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Rethinking Communist Economics After
the Twentieth-Century Debacle
Henry
Flynt
©
1997, 1998 Henry A. Flynt, Jr.
A.
Where to begin?
Academic or bourgeois economics
begins by presenting axioms which mathematicize the behavior of “atomistically
separate man,” with his portfolio of assets—and which mathematicize processes
which produce outputs from so-called factors of production. The quantitative totality thus obtained is a
model of resource allocation having an equilibrium solution. The equilibrium is an optimum because,
roughly, it gets the most tons of marketable product from all the resources
that can be procured. Right prices are
established by the intersections of supplies and demands in markets. To know the right price—that is the essence
of economics.
As for the idea of Communism, it was
given its official identity by generations of literary publicists,[1] by labor union radicals, and by Soviet-bloc
states. The official tradition
sometimes envisioned Communism as a return to a far simpler, less complex and
technical life. (Lenin once said
it.) I will implicitly reply to this
view below; but in general, I will ignore it as unworthy of a reply. From the other side, there were attempts to
frame a socialist economics which were continuous with the bourgeois
resource-allocation models. Without
going back to the earliest exercises of this nature, I may mention Kornai’s Mathematical Planning of Structural
Decisions; Alec Nove’s The Economics
of Feasible Socialism and its pathetic sequel, The Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited; John Roemer’s
mathematical Marxism.
The collapse of Communism—and what
was symbolically even more significant, Kornai’s personal reversion to
bourgeois ideology—exposed these deferential approaches as socialist defeatism.
In this manuscript, I will use capitalism to denote economic formations
which profess the bourgeois resource-allocation models as their rationale. One of the curiosities of the twentieth
century is the appearance of tendencies which practice capitalism but are
ashamed of the label: social democracy,
mixed economies, the welfare state.
Given the collapse of Communism and the world-wide turn to privatization
at the end of the twentieth century, there is no reason to indulge the attempts
to mitigate capitalism with euphemisms.
I just observed that the spokesmen
for socialism took their stand on academic, that is, bourgeois economics; while
social-democratic propaganda sought to evade the label capitalism. All the while,
bourgeois economics increasingly came to be accepted as a natural science. Three illustrations out of many are: Steven Weinberg’s citation of Samuelson’s
1970 Nobel Prize lecture in Gravitation
and Cosmology (1972); the publication of a Jeffrey Sachs article on
restoring the market in Poland in Scientific
American (March 1992); and the “Pricing the Planet” issue of Nature, May 15, 1997. The mystique that everything in heaven and
earth is born with a price tag has become a truism accepted by all public
intellectuals I know of. (Below, I
mention how physico-mathematical science and capitalism are interwoven by the
Action Principle and mathematical preference theory.)
Meanwhile, Francis Fukuyama argued
that the bourgeois republic is the summit of human social creativity. And indeed, there is no publicly understood
evidence which refutes him. I will call
this claim Fukuyama’s challenge. What
emerged at the end of the twentieth century was an implicit consensus among
public intellectuals that the bourgeois vision was an unsurpassable
culmination. Claims by Soviet spokesmen
that the Soviet Union had discovered a new system called socialism (e.g.
Bukharin’s “Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical
Materialism”) had in the end to be called a hoax. The only room for disagreement was over whether the capitalist
rationale should be called by its name or by something else.
All roads in official economic
thought and economic practice led back to capitalism. That capitalism proved so difficult to escape must have some
significance. I will comment on
capitalism’s observed inescapability later.
If I consented to the consensus, it
would nullify the topic I propose to write about. Our purpose here must be to escape the consensus. Ultimately, Communist economics will be
intricately quantitative, since it envisions even the coordination of a global
economy without money and with an immense increase in automation. But we have just seen why Communist
economics cannot begin with a resource allocation model. It cannot begin by writing axioms which
mathematicize the behavior of economic actors, employment of factors of
production, processes of production. It
must begin with an attempt to imagine qualitatively what bourgeois economics
would call non-economic existence. Only
later can the lessons learned be translated into operations research, which
will itself have to be constituted on a new basis.
°
Qualitative aspects of life
Human life, in the larger view, is
an individuated journey of desire, satisfaction, [curiosity, initiative,
inventiveness, imagination, speculation, awe,] esteem, morale, contentment,
boredom, etc. We must try to understand
qualitatively how economic precepts might honor this realm (as opposed to
disgracing it). What sort of mode of
life would escape selfishness, greed, property, trading as economic principles
(principles which will always engender capitalism)? We have to find mental handholds by which to move into a
profoundly new conception of existence.
To get the most tons of processed product from all the resources that
can be procured, for example, is not an appropriate goal for humanity.
The following topics, then, need extensive qualitative discussion.
1. Collectivism—interdependence as an enabler
of human possibility.
2a. Self-arrival, enjoyed self-realization.
2b. Amenities, benefits, not measurable in
money.
We have to reason backwards from
(1)-(2b). Humans are intrinsically
interdependent, intrinsically communal.
Humans provision themselves—envision needs which can only be satisfied
by inventive production. Human
amenities are realized on the platform of organizing and producing
sociality. Production and civility
embody or evince a system; society is intrinsically systemic.
The question is how the human need
to produce subsistence—and the long-term alteration of the human/environment
relation by the expansion of production (resource-depletion, etc.)—can be
programmed, coordinated, guided in a way appropriate to (1)-(2b).
°
Innate human disposition?
Historically, average people are
involved in a game of “selfishness and greed”:
covetousness, comparative comfort, possession of baubles conferring
self-confidence and sexual appeal.
Human vanity was already highly developed in the earliest civilizations
(if not in primitive society). What
capitalism, in particular, does is: to
democratize or vulgarize these impulses as mass-market status symbols.
What will become of these
impulses? It is facile to dismiss
trading, and to dismiss the use of people as beasts of burden and pawns. Slavery, and trading, would hardly have been
thought of if their basis was shallow.
Marx made it an axiom that selfishness and greed are the product of the
objective evolutionary forces materialized in class society. Implicitly, there was the question of the
innate component in generic human disposition and potential. (Human nature.) In the nineteenth century, molecular biology did not exist, and
the notion of re-engineering human hardware would have been considered
mad. So experimental manipulation of
the conditions was impossible, and Marx had no way of demarcating human nature,
not even in theory. He posited a
determinism of environment, of culture, with no supporting evidence; and people
espoused it as a religion.
The scientific Establishment as we
know it worships the manipulation of matter and bourgeois values. (I already alluded to the interweaving of
science and capitalism in §A.) This
Establishment has already altered human fate, with the introduction of nuclear
power. Another round of dislocations
has commenced with genetic engineering.
Thus, it would be ignorant to imagine that biological tinkering with
human nature is impossible.
All the same, I do not wish to
include such heroic tinkering in the present discussion. I will abstract from the prospect that the
present scientific Establishment will re-engineer human nature for the purposes
of “social harmony.” If scientific
reality is to be brought to the center of the discussion, I would insist on my
perspective of an intellectual revolution so profound as to cancel scientific
reality.[2] In turn,
that would open a truly visionary perspective on collective existence. Then, meta-technology might reshape the
sphere of material necessity through and through.
In §A, I noted Fukuyama’s
challenge. Among other things, this
study aims to refute Fukuyama in thought.
I want to envision a society which could lie in our future and itself
have a future. I seek understandable
arguments. What, then, of generic human
disposition? We can learn a lesson from
the way in which slavery was ended.
Progress did not eliminate the human capacity to enslave. What progress accomplished was to make
slavery structurally and psychologically unnecessary and difficult. That is the sort of solution I seek in
regard to selfishness, greed, covetousness, vanity, etc.: to make them structurally and
psychologically unnecessary and difficult.
•
B.
The individual, the collective, striving and economic activity
Our perspective can reject
selfishness as an absolute.
The collective would make an
unconditional commitment to nurture individuals, acknowledging individual
differences: so that people would
quicken one another. You are helpful toward
other people because you enjoy them, because you find them indispensable. You want intact friends, not battered and
beaten friends. A parent’s relation to
children: you don’t make them prove
individually that they produce a good return to your investment in them. You nourish them according to their different
natures.
The crux of Communism—what Communism
holds out that is profoundly new—is that your helpfulness is no longer charity,
no longer sentimental, no longer a sentimental duty. Systematic wealth-based power is gotten rid of. In a philanthropic relation, person A gives
person B something because A is pleased by B’s satisfaction. In the classless society, B would get
something as his or her “stake in the system,” without reference to A’s
sentimental disposition. People are not
nourished because they elicit a sentimental solicitousness; they are nourished
because everyone is entitled, is a peer.
The aim of Communism is to arrive at general entitlement, realizing the
collectivity of interest.
Let me backtrack to lessons about
selfishness in historical societies.
The “quality of my life” is profoundly dependent on the condition of
other people. If I live as a rich
person where a population is starving, my “quality of life” is poisoned.
That is not the end of the matter,
however. It does not follow that I am
better off if the populace enjoys Swedish prosperity as opposed to the
destitution of India. It is much more
nuanced than that. Values can survive
in a society of traditional dominance and subservience which will mean more to
some than the amenities of the European welfare state. A profound lesson emerges here about
fabianism. “Progressive” thought in the
West in the twentieth century arrived at something of a consensus as to what
gradual progress in equality consists of.
But there was an enormous catch here.
Increases in equality may not at all constitute an absolute improvement
in the quality of life. That is because
today’s relatively progressive societies—examples would be Sweden or New York
City—are not utopias. What they have
done is to take capitalism, the manipulation of matter, bureaucratic
rationality, sterile design farther than they have ever been taken before. There is not the slightest reason to
consider these “advances” a utopia.
There is not the slightest guarantee that they bring the population
closer to an absolute of fulfillment.
We reject selfishness as an economic
axiom. On the other hand, what it means
to say that the quality of life depends on the condition of the collective is a
still-unanswered question. We require
discoveries which are far removed from the welfare states of the third quarter
of the twentieth century (which are now tottering, anyway).
Our perspective can reject greed as
an absolute. But to implement this
remark, we must insist on the distinction between what a person uses and what a
person owns. Communism undertakes to
provide reasonable satisfaction in what people use. In that respect, greed is not defensible. I may eat one chocolate bar in a day. To try to eat a thousand of them is mad. A person might want a thousand bars if he
could own and trade them. But the
accumulation of stocks as the nucleus of personal wealth is one of the
practices which, by definition, Communism wants to abolish.
Either there will be no “ownership
of assets”; or trading of assets will be abolished.
It is sensible for the social body
to “give” individuals what they do not desire.
An understandable illustration is the vaccination of children. “If it feels good, do it, and otherwise,
don’t” is not, as an absolute, compatible with Communism. The collective’s wisdom can outrank the
individual's pleasure-seeking. That is
a fundamental principle here.
°
Production
Marx took a fateful step in
circumscribing the production of necessities of subsistence, treating it as a
burden, to be shared by all and to be made as light as possible. Indeed, will there be a rigidly
circumscribed sphere of production concerned with mass provision of food,
shelter, clothing, medical services, etc. etc.? If so, that has consequences throughout the mode of life. To crystallize a sphere of production of
“necessary work” would seemingly be necessary to reap the benefits of advanced
technology and absolute efficiencies of scale.[3]
Another sphere of activity in which
a nonchalant or individualist approach is improbable is adventure which
consumes massive resources, such as off-planet astronomical facilities or
particle accelerators. This sphere will
have to be one in which accountable administrators issue wide-scope commands—correlative
to the way production is administered.
°
Distribution
Apart from the “giving” of benefits
which an individual may not desire, how are people’s experienced needs,
desires, satisfied? We have to follow
the path of public libraries and “complimentary” (i.e. moneyless)
cafeterias. Administrative assignment
of complimentary housing.
Laundromats. As throughout this
essay, I choose the examples for their familiarity. When we finally come to particular technical perspectives,
technological revolution may render the particular illustrations
antiquated. The providers—cafeterias,
clinics, laundromats, etc.—are supervised by people specializing in the work.
As with a public library, “request
levels” are one signal to the supervisors of what to offer. Electronic referenda could be another avenue
for transmitting consumer wishes. (The
electronic suggestion box.) There is a
great deal more to be said here, which I will get to below. The notion of rationing has to be
re-thought, so that it no longer connotes a makeshift of scarcity. What is sought is a moving equilibrium of
people getting what they will accept.
The point-to-point match between the
individual’s money and the product uniquely elicited by that money which is
supposed to be embodied in a consumer purchase cannot be a goal—not in the
sphere of mass provisioning of the population.
What if a consumer good required
coal for its production, but when the order went to the supply end, people
didn’t want to supply it, i.e. to be coal miners? What is the incentive to produce the supplies which (accountable)
administrators demand? How is
unpleasant work to be divided among people?
Capitalism, we may observe, does not solve the problem of distasteful
work by paying higher for it; that is a myth.
Coal miners are paid far less than athletes. The capitalist solution is to trap sub-populations in low castes,
wherein most members experience themselves as having to accept the same
unappealing jobs their forebears have accepted.
Our answer begins with a culture in
which people are expected to serve, to give something back to those on whom
they depend. There has to be a social pressure to give something back, an
active resentment of the person who is all take and no give. Again, I appeal to an antiquated
illustration for its familiarity: the
military draft. Everyone has a service
obligation; and there has to be concept of occupational options considered
equivalent. So it is that routine or
productive work would be allocated. You
have to fulfill an obligation in one or another designated way, given a
schedule of options. If for some reason
the job requires continuous attendance for long periods, the off time has to be
greater. Coal mining might be
considered more burdensome than clerking.
The jobs might be segmented so that total per-person time in the former
job might be shorter than in the latter.
Human effort outside the realm of
production (assuming there is a circumscribed productive realm) will be donated
outright—since the individual’s means of consumption will have been provided
anyway. I will return to this topic.
°
Central administration and authority
Obviously this perspective requires
professional supervisors, administrators, people entitled to issue commands of
wider and wider scope, to make decisions of wider and wider scope. They will be authorized in a system of
representation. That means that
accountability, recallability, must be built into all organizations in which
authority is granted. A further
question to be pondered is that of organizations whose members’ job is to
“guard public order.” Police
agencies. Lenin said that the need for
separate police organizations would disappear.
It was part of his notion that Communism would comprise a return to a
simpler, indeed primitive mode of life.
Public disorder would arise only in individual cases, from those who
were emotionally unbalanced. The
collective would coalesce spontaneously to restrain the individual. Lenin promised that jailing would not
exist. But because of the confluence of
great masses of people and advanced and dangerous technology—of processes that
set massive resources in motion—I hold that there must a be a central
perspective on society, making decisions of wide scope, issuing commands of wide
scope. Let us follow the hypothesis
that there would be organizations “guarding public order” concomitant to this
central perspective on society. Again
the problem is to create a system of representation, to build accountability in
everywhere. But then we presuppose a
rule of law; and the reconstitution of law for the future envisioned here is
unexplored territory indeed.
What institutions must forestall is
a scenario in which a police agency becomes the captive of a clique of
administrators, so that the latter gain power outside their authorization and
can declare themselves nonaccountable and nonrecallable. A peer culture would have to be cultivated
which would guard accountability. This
culture would be interdependent with, on the one hand, contempt for the person
who is all take and no give, and, on the other hand, with a perspective that
service obligations can be discharged in offbeat ways.
I will expand on these questions in
what follows. But let me state some
very general principles. To pass from
levels of narrower scope to levels of wider scope need not mean passing to
centers of more and more coercive force.
An organization’s executive can be very much controlled by the members which constitute it. All the while, I do not see multiple centers
or apexes of administration as the key—because our world has already been
unified, and we do not wish to disconnect the fate of one region of the world
from others. The key, rather, is to
build in
i. consultation between center and periphery.
ii. local independences, locally autonomous
solutions.
iii. a flow of instructions upward as well as
downward.
All
the same, I have to disavow a mystique of local initiative. It is facile to locate all virtue in one
corner of society like that. With that
said, the principles (i)-(iii) have to be embodied in mathematical programming
without optimization.[4] It is
(among other things) a problem in applied mathematics which has never been
addressed because there was no public motivation to address it.
To repeat, the purpose of this
discussion is to shape an attitude, far in advance of particular technical
perspectives. Again, I choose
illustrations, for familiarity, which might be rendered antiquated. Also I do not seek to envision a society
which can instantly grant every request made by every individual. Nor do I seek to envision a society free
from built-in risks of usurpation. It
is precisely bourgeois anarchism[5] that wields such expectations; and they are
inherently unfulfillable.
A Communist perspective must insist
that a given “society” projects a temper
or sensibility which shapes what individuals can do and what they want, while
at the same time, that temper or sensibility is created by the collective, not
by an individual. The envisioned society
might not provide this or that individual with a favorite brand of
cigarettes. To bourgeois anarchism,
that might be an overwhelming objection to it.
But the objection does not take into account how a society’s temper, a
mode of life, are collective creations.
A genuine Communism would expose the whole of present civilization to
have been a horrible temper, if you will.[6] I wish to
envision a holistic advance in collective existence—not a promise to grant
every desire that can be named, not a promise to allow people to live without
organizations.
The problem of accountability (local
entitlement, democracy) may be inseparable from the problem of whether the
economic problem (the dependence of survival on material production) can be
handled in a post-capitalist way at all. But if we distinguish the problems verbally,
it is the latter problem which has been the great stumbling block (because its
solution needs a technical insight). My
focus here is on the latter problem.
•
C.
Production, mass existence, self-motivated endeavors, spontaneity
Let me resume with the question of
circumscribing a sphere of production (of high-level subsistence). One way to build a house is to make a hobby
of it, working “inefficiently.”
Here is where I may interject that a
perspective which wants to freeze “the liberated zone” at a low-tech level
(neo-primitive anarchism) will be beaten from outside, where unrestrained
capitalism will invent baubles and infiltrate the low-tech zone to market them.
Mass production builds millions of
dwellings by mechanical methods so that everybody can have a sophisticated
amenity. Another example is provided by
washing machines. How, in fact, would
Communism distribute access to washing machines? Complimentary laundromats.
The loaning of appliances like books from a lending library. The building of complimentary domiciles
pre-equipped with utilities.
The mass production of washing
machines is not a labor of love: it is
a burden that immediate producers bear, a social responsibility only. Certain occupations may need full-time
dedication; at the same time, some people will find them rewarding enough to
seek them. (Medicine; managing.) The contours of burdensome work are to be
transformed by automation. The time
released will be distributed to those whose work is not a labor of love.
Production and the provisioning of
the collective emerge as a pragmatic burden.
There is a tension in the way that this burden contracts and expands
simultaneously. Metaphorically, you give
people a computer for $1000 which would have cost millions, if not billions, to
have been built as a unique item. When
support industries are established and appliances are mass produced, the
resources embodied in a single unit are greatly contracted. At the same time, even more of human
activity has to be devoted to this sphere of “necessary labor,” because
expectations of comfort and scope rise.
More and more attention has to be given to the changing
human-environment relationship.
Humanity becomes addicted to the fruits of “development”—i.e. the
introduction of new products, the building of new facilities, the creation of
new industries. Human self-realization
depends on the availability of mass-produced appliances.
Another complication is that food
which is the first solution to occur to mass producers is not necessarily as
healthful or as delectable as “organic” or “primitively assembled” food. Would some useful work be carried out as a
hobby with complimentary, rationed supplies?
The product would be distributed as a gift.
I have rejected the absolutizing of
selfishness; the individual’s possibilities are enabled by a social temper
which is a collective creation. But
that is not to deny that the individual can be menaced by the group’s stupidity;
or to deny that there can be value in self-sequestration or “going off on one’s
own.” I don’t want to be a captive of a
collective sensibility, of collective styles.
At the same time, I have great admiration for some styles or
sensibilities which were produced collectively. The Communist task, among other things, is to abolish trading—and
the pursuit of money as the value which annuls qualities. Marx promised that it was obvious and easy
how the private person and the social person would be re-united. For him to promise that was not only
irresponsible; it was retarded.
A collective sensibility is
inevitable in public space and in decisions which have to be made for
multitudes of people. There will not a
be a different city for every person, because a city is a collective zone;
there cannot be a different industrial landscape for each person. Fishing, on an economically significant
scale (not a hobby or voluntary simplicity), cannot be designed from zero by
each individual. It is an industry whose
practitioners can only combine given means in different ways. It is entirely possible that the only
innovation in fishing which would matter would be an innovation which
reorganized the entire industry.
As I hinted at the beginning, if the
mode of life can only materialize in the far future, then meta-technology could
play a crucial role—reshaping the sphere of material necessity through and
through. Then we would be beyond the
range of the illustrations I have given here to convey the outlook. Even if technology became more
“psychological,” the devotion of effort to the sphere of necessity would
remain.
You may think of big research as
collective adventure, or as a support system which the economy’s embrace of
technology has made indispensable. In either case, it is a sphere in which
individualistic solutions are not possible.
The researcher has to convince administrators that his or her use of the
massive equipment should take precedence over the other researcher’s wish to
use the equipment—and that involves demonstrating understandable expertise, and
agreeing to canons of responsibility and secrecy.
Again, we arrive at the necessity
for administrative hierarchies able to make decisions of wide scope. What we may ponder is that historically, the
societal temper or sensibility resulting from the decisions made by the
authorities varied profoundly. We seek
to alter the context of the decisions so that unpriceable human possibility is
encouraged, non-“material” technology is encouraged, the constriction of people
in order to get use of them is avoided, abolished. We have acknowledged the necessity of the social executive or
planner. We have anticipated questions
of how wide the scope of this body will be, what sort of authority it will
have. But, while awaiting a survey of
these issues which is even plausible, my focus here is on whether a
post-capitalist solution is possible at all.
The bourgeois production function
offers itself when the topic of production of subsistence, necessary labor, is
posed. “Radical economics” in the
universities in the second half of the twentieth century assented to the
bourgeois production function (if not the neo-classical version, then a linear
or circular version). All I shall say
here is that I provisionally accept absolute efficiency: the avoidance of pure waste. Referring to a given qualitatively specific
input to a production process, if other inputs are held constant, then given
output should be produced with the least of the given input that custom permits. If one makes an item much more slowly than
the process presupposes, then one has dropped out of mass production and is
making the item as a hobby.
On the other hand, I reject the
concept of relative efficiency, because it depends on the establishment of
ratios of value between inputs.
Investment decisions would be made not on the basis of relative
efficiency, but on the basis of computer “impact” studies, which would preserve
qualitative specificity of inputs, and be mindful of the environmental context. (What bourgeois economics has to call
external because it is outside of the firm’s purchasing decision.)
Again, we do not rebut capitalism by
saying “individual is bad, society is good.”
As is known well enough, this slogan can, among other things, enable a
clique to usurp the general interest and claim to speak for it. Beyond that, we do not want the sociality of
a caste system—or of the welfare state, for that matter. We want a collectivism which finds a place
of spontaneity and for people who go off on their own.
°
Local authorization
Even if we had at our disposal a
science fiction supercomputer, it would be out of the question to have a
centrally commanded economy in which all signals flow from the top: because that would turn the population into
cogs in a machine, limited to following orders.
Again, there has to be an executive
organ which manages the productive and distributive system in the large,
including environmental relations. At
the same time, there is the important problem of consulting with local
production councils, of allowing local initiatives and views to guide the
center. We must be cognizant of the
case of groups which spontaneously embark on new modes of “useful” work. Local, spontaneous, experimental production.
The economic coordination routines
must provide for the center’s decisions to dovetail with certain independences
in routine management; and to dovetail with local experimental production or
invention. [Local authorization and
consensual authority.] Closely parallel
with the way that central authority derives from members’ consent, with the way
members constitute central authority.
[The system must be at once planned,
centralized, and bounded; and also improvised, decentralized, and
unbounded.] The label in algorithm
theory presently known to me is decomposition.
°
The self-motivated vocation
The case of groups which innovate in
“useful work” is understandable, and to be expected. But there is also the case of the individual in a unique situation,
the case which cannot be judged by pre-existing standards. My foremost personal reason for entertaining
the Communist idea was my crisis of survival, as a person with a self-motivated
vocation, in the years following 1960.
There were other compelling reasons,
of course, to turn to the Communist idea.
Capitalism abolishes quality. It
demands human sacrifices: a continual
supply of pauperized workers (no matter how far it has to range to find them);
ever-expanding markets (no matter what it has to do to secure them). And capitalism perpetuates, via the
inheritance of wealth, the ancient phenomenon of inheritance of privilege.
Again, though, what settled it for
me was the promise that a genuine Communism would protect the individual from
the group’s stupidity far more fairly than capitalism. Suppose an individual attempts something
worthwhile which the group is unable to appreciate. How does one deal fairly with the innovator whose innovation
can’t pay its own way?—because it transcends the very criteria by which
worthiness is measured. The obvious
answer is to make the individual’s subsistence unconditional; and to conceive
every individual contribution to the collectivity as service or gift. To repeat, the individual receives the means
of subsistence unconditionally.
Every individual will have a service
obligation which must be discharged in a way understandable to other
people. As for capitalism, it
structures work in a way which can be lethal to inspiration. Capitalism wishes for workers to make the
specialized job their entire life. The
inducement is money, not released time.
The above-the-line occupation is so burdensome as to preclude the
below-the-line vocation.
The service obligation in Communism
should not rule out the self-motivated endeavor. There should be service obligations which do not exhaust the
person—after all, while I do not discuss technical questions here, I assume a
pervasive application of automation.
Ultimately, just these two
arrangements may carry the entire burden of protecting the self-motivated
endeavor. There is another avenue which
could be thought through. The
administrative authority could have the option of approving self-motivated
undertakings as fulfillment of the individual’s obligation. Depicting this avenue in the most favorable
light, the obligation to serve would allow different tracks. Some people would commit fully to “the
practical,” medicine, management, planning of environmental consequences, etc. Other people could be accredited to engage
in “visionary” pursuits.
Let me say immediately that I am
all-too-familiar with the risks of this avenue. The authorities, the group, never welcomes the claim that an
“obscure” submission embodies standards higher than the standard embodied in
official accreditation and certification.
If you can petition to be exempted from routine work in order to fulfill
your obligation by being a visionary, that will put accreditation as a
visionary in the hands of a “governmental” committee. Being a “genius” is treated like being a baseball player. A class of people is elicited who make a
high art of playing to the administrators’ limitations—when those are the very
obstacle we are contending with. To
underline the point, a committee charged with giving dispensations to
“exceptional” people favors “innovations” which are entertaining, which the
benefactors can patronize. Those who
pointedly cast aspersions on the benefactors’ honesty or refinement are not
favored. I spelled this out in the
first of the “social recognition” essays in 1961.[7] For this
avenue to lead to the wanted result, then, the collective would have to exhibit
an elevation of spirit which has no precedent known to us.
Again, therefore, the only certain
protection for the self-motivated endeavor may come from the two arrangements I
outlined in the first place. The
condition of having a dual vocation would have to be accepted, to come to be
understood.
Under Communism, individual
contributions which were not service would be gifts. Practical inventions would be donated, not traded for
wealth. Obvious precedents are the
medical discoveries, such as the polio vaccine, whose discoverers were not
remunerated in proportion to the discovery’s benefit to humanity. We don’t want to encourage the notion of
making benefactors of humanity commensurately wealthy. Not when people no longer support themselves
via their occupations.
•
D.
The dimensions of the problem reviewed
Again, the Communist idea has been
poorly served by Leftist folklore which has promised that the “new dawn” will
restore Arcadia—and in consequence of that, frictionlessly reconcile the
private and the social person, abolish all risk of usurpation, grant everyone
every wish they can conceive. How could
that be, when humans already know how to blow up the world, when there is no
prospect of abolishing illness and death (and if there were, the demographics
would pose a new problem), when cybernetic systems have to be the key to
superseding the manual and repetitive labor which made class societies
advantageous?
Again, to promise people that a
foreseeable arrangement in which people live together and produce their means
of subsistence will grant everyone every wish they can conceive is demagogic;
it just throws up another obstacle to answering Fukuyama’s challenge.
The existing quantitative tools in
economics have capitalism’s mystique—universalization of trading, homogeneous
factors of production, selfishness, greed, etc etc.—as their foundation and
basis. The mystique is further
buttressed by the enshrining of the action principle, by which Nature Herself
is discovered to be a profit-maximizer.
And by mathematical preference theory, which encourages scorn for
collective demand, collective consumption.
Additionally, Communist theory
suffered a massive setback when Marx sought to explain the dynamics of
capitalism, and to prove the theft of profit from the workers, by taking his
stand on a price concept (labor values, efficiency prices).
The ultimate failure of all socialisms
and anarchisms in the twentieth century teaches us that a Communist economy
cannot rest on this “economism.”
Now the quantitative tools for
Communism have to be created from scratch, from the “physical” considerations
in consumption and production. It goes
even beyond that, because engineering science has been deeply compromised by
the notion that there is always an “objective” which has to be driven to the
resource limit. So the quantitative
tools need to concretize the conceptual environment which I have explored here.
It is an environment of interdependencies and group needs, of resources and
throughputs which can be substituted, but not measured in a common unit. Consumption is planned to reflect custom, engineering
expertise, and what amount to initiatives and referendums; investment is
planned with disaggregated “impact” studies.
There is no such thing as a single (composite) good which the economy
sacrifices everything else to maximize.
°
Certain particular issues in
consumption are instructive in principle.
Vices
It is plausible that Communism would
not cater to certain consumer vices, such as alcohol and tobacco. In other words, strip people of the option
to become users in the first place, on the grounds that the person who starts
using is only made worse off. I
discused this suggestion with a person who doubted that these common vices
could be abolished, reminding me that the Soviet Union had not dared to curb
them. But that is an important
lesson. The Soviet Union could not restrict
these vices for the same reason that colonialists did not curb the use of
narcotics by the colonized. It was
advantageous, necessary, to give anodynes, soporifics, to the subjects. If that consideration continued to be
operative after the inception of the envisioned Communism, it would be a
symptom that the system was psychologically toxic.
Incidentally, I favor
experimentation with mind-altering drugs.
It seems to pose the same problem of supervision as any technique which
has a threshold of harmful consequences.
( A person could want to play with an X-ray machine, too.) When we consider narcotics, we are reminded
of a factual consideration which has profound consequences for an ethics of
prudence. Humans are seducible. The offer of pleasure leads to a habit which
relentlessly destroys the user. We do
not judge a practice by the individual case, but the collective impact. That is why it seems suitable not to offer
certain vices in the first place.
The utopian abolition of art
I have a critique of art which is
utterly unlike the “anti-art” buzz surrounding various famous modern
artists. The public anti-art buzz
proves to have been a version of artistic conservatism, complaining that art
has been corrupted by commercialism, or that Dada ruined the European
sensibility so that it was no longer possible to make good art. When I first framed my theory, I assumed
that traditional art was discredited by its ties to reactionary social
arrangements. I also thought that the
genres standard in the European tradition were intolerably corny. I rejected the claims of intellectual
edification (not to mention the claims of religious edification ) made for Bach
or for twelve-tone music, for example.
Beyond that, because I began my career very much in the modern art
milieu, I was intensely aware of what is casually called self-indulgence: wherein the artist demands attention simply
for objectifying his or her “self” in an institutional genre. Without re-tracing my reasoning any further,
I concluded that a utopia would not have what we call art: museums, opera houses, concert halls,
playhouses. This is not the place to
insist on the point, but I must say that the prospect of a society without the
objectifications and the roles associated with the arts still fascinates
me. (There would still be public space,
decoration, a public sensibility.)
These views may have some bearing on my conception of self-motivated
endeavors whose results are distributed as gifts.
•
E.
Notes on classes and the transition
Communism has pictured itself as the
political movement for the most deprived and disadvantaged and impoverished of
the earth. But there is no way that
this constituency would spontaneously construct an economy which literally
transcended capitalism, sustaining and surpassing whatever intellectual wealth
and technical expertise had already been attained. When Leftists propose that paupers (if you please) will
spontaneously create a utopian society, they have in mind a neo-primitivist
cliche such as rust-and-smokestack syndicalism, or even regression to
aboriginal culture.
A feasible reconstruction of the
Communist idea would move it further away from what is intuitively plausible to
the destitute. Communism cannot be an
industrial regimentation whose architects are paupers. (Nor can it be a consolation prize for a
romantic fringe of society.)
I accept that the bourgeoisie is a
class in power which has to be divested of its power. Direct action by the poor is necessary to shake loose the existing
property relations. A successful
revolutionary movement would have to expropriate the means of production
immediately, because the capitalist class would have to be defeated and
dispersed. System-wide economic
consequences would have to be addressed immediately.
In the nineteenth century, the Left
accepted that the proletariat was the necessary protagonist of modern history;
that the proletariat was the revolution’s protagonist. It assumed that the factory worker is intrinsically
the nucleus of a new society.
Industrial workers were collectively organized in production; hence
their wants coincided with what was best for all. The shop floor molded a consciousness to which solutions to
problems of a futuristic civilization manifested in immediate experience.
Historical experience belies these
assumptions. Workers are committed to
the preservation of their existing skills, and to demanding steadily increasing
pay for the given job. The syndicalist
aspirations of workers in the Spanish Civil War did not become a significant
experiment.
In the beginning, industrial
society—mass production and marketing—installed the sociological preconditions
for labor organization and bargaining.
In that sense, capitalism gave birth to a tendency countering it. However, remarkably, capitalism beat back the
relevance of unionism. Unions landed
behind the technology curve. Capitalism
chose technologies lending themselves to independent contracting.
The notion that the proletariat is
the revolutionary protagonist was an idealization of smokestack-and-rust
production and union radicalism. The
actual developments do not confirm this notion. The shop floor of a rust-belt factory does not produce a
consciousness to which solutions to problems of a futuristic civilization
manifest themsleves in immediate experience.
Organized immediate producers may in
some sense be the core of modern society, but the political consequences which
were expected from this circumstance have not materialized. The success of the bourgeoisie in staying in
command must mean that capitalist relations are not yet archaic—which is why
this study is carefully positioned as a thought-experiment.
The notion of an economy of
factories owned by their workers—which confront each other like competing
artisans—is an attempt to “workerize” private
property which must now be considered quaint.
All the same, we are left with
questions of the revolutionary protagonist and of institutionalized economic
power in a revolutionary society. Let
us reason backward. I envision a
society in which all members have work obligations, no one owns capital, and
administrative authority is democratically constituted. The parallel today, then, is with everyone
who is an employee, neither a small nor a large businessman. Vaguely, that speaks for itself.
But to try to add a political
strategy to the mode of life hypothesized here would be hopelessly
premature. I do not see any value in
lionizing factory workers as the revolutionary protagonist or future ruling
class.
The bourgeois revolution merely
adjusts political life to the convenience of an exploiting class which has
arisen spontaneously, and which wields power directly, via its control of the
means of production. Communism expects
for the victorious political movement to reconstitute the economy. In the Leninist model, self-appointed
autocrats make a coup d’etat, then commandeer technocrats and demand that they
establish collectivism with the tools they already have. As for anarchic movements, we have to distinguish
between their fine rhetoric and the actual outcomes of their activity. The Situationists were typical of all of
them. They are publicity
stunts—reflecting fads such as those codified in the early work of Baudrillard
and Sollers, and usually amounting to claques owned by one or two charismatic
leaders. No matter how cathartic it is
to read their denunciations of authority, it is impossible that such groups
would go beyond being publicity stunts.
That leaves the question of the
organization of the political movement as an obscure one. The political game plan for Communism will
have to be rethought as circumstances permit.
It would be absurd to propose a political strategy here.
Rapid expropriation of the means of
production would mean, if you will, that by the authority vested in the
revolutionary political organization, functionaries would tabulate the newly
expropriated resources, ensure that the capitalists had indeed been
expropriated, and sit on factory councils to ensure that the policies of the
general authorities would be carried out.
A vast system of communication and decision-making would be required for
the management of expropriated means of production.
Such authority has to be balanced by consultation and local
authorization; and that is one of the profound questions for this
perspective. There has to be an
intricate system of political representation that accurately transmits the
different interests and priorities of the sectors of the productive means of
society. The system must allow for the
determination of general policies that reflect the different interests and
priorities; while preventing authorities at the center from abusing their
power.
The system must produce, reproduce,
the entitlement of the peers, the comrades—guarding the accountability and
recallability of representatives. An
active peer culture. The peers demand
more free time than in previous epoches.
The question was traditionally
asked, and suitably asked, how can the proletariat control a state that owns
the means of production? Factory
councils represent the partial, sectoral interests of relatively small groups
of workers. The summit of authority
represents the interests of the population as a whole. Would the authority (and the apparatus it
controls), given the power at its disposal, strive to become an autonomous
ruling body? Would it become a distinct
social class with its own interests?
A negative observation is
possible. The criteria of
accountability announced by Marx in his commentary on the Paris Commune are
merely quaint. Perhaps there could be a
transitional role for them; but they presuppose a socialism which is a
regression to a far simpler society.
All the same, historical experience
shows that social outcomes do not depend primarily on voluntarism, but on
non-voluntaristic power relationships and material advantages. (The latter manifest as laws of
history: in the sense that various
schemes of voluntary cooperation which seemed reasonable to some people did not
work. I turn to one example of this
state of affairs in the next section.)
How usurpation will be forestalled at that level is the real
problem. Some sectarian socialisms
today imagine that even if the following preconditions were satisfied,
i)
workers hold political power
ii)
“the society” uses resources in the most egalitarian way
the
threat of workers being politically disenfranchized in their state would still
be overwhelming. This belief in inevitable usurpation is a
pessimism which needs a thorough probing.
•
F.
Capitalism’s observed inescapability
A paramount philosophic question for
Communist economics is: why does
laissez-faire have so great a competitive advantage in the present epoch? (Why, for example, was capitalism not
discredited relative to the Soviet Union by the Great Depression?) Why does laissez-faire re-emerge as the
winner in every attempt at a mixed economy?
In our time, capitalism is like a
virus that always conquers the host.
When it co-exists in a polity with a compensating, counteracting
arrangement, such as an attempt by the state to make economic activity improve
the condition of the poor, capitalism always wins out. (So long as world financial collapse can be
forestalled by governmental intervention.)
Social democracy has the status of a compromise which needs an
excuse: because the very way economic
thought is framed already militates against it. Social transfers are seen as a bribe, with the state as the
bagman, paid by those with incomes to those with no incomes to keep the latter
docile. Welfare and Medicaid are bribes
to unwanted personnel to stay out of the labor force. But when social transfers are distributed in kind (education,
health care), economists can object that the individual summoning of products
is prevented. Economic theory has it
that:
The purpose of society is to foster
the individual’s purchasing decisions:
the individual’s exchange of “assets” he or she owns for goods
desired. The aggregation of these private
choices is sacrosanct.
The
state may intervene in the economy, but the practice is inherently perverse
because it is an interference with the aggregation of private choices. Any occurrence other than private action is
a defect.
Private enterprise is conspicuously
aggressive as a “developer”—introducing new products, building new facilities,
creating new industries. (However, the
state can also act as an aggressive developer, for better or worse. The Five-Year Plans, the supersonic
airliner, nuclear power, the space program, particle accelerators.)
Capitalism unleashes the individual,
and individual greed, holding out wealth as a reward for establishing a new
salable benefit. Historically, average
people have been involved in a game of “selfishness and greed”: covetousness, comparative comfort,
possession of baubles conferring self-confidence and sexual appeal. (What capitalism, in particular, does
is: to democratize or vulgarize these
impulses as mass-market status symbols.)
It is facile to dismiss trading, and to dismiss the use of people as
beasts of burden and pawns. Slavery,
and trading, would hardly have been thought of if their basis was shallow.
Capitalism orients human intellect
in the direction of receiving money for inventing weapons and salable
benefits. Other things being equal,
weapons, for example, are necessities which are also levers of power.
intellect —>
weapons —> money —>
intellect
Would
war have to be made unimportant before
Communism could get started?
•
Afterward,
June 1998
Reading the foregoing, a trained
economist will know that it is necessary to go more deeply into quantitative
transactions and their “behavioral” rationales to substantiate that economic
management is possible under the circumstances pictured.
There is also the question how the
inherited capitalist economy would straightaway be reorganized once the
bourgeoisie had been divested of power.
My thoughts on these matters are
scattered in manuscripts written over several decades. A leading aim of these writings is to reconstruct
economic thought from the base in a way which replaces the bourgeois slogan of
efficiency with the watchword of feasibility.
Bourgeois economics assumes atomistic isolation, atomistic separation, both because the
political ideal of the Enlightenment was “the free individual and his
aggrandizement,” and because “the invisible hand” technically cannot work
without these assumptions. (And since
the assumptions are false, one gets the sciences of market failure and
externalities.)
In my perspective, atomistic
separation is rejected at the base, at least in the form in which economics has
known it. I propose an individuality
which is not defined by
“consumerism.” I do not assume that production is carried
out by “firms,” “companies,” whose physical behavior is atomistically segmented
in the Neoclassical manner.
I do not recognize “proceeding to
the point of market failure and then compensating for it with government
intervention.”
I do not recognize planning by
computer which pictures the economy for computational purposes as if it were a private enterprise
economy — loading Neoclassical preference maps, Neoclassical production
functions, Neoclassical interest rates into the big computer and solving for
profit-maximization.
That puts the responsibility on me
of solving the problem of physical description of the economy in a new way —
from the base up.
Investment projects too large for
community initiative — no longer commanded by individual entrepreneurial
decisions — are modelled on the basis of interdependency, collective
consumption, etc. from the outset. They
are technically qualified by criteria of feasibility. Again: computerized
modelling not only replaces investments controlled by entrepreneurial purchases
— it supersedes marketized definitions
of economic transactions in computer
models.
This is heavy — because, as I
realized when I was writing my dissertation, existing computer control theory
is a translation of capitalist behavior into machine relationships. There is always an objective function —
qualitative de-individualization of benefits, or shadow pricing. So not only economics, but systems
engineering has to be ripped apart and reconstituted.
My principal writings which are
germane here are:
The
Theory of Socialist Economic Administration (1978)
Ch. VII. Advanced Industrial Economies and Classical Socialism
Ch. VIII. A Hypothetical Totally Automated Economy of the Future
Premises for Communist Economics: Contrasted with premises of Neoclassical
economics (Feb. 1976)
Marx’s Economic Axioms: Their Compatibility with Bourgeois Economy (Oct. 1977)
•
The other puzzle is that of the
political method for a tendency which aspires to actual communism. I am not even going to take the space here
to defend myself from that majority of “the Left” which says that one must
confine oneself to current rebellions of the destitute, and maintain an
unbroken silence on strategic questions.
The last one hundred fifty years have been years of searing historical
experience, of grand illusions and tragic and humiliating aftermaths. Courses of collective conduct have definite
consequences. Unless we propose to be
defeatists of socialism, we have to learn from the many decades of historical
evidence. The theorist has a necessary
role in spelling out framing questions
and criteria of consequences, as I
call them.
My thoughts to date on the political
modality are found in:
The
Future of Utopian Deliverance (1989/90)
The Organization Question (1978)
and
in concluding sections of:
A
Critical Communist Survey of Economics (February 1996)
Ecology,
Social Democracy, and Art: More
Thoughts on Economics (1996).
An obvious puzzle concerns Marx’s
picture of the manual laborer as the revolutionary protagonist. Indeed, the proletariat is the class which
would be served by divesting the bourgeoisie of their power and property; the
class whose social role involves mass production, and for whom collective
consumption is a familiar practice. But
we have to be clear that the productiveness of a class does not qualify it as
revolutionary subject. Marx never
denied that farmers and artisans make useful things. If it were a question of being grateful to classes which benefit
us, farmers would have to be shown gratitude.
But that was not the point. Marx
denied that the social roles of these producers qualified them psychologically
to be socialism’s campaigners or sovereigns.
Marx was looking for a class whose circumstances of life fitted it to be
sovereign in an industrialized and collectivist society.
There has been an amazing expansion
of the contribution of cognitive work in production; the assembly line is no
longer the “commanding height in production.” Supposedly plants in which
photographic film is manufactured have no line workers. It is not only that the new scientificity
has forged ahead; it has created dangers which only other scientists can gauge
precisely (although the public is often ahead of the scientists in suspecting
the danger). In an age of
information-driven production systems, the manual laborer is less and less able
to say what the technique should be.
The manual laborer is no longer an initiate.
The manual laborer is not the
natural sovereign of production which he was thought to be after the Left
embraced unionism in the nineteenth century.
Politically, manual laborers as a mass have easily been co-opted by
reformism or ambient social interests; or else by party leaders with a police
apparatus.
Again, it is not a matter of
expressing our gratitude to those who make the things we use; it is a matter of
strategizing the base for the struggle for socialism. Answers à la mode, such as the turn to the Third-World peasantry,
or to students, don’t work; in the long run, an objective rationale reasserts
itself.
A struggle which had genuine
communism as its aim would at some point have to break with the institution
which I call bourgeois justice (the democracy managed by the bourgeois
state). This is a key juncture —
because such historical evidence as we have says that at this juncture, a
single political organization, headed by a professional leader, appoints itself
sovereign for the class and for society.
It is even more difficult:
because a rule of law would evidently be necessary in such futures as
are envisioned here.
It is not a matter of us solving these problems affirmatively. Perhaps the events we want to speak about will not occur in our lifetimes. All the same, a great deal can be known about the consequences of known courses of conduct. We can expect ourselves to spell out framing questions and criteria of consequences relative to affirmative solutions.
[1]Who typically were scientifically illiterate, not
to say anti-intellectual.
[2]I do not want to launch into an explanation of the
balance of my work here. “Meta-Technology: An Analytical Sketch,” which has been
published, will serve as a sample.
[3]Efficiency is a tendentious concept which I will
return to. I reject relative
efficiency, but provisionally accept absolute efficiency—it is co-implicated
with circumscribing a sphere of production.
[4]I don’t even bother to put this disgraceful
bourgeois term in quotes.
[5]Cf. the label ‘individualist anarchism’.
[6]The import of capitalism in itself is neither
consensual nor majoritarian.
[7]The original essay does not survive.