On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 1:27 PM, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com
> wrote: Mathias: Why would socialism require particularly altruistic people?
Somebody: Chris knows more about this when it comes to the Soviet Union, but it's clear that worker's are less productive when they know they aren't going to be laid off and that there's limited opportunity for wage growth. The cliche "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us," has more than a kernel of truth to it, don't you think? The alternative of course is to turn harsher methods to compel labor, as Trotsky with his visions of militarizing labor and Stalin with his best attempt to put that into practice, revealed. This latter method does seem to work, at least.
So, people need to be more altruistic because they'll need to put in work that's not fully compensated for (as in capitalism), but without the lash of economic necessity (although there can be other consequences like ostracism). I mean, aside from the period of enthusiasm and ideological fervor immediately following revolutions, isn't it the case that worker apathy tends to become endemic in socialist countries? Doesn't that in a sense, come down to selfishness?
A few historical points, and then a few analytic ones:
One, weren't intraindustrial wage differentials, and intergenerational mobility, higher in the USSR than the West?
Two, I'm not so sure coercion was as effective as you claim. Aside from the early 30s positive material incentives were extremely prominent as well, and they still had - or at least they thought they had - the worst labor discipline problems ever, because so much of the workforce were recently urbanized peasants. The economy had such astronomical growth because (1) planning allowed them to set the savings rate extremely high and (2) there were so many easy investment opportunities - just move peasants into the cities and presto.
Three, and partly for the above reasons, I don't think the purely economic record of the Second World was all that bad. The USSR grew faster than the West up until the late 60s/early 70s and slower after that, and defense expenditures were ridiculous. The Chinese population grew quite significantly despite the regime's well-known violence. The right to work probably constricted the economy's ability to shift workers and investments from one sector to another, though, which was a major reason for the slowdown.
Chris knows more about this than me, though.
Analytic points: one, what counts as "socialism?" I'd be fine with a system of worker-owned cooperatives plus a social democratic welfare state, but obviously not all would. Two, what labor/leisure tradeoffs are legitimate for a society that "works?" All these effects work at the margin; would it be so bad to have modest if positive growth if poverty can be eliminated?