"Of course, a worker-run society would have to give people incentive to work - and that would include making people pay a penalty for refusing to work for no good reason, or for doing their work poorly for no good reason."
While this takes us away from Marx a bit, I did find this assertion to be somewhat unimaginative for us leftists. Why preempt what a much freer society than our own can or cannot achieve guided by our "common sense" alas shaped by our relative unfree and undemocratic society?
Empirically, there are numerous experiments with unconditional basic income - either paid universally in a small test region or by lottery to individuals. They all show that the vast majority of people are happy to work in some capacity in the total absence of negative incentives to do so.
This is similar to the experience of non-compulsory schools that do not force their pupils to work/learn. The only children who tend to slack off completely are those who come from traditional schools where they learned to internalize needing an outside push. Boredom usually sets in after a few weeks of doing nothing - at which point they begin to join in with their peers in much more interesting self-driven pursuits.
Even lacking the actual experience of such freer societies - or glimpses offered by small-scale projects - pretty much anybody has witnessed some hobbyist scene or another. People are happy to engage in quite elaborate unpaid work when their heart is in it.
A future society may or may not use remuneration to incentivize necessary "dirty" or maintenance work (before that can be automated?); and opting out of such work would then arguably constitute a "penalty".
-> However, people who limit their consumption to limit the work they need to do are hardly a threat, especially in the era of ecological overreach...
Aside from that, policing what counts as "good reasons" to opt out of working is somewhat disturbing, especially given the very real conditions of chronic fatigue, etc., which now has gotten another boost with post-covid syndromes.
Disagree. I think this kind of anarchist thinking that rules aren’t necessary and enforcing them is abhorrent has contributed to the applying spectacle of leftists joining western imperialists is trashing the USSR - and today China, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua etc…As Losurdo has pointed out, it was a destructive tendency within the Russian left right from the beginning of the revolution.
You are free to disagree with anarchism. Btw I never said that "rules aren't necessary" (and never met or read anyone who did for that matter).
I was just asking you to revisit that statement I quoted, perhaps in the vein of "a worker-run society may well use incentives to work and punishments over refusal to work".
I'm not sure why you would want to claim omniscience and pronounce *any* worker-run society to *necessarily* use coercion. I can't see how this is part of your argument here and it will merely put off those on the left who aspire to - let alone have actually experienced - participating in worker-run (micro-)societies which do very well in the absence of coercion. For some of us this is the main attraction to socialism.
I was not even going to try to convince you or anyone of the value of non-coercive self-management - only to entertain the theoretical possibility that it possibly could exist in any one of many possible futures.
I deliberately used examples from quite outside of the anarchist tendency: basic income which is a quite liberal idea totally compatible with capitalism, and alternative education which also includes models like Montessori education (who use *a lot* of structure but not coercion).
Personally I never took non-coercive self-management seriously as an idea until I myself experienced participating in a fairly large group of people working together for a couple of months without anybody being in a position to force anyone else to do anything. I now read descriptions of e.g. the Paris Commune as straightforward reports where I previously would have read them as utterly unconvincing Utopian blueprints or mere wishful thinking.
I agree it can be vexing that such visions make uniting the left more difficult. On balance I think (hope?) that such ideas are going to enrich future left projects.
It certainly can be problematic to focus on problems of historical left projects, which does put us at risk of being selectively co-opted by anti-communist propaganda efforts which were strong in the 20th century (now I think they mostly ignore the Left, certainly the historic USSR). On balance, I think (hope?) that we can have a critical reading of the Soviet experiment, to enrich future left project if and when we get to try again, at small or large scales.
I do find it a bit rich, though, to say that "anarchists" were a "destructive tendency within the Russian left right from the beginning of the revolution". May I remind you and Losurdo that it was the Bolsheviks who took state power and exiled or imprisoned all prominent socialist leaders who did not subscribe to Leninism. (Some of these leaders outlined fundamental flaws in the Bolshevik project that turned out quite prescient...).
On balance, I find it more illuminating to ask what could have happened if the Soviet state had found a way to accommodate those important divergent perspectives - rather than to ask how much more convenient it would have been had the people who had to be exiled or imprisoned only renounced their unenlightened ways and instead switched on a dime to the ideology of their exilers and jailers.
"Marx attacks slave owners at one point in this section, ridicules the idea that they engaged in any king of abstinence, but in doing uses the word “nigger” which exploses [sic] a comfort level with European racism."
Marx emphatically does NOT use the [n-word] as it literally does not exist in German. He uses the word "Neger" about 30 times in Kapital in different contexts. This is to be translated as "Negro", a German speaker explicitly has to use the N-word in English to capture the Negro-[N-word] distinction and explain this to their German speaking audience. The N-word is not to be found in Kapital.
[Needless to say both "Neger" and "Negro" have fallen out of usage, but only rather recently. MLK routinely talks about himself and his people as "Negro" etc.]
Which translation are you using? It would be interesting to check how different translations treat this section... perhaps you could give a direct quote, I was not completely sure which paragraph you are referring to. Thanks.
Good point. I have have been using two different translations available on internet archive. Sometimes one has a typo that another does not. The titles for Part 8 are slightly different as I’ll mention etc …I’ll check into this and if necessary edit this summary, but after I complete my synopsis and commentary on Part 8
"Of course, a worker-run society would have to give people incentive to work - and that would include making people pay a penalty for refusing to work for no good reason, or for doing their work poorly for no good reason."
While this takes us away from Marx a bit, I did find this assertion to be somewhat unimaginative for us leftists. Why preempt what a much freer society than our own can or cannot achieve guided by our "common sense" alas shaped by our relative unfree and undemocratic society?
Empirically, there are numerous experiments with unconditional basic income - either paid universally in a small test region or by lottery to individuals. They all show that the vast majority of people are happy to work in some capacity in the total absence of negative incentives to do so.
This is similar to the experience of non-compulsory schools that do not force their pupils to work/learn. The only children who tend to slack off completely are those who come from traditional schools where they learned to internalize needing an outside push. Boredom usually sets in after a few weeks of doing nothing - at which point they begin to join in with their peers in much more interesting self-driven pursuits.
Even lacking the actual experience of such freer societies - or glimpses offered by small-scale projects - pretty much anybody has witnessed some hobbyist scene or another. People are happy to engage in quite elaborate unpaid work when their heart is in it.
A future society may or may not use remuneration to incentivize necessary "dirty" or maintenance work (before that can be automated?); and opting out of such work would then arguably constitute a "penalty".
-> However, people who limit their consumption to limit the work they need to do are hardly a threat, especially in the era of ecological overreach...
Aside from that, policing what counts as "good reasons" to opt out of working is somewhat disturbing, especially given the very real conditions of chronic fatigue, etc., which now has gotten another boost with post-covid syndromes.
Disagree. I think this kind of anarchist thinking that rules aren’t necessary and enforcing them is abhorrent has contributed to the applying spectacle of leftists joining western imperialists is trashing the USSR - and today China, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua etc…As Losurdo has pointed out, it was a destructive tendency within the Russian left right from the beginning of the revolution.
You are free to disagree with anarchism. Btw I never said that "rules aren't necessary" (and never met or read anyone who did for that matter).
I was just asking you to revisit that statement I quoted, perhaps in the vein of "a worker-run society may well use incentives to work and punishments over refusal to work".
I'm not sure why you would want to claim omniscience and pronounce *any* worker-run society to *necessarily* use coercion. I can't see how this is part of your argument here and it will merely put off those on the left who aspire to - let alone have actually experienced - participating in worker-run (micro-)societies which do very well in the absence of coercion. For some of us this is the main attraction to socialism.
I was not even going to try to convince you or anyone of the value of non-coercive self-management - only to entertain the theoretical possibility that it possibly could exist in any one of many possible futures.
I deliberately used examples from quite outside of the anarchist tendency: basic income which is a quite liberal idea totally compatible with capitalism, and alternative education which also includes models like Montessori education (who use *a lot* of structure but not coercion).
Personally I never took non-coercive self-management seriously as an idea until I myself experienced participating in a fairly large group of people working together for a couple of months without anybody being in a position to force anyone else to do anything. I now read descriptions of e.g. the Paris Commune as straightforward reports where I previously would have read them as utterly unconvincing Utopian blueprints or mere wishful thinking.
I agree it can be vexing that such visions make uniting the left more difficult. On balance I think (hope?) that such ideas are going to enrich future left projects.
It certainly can be problematic to focus on problems of historical left projects, which does put us at risk of being selectively co-opted by anti-communist propaganda efforts which were strong in the 20th century (now I think they mostly ignore the Left, certainly the historic USSR). On balance, I think (hope?) that we can have a critical reading of the Soviet experiment, to enrich future left project if and when we get to try again, at small or large scales.
I do find it a bit rich, though, to say that "anarchists" were a "destructive tendency within the Russian left right from the beginning of the revolution". May I remind you and Losurdo that it was the Bolsheviks who took state power and exiled or imprisoned all prominent socialist leaders who did not subscribe to Leninism. (Some of these leaders outlined fundamental flaws in the Bolshevik project that turned out quite prescient...).
On balance, I find it more illuminating to ask what could have happened if the Soviet state had found a way to accommodate those important divergent perspectives - rather than to ask how much more convenient it would have been had the people who had to be exiled or imprisoned only renounced their unenlightened ways and instead switched on a dime to the ideology of their exilers and jailers.
Thanks Joe, that's very useful.
"Marx attacks slave owners at one point in this section, ridicules the idea that they engaged in any king of abstinence, but in doing uses the word “nigger” which exploses [sic] a comfort level with European racism."
Marx emphatically does NOT use the [n-word] as it literally does not exist in German. He uses the word "Neger" about 30 times in Kapital in different contexts. This is to be translated as "Negro", a German speaker explicitly has to use the N-word in English to capture the Negro-[N-word] distinction and explain this to their German speaking audience. The N-word is not to be found in Kapital.
[Needless to say both "Neger" and "Negro" have fallen out of usage, but only rather recently. MLK routinely talks about himself and his people as "Negro" etc.]
Which translation are you using? It would be interesting to check how different translations treat this section... perhaps you could give a direct quote, I was not completely sure which paragraph you are referring to. Thanks.
I looked up an original German version and you are quite right. I edited that bit
Good point. I have have been using two different translations available on internet archive. Sometimes one has a typo that another does not. The titles for Part 8 are slightly different as I’ll mention etc …I’ll check into this and if necessary edit this summary, but after I complete my synopsis and commentary on Part 8