circumstances. (Except as a stalking horse to accuse others of advocating.) It's a set of dispositions to behave in different ways depending on the circumstances.
The no-coercion, make everything voluntary types here like John and Bill think that in a classless society with no coercion human nature is such that people will voluntarily undertake distribution of tasks, pleasant and unpleasant, that is acceptable to most, and that free riding would be rare.
I don't believe this; it doesn't take much free riding to provoke resentment, and a moderate amount will do. The basic prisoner's dilemma type social structures and incentives that create free riding capitalism exist in societies without wage labor, private property, or even markets. Hence Chris' (I think) reference to the joke that "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work," an old Soviet wisecrack. Nor is lack of Soviet democracy the issue.
The basic problem is that each of us can benefit by the labor of others without doing the work ourselves. If the work is even mildly unattractive, there will be a very large incentive not to do it. Note that this is independent of the existence of classes, of the structure of property relations, or whether there are markets. It just depends on two things: the fact that some (necessary) work is less pleasant and (many) people would rather do nothing or something else than that less pleasant work, and (the further fact that the free-riders will still benefit by others' doing that work. The result is, it's rational for each of us not to do that work. Note further the the point doesn't even depend on some people being goof-offs. Everyone may want to work very very hard at something that is more fun.
I don't see any argument that has been offered for against this except the observation that sometimes people do volunteer work. That's weak and doesn't go to the problem raised. As noted, most people don't. And the volunteer work may not be the necessary work that is needed. Maybe I build houses for Habitat while the sewers that need widening to avoid flooding go undug, for example. (Well, there's unpaid women's work, but that's not exactly "volunteer" labor or a model we'd advocate.) Ok, this will be under socialism, but the volunteer work we are speaking of is under capitalism.
Alternatively the left libertarians bite the bullet and say that if people won't do necessary tasks without coercion, they won't get done. I guess I think that the price to pay of undone necessary tasks would be very high.
I haven't mentioned it here but in addition to free riding there is a Hayekian epistemological problem, how will people know what to do even if they want to? How will they find out allocate their volunteer efforts in a constructive way? Are you sure, John, that your time is best spent working on Habitat? Why do you think so? Multiply the question by 300 million. See above with my question about what's the best way to allocate limited resources.
Differential pay is a red herring. It is a potential tool that might be usable in some circumstances. I don't see the moral objection. I don't understand why people get passionate about it. Maybe it's because they buy into the idea that money measures the intrinsic value of your work, hence of you, so if you pay doctors more than ditch diggers you are saying that doctors are better people. Needless to say every link in this nonsequiter is pure bourgeois ideology. Differential pay is a set of incentives independent of our valuation of persons or even of the intrinsic value of their work; it may partly reflect judgments of desert insofar as desert depends on contribution and effort, but that doesn't involve judgments about who is a better person. If a future society votes down differential pay, I'm sure that most people will live with that and find some other way to rewards contribution and allocate labor resources, hopefully a nonauthoritarian one. One
can build models with and without it to explore various possibilities, that's all. I think it's a good idea, but I'm interested in egalitarian models too.
--- On Sun, 4/20/08, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> From: Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] To each according to work
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Sunday, April 20, 2008, 3:12 PM
> Lew wrote:
> > Miles Jackson wrote:
> >
> >
> >>I have to say I want to side with Bill and John on
> this one, but I'm
> >>don't follow the argument here. How will a
> socialist society ensure
> >>that all of the useful and necessary work is done?
> Will there just be
> >>enough diversity in interests and preferences so
> that all of the work
> >>will be accomplished without coercion? (Are there
> enough people
> >>intrinsically interested in cleaning public toilets
> so that we need no
> >>social or economic coercion to make sure all the
> public toilets are
> >>cleaned?)
> >
> >
> > The answer would seem to be that, if it can't be
> done by voluntary
> > co-operation, then it won't be done. The toilets
> would go uncleaned and
> > they would suffer the ensuing hygiene problems. But I
> would have thought
> > that at least some would see the mutual benefits of
> regularly cleaning
> > the toilets, perhaps leaving the uncleaned toilets for
> those who don't
> > want to bother.
> >
> > We could generalize from this as the answer to the
> "free-rider problem"
> > in socialism, though it is clear that some people are
> more perturbed by
> > this than the free-riders under capitalism (i.e. the
> capitalist class).
>
> First of all, everybody on this list is perturbed about
> capitalist
> exploitation, so there's no need for the cheap shot in
> your last
> sentence. Second, "how do we solve the free rider
> problem?" is the
> wrong question to ask, much less answer. The crucial
> question here is
> "In a socialist society, how do we ensure that we
> accomplish all of the
> important work?" Saying "some people will see
> the benefits and take
> care of it" seems like a pretty weak argument to me.
>
> As much as I detest parecon, there is a need for some
> systematic
> planning in industrial societies. Now, we can do that
> planning in a
> democratic way, and as colleagues we can hold each other
> accountable for
> getting the important work done without a police state. I
> just don't
> see how this can be left to individual perogative.
> (Granted, that may
> reflect my lack of imagination about possible future
> societies, but
> that's how I see it right now.)
>
> It just occurred to me that this "no coercion"
> position is an
> ideological precipitate of capitalist social relations.
> Under
> capitalism, the individual is supreme; personal choices
> supposedly lead
> to optimal allocation of resources; government screws up
> the optimal
> allocation. In the same way, the "no coercion"
> position assumes that we
> can just trust individuals to make the right personal
> choices, and all
> the work will get done. At the ideological level, both the
> capitalist
> and the no coercion perspectives are glorifications of the
> individual
> and the sanctity of individual preferences.
>
> Perhaps this is why we shouldn't spend much time
> drawing blueprints for
> our glorious socialist future: much of what we imagine is
> conditioned by
> the capitalist social relations in which we are enmeshed.
> In a real
> sense, how to allocate work in a socialist society
> isn't our project.
> We need to do political work now to make it possible for
> people at some
> point in the future to grapple with that project.
>
> Miles
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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