Raise the Hammer

Believing that it's justified for a whole branch of the human family to "get run over" - for any reason - is so obviously genocidal, it warrants no more further comment from me. Your paternalistic words speak for themselves.

It's funny how you resort back to straw man criticisms of central planning and command economies, though I've never written in favour of such things. I'm consistently opposed to centralized planning - whether it's Stalinist commissars, or economic bureaucrats at the IMF and World Bank making macroeconomic policy for billions of people out of offices in New York.

And by the way, it's pretty funny that you criticize me for citing a dead philosopher, when you name yourself after one (one that I'm pretty sure you've never read - ha ha).

I'm not arguing for the collectivization of the means of production tomorrow. I want to contribute to organization and purpose on the grassroots level so people can take control of their lives someday. I'm opposing the notion that private property is an sufficient ethical reason not to engage in this work - to organize in the workplace and the community.

Related to that, you completely ignore the very concrete example of worker self-management that has been successful on many occasions, the most extensive being the Spanish Revolution. I'll tell you again.

From 1936-1939, millions workers kept the economy of Catalonia humming without owners, bosses, or centralized planning of any kind. Using a ground-up confederal structure called anarcho-syndicalism, the CNT and other unions literally "kept the trains running on time" while fighting and supplying a trench war with democratic militias. In many areas, huge productivity gains were reported, in industry, agriculture, and services. Products were marketed directly by the syndicates. Metalworker collectives took automobiles left behind by the rich and transformed them into ad hoc armoured vehicles. Collectivized doctors even extended modern health care to rural areas that had never seen it before.

Further study is needed on this period, since the "free press" of Britain, America, and Europe completely blacked out what the CNT-FAI were doing. (Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" has a pretty nice description though.) But like I said before, there is no reason to offhandedly dismiss the accounts, since rank-and-file workers could question numbers at any time, or immediately recall union delegates who weren't doing their job properly.

Is that enough evidence for you? If not, you can look up the recent (2001) "factory recuperations" of Argentina in the documentary "The Take". Smaller examples exist all over Europe and the Americas. Don't ignore this concrete alternative again and use a criticism of Stalinism or Maoism against me, because it doesn't apply. And I'm referring to anarcho-syndicalism, not because I want to recreate it. I think such a "workerist" orientation alone is inadequate for a lot of issues of today. I merely cite syndicalism as a concrete example of a functioning, progressive economy that was not based on private property. "Individuals" did indeed "drive economic decisions". But they did so in a democratic way, that did not mete out the input each individual had based on how much money or capital they possessed. You just have to work, pay your dues, and show up to assembly. Any rank-and-file worker - blue or white collar - knows this can be a better way because they've been exposed to incompetence and counterproductive power dynamics of owners and managers.

People really need to read about this before they can claim to know everything about modern economics. Self-management does not preclude wage differentials as incentives, by the way. Personally, I wouldn't oppose wage premiums for people doing work that requires technical specialties, or work that's particularly dirty or unsafe. Michael Albert's "Parecon" model has a lot to say about this. But if 1% of workers in a self-managed enterprise claimed that their contribution was so great that they deserved to take 40% of the income of that enterprise, I think they'd have a hard time convincing the majority.

Nothing in economics can be proven, since economics is not a science. Human economies are phenomena, like geology, biological evolution, or human culture as a whole. The "laws" of classical economics are based on cultural norms human behaviour that are themselves mutable and partially conditioned by the economic structures within which human subjects are socialized. (Economic behaviour reflects the way cultures teach their children. Duh!) That's the basic fallacy of classical economics: a static conception of human nature and a denial of the possibility of conscious change.

While our genes provide parameters of what is possible, these paramaters are quite wide. We are the most adaptable organisms on the planet. We've (you notice how I use "we" differently from A Smith) thrived in just about every ecosystem on the planet, from tundra to rainforest. We've created authoritarian societies and libertarian ones; centralized and decentralized; patriarchal and matricentric; societies based on private property and communal ones. Like nature itself, we have competitive tendencies and cooperative ones, but 500 years of capitalism have clearly overemphasized the former. But we have the benefit of culture and an awareness of our own evolutionary nature. I've never heard a good argument about libertarian society is possible, only excuses why people don't feel like working towards one.

That's not surprising. It takes time and effort to create change from the grassroots. It's a constant dialogue between activists and communities. Spanish anarchism took 70 years. I'm pretty confident that capitalism has it's internal contradictions that cannot be solved through regulation, and that today's crop of radical-democratic movements will have a chance to shine in the coming decades.

The "marginal utility" of supporting the system is depreciating.