Strict Equality - Original Article
INTRODUCTION In this article I will share an idea of mine - an alternative political/economic system that I have called “strict equality”. I believe that this idea may have great potential and am keen to debate and develop it. I am also anxious to learn of any previous similar ideas that may have been suggested or tried. If nothing similar has been tried then I believe that humanity will lose very little and potentially gain massively by trying this system out somewhere. The most similar previously-suggested system that I know of, and indeed a major inspiration to this system, is participatory economics/politics introduced by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel. I’m happy for strict equality to be described as a particular version of participatory politics/economics or of socialism or communism in general |
I don’t think that it qualifies as a form of anarchism as it recommends a state of some sort, however its abolition of hierarchies is in the anarchist spirit. Anyone who thinks strict equality is a good idea should, in my view, find common ground with other similar left-wing radicals and utopians, as I do.
I have divided this piece into four sections. The first section summarises the main rules of the system. In the second section I deal with two major criticisms/issues that I think will come to the mind of the reader, and hopefully deal with them successfully. In the third section I try to flesh out how I think society would look if it followed the system. Finally, in the last section, I try to lay out my philosophical/moral justification for the system.
1) DESCRIPTION OF RULES
OVERVIEW
Strict equality is quite a simple political/economic system to summarise. It consists of a constitution that equalises three quantities among all mentally able adults (with the exception of people who actually choose to have less of one or more of the quantities). These quantities are the following –
1) Political Power
2) Social Status
3) Material Comfort
I define power as an individual’s ability, which he or she derives from his or her role in society, to change the world in ways that affect people. Status, I define as the respect derived from one’s role in society. Comfort is the pleasantness of one’s role in society, excluding pleasantness derived from one’s power or status. The major determinants of comfort are pleasantness of one’s home, possessions and recreational activities, working conditions and working hours. (By "role in society" I mean a person's job plus possessions plus any commitments they have in their spare time).
ENFORCEMENT OF EQUALITY
“Equality Courts” will be set up to enforce equality of the three quantities. The way these courts work is that any mentally-able adult (hereafter referred to as a "citizen") can accuse another of possessing more of one of the three quantities than they do, even if the accuser and accused have never met one another or interacted economically. It’s as if every pair of citizens had signed a contract agreeing to share equally what they have of each of the three quantities.
If the court agrees that the person accused does indeed possess a greater amount of the given quantity than the accuser, then a transfer has to take place such that both individuals concerned are left equal with regard to the quantity in question (and unchanged with regard to the other two quantities). A court order goes to the defendant which the state will back up by force if disobeyed. Citizens who repeatedly end up being ordered to hand over large amounts of one or more of the three quantities will have their freedom to acquire more of them restricted for a penalty period, say a few years.
The equality courts should have a jury. The jury can be dismissed by the judge if the jurors don’t stick to the plan of equalising whichever quantity is in question and instead, for example, try to allocate more of it to the person they think is more deserving of it.
The decisions of these courts should be made on balance of evidence, so there is no greater onus on the accuser than the accused to back up their claims with evidence. This means that every citizen will be well advised to, throughout their lives, keep evidence of their levels of the three quantities, for example by getting witnesses to see how much time they spend working or how basic their lifestyle is.
Groups can make equality claims against other groups, and the procedure will be the same as with individuals but with average levels of the quantities per person of the two groups being considered.
THE CONSTITUTION
Strict equality is a system that might be applied to an area of any size, from the whole world down to a small community. Let us call the area under strict equality the “strict equality zone”. Whatever the size of this zone, the system should, I would suggest, be written into a constitution that can be abolished by a majority vote in a referendum.
2) TWO MAJOR ISSUES
There are two major questions/criticisms that might well be on the mind of the reader based on what's been written here so far. Firstly - how are the equality courts going to be able to measure such nebulous quantities as political power, social status and material comfort? Secondly - in a society where an equal share of material comfort and social status are guaranteed, why would anyone work? I think that these points are crucial, so let me try to deal with them now, before I go on to sketch out how society would look in more detail.
MEASUREMENT OF THE QUANTITIES
Addressing the first question - suppose a tax expert accuses a 6th grade schoolteacher (leaving aside for a moment the question of whether these specific roles would exist in the society that I am imagining) of having more political power than he or she does. How can we measure which of the two has the greater political power, defining political power as I did above, as the “ability, which he or she derives from his or her role in society, to change the world in ways that affect people”?
While I am under no illusion that such measurements can be made with complete rigour, I believe that sufficient accuracy can be achieved such that people’s levels of political power and the other two quantities can be kept roughly equal by the threat of the equality courts. Jurors will be able to draw on a body of expertise on these matters. Social scientists will develop their knowledge of the measurement of political power, social status and material comfort.
An example of the work such social scientists might do would be the following experiment: groups that are campaigning for changes in the law in various areas would be asked if they want a new supporter who is (a) a tax expert, or (b) a 6th grade schoolteacher. If most of them choose (a) then this might imply that the tax expert is expected to have more political power. This is, I believe, an example of how rigour can be brought into the measurement of such things as power, status and comfort.
The measurement of status might be based on statistical relationships between the results of surveys asking people to rate how much they respect people they know and the activities/jobs/possessions of these people. The measurement of comfort is, I admit, more difficult than the other two, as comfort is a subjective quantity – different people find different tasks pleasant/unpleasant. Here the juries and the experts that they might use to help them would have to try to guess people’s taste to some extent, for example if a person is accused of having a comfortable life because he or she spends a lot of time painting and drawing, the jury will have to guess the extent to which the person in question enjoys such activities. For two people who have the same taste, the more comfortable would be the person whose day-to-day activities are preferable (discounting the pleasantness derived from power or status).
A last difficulty comes when the jury has to, having decided that the accusing person or group is indeed worse-off with regard to the quantity in question, transfer to this person or group the amount of the quantity that renders them equal. In some cases, like those of comfort, it might be a case of forcing the better-off person or group to hand over some possessions (although they would have to be ones that don’t carry any status value). The handing over of power might involve giving the worse-off person or group some jobs or responsibilities of the better-off person or group (although they should be jobs that don’t carry status). All this is, I admit, a challenge, although not necessarily more difficult than some of the issues that courts deal with nowadays, such as trying to quantify psychological damage or a non-working spouse’s contribution to their partner’s job.
INCENTIVES TO WORK
So, to address the second question that I posed above, concerning incentives to work - would guaranteed equal comfort ensure universal idleness? I don’t believe it will. If a person does little work and consumes a lot they will fall foul of the equality courts and have to reduce their comfort levels by either increasing their work or reducing their consumption, as I have defined comfort as the pleasantness of day-to-day activities, which would include both the pleasantness of consuming a lot and the pleasantness of not working so much.
If this argument is accepted, strict equality can still face the criticism that citizens have no incentive to endure productive discomfort. For example, someone might avoid the equality courts by lying on a bed of nails on a daily basis!
Under these circumstances I believe that the moral motive would kick in in many cases and people would do what they feel is socially useful work. Given a choice between digging holes and filling them in again and digging holes that fulfil some purpose, I think that most people would do the second one. I can’t imagine, on the other hand that society would be as materially productive as our present system is. Maybe, at a total guess, strict equality might produce half the amount of goods as our present mixed economy. However I am hopeful that the system would be superior by most other measures – pollution levels, individual freedom, maybe happiness or health. It would also offer an end to the division of rich and poor and much of the oppression of gender, racial and age groups by others.
3) HOW SOCIETY WOULD LOOK UNDER STRICT EQUALITY
Having roughly described the system and discussed two crucial potential criticisms, I will now try to sketch out in a little more detail how society would work under strict equality, before finishing with my philosophical/ethical justification of the system. I should make it clear that I define strict equality simply as the equalisation of power, status and comfort as described in the first section, above. This and the previous section contain my own guesses and recommendations of how a society under strict equality might work. Someone might disagree with these predictions and recommendations but still be a supporter of strict equality.
Society under strict equality would be free to pass any laws it likes as long as they don’t contradict the constitution, for example it could ban trespassing on private property or drinking alcohol in the street. I expect laws that get passed to be backed up by state force if and when they are broken. The strict equality zone will be ruled by a specific bunch of laws which need not be greater in number or more complicated than the laws that govern a typical country today.
LAWMAKING
All lawmaking will be achieved without politicians or unelected powerful people.
Each citizen may propose changes in the law. At any one time each citizen is allowed to have one active proposal. Active proposals may be supported by other citizens. Each citizen may support, say 10 proposals of other people at one time (in addition to having one proposal of his or her own). Each week, the two proposals with the most supporters in the strict equality zone are advanced from the support gathering stage to the debating stage. For example, I may write a proposal saying that cannabis should be legalised. After a few months this proposal might get thousands of supporters. This might get it to No2 in the "proposal charts" and move it on to the debating stage.
At the debating stage 2,000 randomly selected citizens debate each proposal. They are divided into juries of five citizens. Juries may call any expert witnesses they want to argue for and against the proposed change in the law. Eventually each jurist votes and the change in the law may be passed by a simple majority of votes of all the citizens debating the law.
Citizens would be wise to put clauses in many of their laws allowing countries and regions within the strict equality zone (assuming the zone is that big) to opt out of them. Other laws, on the other hand, I believe should be compulsory for all regions, for example laws governing pollution, which affect the whole world.
Equality of power will force each country, region, town etc. to also make decisions in a directly democratic way, so laws at the equality zone level need not prescribe this for them. Likewise the law need not insist that entities such as companies, partnerships, agencies, co-operatives etc. have egalitarian decision-making procedures as the constitution will do this. However, it seems likely that entities similar to partnerships or co-operatives in our current society would be the most popular way for people to be employed and the law would probably want to insist on some decision making procedures specific to such entities in order to make life easier though standardisation.
THE ECONOMY
It may be realised by the majority in some cases, that a minority is ruining the world by, for example, polluting or creating new, dangerous technology. The simplest way to deal with this is to ban the activity. In other cases the majority may realise that individuals are failing to do some vital activity, for example not making enough food. The simplest way to deal with this would be to make the activity compulsory. (One would hope that in this second case people's moral motive would kick in, as suggested above, but things may not always go to plan).
A preferable, less draconian/painful (albeit a little more complicated) way to achieve these things, however, might be with "ration points". In the case of undesirable activities such as polluting, individuals would have a limit to the number of ration points they can spend, say, per month, with each undesirable activity carrying a certain amount of points. Falling short of state-set individual targets for socially useful activities such as growing food would also cost ration points. Ration points would not be transferable between people.
This would all be in addition to the constitutional rationing of political power, social status and material comfort that is the core of strict equality. It may help the smooth running of society if shops are forced to label all products with an estimate of the contribution of each product to material comfort, expressed as a number. This would be similar to calorie values of food being quoted on food packaging. Consumers would be able to avoid the equality courts by staying on a “comfort diet”.
I don’t believe that the strict equality zone needs to go further and have a currency that is transferable between people.
With regard to private property, I believe that when it is egalitarian it is a reasonably natural thing, particularly outside work, and will and should continue under strict equality.
THE WORKPLACE
Most workplaces may be categorised as co-operatives. Whatever their exact rules, certainly there would be no management in any workplace due to the equality of power – no police chiefs, head teachers, directors, editors, bosses, unless these posts are constantly rotated.
Important tasks such as flying planes, performing surgery or other emergency or potentially dangerous situations can still be left to experts who must keep proving their abilities though a licence/qualification system. However, those experts must be carefully denied above-average levels of power and status. This can be achieved in several ways, albeit at a cost to efficiency. Expert tasks can be part time, with experts spending the remainder of their time on particularly low power and status tasks. With regard to power, “second opinions” can be sought from other experts nullifying much of the power that can be derived from expert roles. Experts can also be forced to suffer low status houses/cars etc. Other, more extreme measures might be to reduce experts’ lawmaking power or forcing them to keep their expert work secret.
These balancing actions would also be applied to more common areas of expertise such as driver’s licences or licences to work with children. To the extent that such licences bestow power and status upon people, those people should have power and status reduced in other parts of their lives.
FAME
The levels of power and status given to celebrities - film, TV and sport stars, writers, film directors etc. - in our current society, cannot be balanced for in this way however. Under strict equality, therefore, no-one would be allowed to be famous. For example, individual writers who are influential will fall foul of the equality courts and be forced to share their newspaper columns, books etc. with co-writers. If they still remain powerful they will perhaps be commanded by the courts to reduce the scope of the distribution of their writing, for example by limiting access to their website to, say 1,000 users. Or they might be commanded to write less often. Similar sanctions would be taken against any artist, actor, film-maker etc. who started becoming well known. The only writing, art, performance etc. that would be seen by large numbers of people would be collectively produced work, such as Wikipedia or an episode of the Simpsons (if there were no management running the show, and the voice actors, writers and artists etc. were regularly changed). Indeed in a society under strict equality the only famous people allowed would be fictional cartoon characters (or perhaps live-action characters played by a different actor every time) or dead people.
CRIMINAL PUNISHMENT
Lastly, the issue of punishing criminals is a slightly uncertain area for the system. If strict equality is taken to its logical conclusion punishment of criminals would be virtually impossible as it generally means depriving the convict of one of the three equally distributed quantities. A simple solution to this might be to make criminals an exception to the equality rules. On the other hand - and I am hopeful about this - we might simply restrain and attempt to rehabilitate criminals, affording them the same overall power, status and comfort as everyone else.
4) WHY I ADVOCATE SUCH A SYSTEM
This system is an attempt to improve humanity’s chances of surviving into the long term on this planet. The reason I believe this to be the aim of paramount importance is that I adhere to a hedonistic utilitarian ethical system. According to the version of the system that I endorse we should aim to maximise the amount of happiness in the universe over the long term and minimise the amount of pain. For humanity, the priority for the next few hundred years or so should be to avoid wiping ourselves out. This is because I believe that if humanity turns into a very advanced race that is stable over the long-term it will probably develop the ability to alter its own biology and use this power to live in a pleasurable state most of the time as this is arguably our greatest desire. Determining the best approach to reaching that point is a complicated matter but one crucial thing to realise is that getting there safely is our aim, not getting there quickly, as we potentially have billions of years to play around with.
So we ought to advance our technology, but the problem is that we might destroy ourselves along the way. Whether our chance of destroying ourselves is 1%, 99% or anything in-between, making this chance less should be our goal as so much happiness is on the line.
We clearly need to be selective in which technology we develop, possibly holding back technological development in most areas. Clearly our current political and economic culture is a million miles away from taking this sort of approach. Two problematic features of our current society are concentrations of power in the hands of few people and a competitive ethos. The collection of political power in the hands of few people has given us the problem that humanity has largely been steered by the most extremely competitive people of its number, leading to high levels of militarism and weapons research, which I view as the greatest threat to human survival. The competitive culture has lead us to levels of material consumption that may be dangerous to the stability of our biosphere. It has also lead to a frantic race among firms and countries to develop new technology, which again over time increases the risk to the biosphere and human health. The competitive culture also blinkers us towards acting in the interests of humanity as a whole and future people.
Unfortunately the centralised state and capitalist systems which are so rife with these problems have, so far, been extremely stable and hard to get rid of. One of the things that has made them successful, particularly in the case of capitalism is that they are simple systems that everyone can (roughly speaking) understand. We need an alternative that is equally elegant but without the drawbacks just described. Strict equality is an attempt to do that. With comfort and social status, and to a lesser extent political power, equalised across all individuals, strict equality will reduce the competitive culture and individuals will feel a greater freedom to act in humanity’s collective interest. Also its levelling of the powerful elite will, hopefully bring a greater level of sanity to political decisions. Furthermore it is as simple as capitalism, which might help it to catch on. It probably won’t furnish us with as much material wealth as capitalism or centralised state socialism have done, but I believe that this is a price well worth paying.
Strict Equality vs Parsoc
Let me argue strict equality against the participatory society ("parsoc" for short). Firstly, it should be noted that the systems are quite similar, and, as I have said previously, the supporters of both should find common ground and campaign together for a less capitalistic and hierarchical world. This is pretty academic at the moment as I’m the only supporter of strict equality, with only my sad self to be equal with:-)
I am taking parsoc to mean parecon plus Stephen Shalom's parpolity (which Michael Albert seemed to regard as the best option in the political sphere in "Realising Hope"). For those unfamiliar with these ideas, wikipedia has articles on parecon and parpolity. Those unfamiliar with strict equality may want to refer to my article "Strict Equality" on this site.
I have boiled my argument for strict equality against parsoc down to six reasons and put them in order of importance.
REASON 1 - NESTED COUNCILS ARE LESS DEMOCRATIC/MORE HIERARCHICAL THAN LAWMAKING JURIES.
To explain why I think strict equality's lawmaking juries are preferable to parsoc's nested councils I should go back to the philosophical basis for my views. This will also help explain my other reasons. I adhere to a utilitarian ethos (hedonistic "total view" version). This makes me rate political systems according to how they contribute to the future amount of happiness/lack of misery in the universe. The main factor contributing to future happiness/lack of misery that we can affect is the sustainability of the human race, as no human race means vastly less future happiness/lack of misery than there might otherwise be. I believe that the safest road to a sustainable future (albeit by no means a certain one) in the political sphere is by minimising hierarchies of power. This is because if you have a minority who have qualified to be the most powerful they will either have a more aloof or more competitive attitude, either way more selfish than the average person, leading to less sane decisions for humanity in the long-term.
So, what I want to see in the political sphere is a system with as much democracy as possible, or to view it another way, as little hierarchy of power as possible (I see these as two ways of viewing the same thing). I think that strict equality's lawmaking juries (see my article Strict Equality, Section 3, "Lawmaking" for a description of this) viewed either in terms of maximisation of democracy or of minimisation of hierarchies, do a pretty good job. In terms of democracy, the perfectly democratic system would pass laws which represent the average person’s opinion on those matters. The lawmaking jury system does exactly this, taking a large enough sample of ordinary people that their opinion can be said to be the average person's. From the point of view of minimisation of hierarchies, strict equality achieves this fully, with no person being more powerful than anyone else.
Parpolity, on the other hand can, I think, be fairly summarised as being representative democracy with one major difference and four significant safeguards. The major difference is that it has many levels of representatives, with only the lowest representatives being directly chosen by the general public. This is in contrast to our current representative democracies, where the members of parliament are only one level above the people at the bottom. So if we view a hierarchy as a pyramid, parsoc gives us a tall pyramid and our current representative democracy a flat one. I believe that this structure would make it more hierarchical than our present system, reducing the chance of the laws being a reflection of popular opinion, all else equal.
The four safeguards included in parpolity, on the other hand, perhaps make up for the tall pyramid problem. Firstly, the automatic rotation of representatives after a certain amount of time is certainly a step in the right direction. How big a step depends on how long the fixed terms are. If terms are of, say, two weeks, which might be the time it takes to debate and pass or reject a new law, this would make the system similar to the lawmaking juries and radically democratic. If, on the other hand, representatives sit for, say, two years, then this would merely be an improved version of representative democracy. The other three safeguards are less radical. Firstly the immediate recall of unpopular representatives will still leave us with representatives who pass the occasional unpopular law being tolerated by the council below as better than the alternatives. Next, the passing down of close decisions, though an ingenious and entirely welcome suggestion, will only represent the passing down of what the top level believe to be close decisions. Tyrannical decisions, like those to go to war may often be considered to be uncontroversially the right thing to do by those on top, and thus never be passed down. Lastly, the ability of the general public to force a popular referendum exists in Switzerland now and, though again, entirely welcome, would, I think, be seriously hampered by voter apathy.
So the tall pyramid will, I suggest, make things less democratic than under the present system and the four safeguards, though welcome, won't bring parpolity anywhere near the level of democracy exhibited by the lawmaking juries (the only possible exception being the very rapid rotation of representatives which, as I just suggested, would turn the system into something resembling the lawmaking courts anyway, presumably not what Shalom intends). So I would conclude that it's not clear whether parpolity ends up being more democratic than our present system, but clear that it is less democratic and more hierarchical than the lawmaking jury system.
Advocates of parsoc might argue here that my system doesn't mandate lawmaking juries, and complain that I am arguing as if it does. It's true that strict equality doesn't mandate any particular political setup, but I believe that strict equality would lead to lawmaking juries for the following reason. Equality of power effectively outlaws politicians, so society is forced to adopt either direct democracy, some sort of anarchy or perhaps politically separate communities with internal direct democracy. However, after forcing themselves to adopt equality of power, I think the people would want to have some kind of democracy to deal with local and global decisions, and wouldn’t want the hassle of all the people having to make all the decisions all the time, and so would reject a “referendum on everything” approach in favour of the only other form of direct democracy I can think of – direct democracy by lawmaking jury.
Lastly, the parsocist could argue that my system puts too much faith in the judiciary, who could take advantage of the situation and become an elite. I acknowledge that this is a potential danger with my system, but I believe that they would be reined in by the equality (of power) courts, leading to frequent rotation of individuals and (as we have with the current judiciary) clearly defined limits to their role.
REASON 2 - STRICT EQUALITY HAS A CLEAR ENFORCEMENT SYSTEM.
My second reason to favour strict equality over parsoc concerns enforcement. After reading two-and-a-half books on parsoc I don't have a clear sense of its enforcement system to keep society equal. I don't know exactly what happens when, say, one person in one of parsoc’s councils or workplaces gets a bit more power or a slightly cushier job than the rest and maybe uses this extra power to get even more. Maybe parsocists have a good answer to this that I’ve missed, but I fear that they are relying on a culture to emerge to keep egalitarian order in their system. I have little faith in this approach and believe that the strictness and clarity of the equality courts are a much better bet for keeping an egalitarian system from succumbing to the all too natural tendency towards hierarchy and corruption.
REASON 3 - NESTED PARTICIPATORY PLANNING COUNCILS ARE ALSO HIERARCHICAL.
My next reason in order of importance to favour strict equality over parsoc is that participatory planning employs a nested council approach that is similar to parpolity, and therefore is susceptible to all the deviations from democracy described in Reason 1. This means that, say, the council in charge of farming for the UK may have as little interest in doing the right thing as our current government minister of agriculture or a trade union boss. Strict equality will, on the other hand, deliver an entirely democratic economy, where the development of concentrations of power are always destroyed by the equality courts.
REASON 4 - I DON'T SEE THE APPEAL OF PARTICIPATORY PLANNING.
A big difference between parsoc and strict equality is that the former prescribes a particular way of organising economic activities – participatory planning. The latter, on the other hand allows any economic structures that conform to the three equalities, leading, I predict, to most of the economy being performed by non-hierarchical companies (which might go by the name of cooperatives) where all workers act like volunteers do in our current society and an internal direct democracy of some kind operates. Once we create a system where producers are broadly trying to do the right thing (as is the case with strict equality and I believe to a lesser extent parsoc) then I can't see any particular reason why we should mandate a particular form of planning where suggestions go back and forth between different committees in a certain way. Maybe I've missed a crucial point about participatory planning (and I admit I find explanations of it a bit technical and difficult to understand) but nothing I've heard about it strikes me as particularly efficient or necessary. As far as I can see, under strict equality, and to the extent that it is non-hierarchical, under parsoc, producers would be able to see which products are popular, be able to conduct customer surveys if they wish to find out more about what people desire individually or collectively and would be honestly trying to make stuff that they think the world needs.
REASON 5 - THE BATTLE FOR STATUS WOULD CONTINUE UNDER PARSOC.
Another area in which I believe strict equality has an advantage over parsoc is the former’s inclusion of equality of status. While balancing job complexes for desirability may achieve the same thing to some extent in the workplace, it doesn't apply to a person's home and possessions. This means that the competitive ethos may tend to continue under parsoc, as one person may put in extra hours to get a bigger house than his or her neighbour, in order to reap the greater status attached to it. This kind of behaviour obviously will create more damage to the environment, create a competitive culture which might leak into large scale political choices, for example making war more popular and not benefit even the people doing it as a status battle is a zero-sum game.
REASON 6 - STRICT EQUALITY IS SIMPLER.
Lastly, strict equality has the positive feature of being a simpler concept to express - strict equality can be summarised as having three main rules – equality of power (enforced by equality courts) equality of status (enforced by equality courts) and equality of comfort (enforced by equality courts) whereas parsoc has four main rules – balanced job complexes, effort-based pay, participatory planning and nested councils. It's one more rule for parsoc, and more importantly the three rules of strict equality are more similar to one-another. Simplicity may help to keep a system stable once it is up and running and may be more important when trying to popularise a system now.
CONCLUSION
So these are the six main reasons why I favour strict equality over parsoc. I should finish by reiterating the similarities of the two systems. Balancing jobs for empowerment might be interpreted as strict equality of power or something close to it. Balancing jobs for desirability comes close to the three equalities also. Pay for effort also might approximate the equality of comfort. Parsoc and strict equality would both give us radically improved societies with radically improved chances for the future of the human race.
Discussion with Joe
Joe’s first statement to Kuan
Hi Kuan, thanks for contributing to debate on possible alternative ways to organize societies. I'm afraid I don't find strict equality very attractive, but I hope these comments are useful. Overall, it seems that competitiveness and inequality, rather than capitalist relations, authoritarianism, patriarchy and so on, are identified here as root problems. I see our current problems as resulting from the in and outs of these institutional structures, rather than from any manifestation of one or two human tendencies like competitiveness.
As an example, I don't see any advantage in directly suppressing those who have a great talent. Do you object to this in principle, i.e. "it is unfair that anyone should be more famous and influential than others"? It sounds more like you object because you see this as leading to other problems somehow. However, I don't see any specific problem that would arise from allowing people influence merely by dint of their recognized talent, given a system in which fame was not manipulated for private profit. I'm more concerned with the large negative effects of missing out on their productivity, treading on the freedom of that talented person, and restricting people's choices about who they admire or listen to. Would we have to suppress a Chomsky or a Zinn?
Right demagogues often stereotype leftist visions as systems of envy and resentment: suppressing excellence and dragging everyone back to the lowest level in order to achieve equality; groups interfering with the just rewards of hard-working individuals. They imply that leftists would rather that everyone had 1 unit of something, than that 99% of people had 2 units and 1% had 10. In my mind these arguments are straw-men, because people are nowhere near reaping the rewards of their individual effort under capitalism anyway, and because the actual alternatives are nowhere near those given in the argument. But it seems like strict equality is indeed vulnerable to these complaints. Limiting the next Shakespeare's publications seems to value equality of fame vastly over general welfare (or implies some really terrible consequence of allowing this guy to be famous, which I can't see). This seems wrong-headed to me (actually, in principle I don't care much about equality per se personally, it just effects other things I value like general material welfare and social solidarity, but that's just me). There are similar examples in other categories of equality that you could come up with
As a second theme, I'm not sure that it is feasible to start with the juridical side of things as the main institution, and hope that other aspects will fall into place. There has to be some workable economic system behind this which is consistent with the juridical system. The way the police and courts work in London today, for instance, is the result of a complex interaction of economic and political power, which has changed as economic relations have changed. They are more at once a product of the system and some of its gears and wheels (rather minor ones I'd say), not the source of all societal relations. Their role would change if other factors changed. Likewise to make equality courts central to your scheme begs the question of how they would maintain their power. What is the economic system which is at once consistent with the equality courts, and yet means they are still necessary to have a good society?
Kuan replied....
Hey Joe. Great to get your comments on this. Sorry to take a while responding, I’ve been trying to respond to emails in the order they have been sent to me, but got months behind due to work and other commitments.
Your reply is long and interesting. As I state in my article, my aim is the utilitarian one of maximising the wellbeing of conscious life in the long-run. I believe that an early demise of the human race is the greatest threat to this and the competitive ethos is a great contributor to the early demise of the human race. So I’m not concerned about “our current problems” as the potential amount of wellbeing in the future dwarfs that of the present. Neither do I care about fairness, equality, freedom or any other quantity as a moral end in itself.
While I am not directly trying to reduce capitalist relations, authoritarianism or patriarchy, I believe that equality of power in my system will pretty much end all three, if those are the things that concern you. With the banning of the overpowering of one individual by another, along with elimination of status and comfort differentials, I think the major demands of the left will be met, including those of feminists, minority rights people and champions of the working class. However, I’m not claiming that strict equality will please everyone or represents the culmination of human intellectual development or anything crazy like that. We could all adopt strict equality tomorrow and humanity might destroy itself 200 years later anyway. I just think it might help make this outcome less likely.
Ultimately I believe that humanity should pursue some kind of pleasure-enhancing super-technology such as transhumanism or blissfully happy artificial intelligence. Right now, however, I think that most technological developments and increases to material welfare (at least in the industrialised world) are bad news as they seem likely to contribute to the likelihood of human extinction. They also, incidentally don’t seem to be making us any happier, as self-reported happiness has stagnated for decades despite vast technological developments. Technological advancement needs, in my view to be pursued very selectively, as right now we seem to be rushing into the next ozone layer, global warming etc. disaster. This makes most talent in technological areas dangerous right now. So I see missing out on the productivity of talent in the technological sphere as generally a good thing! In fact I’d rather not use the word “talent” in favour of the less positive-sounding “high ability”.
As for high ability of people like Chomsky and Zinn, working in the humanities, the goal of the humanities is that the truth about society, the past etc. gets discovered and put out there. I think that a bunch of anonymous writers each producing a little bit of text on the internet and being able to edit each other can achieve this. We have seen the great achievement that is Wikipedia. Under strict equality we would have Wikipedia plus all the contributors would be compensated comfort-wise for their time, leading to there being a far greater number of contributors. In fact, I think we’d have a far greater number of people working in the humanities altogether than we currently have as people will probably gravitate towards endeavours that they believe are socially useful. We might get more truth this way than from experts like Chomsky who may have their own biases and faults.
Another point is that if you favour the participatory society over my system, you should realise that under that system someone like Chomsky might find that his work is considered “not socially useful” by politicians which means he doesn’t get paid for what he does. This might represent a much greater systematic bias on writing content than you will find under strict equality, as under my system everyone would have the right to write and be compensated for it (albeit only to a few hundred readers if you don’t do it collectively).
As for the next Shakespeare, I admit that strict equality may well make fiction writing more difficult. Strict equality is an attempt to create an elegant alternative to other political and economic systems, that will give humanity a better chance of surviving. I wouldn’t want to claim that it will make life easier or better in all areas - It would be extremely unlikely if it did. I believe that fiction writing is a relatively unimportant aspect of life – much as I love films etc. A choice between increasing humanity’s chance of survival and improving the arts isn’t much of a contest for me. Also, examples like The Bible and The Simpsons show that great fiction can be created by groups of fairly anonymous people. So maybe fiction can be just as good under strictly egalitarian restrictions, though clearly quite different. I would also point out that in recent decades life satisfaction in the west seems unaffected by the presumably great increase in books, tv, radio, films etc. created, so it is debatable whether all this extra art has improved present-day human welfare.
With regard to banning fame in general I agree that the Daily Mail, and indeed the average person in the street (who spends about half of his or her free time watching tv) is going to see this as about as sensible as banning socks. I also accept what you say that to ban people from reading, say Chomsky or Stephen King’s next book is a serious restriction of freedom. I can only say that I think on balance that this restriction will contribute to human survival, via the destruction of hierarchies and the ethos of competition, and is therefore worth it, as the famous are a major part of the hierarchical dog-eat-dog and consumer culture.
In your second point you suggest that it’s not feasible to just make equality the law, without a “workable economic system behind” it. For you, an egalitarian economic system is essential for other elements of society to become egalitarian, and the law doesn’t seem to be so important for you.
I’m no expert in understanding how society works but I still feel that I am correct in identifying the law as the element of the system most likely to make the other parts fall into place. For a start, any economic system, as far as I can see, has to be defined in law (in the case of our society, company law, tax law etc.) To deny this you would have to believe that individuals can conform to material equality or “to each according to his need” voluntarily. I don’t believe this (though, as an aside, I would say that I think it’s worth trying out in some town somewhere, if it hasn’t been done already). So I think that the economy has to be regimented by laws.
Perhaps the main reason I favour the legal approach is that it seems to be the most straightforward one, in fact the only approach that I understand, to achieve what I want. I want all citizens to be equal in power, status and comfort, therefore I suggest that we make it the law that all people must be equal in power, status and comfort. There are no absolute guarantees of success (as we can see from widespread disobedience of our current drug laws) but, as I say, it seems like the most logical and straightforward approach.
Another reason for favouring the legal, rather than economic approach, is that I want citizens to be equal in things that go beyond their economic activities. For example, I want a lecturer and his or her (adult) student to be equal in status, a lawyer and a defendant to be equal in power (not necessarily over each-other in the courtroom but overall in their non personal lives). I don’t see how an economic system can deliver this.
Also by enshrining equality in the constitution we guarantee the right to equality on the part of a person who has become worse off. Otherwise someone who has been left worse off by inegalitarian workmates will have no ability to get even. Whatever we do with the economic system we would surely wish to put this right into law as well. Take for example the U.S. written constitution, as compared with our lack of one in the U.K. - surely having these rights formally extended to all citizens can’t make them less likely to be honoured.
So those are my reasons to favour the legal approach (legislative, judicial, whatever it should be called!) Your answer also implied that strict equality doesn’t have a viable economic system. I think this may be an important factor in your bad first impression of this system and therefore an issue I would like us to discuss further at some point.
Joe replied...
Hi Kuan,
Took me a long time to get back to you, so apologies. I may also repeat things that others have said by mistake.
One thing to note is that the resolution of disputes and violation of rules hasn't really been fleshed out in ParPolity yet. Maybe there will be a place for juries there, it seems like a good institutions for such matters to me.
As to where to start, "law" (or whatever it is called) or economy, I have a few comments. I'm not entirely saying that everything flows from economy, but I am saying that I am not convinced that things flow from legal institutions to the point that equality can be imposed by law. The law is supported by a complex web of social relations, of various characters (broken down in Holism into four broad types) based on shared expectations, norms and institutions. Social relations can perpetuate or undermine each other.
To state by criticism more forcefully, say you have social system X, along with the strict equality institutions. If system X was unequal, and produced social forces that perpetuated this inequality, would not these forces also act to undermine the equality courts? If system X was a viable system that met people needs while producing and sustaining equality, what need for the courts, apart from as a small part of such a system? The point is I don't see enough here to guarantee a good system, and it doesn't seem like laws to this extent are a necessary part of it either.
So a vision to me has to contain some idea of the overall social relations (this is also a criticism of economistic Marxist analysis by the way!) Parecon is an attempt to give some necessary conditions for a desirable society, ot be augmented by some political and juridical, and kinship and cultural, stuff. I don't think it specifies, e.g., how its suggested workplace norms would be (or not be) enforced. I don't see such a model in strict equality.
And as I said before I tend to think of the worst institutions that need fixing a bit different from you. For instance I think that personal elitism and competitiveness will look a lot less of a problem once economic and political matters are nearer a just system. And I generally value liberty -- you can call that part of my utility function I guess. Where freedom begins and ends when dealing with others is up for debate, but it is at least better for people to "feel free" as much as possible, that is, to go along with things naturally and voluntarily ("autonomy") as a result of shared norms rather than being "controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded..." as Proudhon had it ("heteronomy"). Strict equality goes further than is necessary in terms of explicit control for me, even if it is egalitarian control.
End of discussion between Kuan and Joe
Discussion with Mark
Mark’s first statement to Kuan
Okay Kuan – here are some of my thoughts –
You propose "Equality Courts" which "will be set up to enforce equality of the three quantities".
My feeling is that such courts are only necessary to attain equality in a social system with institutional features that allows for inequality – via the hierarchical division of labour, remuneration for power / ownership etc. But in a system that institutionalises equality of power – via balanced job complexes, remuneration for effort and sacrifice etc. – no such courts are necessary.
There is a difference in approach here. You address the issue of equality via creating new institutions that you call equality courts whereas advocates of participatory society address this issues at the systemic level.
You also write –
"Important tasks such as flying planes, performing surgery or other emergency or potentially dangerous situations can still be left to experts who must keep proving their abilities though a licence/qualification system. However those experts must be carefully denied above-average levels of power and status. This can be achieved in several ways, albeit at a cost to efficiency. Expert tasks can be part time, with experts spending the remainder of their time on particularly low power and status tasks. With regard to power, "second opinions" can be sought from other experts nullifying much of the power that can be derived from expert roles. Experts can also be forced to suffer low status houses/cars etc. Other, more extreme measures might be to reduce experts’ lawmaking power or forcing them to keep their expert work secret."
I would like to say a couple of things in response to this –
As you know in a participatory economy jobs are equally balanced for empowerment and desirability. This does mean that surgeons (for example) don’t just do surgery. But parecon advocates don’t assume that this will result in a reduction of efficiency – as you seem to with your system. In fact we believe that balanced job complexes and self-management will increase efficiency.
For one thing studies in workers self-management show that productivity increases. For another thing getting rid of the class system frees-up opportunities for the working class (80% of the population) to develop skill that under capitalism are monopolised by coordinators.
But again I would argue that these institutional features establish a new social norm that address the issue of equality of power without having to resort to people being "forced to suffer low status houses/cars etc." or other "more extreme measures".
One last thing. I don’t like the idea of a social system enforcing equality of material comfort. My feeling is that some people value material comfort more than others and should be free to have more or less as they choose.
The point of a just economy is that people get a fair say in what is produced and a just reward for their work. What they do with their credit should, in my opinion, be determined by them in co-operation with other members of their consumer council. The point, I think, is to have full employment and for all to have equally empowering jobs. If some want to work longer or harder than others in order to gain more credit for more material goods then that is a matter for the workers council to consider.
There are other things in your proposal that I would question but I will leave it at that for now.
Kuan replied...
Hi Mark.
Thanks for taking time to read and respond to my article. Thanks also for inspiring me to write it and for all your good work in PPS-UK which is a great group to be part of.
So, to respond to your comments:
You say that the equality courts won’t be “necessary” if we have participatory institutions such as balanced job complexes and effort-based pay. I think it would be just as true to say that if we had the equality courts, the participatory institutions would be unnecessary. By calling strict equality’s institutions unnecessary you are implying that you think they are worse in some way, but I’m interested in hearing more about what’s worse about them (and I won’t be offended if you are extremely direct about it).
You characterise the participatory society as “institutionalising the equality of power”. To me it seems that this could also be said of strict equality, which has the institution of courts, which, amongst other things, equalise power. You also say that the participatory society addresses equality at “the systemic level”. This description might too might apply to strict equality, which has a system (of courts) that do nothing except address equality. These particular comments, therefore, don’t seem to give us a reason to prefer one system over the other (not that you were necessarily trying to argue for the participatory society here anyway).
You say that, contrary to the guesses in my article, you believe that balanced job complexes and self management will increase efficiency. My guess that it won’t is only a hunch – I haven’t really got a clue and I hope you’re right. I’d be interested to hear more about the studies you refer to.
You also say that the participatory society will “establish a new social norm” as opposed to resorting to making people suffer low status houses etc. You seem to be implying that forcing the better-off status-wise to be brought down, against their wishes, to the average level by means of requiring them to do low-level tasks part-time is a bad thing to do. I don’t see why you think this is so much worse than doing the same thing with regard to empowerment and desirability of role, as the participatory society does. Perhaps here, and earlier, you are making a point that strict equality is too authoritarian. Unfortunately I’m a little uninformed about what enforcement systems the participatory society includes in order to keep its institutions in place – assuming there are any. Perhaps you could point me in the direction of this information or explain your views on this matter.
Finally, in your last comment, you say that you don’t like the idea of a social system enforcing equality of material comfort, feeling that as some people value material comfort more than others they should be free to have more or less as they choose. Firstly, I don’t think that even the participatory society recommends this. If I assume you are using my definition of material comfort here, which equates it to the pleasantness of one’s day-to-day activities, not including pleasantness derived from power or status, then the participatory society pretty much rations this with its effort-based pay rule, which forces people to choose between the comfort of not making an effort and the comfort that money can buy. Secondly, I think that this is as it should be, as otherwise (and I’m back to my hunches again here, I’m afraid) too many people will want to live a life of luxury and do no work for the system to support the bastards. Again, as a lover of humanity, I’d be very happy to be proved wrong here.
Ok, that’s my response. Feel free to ignore large parts of it if you want as I did write quite a lot. I look forward to hearing from you soon, one way or another.
All the best
Kuan
Mark replied...
Kuan – it is "just as true" to say that "if we had the equality courts, the participatory institutions would be unnecessary". That is very important and, I think, says a lot about your proposal.
A proposal that has as its objective "strict equality" but makes redundant participatory institutions is, to my mind, a contradiction in thinking. I mean, the whole point of designing participatory institutional features - like remuneration for effort, BJCs, self-managed councils, etc. - is to create a system in which all people can interact as equals. If we get rid of these institutional features, it seems to me, we loose the ability, the freedom, to participate as equals.
On the other hand, if we maintain the hierarchical division of labour, competitive markets, etc. but have equality courts then do we have a system in which people can interact as equals? Obviously the hierarchical division of labour makes self-management impossible so it seems to me that the answer to that questions is, no.
You write - "You say that, contrary to the guesses in my article, you believe that balanced job complexes and self management will increase efficiency. My guess that it won’t is only a hunch – I haven’t really got a clue and I hope you’re right. I’d be interested to hear more about the studies you refer to."
I think Robin Hahnel addresses this issue in his Economic Justice and Democracy (if you haven’t got a copy let me know and I will send you one) and references some studies into workers self-management and efficiency. If I remember rightly these studies indicate that the more workers participate in the running of their workplace the more efficient they become.
But there is another way of looking at this issue. We might assume that freeing-up 80% of the workforce from institutional oppression (as under capitalism / socialism) and instead facilitating them to grow and take on more fulfilling tasks (as with Parecon) will result in an overall increase in efficiency.
Of course some people will argue that this will decrease efficiency – but for me this is plain classism, just as it is sexist / racist to argue that giving women / blacks their freedom to participate as equals will have a negative affect on society.
You say – "Unfortunately I’m a little uninformed about what enforcement systems the participatory society includes in order to keep its institutions in place – assuming there are any. Perhaps you could point me in the direction of this information or explain your views on this matter."
The short answer here is the legal system, which emerges out of the political system – which is of course participatory. Steve Shalom has done the initial work on this system and you can find his work all over ZNet as well as some on the PPS-UK site.
Im not sure I understand the other comments you make so I will leave it there for now and maybe we will clarify as we go.
Hope to see you soon for a real life talk.
Kuan replied....
Hi Mark. You are very kind to offer to send me a copy of the Hahnel book. Maybe I’ll take you up on that one – but we can talk about this when we meet in London in about a week’s time. I hope that self management is efficient in as many respects as possible – this would be good news for both the systems we are discussing.
Thanks also for pointing me in the direction of Shalom’s writing – I’ll try to read some of that, and get to grips with the enforcement system of the participatory society.
Sorry I haven’t persuaded you on the strict equality front so far, but I’m happy to keep on trying:-) I’ll try to respond to your latest comments.
You give the impression that strict equality will reject participatory institutions, maintain the current hierarchies and competitive ethos and basically not be all that egalitarian. In fact, though strict equality doesn’t specify balanced job complexes and effort-based pay etc. the systems will in practice be the same or similar to these. Hierarchies and competitive markets will be impossible under strict equality, assuming all goes to plan. As for its egalitarian credentials, I see strict equality as more egalitarian (though I’d put them both in the same ball-park) than the participatory society. I say this because its 3 main rules are all about forcing everyone to be equal in the most important respects, whereas the participatory society’s rules are more indirect about achieving equality.
Just to be clear, I think our ideas are very similar and we should work together against the hierarchists, capitalists etc. for a world where we can all participate as equals.
I look forward to seeing you next weekend. Best regards. Kuan
Mark replied....
Hi Kuan - I think the following extracts address some of the issue your article raises.
In his Economic Justice and Democracy Robin Hahnel writes –
“There is an ample literature documenting the advantages of employee management. Evidence is overwhelming that people with a say and stake in how they work not only find work more enjoyable, they are more productive and efficient as well. [see reference] “ (page 189)
“We did not engage in the pointless exercise of assuming individuals are “revolutionary saints” who would act in socially responsible ways, and then tautologically proclaim that in a participatory economy the social interest would, indeed, be served, as many critics apparently assume. Instead, we designed institutions, procedures, and rules so when people act out of self-interest their behaviour would prove both socially efficient and equitable as well.” (page 249)
Kuan replied....
Hi Mark.
I’m currently reading and enjoying the Hahnel book you quote from, which you kindly gave me a copy of. Unfortunately I’m a bit of a slow reader, and with regard to your first quote, I haven’t reached the parts referring to such studies, so I don’t know any more about the issues that you are referring to than I did before. As a result I still believe my hunch that both a society under strict equality, and a society under the participatory society (pasoc, for short) would be less productive in terms of goods and services than our current system.
If I were asked to rate the productivity of the following 4 systems – strict equality, parsoc, captitalism and state planning, in terms of total market value of goods and services produced in a given time-period, I would say that the most productive of them is capitalism, closely followed by state planning, with parsoc a distant third and strict equality narrowly taking last place. The reason for this ordering is that I think that systems that reward the productive and punish the unproductive, harsh though they might be, would tend to be the most productive. In terms of which systems I want to see implemented/promoted I would rate the four systems mentioned in the reverse order of their productivity, with strict equality as the best system, followed by parsoc, then state planning and capitalism as the worst. This is because I rate systems on their contribution to the sustainability of the human race not on the amount of goods and services they produce.
As I said before, however, my views on productivity are all just an uneducated hunch as I haven’t investigated any studies into the productivity of things like parsoc, or finished the Hahnel book. The reason I think that capitalism is more productive than central planning is that capitalists will always be hell-bent on producing stuff, wheras central planners may have other considerations like public health, the environment, national glory etc. especially if central planning occurs in a representative democracy. Parsoc is much more liberal and democratic than these two systems, and will therefore, I imagine, lead to people living much more sensibly-paced lives where they ease off the productivity in favour of their own health, sanity etc. The reasons I think that strict equality would be even less productive than Parsoc are twofold. Firstly, in contrast to Parsoc, strict equality has no threshold of quality of an individual’s work, below which a person doesn’t get paid – people can be rewarded for digging holes and filling them in again if that’s what they want to do. Secondly, under Parsoc people might compete with each other effort-wise in order to buy status symbols like big houses, with their effort-related pay. Under strict equality such reasons to work harder than one’s neighbour are eliminated by the equality of status.
With regard to your second quote, I’m glad that Hahnel is aware of the need to create systems that take account of human nature as it is, not as we want it to be. I expect that everyone who has created a political system believes this - I certainly do. This quote doesn’t prove a lot to me, nor is it much to do with my article or the conversation so far.
Anyway, as we discussed in private messages, this discussion has inspired me to start writing a strict equality v/s parecon article. You can reply to this message or wait to respond to that article, when I post it on Znet, maybe in a few weeks.
All the best. Kuan.
Mark replied....
Glad to hear you are enjoying the book Kuan.
Just a couple of quick points on productivity –
You say that a parsoc would be “less productive in terms of goods and services than our current system”. Here I think it is important to be clear about what we mean when we are comparing different economic systems for productivity.
When Hahnel highlights the evidence that employee management increases productivity and efficiency it does not necessarily follow that in a participatory economy more goods and services will be produced than under capitalism. This is for the simple reason that levels of productivity in a parecon will be determined by the workers and consumers during the participatory planning process and can not be predetermined or known in any way before hand.
What we can know with some confidence is that what ever workers / consumers decided on during the participatory planning process will be produced more efficiently (by which I mean that work is undertaken with minimum waste) than it is under capitalism.
In my opinion we should not be surprised by this. After all capitalism is an incredibly wasteful economic system. Two features of capitalist economics in particular illustrate just how wasteful the current system is –
1) The profit motive drives much of productivity under capitalism and yet much of what is produced has little, if any, real social value. Advertising campaigns are designed to induce feelings of dissatisfaction in the general public in order to create an incentive to consume more and more.
2) The class system alienates workers from their work which in turn greatly reduces their enthusiasm to produce efficiently. In fact it is likely (and in my opinion predictable) that under conditions of class exploitation workers will deliberately adopt a kind of anti-efficient / pro-waste attitude.
A participatory economy would remove the profit motive and the distorting affects it has on the overall economy allowing workers and consumers to focus their energy on socially valuable work. The class system is also gone in a parecon and therefore with it the negative and debilitating affects of alienation. Combine these two points with the evidence regarding employee managements highlighted by Hahnel and I think we have a very strong case in favour of a participatory economy.
Regarding some other issues you raise –
You say that in a Strict Equality “people can be rewarded for digging holes and filling them in again if that’s what they want to do”. In contrast workers in a parecon are remunerated for effort and sacrifice - but only for what is consider to be socially valuable work, and I doubt that any sane person would consider, digging holes and filling them back in, socially valuable work.
You also raise another concern regarding parecon’s criteria for remuneration when you say “under Parsoc people might compete with each other effort-wise in order to buy status symbols like big houses, with their effort-related pay” adding “Under strict equality such reasons to work harder than one’s neighbour are eliminated by the equality of status.” This suggests that you believe that in a participatory economy inequality could reemerge due to the fact that there is no mechanism in the system to impose equality.
Here, if I understand you correctly, you are right in so far as there is no external authority that imposes equality on workers. However you are wrong in thinking there is no mechanism at all. Participatory economics is a self managed system which can only function if the participants understand that inequality undermines democracy (in fact, in my opinion, it is unlikely that a parecon could even emerge without such understanding and that such a level of consciousness is easily reachable by most people) . So threats to participation that could occur as a result of inequality can easily be addressed by the workers council if and when necessary without having to resort to undesirable authoritarian means.
Having said all of that it is not clear to me why it is a problem that some people might choose to spend their earning on their house whilst others choose to spend it on traveling, for example. I don’t see why that would mean that such neighbour could no longer interact as equals as a result of their different priorities for pleasure.
Iv’e probably said too much so I will leave it there for now.
Hope to see you soon.
Mark
Kuan replied....
You can never say too much Mark!
Great to see you up in Birmingham in the summer.
Sorry I took an eon to write the following. Re-reading it I find it more dense and unreadable than I would like – sorry about this. Maybe it’s a reflection of my confused thinking. I started re-writing it but it didn’t seem to be getting any better!
I’ll start with this efficiency/productivity issue. I’ve read the Hahnel’s “Economic Justice and Democracy” now. I’ve also spent a few hours investigating the evidence he presents for the efficiency of participatory organisations. I have found 2 pieces of evidence referred to in his book. The first is a paper by Levine and Tyson (that he refers to in Chapter 8, footnote 3). This paper suggests that firms opting for a more participatory approach tend to be more productive. The other is an article by Noam Chomsky called “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” (mentioned by Hahnel on page 146) in which it is claimed that workplaces collectivised by the Anarchists during the Spanish Civil War produced at least as much as non-collectivised ones (Chomsky’s footnotes 35 and 60 being the most relevant).
I would imagine that few of the firms investigated by Levine and Tyson are as radically egalitarian as they would be under parsoc institutions such as balanced job complexes. The anarchist industry mentioned by Chomsky may have been more radical, but his investigation falls short of being a scientific study. These pieces of evidence together certainly make me take the possibility of greater productivity under parsoc more seriously, but aren’t enough for me to share your confidence that “whatever workers / consumers decided on during the participatory planning process will be produced more efficiently (by which I mean that work is undertaken with minimum waste) than it is under capitalism”.
In my last reply to you I talked about “productivity”, referring to the productivity of the entire society. On reflection I think “output” or “GDP” would have been less misleading terms to use, as “productivity” is, I think, normally used by economists to mean output (measured by market value) per hour worked. “Efficiency” is normally thought of as output divided by effort, and I’m not sure if you are in agreement with this with your “minimum waste” comment.
I think we agree, however, that political and economic systems should be judged on their achievements with regard to our core values or value, and that stuff like output, productivity, efficiency etc. are at best a means to an end. My core value is the well-being of conscious life. I think that the 2 ways that the output, efficiency etc. of a new wellbeing-promoting system such as parsoc or strict equality are instrumental towards this value are the following.
a) if mainstream people are to adopt a new system then the more efficient, productive etc. it is, the more impressed they are going to be and therefore more likely to adopt it.
b) it is probably easier to modify a system to make it less efficient than more efficient, therefore it is better in this respect for a new system to be more efficient in case it really needs to be more efficient in the future for some reason.
On the other hand, if either parsoc or strict equality takes over and is super-efficient we may end up continuing to over produce/pollute, making these systems as bad in practice as our current system.
Our discussion is further complicated by the fact that output can be defined in a variety of ways. It could be measured by market value or by some more enlightened measure that brings it closer to describing its contribution towards our core values. You seem to be tending towards a more enlightened measure of output when you suggest that advertising isn’t socially useful, and therefore, I guess, doesn’t count towards output, efficiency etc. One problem I have with an enlightened measure of output is that if we take it to its logical conclusion we would say, according to my core value, that output is contribution towards the wellbeing of conscious life. According to this measure most output measured by market value becomes negative as I think that most TV sets etc. produced make the world worse off in the long-run. If output is negative it seems strange to start talking about efficiency.
Point (a) above, however, suggests there is merit in talking to the mainstream in terms of their own unenlightened terminology.
With regard to your other comments-
I agree with your paragraph about digging holes but don’t understand what you were trying to argue if anything.
With regard to the following paragraphs, you are right that I think that parsoc lacks a mechanism for maintaining equality. I do not believe that making equality the law of the land constitutes “undesirable authoritarian means”. I don’t think that if you lived under strict equality you would find it remotely authoritarian, but as you, Tom and Joe have raised this kind of objection I’ll try to give it further thought. I believe, however, that your view that people in each locality will want to maintain equality with neighbouring areas is over-optimistic. Once a dymamic of competition gets hold of people, most people can get swept up in it. Hahnel is, in my view, reckless towards this dynamic occurring where he says that each work council should be paid in proportion to its output (at least, that’s how I read his “social benefit-to-social cost” comment near the top of page 230) and that higher pay might be awarded to individuals who’s effort is more proficient (page 229, last sentence).
Lastly, your final paragraph suggests that strict equality would prevent someone from choosing whether to improve their house or go travelling. I don’t believe strict equality would prevent this.
Anyway, hope you gained something from some of this, and I look forward to catching up with you in the real world.
Kuan
Mark replied....
Great to see you (and the wife) also!
I have to say that I feel a bit out of my depth trying to answer this. As you know I am not an economist and have no formal training in the subject.
I advocate parecon because - as a model - it institutionalises values that I like. One of those values is efficiency. What advocates of parecon mean by efficiency is that we produce goods and services with minimal waste. The claim here is that the institutions we propose will make real this value.
However, efficiency does not mean that we will produce more in a parecon than we do under capitalism. We may produce more or we may produce less - probably more of some things and less of others. But the claim is that whichever it turns out to be there will be less waste of peoples time and energy, less waste of natural resources, etc.
One of the reasons for this is that we remove the hierarchical division of labour which institutionally keeps the majority of workers down and is therefore very wasteful of peoples natural talents. We hope to replace this institutional barrier with balanced job complexes which would allow this majority to exercise their full potential. More people performing at full potential means less waste.
Another reason for this efficiency claim is that the participatory planning process (our alternative to competitive markets) allows for the “true social cost” of producing goods and services to be incorporated in to the price. This is something that competitive markets and central planning can not achieve. Taking into account the true social cost probably means that some goods we can afford under capitalism (think petrol driven cars for example) might prove to expensive under parecon because of the environmental cost of cleaning up after them. If true this reality would force economic actor in a parecon to look for alternative (greener) forms of transportation. Again, less waste.
The participatory planning process also ensures that the economy produces things that people actually want. By doing so we would not be producing all the shite that now gets made (as a result of the logic of markets) in the present system to maximise profit for rich people. Less waste!
Sorry Kuan - Im not sure about the other issues you raise.
... actually I did want to say something about your comment regarding competition - “Once a dynamic of competition gets hold of people, most people can get swept up in it.”
I am assuming here that we are talking about a fully functioning parecon. If so it is important to keep in my that to get this far we would need a vast majority of people to support the values and institutions of the parecon system. As you know this includes balanced job complexes and participatory planning etc... which helps maintain a culture of cooperation and equality of power.
However if people stopped supporting these values and institutions then a dynamic of competition could emerge. But I put it to you that this is true of all systems. In the end the only true safeguard for any system of this sort is that of commitment by the people. If the people loose that commitment then the system will change into something else. But again I think this is true of all systems - including Strict Equality.
Regarding Hahnel - I think you misunderstand what he is saying. He states -
“People do not receive equal consumption for unequal effort in a participatory economy. People’s efforts are rated by their co-workers, and people are awarded consumption rights in their neighborhood consumption councils according to those effort ratings. To each according to her effort - the distributive maxim in a participatory economy - means there are material rewards for above-average effort.” (page 226)
So people are not “paid in proportion to [their] output” and “higher pay” is not awarded to “individuals who’s effort is more proficient”. From the above quote you can see that the parecon maxim is “to each according to her effort” and NOT “to each according to his output / proficiency”. In fact both of these criteria for remuneration are clearly rejected by the parecon model.
Kuan replied....
Hi Mark. Sorry this was a while coming. I’ll buy you a pint for every season I delayed.
Since my last reply I have found, in The Spirit Level, more evidence to back up your belief in the efficiency of participation. Page 256 and the last paragraph of page 258 give four references to support such claims, though unfortunately I didn’t find full texts for any of them online. Combined with the references in Hahnel’s book it’s enough to convince a not-much-of-a-scientist like me that more participation, compared to the levels we have in our current society will give us more efficiency, on most definitions. However, as I stated in my last posting, this doesn’t prove that the sort of radical equality that we advocate will make things more efficient. It just shows that hierarchism in our current firms is stifling efficiency to some extent. We might be only a little more hierarchical than the optimal level.
I’ll make this my last comment on the efficiency element of this discussion. Efficiency isn’t the reason I favour strict equality over parsoc and as far as I know it isn’t the reason you favour parsoc over strict equality. You have persuaded me a little on this issue, as I just explained, but I’d rather discuss what we see as the crucial pros and cons of our two systems that lead us to choose one over the other. Unless you have a burning desire to discuss efficiency further.....
I expressed concern in my previous posting that a competitive dynamic might take hold within a system that is intended to be egalitarian, such as parsoc. In response you have suggested that in order for parsoc to have been adopted in the first place, most people must have come to believe in an egalitarian ethic. You seem to suggest that this grassroots belief in maintaining equality, combined with parsoc’s institutions will be enough to maintain equality.
The first thing I’d like to do in response to this is to distinguish two types of person with regard to their support of equality. Let us define an egalitarian as a person who would vote for an egalitarian system such as parsoc or strict equality in a referendum or election. Let us define a group of people within this group as “egalitarian saints” (a phrase inspired by Hahnel’s “revolutionary saints” comment that you quoted earlier in this discussion). An egalitarian saint will not only vote for an egalitarian system in a referendum or election but would also refuse an opportunity to legally gain greater wealth, status etc. than his or her peers. If we think of the number of people in Britain who would vote for the National Health Service to continue, and then think of the number of these who, if the NHS didn’t exist, would actually personally give serious amounts of their money so that poor people in their neighbourhood could get healthcare, we see that egalitarian saints are likely to represent a small fraction of egalitarians.
Let’s suppose that egalitarianism is on the rise. At some point in the future, egalitarians will find themselves in a majority for the first time. At this point we would hope that a referendum or election would take place which establishes something radically egalitarian such as parsoc or strict equality as the political and economic system of the country or region or whatever. At this point, however, only slightly more than half of the population would be egalitarians and I would suggest that only a small fraction of those would be egalitarian saints. So most people, at the point when society adopts parsoc or strict equality, would be trying to maximise the amount of wealth, status etc. that they have compared with their peers, to the extent that institutions allow them to do so. Also, I think it follows from this that the vast majority of workplaces, towns, regions etc. would be trying to maximise their wealth, status etc. compared with their neighbours, again to the extent that the institutional structures allow this. We won’t be seeing people or groups of people donating wealth, status etc. to worse-off neighbours purely in the name of equality unless forced to.
So I think that at this crucial point in the future it will really be down to the institutions to keep society equal (as Hahnel suggests with his “revolutionary saints” comment). While broadly being enthusiastic about parsoc, I do question whether its institutions can do this job.
There are two ways in which parsoc falls short, in my opinion. The first is that its institutions don’t try to extend equality to all the areas that strict equality does. For example, unlike strict equality, it allows relatively hard-working people to attain greater comfort and status outside of work than their peers, through higher income. It also doesn’t appear to do much to equalise the power, status or comfort of non-workers with those of workers. A large chunk of society are currently students, retired, unemployed or sick. Under parsoc they might still be fighting for equality of power, status or comfort.
Now, you might argue that guaranteed equality can only go so far, and, indeed, even strict equality draws the line somewhere, not compensating for problems that individuals have in their personal lives, for example. However, I think that parsoc doesn’t go far enough and allows inequality and the competitive culture that goes with it to keep their grip on society in the areas just mentioned. I fear, as I state in point 5 of my Strict Equality vs Parsoc article, that this competitive behaviour will inflict more damage on the environment and create a competitive culture which might leak into large scale political choices.
The second way that parsoc falls short is in the area of enforcement. Parsocists seem reluctant to make its institutional features the law of the land. This means that the equality that they talk about - equality of desirability and empowerment of job (balanced job complexes) and equality of pay for a given amount of effort - may not be universally applied. Hahnel even goes as far as to deviate from these principles himself in the passages I quoted from in my last posting. In a world where egalitarian saints are in a minority, hierarchies will tend to spring up everywhere. Laws and courts are, in my view, the best way to deal with this. Better than Shalom’s elected politicians who might well identify with one group against another as elected politicians often do.
You might want to look at my second reply to Joe, above, where I also talk about this enforcement of equality issue, as well as my Strict Equality vs Parsoc article, which summarises my main arguments in this debate, if you didn’t read these things already.
Finally, with regard to those quotes from Hahnel in my last posting, if I do misunderstand him, as you claim, then please explain my misunderstanding using the passages I refer to, not from another page in the book, as he may just be contradicting himself a bit (I think he is).
Talk to you soon, mate.
Mark replied....
Hi Kuan -
“You seem to suggest that this grassroots belief in maintaining equality, combined with parsoc’s institutions will be enough to maintain equality.”
Actually I would more than just suggest it. My claim is that there is no other non-authoritarian means of getting to, and maintain, a participatory society other than popular support for the systems values and institutions.
I assume the same is true of your system. If enough people in society decided they don’t want strict equality anymore then your system would also brake down and would be replaced by some other system.
“There are two ways in which parsoc falls short, in my opinion.” -
“The first is that its institutions don’t try to extend equality to all the areas that strict equality does. For example, unlike strict equality, it allows relatively hard-working people to attain greater comfort and status outside of work than their peers, through higher income. It also doesn’t appear to do much to equalise the power, status or comfort of non-workers with those of workers. A large chunk of society are currently students, retired, unemployed or sick. Under parsoc they might still be fighting for equality of power, status or comfort.”
In a self-managed economy like parecon any concerning tendencies towards concentrations of power would be addressed by the workers council. If this fails and elitism continues to develop then the system fails.
In a parecon those who can’t work get the equivalent consumer credit as the average wage. Same with students and the retired I imagine.
“The second way that parsoc falls short is in the area of enforcement. Parsocists seem reluctant to make its institutional features the law of the land. This means that the equality that they talk about - equality of desirability and empowerment of job (balanced job complexes) and equality of pay for a given amount of effort - may not be universally applied.”
I assume that a successful revolution would result in a new constitution made-up of new rights and responsibilities. More specifically we can imagine new laws that grow out of the economic sphere that express these rights as legal obligations for all workplaces. In a parecon this could included a legal obligation to institutionalise BJC’s which would outlaw the hierarchical division of labour making it impossible for the capitalist / coordinator class to legally mount a counter-revolution. Presumably part of the role of the police in a parsoc would be to use their legal power to protect the people against such organised economic crime. I see no reason why this couldn’t happen in a parsoc.
I look forward to that drink.
End of Mark and Kuan’s discussion
I have divided this piece into four sections. The first section summarises the main rules of the system. In the second section I deal with two major criticisms/issues that I think will come to the mind of the reader, and hopefully deal with them successfully. In the third section I try to flesh out how I think society would look if it followed the system. Finally, in the last section, I try to lay out my philosophical/moral justification for the system.
1) DESCRIPTION OF RULES
OVERVIEW
Strict equality is quite a simple political/economic system to summarise. It consists of a constitution that equalises three quantities among all mentally able adults (with the exception of people who actually choose to have less of one or more of the quantities). These quantities are the following –
1) Political Power
2) Social Status
3) Material Comfort
I define power as an individual’s ability, which he or she derives from his or her role in society, to change the world in ways that affect people. Status, I define as the respect derived from one’s role in society. Comfort is the pleasantness of one’s role in society, excluding pleasantness derived from one’s power or status. The major determinants of comfort are pleasantness of one’s home, possessions and recreational activities, working conditions and working hours. (By "role in society" I mean a person's job plus possessions plus any commitments they have in their spare time).
ENFORCEMENT OF EQUALITY
“Equality Courts” will be set up to enforce equality of the three quantities. The way these courts work is that any mentally-able adult (hereafter referred to as a "citizen") can accuse another of possessing more of one of the three quantities than they do, even if the accuser and accused have never met one another or interacted economically. It’s as if every pair of citizens had signed a contract agreeing to share equally what they have of each of the three quantities.
If the court agrees that the person accused does indeed possess a greater amount of the given quantity than the accuser, then a transfer has to take place such that both individuals concerned are left equal with regard to the quantity in question (and unchanged with regard to the other two quantities). A court order goes to the defendant which the state will back up by force if disobeyed. Citizens who repeatedly end up being ordered to hand over large amounts of one or more of the three quantities will have their freedom to acquire more of them restricted for a penalty period, say a few years.
The equality courts should have a jury. The jury can be dismissed by the judge if the jurors don’t stick to the plan of equalising whichever quantity is in question and instead, for example, try to allocate more of it to the person they think is more deserving of it.
The decisions of these courts should be made on balance of evidence, so there is no greater onus on the accuser than the accused to back up their claims with evidence. This means that every citizen will be well advised to, throughout their lives, keep evidence of their levels of the three quantities, for example by getting witnesses to see how much time they spend working or how basic their lifestyle is.
Groups can make equality claims against other groups, and the procedure will be the same as with individuals but with average levels of the quantities per person of the two groups being considered.
THE CONSTITUTION
Strict equality is a system that might be applied to an area of any size, from the whole world down to a small community. Let us call the area under strict equality the “strict equality zone”. Whatever the size of this zone, the system should, I would suggest, be written into a constitution that can be abolished by a majority vote in a referendum.
2) TWO MAJOR ISSUES
There are two major questions/criticisms that might well be on the mind of the reader based on what's been written here so far. Firstly - how are the equality courts going to be able to measure such nebulous quantities as political power, social status and material comfort? Secondly - in a society where an equal share of material comfort and social status are guaranteed, why would anyone work? I think that these points are crucial, so let me try to deal with them now, before I go on to sketch out how society would look in more detail.
MEASUREMENT OF THE QUANTITIES
Addressing the first question - suppose a tax expert accuses a 6th grade schoolteacher (leaving aside for a moment the question of whether these specific roles would exist in the society that I am imagining) of having more political power than he or she does. How can we measure which of the two has the greater political power, defining political power as I did above, as the “ability, which he or she derives from his or her role in society, to change the world in ways that affect people”?
While I am under no illusion that such measurements can be made with complete rigour, I believe that sufficient accuracy can be achieved such that people’s levels of political power and the other two quantities can be kept roughly equal by the threat of the equality courts. Jurors will be able to draw on a body of expertise on these matters. Social scientists will develop their knowledge of the measurement of political power, social status and material comfort.
An example of the work such social scientists might do would be the following experiment: groups that are campaigning for changes in the law in various areas would be asked if they want a new supporter who is (a) a tax expert, or (b) a 6th grade schoolteacher. If most of them choose (a) then this might imply that the tax expert is expected to have more political power. This is, I believe, an example of how rigour can be brought into the measurement of such things as power, status and comfort.
The measurement of status might be based on statistical relationships between the results of surveys asking people to rate how much they respect people they know and the activities/jobs/possessions of these people. The measurement of comfort is, I admit, more difficult than the other two, as comfort is a subjective quantity – different people find different tasks pleasant/unpleasant. Here the juries and the experts that they might use to help them would have to try to guess people’s taste to some extent, for example if a person is accused of having a comfortable life because he or she spends a lot of time painting and drawing, the jury will have to guess the extent to which the person in question enjoys such activities. For two people who have the same taste, the more comfortable would be the person whose day-to-day activities are preferable (discounting the pleasantness derived from power or status).
A last difficulty comes when the jury has to, having decided that the accusing person or group is indeed worse-off with regard to the quantity in question, transfer to this person or group the amount of the quantity that renders them equal. In some cases, like those of comfort, it might be a case of forcing the better-off person or group to hand over some possessions (although they would have to be ones that don’t carry any status value). The handing over of power might involve giving the worse-off person or group some jobs or responsibilities of the better-off person or group (although they should be jobs that don’t carry status). All this is, I admit, a challenge, although not necessarily more difficult than some of the issues that courts deal with nowadays, such as trying to quantify psychological damage or a non-working spouse’s contribution to their partner’s job.
INCENTIVES TO WORK
So, to address the second question that I posed above, concerning incentives to work - would guaranteed equal comfort ensure universal idleness? I don’t believe it will. If a person does little work and consumes a lot they will fall foul of the equality courts and have to reduce their comfort levels by either increasing their work or reducing their consumption, as I have defined comfort as the pleasantness of day-to-day activities, which would include both the pleasantness of consuming a lot and the pleasantness of not working so much.
If this argument is accepted, strict equality can still face the criticism that citizens have no incentive to endure productive discomfort. For example, someone might avoid the equality courts by lying on a bed of nails on a daily basis!
Under these circumstances I believe that the moral motive would kick in in many cases and people would do what they feel is socially useful work. Given a choice between digging holes and filling them in again and digging holes that fulfil some purpose, I think that most people would do the second one. I can’t imagine, on the other hand that society would be as materially productive as our present system is. Maybe, at a total guess, strict equality might produce half the amount of goods as our present mixed economy. However I am hopeful that the system would be superior by most other measures – pollution levels, individual freedom, maybe happiness or health. It would also offer an end to the division of rich and poor and much of the oppression of gender, racial and age groups by others.
3) HOW SOCIETY WOULD LOOK UNDER STRICT EQUALITY
Having roughly described the system and discussed two crucial potential criticisms, I will now try to sketch out in a little more detail how society would work under strict equality, before finishing with my philosophical/ethical justification of the system. I should make it clear that I define strict equality simply as the equalisation of power, status and comfort as described in the first section, above. This and the previous section contain my own guesses and recommendations of how a society under strict equality might work. Someone might disagree with these predictions and recommendations but still be a supporter of strict equality.
Society under strict equality would be free to pass any laws it likes as long as they don’t contradict the constitution, for example it could ban trespassing on private property or drinking alcohol in the street. I expect laws that get passed to be backed up by state force if and when they are broken. The strict equality zone will be ruled by a specific bunch of laws which need not be greater in number or more complicated than the laws that govern a typical country today.
LAWMAKING
All lawmaking will be achieved without politicians or unelected powerful people.
Each citizen may propose changes in the law. At any one time each citizen is allowed to have one active proposal. Active proposals may be supported by other citizens. Each citizen may support, say 10 proposals of other people at one time (in addition to having one proposal of his or her own). Each week, the two proposals with the most supporters in the strict equality zone are advanced from the support gathering stage to the debating stage. For example, I may write a proposal saying that cannabis should be legalised. After a few months this proposal might get thousands of supporters. This might get it to No2 in the "proposal charts" and move it on to the debating stage.
At the debating stage 2,000 randomly selected citizens debate each proposal. They are divided into juries of five citizens. Juries may call any expert witnesses they want to argue for and against the proposed change in the law. Eventually each jurist votes and the change in the law may be passed by a simple majority of votes of all the citizens debating the law.
Citizens would be wise to put clauses in many of their laws allowing countries and regions within the strict equality zone (assuming the zone is that big) to opt out of them. Other laws, on the other hand, I believe should be compulsory for all regions, for example laws governing pollution, which affect the whole world.
Equality of power will force each country, region, town etc. to also make decisions in a directly democratic way, so laws at the equality zone level need not prescribe this for them. Likewise the law need not insist that entities such as companies, partnerships, agencies, co-operatives etc. have egalitarian decision-making procedures as the constitution will do this. However, it seems likely that entities similar to partnerships or co-operatives in our current society would be the most popular way for people to be employed and the law would probably want to insist on some decision making procedures specific to such entities in order to make life easier though standardisation.
THE ECONOMY
It may be realised by the majority in some cases, that a minority is ruining the world by, for example, polluting or creating new, dangerous technology. The simplest way to deal with this is to ban the activity. In other cases the majority may realise that individuals are failing to do some vital activity, for example not making enough food. The simplest way to deal with this would be to make the activity compulsory. (One would hope that in this second case people's moral motive would kick in, as suggested above, but things may not always go to plan).
A preferable, less draconian/painful (albeit a little more complicated) way to achieve these things, however, might be with "ration points". In the case of undesirable activities such as polluting, individuals would have a limit to the number of ration points they can spend, say, per month, with each undesirable activity carrying a certain amount of points. Falling short of state-set individual targets for socially useful activities such as growing food would also cost ration points. Ration points would not be transferable between people.
This would all be in addition to the constitutional rationing of political power, social status and material comfort that is the core of strict equality. It may help the smooth running of society if shops are forced to label all products with an estimate of the contribution of each product to material comfort, expressed as a number. This would be similar to calorie values of food being quoted on food packaging. Consumers would be able to avoid the equality courts by staying on a “comfort diet”.
I don’t believe that the strict equality zone needs to go further and have a currency that is transferable between people.
With regard to private property, I believe that when it is egalitarian it is a reasonably natural thing, particularly outside work, and will and should continue under strict equality.
THE WORKPLACE
Most workplaces may be categorised as co-operatives. Whatever their exact rules, certainly there would be no management in any workplace due to the equality of power – no police chiefs, head teachers, directors, editors, bosses, unless these posts are constantly rotated.
Important tasks such as flying planes, performing surgery or other emergency or potentially dangerous situations can still be left to experts who must keep proving their abilities though a licence/qualification system. However, those experts must be carefully denied above-average levels of power and status. This can be achieved in several ways, albeit at a cost to efficiency. Expert tasks can be part time, with experts spending the remainder of their time on particularly low power and status tasks. With regard to power, “second opinions” can be sought from other experts nullifying much of the power that can be derived from expert roles. Experts can also be forced to suffer low status houses/cars etc. Other, more extreme measures might be to reduce experts’ lawmaking power or forcing them to keep their expert work secret.
These balancing actions would also be applied to more common areas of expertise such as driver’s licences or licences to work with children. To the extent that such licences bestow power and status upon people, those people should have power and status reduced in other parts of their lives.
FAME
The levels of power and status given to celebrities - film, TV and sport stars, writers, film directors etc. - in our current society, cannot be balanced for in this way however. Under strict equality, therefore, no-one would be allowed to be famous. For example, individual writers who are influential will fall foul of the equality courts and be forced to share their newspaper columns, books etc. with co-writers. If they still remain powerful they will perhaps be commanded by the courts to reduce the scope of the distribution of their writing, for example by limiting access to their website to, say 1,000 users. Or they might be commanded to write less often. Similar sanctions would be taken against any artist, actor, film-maker etc. who started becoming well known. The only writing, art, performance etc. that would be seen by large numbers of people would be collectively produced work, such as Wikipedia or an episode of the Simpsons (if there were no management running the show, and the voice actors, writers and artists etc. were regularly changed). Indeed in a society under strict equality the only famous people allowed would be fictional cartoon characters (or perhaps live-action characters played by a different actor every time) or dead people.
CRIMINAL PUNISHMENT
Lastly, the issue of punishing criminals is a slightly uncertain area for the system. If strict equality is taken to its logical conclusion punishment of criminals would be virtually impossible as it generally means depriving the convict of one of the three equally distributed quantities. A simple solution to this might be to make criminals an exception to the equality rules. On the other hand - and I am hopeful about this - we might simply restrain and attempt to rehabilitate criminals, affording them the same overall power, status and comfort as everyone else.
4) WHY I ADVOCATE SUCH A SYSTEM
This system is an attempt to improve humanity’s chances of surviving into the long term on this planet. The reason I believe this to be the aim of paramount importance is that I adhere to a hedonistic utilitarian ethical system. According to the version of the system that I endorse we should aim to maximise the amount of happiness in the universe over the long term and minimise the amount of pain. For humanity, the priority for the next few hundred years or so should be to avoid wiping ourselves out. This is because I believe that if humanity turns into a very advanced race that is stable over the long-term it will probably develop the ability to alter its own biology and use this power to live in a pleasurable state most of the time as this is arguably our greatest desire. Determining the best approach to reaching that point is a complicated matter but one crucial thing to realise is that getting there safely is our aim, not getting there quickly, as we potentially have billions of years to play around with.
So we ought to advance our technology, but the problem is that we might destroy ourselves along the way. Whether our chance of destroying ourselves is 1%, 99% or anything in-between, making this chance less should be our goal as so much happiness is on the line.
We clearly need to be selective in which technology we develop, possibly holding back technological development in most areas. Clearly our current political and economic culture is a million miles away from taking this sort of approach. Two problematic features of our current society are concentrations of power in the hands of few people and a competitive ethos. The collection of political power in the hands of few people has given us the problem that humanity has largely been steered by the most extremely competitive people of its number, leading to high levels of militarism and weapons research, which I view as the greatest threat to human survival. The competitive culture has lead us to levels of material consumption that may be dangerous to the stability of our biosphere. It has also lead to a frantic race among firms and countries to develop new technology, which again over time increases the risk to the biosphere and human health. The competitive culture also blinkers us towards acting in the interests of humanity as a whole and future people.
Unfortunately the centralised state and capitalist systems which are so rife with these problems have, so far, been extremely stable and hard to get rid of. One of the things that has made them successful, particularly in the case of capitalism is that they are simple systems that everyone can (roughly speaking) understand. We need an alternative that is equally elegant but without the drawbacks just described. Strict equality is an attempt to do that. With comfort and social status, and to a lesser extent political power, equalised across all individuals, strict equality will reduce the competitive culture and individuals will feel a greater freedom to act in humanity’s collective interest. Also its levelling of the powerful elite will, hopefully bring a greater level of sanity to political decisions. Furthermore it is as simple as capitalism, which might help it to catch on. It probably won’t furnish us with as much material wealth as capitalism or centralised state socialism have done, but I believe that this is a price well worth paying.
Strict Equality vs Parsoc
Let me argue strict equality against the participatory society ("parsoc" for short). Firstly, it should be noted that the systems are quite similar, and, as I have said previously, the supporters of both should find common ground and campaign together for a less capitalistic and hierarchical world. This is pretty academic at the moment as I’m the only supporter of strict equality, with only my sad self to be equal with:-)
I am taking parsoc to mean parecon plus Stephen Shalom's parpolity (which Michael Albert seemed to regard as the best option in the political sphere in "Realising Hope"). For those unfamiliar with these ideas, wikipedia has articles on parecon and parpolity. Those unfamiliar with strict equality may want to refer to my article "Strict Equality" on this site.
I have boiled my argument for strict equality against parsoc down to six reasons and put them in order of importance.
REASON 1 - NESTED COUNCILS ARE LESS DEMOCRATIC/MORE HIERARCHICAL THAN LAWMAKING JURIES.
To explain why I think strict equality's lawmaking juries are preferable to parsoc's nested councils I should go back to the philosophical basis for my views. This will also help explain my other reasons. I adhere to a utilitarian ethos (hedonistic "total view" version). This makes me rate political systems according to how they contribute to the future amount of happiness/lack of misery in the universe. The main factor contributing to future happiness/lack of misery that we can affect is the sustainability of the human race, as no human race means vastly less future happiness/lack of misery than there might otherwise be. I believe that the safest road to a sustainable future (albeit by no means a certain one) in the political sphere is by minimising hierarchies of power. This is because if you have a minority who have qualified to be the most powerful they will either have a more aloof or more competitive attitude, either way more selfish than the average person, leading to less sane decisions for humanity in the long-term.
So, what I want to see in the political sphere is a system with as much democracy as possible, or to view it another way, as little hierarchy of power as possible (I see these as two ways of viewing the same thing). I think that strict equality's lawmaking juries (see my article Strict Equality, Section 3, "Lawmaking" for a description of this) viewed either in terms of maximisation of democracy or of minimisation of hierarchies, do a pretty good job. In terms of democracy, the perfectly democratic system would pass laws which represent the average person’s opinion on those matters. The lawmaking jury system does exactly this, taking a large enough sample of ordinary people that their opinion can be said to be the average person's. From the point of view of minimisation of hierarchies, strict equality achieves this fully, with no person being more powerful than anyone else.
Parpolity, on the other hand can, I think, be fairly summarised as being representative democracy with one major difference and four significant safeguards. The major difference is that it has many levels of representatives, with only the lowest representatives being directly chosen by the general public. This is in contrast to our current representative democracies, where the members of parliament are only one level above the people at the bottom. So if we view a hierarchy as a pyramid, parsoc gives us a tall pyramid and our current representative democracy a flat one. I believe that this structure would make it more hierarchical than our present system, reducing the chance of the laws being a reflection of popular opinion, all else equal.
The four safeguards included in parpolity, on the other hand, perhaps make up for the tall pyramid problem. Firstly, the automatic rotation of representatives after a certain amount of time is certainly a step in the right direction. How big a step depends on how long the fixed terms are. If terms are of, say, two weeks, which might be the time it takes to debate and pass or reject a new law, this would make the system similar to the lawmaking juries and radically democratic. If, on the other hand, representatives sit for, say, two years, then this would merely be an improved version of representative democracy. The other three safeguards are less radical. Firstly the immediate recall of unpopular representatives will still leave us with representatives who pass the occasional unpopular law being tolerated by the council below as better than the alternatives. Next, the passing down of close decisions, though an ingenious and entirely welcome suggestion, will only represent the passing down of what the top level believe to be close decisions. Tyrannical decisions, like those to go to war may often be considered to be uncontroversially the right thing to do by those on top, and thus never be passed down. Lastly, the ability of the general public to force a popular referendum exists in Switzerland now and, though again, entirely welcome, would, I think, be seriously hampered by voter apathy.
So the tall pyramid will, I suggest, make things less democratic than under the present system and the four safeguards, though welcome, won't bring parpolity anywhere near the level of democracy exhibited by the lawmaking juries (the only possible exception being the very rapid rotation of representatives which, as I just suggested, would turn the system into something resembling the lawmaking courts anyway, presumably not what Shalom intends). So I would conclude that it's not clear whether parpolity ends up being more democratic than our present system, but clear that it is less democratic and more hierarchical than the lawmaking jury system.
Advocates of parsoc might argue here that my system doesn't mandate lawmaking juries, and complain that I am arguing as if it does. It's true that strict equality doesn't mandate any particular political setup, but I believe that strict equality would lead to lawmaking juries for the following reason. Equality of power effectively outlaws politicians, so society is forced to adopt either direct democracy, some sort of anarchy or perhaps politically separate communities with internal direct democracy. However, after forcing themselves to adopt equality of power, I think the people would want to have some kind of democracy to deal with local and global decisions, and wouldn’t want the hassle of all the people having to make all the decisions all the time, and so would reject a “referendum on everything” approach in favour of the only other form of direct democracy I can think of – direct democracy by lawmaking jury.
Lastly, the parsocist could argue that my system puts too much faith in the judiciary, who could take advantage of the situation and become an elite. I acknowledge that this is a potential danger with my system, but I believe that they would be reined in by the equality (of power) courts, leading to frequent rotation of individuals and (as we have with the current judiciary) clearly defined limits to their role.
REASON 2 - STRICT EQUALITY HAS A CLEAR ENFORCEMENT SYSTEM.
My second reason to favour strict equality over parsoc concerns enforcement. After reading two-and-a-half books on parsoc I don't have a clear sense of its enforcement system to keep society equal. I don't know exactly what happens when, say, one person in one of parsoc’s councils or workplaces gets a bit more power or a slightly cushier job than the rest and maybe uses this extra power to get even more. Maybe parsocists have a good answer to this that I’ve missed, but I fear that they are relying on a culture to emerge to keep egalitarian order in their system. I have little faith in this approach and believe that the strictness and clarity of the equality courts are a much better bet for keeping an egalitarian system from succumbing to the all too natural tendency towards hierarchy and corruption.
REASON 3 - NESTED PARTICIPATORY PLANNING COUNCILS ARE ALSO HIERARCHICAL.
My next reason in order of importance to favour strict equality over parsoc is that participatory planning employs a nested council approach that is similar to parpolity, and therefore is susceptible to all the deviations from democracy described in Reason 1. This means that, say, the council in charge of farming for the UK may have as little interest in doing the right thing as our current government minister of agriculture or a trade union boss. Strict equality will, on the other hand, deliver an entirely democratic economy, where the development of concentrations of power are always destroyed by the equality courts.
REASON 4 - I DON'T SEE THE APPEAL OF PARTICIPATORY PLANNING.
A big difference between parsoc and strict equality is that the former prescribes a particular way of organising economic activities – participatory planning. The latter, on the other hand allows any economic structures that conform to the three equalities, leading, I predict, to most of the economy being performed by non-hierarchical companies (which might go by the name of cooperatives) where all workers act like volunteers do in our current society and an internal direct democracy of some kind operates. Once we create a system where producers are broadly trying to do the right thing (as is the case with strict equality and I believe to a lesser extent parsoc) then I can't see any particular reason why we should mandate a particular form of planning where suggestions go back and forth between different committees in a certain way. Maybe I've missed a crucial point about participatory planning (and I admit I find explanations of it a bit technical and difficult to understand) but nothing I've heard about it strikes me as particularly efficient or necessary. As far as I can see, under strict equality, and to the extent that it is non-hierarchical, under parsoc, producers would be able to see which products are popular, be able to conduct customer surveys if they wish to find out more about what people desire individually or collectively and would be honestly trying to make stuff that they think the world needs.
REASON 5 - THE BATTLE FOR STATUS WOULD CONTINUE UNDER PARSOC.
Another area in which I believe strict equality has an advantage over parsoc is the former’s inclusion of equality of status. While balancing job complexes for desirability may achieve the same thing to some extent in the workplace, it doesn't apply to a person's home and possessions. This means that the competitive ethos may tend to continue under parsoc, as one person may put in extra hours to get a bigger house than his or her neighbour, in order to reap the greater status attached to it. This kind of behaviour obviously will create more damage to the environment, create a competitive culture which might leak into large scale political choices, for example making war more popular and not benefit even the people doing it as a status battle is a zero-sum game.
REASON 6 - STRICT EQUALITY IS SIMPLER.
Lastly, strict equality has the positive feature of being a simpler concept to express - strict equality can be summarised as having three main rules – equality of power (enforced by equality courts) equality of status (enforced by equality courts) and equality of comfort (enforced by equality courts) whereas parsoc has four main rules – balanced job complexes, effort-based pay, participatory planning and nested councils. It's one more rule for parsoc, and more importantly the three rules of strict equality are more similar to one-another. Simplicity may help to keep a system stable once it is up and running and may be more important when trying to popularise a system now.
CONCLUSION
So these are the six main reasons why I favour strict equality over parsoc. I should finish by reiterating the similarities of the two systems. Balancing jobs for empowerment might be interpreted as strict equality of power or something close to it. Balancing jobs for desirability comes close to the three equalities also. Pay for effort also might approximate the equality of comfort. Parsoc and strict equality would both give us radically improved societies with radically improved chances for the future of the human race.
Discussion with Joe
Joe’s first statement to Kuan
Hi Kuan, thanks for contributing to debate on possible alternative ways to organize societies. I'm afraid I don't find strict equality very attractive, but I hope these comments are useful. Overall, it seems that competitiveness and inequality, rather than capitalist relations, authoritarianism, patriarchy and so on, are identified here as root problems. I see our current problems as resulting from the in and outs of these institutional structures, rather than from any manifestation of one or two human tendencies like competitiveness.
As an example, I don't see any advantage in directly suppressing those who have a great talent. Do you object to this in principle, i.e. "it is unfair that anyone should be more famous and influential than others"? It sounds more like you object because you see this as leading to other problems somehow. However, I don't see any specific problem that would arise from allowing people influence merely by dint of their recognized talent, given a system in which fame was not manipulated for private profit. I'm more concerned with the large negative effects of missing out on their productivity, treading on the freedom of that talented person, and restricting people's choices about who they admire or listen to. Would we have to suppress a Chomsky or a Zinn?
Right demagogues often stereotype leftist visions as systems of envy and resentment: suppressing excellence and dragging everyone back to the lowest level in order to achieve equality; groups interfering with the just rewards of hard-working individuals. They imply that leftists would rather that everyone had 1 unit of something, than that 99% of people had 2 units and 1% had 10. In my mind these arguments are straw-men, because people are nowhere near reaping the rewards of their individual effort under capitalism anyway, and because the actual alternatives are nowhere near those given in the argument. But it seems like strict equality is indeed vulnerable to these complaints. Limiting the next Shakespeare's publications seems to value equality of fame vastly over general welfare (or implies some really terrible consequence of allowing this guy to be famous, which I can't see). This seems wrong-headed to me (actually, in principle I don't care much about equality per se personally, it just effects other things I value like general material welfare and social solidarity, but that's just me). There are similar examples in other categories of equality that you could come up with
As a second theme, I'm not sure that it is feasible to start with the juridical side of things as the main institution, and hope that other aspects will fall into place. There has to be some workable economic system behind this which is consistent with the juridical system. The way the police and courts work in London today, for instance, is the result of a complex interaction of economic and political power, which has changed as economic relations have changed. They are more at once a product of the system and some of its gears and wheels (rather minor ones I'd say), not the source of all societal relations. Their role would change if other factors changed. Likewise to make equality courts central to your scheme begs the question of how they would maintain their power. What is the economic system which is at once consistent with the equality courts, and yet means they are still necessary to have a good society?
Kuan replied....
Hey Joe. Great to get your comments on this. Sorry to take a while responding, I’ve been trying to respond to emails in the order they have been sent to me, but got months behind due to work and other commitments.
Your reply is long and interesting. As I state in my article, my aim is the utilitarian one of maximising the wellbeing of conscious life in the long-run. I believe that an early demise of the human race is the greatest threat to this and the competitive ethos is a great contributor to the early demise of the human race. So I’m not concerned about “our current problems” as the potential amount of wellbeing in the future dwarfs that of the present. Neither do I care about fairness, equality, freedom or any other quantity as a moral end in itself.
While I am not directly trying to reduce capitalist relations, authoritarianism or patriarchy, I believe that equality of power in my system will pretty much end all three, if those are the things that concern you. With the banning of the overpowering of one individual by another, along with elimination of status and comfort differentials, I think the major demands of the left will be met, including those of feminists, minority rights people and champions of the working class. However, I’m not claiming that strict equality will please everyone or represents the culmination of human intellectual development or anything crazy like that. We could all adopt strict equality tomorrow and humanity might destroy itself 200 years later anyway. I just think it might help make this outcome less likely.
Ultimately I believe that humanity should pursue some kind of pleasure-enhancing super-technology such as transhumanism or blissfully happy artificial intelligence. Right now, however, I think that most technological developments and increases to material welfare (at least in the industrialised world) are bad news as they seem likely to contribute to the likelihood of human extinction. They also, incidentally don’t seem to be making us any happier, as self-reported happiness has stagnated for decades despite vast technological developments. Technological advancement needs, in my view to be pursued very selectively, as right now we seem to be rushing into the next ozone layer, global warming etc. disaster. This makes most talent in technological areas dangerous right now. So I see missing out on the productivity of talent in the technological sphere as generally a good thing! In fact I’d rather not use the word “talent” in favour of the less positive-sounding “high ability”.
As for high ability of people like Chomsky and Zinn, working in the humanities, the goal of the humanities is that the truth about society, the past etc. gets discovered and put out there. I think that a bunch of anonymous writers each producing a little bit of text on the internet and being able to edit each other can achieve this. We have seen the great achievement that is Wikipedia. Under strict equality we would have Wikipedia plus all the contributors would be compensated comfort-wise for their time, leading to there being a far greater number of contributors. In fact, I think we’d have a far greater number of people working in the humanities altogether than we currently have as people will probably gravitate towards endeavours that they believe are socially useful. We might get more truth this way than from experts like Chomsky who may have their own biases and faults.
Another point is that if you favour the participatory society over my system, you should realise that under that system someone like Chomsky might find that his work is considered “not socially useful” by politicians which means he doesn’t get paid for what he does. This might represent a much greater systematic bias on writing content than you will find under strict equality, as under my system everyone would have the right to write and be compensated for it (albeit only to a few hundred readers if you don’t do it collectively).
As for the next Shakespeare, I admit that strict equality may well make fiction writing more difficult. Strict equality is an attempt to create an elegant alternative to other political and economic systems, that will give humanity a better chance of surviving. I wouldn’t want to claim that it will make life easier or better in all areas - It would be extremely unlikely if it did. I believe that fiction writing is a relatively unimportant aspect of life – much as I love films etc. A choice between increasing humanity’s chance of survival and improving the arts isn’t much of a contest for me. Also, examples like The Bible and The Simpsons show that great fiction can be created by groups of fairly anonymous people. So maybe fiction can be just as good under strictly egalitarian restrictions, though clearly quite different. I would also point out that in recent decades life satisfaction in the west seems unaffected by the presumably great increase in books, tv, radio, films etc. created, so it is debatable whether all this extra art has improved present-day human welfare.
With regard to banning fame in general I agree that the Daily Mail, and indeed the average person in the street (who spends about half of his or her free time watching tv) is going to see this as about as sensible as banning socks. I also accept what you say that to ban people from reading, say Chomsky or Stephen King’s next book is a serious restriction of freedom. I can only say that I think on balance that this restriction will contribute to human survival, via the destruction of hierarchies and the ethos of competition, and is therefore worth it, as the famous are a major part of the hierarchical dog-eat-dog and consumer culture.
In your second point you suggest that it’s not feasible to just make equality the law, without a “workable economic system behind” it. For you, an egalitarian economic system is essential for other elements of society to become egalitarian, and the law doesn’t seem to be so important for you.
I’m no expert in understanding how society works but I still feel that I am correct in identifying the law as the element of the system most likely to make the other parts fall into place. For a start, any economic system, as far as I can see, has to be defined in law (in the case of our society, company law, tax law etc.) To deny this you would have to believe that individuals can conform to material equality or “to each according to his need” voluntarily. I don’t believe this (though, as an aside, I would say that I think it’s worth trying out in some town somewhere, if it hasn’t been done already). So I think that the economy has to be regimented by laws.
Perhaps the main reason I favour the legal approach is that it seems to be the most straightforward one, in fact the only approach that I understand, to achieve what I want. I want all citizens to be equal in power, status and comfort, therefore I suggest that we make it the law that all people must be equal in power, status and comfort. There are no absolute guarantees of success (as we can see from widespread disobedience of our current drug laws) but, as I say, it seems like the most logical and straightforward approach.
Another reason for favouring the legal, rather than economic approach, is that I want citizens to be equal in things that go beyond their economic activities. For example, I want a lecturer and his or her (adult) student to be equal in status, a lawyer and a defendant to be equal in power (not necessarily over each-other in the courtroom but overall in their non personal lives). I don’t see how an economic system can deliver this.
Also by enshrining equality in the constitution we guarantee the right to equality on the part of a person who has become worse off. Otherwise someone who has been left worse off by inegalitarian workmates will have no ability to get even. Whatever we do with the economic system we would surely wish to put this right into law as well. Take for example the U.S. written constitution, as compared with our lack of one in the U.K. - surely having these rights formally extended to all citizens can’t make them less likely to be honoured.
So those are my reasons to favour the legal approach (legislative, judicial, whatever it should be called!) Your answer also implied that strict equality doesn’t have a viable economic system. I think this may be an important factor in your bad first impression of this system and therefore an issue I would like us to discuss further at some point.
Joe replied...
Hi Kuan,
Took me a long time to get back to you, so apologies. I may also repeat things that others have said by mistake.
One thing to note is that the resolution of disputes and violation of rules hasn't really been fleshed out in ParPolity yet. Maybe there will be a place for juries there, it seems like a good institutions for such matters to me.
As to where to start, "law" (or whatever it is called) or economy, I have a few comments. I'm not entirely saying that everything flows from economy, but I am saying that I am not convinced that things flow from legal institutions to the point that equality can be imposed by law. The law is supported by a complex web of social relations, of various characters (broken down in Holism into four broad types) based on shared expectations, norms and institutions. Social relations can perpetuate or undermine each other.
To state by criticism more forcefully, say you have social system X, along with the strict equality institutions. If system X was unequal, and produced social forces that perpetuated this inequality, would not these forces also act to undermine the equality courts? If system X was a viable system that met people needs while producing and sustaining equality, what need for the courts, apart from as a small part of such a system? The point is I don't see enough here to guarantee a good system, and it doesn't seem like laws to this extent are a necessary part of it either.
So a vision to me has to contain some idea of the overall social relations (this is also a criticism of economistic Marxist analysis by the way!) Parecon is an attempt to give some necessary conditions for a desirable society, ot be augmented by some political and juridical, and kinship and cultural, stuff. I don't think it specifies, e.g., how its suggested workplace norms would be (or not be) enforced. I don't see such a model in strict equality.
And as I said before I tend to think of the worst institutions that need fixing a bit different from you. For instance I think that personal elitism and competitiveness will look a lot less of a problem once economic and political matters are nearer a just system. And I generally value liberty -- you can call that part of my utility function I guess. Where freedom begins and ends when dealing with others is up for debate, but it is at least better for people to "feel free" as much as possible, that is, to go along with things naturally and voluntarily ("autonomy") as a result of shared norms rather than being "controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded..." as Proudhon had it ("heteronomy"). Strict equality goes further than is necessary in terms of explicit control for me, even if it is egalitarian control.
End of discussion between Kuan and Joe
Discussion with Mark
Mark’s first statement to Kuan
Okay Kuan – here are some of my thoughts –
You propose "Equality Courts" which "will be set up to enforce equality of the three quantities".
My feeling is that such courts are only necessary to attain equality in a social system with institutional features that allows for inequality – via the hierarchical division of labour, remuneration for power / ownership etc. But in a system that institutionalises equality of power – via balanced job complexes, remuneration for effort and sacrifice etc. – no such courts are necessary.
There is a difference in approach here. You address the issue of equality via creating new institutions that you call equality courts whereas advocates of participatory society address this issues at the systemic level.
You also write –
"Important tasks such as flying planes, performing surgery or other emergency or potentially dangerous situations can still be left to experts who must keep proving their abilities though a licence/qualification system. However those experts must be carefully denied above-average levels of power and status. This can be achieved in several ways, albeit at a cost to efficiency. Expert tasks can be part time, with experts spending the remainder of their time on particularly low power and status tasks. With regard to power, "second opinions" can be sought from other experts nullifying much of the power that can be derived from expert roles. Experts can also be forced to suffer low status houses/cars etc. Other, more extreme measures might be to reduce experts’ lawmaking power or forcing them to keep their expert work secret."
I would like to say a couple of things in response to this –
As you know in a participatory economy jobs are equally balanced for empowerment and desirability. This does mean that surgeons (for example) don’t just do surgery. But parecon advocates don’t assume that this will result in a reduction of efficiency – as you seem to with your system. In fact we believe that balanced job complexes and self-management will increase efficiency.
For one thing studies in workers self-management show that productivity increases. For another thing getting rid of the class system frees-up opportunities for the working class (80% of the population) to develop skill that under capitalism are monopolised by coordinators.
But again I would argue that these institutional features establish a new social norm that address the issue of equality of power without having to resort to people being "forced to suffer low status houses/cars etc." or other "more extreme measures".
One last thing. I don’t like the idea of a social system enforcing equality of material comfort. My feeling is that some people value material comfort more than others and should be free to have more or less as they choose.
The point of a just economy is that people get a fair say in what is produced and a just reward for their work. What they do with their credit should, in my opinion, be determined by them in co-operation with other members of their consumer council. The point, I think, is to have full employment and for all to have equally empowering jobs. If some want to work longer or harder than others in order to gain more credit for more material goods then that is a matter for the workers council to consider.
There are other things in your proposal that I would question but I will leave it at that for now.
Kuan replied...
Hi Mark.
Thanks for taking time to read and respond to my article. Thanks also for inspiring me to write it and for all your good work in PPS-UK which is a great group to be part of.
So, to respond to your comments:
You say that the equality courts won’t be “necessary” if we have participatory institutions such as balanced job complexes and effort-based pay. I think it would be just as true to say that if we had the equality courts, the participatory institutions would be unnecessary. By calling strict equality’s institutions unnecessary you are implying that you think they are worse in some way, but I’m interested in hearing more about what’s worse about them (and I won’t be offended if you are extremely direct about it).
You characterise the participatory society as “institutionalising the equality of power”. To me it seems that this could also be said of strict equality, which has the institution of courts, which, amongst other things, equalise power. You also say that the participatory society addresses equality at “the systemic level”. This description might too might apply to strict equality, which has a system (of courts) that do nothing except address equality. These particular comments, therefore, don’t seem to give us a reason to prefer one system over the other (not that you were necessarily trying to argue for the participatory society here anyway).
You say that, contrary to the guesses in my article, you believe that balanced job complexes and self management will increase efficiency. My guess that it won’t is only a hunch – I haven’t really got a clue and I hope you’re right. I’d be interested to hear more about the studies you refer to.
You also say that the participatory society will “establish a new social norm” as opposed to resorting to making people suffer low status houses etc. You seem to be implying that forcing the better-off status-wise to be brought down, against their wishes, to the average level by means of requiring them to do low-level tasks part-time is a bad thing to do. I don’t see why you think this is so much worse than doing the same thing with regard to empowerment and desirability of role, as the participatory society does. Perhaps here, and earlier, you are making a point that strict equality is too authoritarian. Unfortunately I’m a little uninformed about what enforcement systems the participatory society includes in order to keep its institutions in place – assuming there are any. Perhaps you could point me in the direction of this information or explain your views on this matter.
Finally, in your last comment, you say that you don’t like the idea of a social system enforcing equality of material comfort, feeling that as some people value material comfort more than others they should be free to have more or less as they choose. Firstly, I don’t think that even the participatory society recommends this. If I assume you are using my definition of material comfort here, which equates it to the pleasantness of one’s day-to-day activities, not including pleasantness derived from power or status, then the participatory society pretty much rations this with its effort-based pay rule, which forces people to choose between the comfort of not making an effort and the comfort that money can buy. Secondly, I think that this is as it should be, as otherwise (and I’m back to my hunches again here, I’m afraid) too many people will want to live a life of luxury and do no work for the system to support the bastards. Again, as a lover of humanity, I’d be very happy to be proved wrong here.
Ok, that’s my response. Feel free to ignore large parts of it if you want as I did write quite a lot. I look forward to hearing from you soon, one way or another.
All the best
Kuan
Mark replied...
Kuan – it is "just as true" to say that "if we had the equality courts, the participatory institutions would be unnecessary". That is very important and, I think, says a lot about your proposal.
A proposal that has as its objective "strict equality" but makes redundant participatory institutions is, to my mind, a contradiction in thinking. I mean, the whole point of designing participatory institutional features - like remuneration for effort, BJCs, self-managed councils, etc. - is to create a system in which all people can interact as equals. If we get rid of these institutional features, it seems to me, we loose the ability, the freedom, to participate as equals.
On the other hand, if we maintain the hierarchical division of labour, competitive markets, etc. but have equality courts then do we have a system in which people can interact as equals? Obviously the hierarchical division of labour makes self-management impossible so it seems to me that the answer to that questions is, no.
You write - "You say that, contrary to the guesses in my article, you believe that balanced job complexes and self management will increase efficiency. My guess that it won’t is only a hunch – I haven’t really got a clue and I hope you’re right. I’d be interested to hear more about the studies you refer to."
I think Robin Hahnel addresses this issue in his Economic Justice and Democracy (if you haven’t got a copy let me know and I will send you one) and references some studies into workers self-management and efficiency. If I remember rightly these studies indicate that the more workers participate in the running of their workplace the more efficient they become.
But there is another way of looking at this issue. We might assume that freeing-up 80% of the workforce from institutional oppression (as under capitalism / socialism) and instead facilitating them to grow and take on more fulfilling tasks (as with Parecon) will result in an overall increase in efficiency.
Of course some people will argue that this will decrease efficiency – but for me this is plain classism, just as it is sexist / racist to argue that giving women / blacks their freedom to participate as equals will have a negative affect on society.
You say – "Unfortunately I’m a little uninformed about what enforcement systems the participatory society includes in order to keep its institutions in place – assuming there are any. Perhaps you could point me in the direction of this information or explain your views on this matter."
The short answer here is the legal system, which emerges out of the political system – which is of course participatory. Steve Shalom has done the initial work on this system and you can find his work all over ZNet as well as some on the PPS-UK site.
Im not sure I understand the other comments you make so I will leave it there for now and maybe we will clarify as we go.
Hope to see you soon for a real life talk.
Kuan replied....
Hi Mark. You are very kind to offer to send me a copy of the Hahnel book. Maybe I’ll take you up on that one – but we can talk about this when we meet in London in about a week’s time. I hope that self management is efficient in as many respects as possible – this would be good news for both the systems we are discussing.
Thanks also for pointing me in the direction of Shalom’s writing – I’ll try to read some of that, and get to grips with the enforcement system of the participatory society.
Sorry I haven’t persuaded you on the strict equality front so far, but I’m happy to keep on trying:-) I’ll try to respond to your latest comments.
You give the impression that strict equality will reject participatory institutions, maintain the current hierarchies and competitive ethos and basically not be all that egalitarian. In fact, though strict equality doesn’t specify balanced job complexes and effort-based pay etc. the systems will in practice be the same or similar to these. Hierarchies and competitive markets will be impossible under strict equality, assuming all goes to plan. As for its egalitarian credentials, I see strict equality as more egalitarian (though I’d put them both in the same ball-park) than the participatory society. I say this because its 3 main rules are all about forcing everyone to be equal in the most important respects, whereas the participatory society’s rules are more indirect about achieving equality.
Just to be clear, I think our ideas are very similar and we should work together against the hierarchists, capitalists etc. for a world where we can all participate as equals.
I look forward to seeing you next weekend. Best regards. Kuan
Mark replied....
Hi Kuan - I think the following extracts address some of the issue your article raises.
In his Economic Justice and Democracy Robin Hahnel writes –
“There is an ample literature documenting the advantages of employee management. Evidence is overwhelming that people with a say and stake in how they work not only find work more enjoyable, they are more productive and efficient as well. [see reference] “ (page 189)
“We did not engage in the pointless exercise of assuming individuals are “revolutionary saints” who would act in socially responsible ways, and then tautologically proclaim that in a participatory economy the social interest would, indeed, be served, as many critics apparently assume. Instead, we designed institutions, procedures, and rules so when people act out of self-interest their behaviour would prove both socially efficient and equitable as well.” (page 249)
Kuan replied....
Hi Mark.
I’m currently reading and enjoying the Hahnel book you quote from, which you kindly gave me a copy of. Unfortunately I’m a bit of a slow reader, and with regard to your first quote, I haven’t reached the parts referring to such studies, so I don’t know any more about the issues that you are referring to than I did before. As a result I still believe my hunch that both a society under strict equality, and a society under the participatory society (pasoc, for short) would be less productive in terms of goods and services than our current system.
If I were asked to rate the productivity of the following 4 systems – strict equality, parsoc, captitalism and state planning, in terms of total market value of goods and services produced in a given time-period, I would say that the most productive of them is capitalism, closely followed by state planning, with parsoc a distant third and strict equality narrowly taking last place. The reason for this ordering is that I think that systems that reward the productive and punish the unproductive, harsh though they might be, would tend to be the most productive. In terms of which systems I want to see implemented/promoted I would rate the four systems mentioned in the reverse order of their productivity, with strict equality as the best system, followed by parsoc, then state planning and capitalism as the worst. This is because I rate systems on their contribution to the sustainability of the human race not on the amount of goods and services they produce.
As I said before, however, my views on productivity are all just an uneducated hunch as I haven’t investigated any studies into the productivity of things like parsoc, or finished the Hahnel book. The reason I think that capitalism is more productive than central planning is that capitalists will always be hell-bent on producing stuff, wheras central planners may have other considerations like public health, the environment, national glory etc. especially if central planning occurs in a representative democracy. Parsoc is much more liberal and democratic than these two systems, and will therefore, I imagine, lead to people living much more sensibly-paced lives where they ease off the productivity in favour of their own health, sanity etc. The reasons I think that strict equality would be even less productive than Parsoc are twofold. Firstly, in contrast to Parsoc, strict equality has no threshold of quality of an individual’s work, below which a person doesn’t get paid – people can be rewarded for digging holes and filling them in again if that’s what they want to do. Secondly, under Parsoc people might compete with each other effort-wise in order to buy status symbols like big houses, with their effort-related pay. Under strict equality such reasons to work harder than one’s neighbour are eliminated by the equality of status.
With regard to your second quote, I’m glad that Hahnel is aware of the need to create systems that take account of human nature as it is, not as we want it to be. I expect that everyone who has created a political system believes this - I certainly do. This quote doesn’t prove a lot to me, nor is it much to do with my article or the conversation so far.
Anyway, as we discussed in private messages, this discussion has inspired me to start writing a strict equality v/s parecon article. You can reply to this message or wait to respond to that article, when I post it on Znet, maybe in a few weeks.
All the best. Kuan.
Mark replied....
Glad to hear you are enjoying the book Kuan.
Just a couple of quick points on productivity –
You say that a parsoc would be “less productive in terms of goods and services than our current system”. Here I think it is important to be clear about what we mean when we are comparing different economic systems for productivity.
When Hahnel highlights the evidence that employee management increases productivity and efficiency it does not necessarily follow that in a participatory economy more goods and services will be produced than under capitalism. This is for the simple reason that levels of productivity in a parecon will be determined by the workers and consumers during the participatory planning process and can not be predetermined or known in any way before hand.
What we can know with some confidence is that what ever workers / consumers decided on during the participatory planning process will be produced more efficiently (by which I mean that work is undertaken with minimum waste) than it is under capitalism.
In my opinion we should not be surprised by this. After all capitalism is an incredibly wasteful economic system. Two features of capitalist economics in particular illustrate just how wasteful the current system is –
1) The profit motive drives much of productivity under capitalism and yet much of what is produced has little, if any, real social value. Advertising campaigns are designed to induce feelings of dissatisfaction in the general public in order to create an incentive to consume more and more.
2) The class system alienates workers from their work which in turn greatly reduces their enthusiasm to produce efficiently. In fact it is likely (and in my opinion predictable) that under conditions of class exploitation workers will deliberately adopt a kind of anti-efficient / pro-waste attitude.
A participatory economy would remove the profit motive and the distorting affects it has on the overall economy allowing workers and consumers to focus their energy on socially valuable work. The class system is also gone in a parecon and therefore with it the negative and debilitating affects of alienation. Combine these two points with the evidence regarding employee managements highlighted by Hahnel and I think we have a very strong case in favour of a participatory economy.
Regarding some other issues you raise –
You say that in a Strict Equality “people can be rewarded for digging holes and filling them in again if that’s what they want to do”. In contrast workers in a parecon are remunerated for effort and sacrifice - but only for what is consider to be socially valuable work, and I doubt that any sane person would consider, digging holes and filling them back in, socially valuable work.
You also raise another concern regarding parecon’s criteria for remuneration when you say “under Parsoc people might compete with each other effort-wise in order to buy status symbols like big houses, with their effort-related pay” adding “Under strict equality such reasons to work harder than one’s neighbour are eliminated by the equality of status.” This suggests that you believe that in a participatory economy inequality could reemerge due to the fact that there is no mechanism in the system to impose equality.
Here, if I understand you correctly, you are right in so far as there is no external authority that imposes equality on workers. However you are wrong in thinking there is no mechanism at all. Participatory economics is a self managed system which can only function if the participants understand that inequality undermines democracy (in fact, in my opinion, it is unlikely that a parecon could even emerge without such understanding and that such a level of consciousness is easily reachable by most people) . So threats to participation that could occur as a result of inequality can easily be addressed by the workers council if and when necessary without having to resort to undesirable authoritarian means.
Having said all of that it is not clear to me why it is a problem that some people might choose to spend their earning on their house whilst others choose to spend it on traveling, for example. I don’t see why that would mean that such neighbour could no longer interact as equals as a result of their different priorities for pleasure.
Iv’e probably said too much so I will leave it there for now.
Hope to see you soon.
Mark
Kuan replied....
You can never say too much Mark!
Great to see you up in Birmingham in the summer.
Sorry I took an eon to write the following. Re-reading it I find it more dense and unreadable than I would like – sorry about this. Maybe it’s a reflection of my confused thinking. I started re-writing it but it didn’t seem to be getting any better!
I’ll start with this efficiency/productivity issue. I’ve read the Hahnel’s “Economic Justice and Democracy” now. I’ve also spent a few hours investigating the evidence he presents for the efficiency of participatory organisations. I have found 2 pieces of evidence referred to in his book. The first is a paper by Levine and Tyson (that he refers to in Chapter 8, footnote 3). This paper suggests that firms opting for a more participatory approach tend to be more productive. The other is an article by Noam Chomsky called “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” (mentioned by Hahnel on page 146) in which it is claimed that workplaces collectivised by the Anarchists during the Spanish Civil War produced at least as much as non-collectivised ones (Chomsky’s footnotes 35 and 60 being the most relevant).
I would imagine that few of the firms investigated by Levine and Tyson are as radically egalitarian as they would be under parsoc institutions such as balanced job complexes. The anarchist industry mentioned by Chomsky may have been more radical, but his investigation falls short of being a scientific study. These pieces of evidence together certainly make me take the possibility of greater productivity under parsoc more seriously, but aren’t enough for me to share your confidence that “whatever workers / consumers decided on during the participatory planning process will be produced more efficiently (by which I mean that work is undertaken with minimum waste) than it is under capitalism”.
In my last reply to you I talked about “productivity”, referring to the productivity of the entire society. On reflection I think “output” or “GDP” would have been less misleading terms to use, as “productivity” is, I think, normally used by economists to mean output (measured by market value) per hour worked. “Efficiency” is normally thought of as output divided by effort, and I’m not sure if you are in agreement with this with your “minimum waste” comment.
I think we agree, however, that political and economic systems should be judged on their achievements with regard to our core values or value, and that stuff like output, productivity, efficiency etc. are at best a means to an end. My core value is the well-being of conscious life. I think that the 2 ways that the output, efficiency etc. of a new wellbeing-promoting system such as parsoc or strict equality are instrumental towards this value are the following.
a) if mainstream people are to adopt a new system then the more efficient, productive etc. it is, the more impressed they are going to be and therefore more likely to adopt it.
b) it is probably easier to modify a system to make it less efficient than more efficient, therefore it is better in this respect for a new system to be more efficient in case it really needs to be more efficient in the future for some reason.
On the other hand, if either parsoc or strict equality takes over and is super-efficient we may end up continuing to over produce/pollute, making these systems as bad in practice as our current system.
Our discussion is further complicated by the fact that output can be defined in a variety of ways. It could be measured by market value or by some more enlightened measure that brings it closer to describing its contribution towards our core values. You seem to be tending towards a more enlightened measure of output when you suggest that advertising isn’t socially useful, and therefore, I guess, doesn’t count towards output, efficiency etc. One problem I have with an enlightened measure of output is that if we take it to its logical conclusion we would say, according to my core value, that output is contribution towards the wellbeing of conscious life. According to this measure most output measured by market value becomes negative as I think that most TV sets etc. produced make the world worse off in the long-run. If output is negative it seems strange to start talking about efficiency.
Point (a) above, however, suggests there is merit in talking to the mainstream in terms of their own unenlightened terminology.
With regard to your other comments-
I agree with your paragraph about digging holes but don’t understand what you were trying to argue if anything.
With regard to the following paragraphs, you are right that I think that parsoc lacks a mechanism for maintaining equality. I do not believe that making equality the law of the land constitutes “undesirable authoritarian means”. I don’t think that if you lived under strict equality you would find it remotely authoritarian, but as you, Tom and Joe have raised this kind of objection I’ll try to give it further thought. I believe, however, that your view that people in each locality will want to maintain equality with neighbouring areas is over-optimistic. Once a dymamic of competition gets hold of people, most people can get swept up in it. Hahnel is, in my view, reckless towards this dynamic occurring where he says that each work council should be paid in proportion to its output (at least, that’s how I read his “social benefit-to-social cost” comment near the top of page 230) and that higher pay might be awarded to individuals who’s effort is more proficient (page 229, last sentence).
Lastly, your final paragraph suggests that strict equality would prevent someone from choosing whether to improve their house or go travelling. I don’t believe strict equality would prevent this.
Anyway, hope you gained something from some of this, and I look forward to catching up with you in the real world.
Kuan
Mark replied....
Great to see you (and the wife) also!
I have to say that I feel a bit out of my depth trying to answer this. As you know I am not an economist and have no formal training in the subject.
I advocate parecon because - as a model - it institutionalises values that I like. One of those values is efficiency. What advocates of parecon mean by efficiency is that we produce goods and services with minimal waste. The claim here is that the institutions we propose will make real this value.
However, efficiency does not mean that we will produce more in a parecon than we do under capitalism. We may produce more or we may produce less - probably more of some things and less of others. But the claim is that whichever it turns out to be there will be less waste of peoples time and energy, less waste of natural resources, etc.
One of the reasons for this is that we remove the hierarchical division of labour which institutionally keeps the majority of workers down and is therefore very wasteful of peoples natural talents. We hope to replace this institutional barrier with balanced job complexes which would allow this majority to exercise their full potential. More people performing at full potential means less waste.
Another reason for this efficiency claim is that the participatory planning process (our alternative to competitive markets) allows for the “true social cost” of producing goods and services to be incorporated in to the price. This is something that competitive markets and central planning can not achieve. Taking into account the true social cost probably means that some goods we can afford under capitalism (think petrol driven cars for example) might prove to expensive under parecon because of the environmental cost of cleaning up after them. If true this reality would force economic actor in a parecon to look for alternative (greener) forms of transportation. Again, less waste.
The participatory planning process also ensures that the economy produces things that people actually want. By doing so we would not be producing all the shite that now gets made (as a result of the logic of markets) in the present system to maximise profit for rich people. Less waste!
Sorry Kuan - Im not sure about the other issues you raise.
... actually I did want to say something about your comment regarding competition - “Once a dynamic of competition gets hold of people, most people can get swept up in it.”
I am assuming here that we are talking about a fully functioning parecon. If so it is important to keep in my that to get this far we would need a vast majority of people to support the values and institutions of the parecon system. As you know this includes balanced job complexes and participatory planning etc... which helps maintain a culture of cooperation and equality of power.
However if people stopped supporting these values and institutions then a dynamic of competition could emerge. But I put it to you that this is true of all systems. In the end the only true safeguard for any system of this sort is that of commitment by the people. If the people loose that commitment then the system will change into something else. But again I think this is true of all systems - including Strict Equality.
Regarding Hahnel - I think you misunderstand what he is saying. He states -
“People do not receive equal consumption for unequal effort in a participatory economy. People’s efforts are rated by their co-workers, and people are awarded consumption rights in their neighborhood consumption councils according to those effort ratings. To each according to her effort - the distributive maxim in a participatory economy - means there are material rewards for above-average effort.” (page 226)
So people are not “paid in proportion to [their] output” and “higher pay” is not awarded to “individuals who’s effort is more proficient”. From the above quote you can see that the parecon maxim is “to each according to her effort” and NOT “to each according to his output / proficiency”. In fact both of these criteria for remuneration are clearly rejected by the parecon model.
Kuan replied....
Hi Mark. Sorry this was a while coming. I’ll buy you a pint for every season I delayed.
Since my last reply I have found, in The Spirit Level, more evidence to back up your belief in the efficiency of participation. Page 256 and the last paragraph of page 258 give four references to support such claims, though unfortunately I didn’t find full texts for any of them online. Combined with the references in Hahnel’s book it’s enough to convince a not-much-of-a-scientist like me that more participation, compared to the levels we have in our current society will give us more efficiency, on most definitions. However, as I stated in my last posting, this doesn’t prove that the sort of radical equality that we advocate will make things more efficient. It just shows that hierarchism in our current firms is stifling efficiency to some extent. We might be only a little more hierarchical than the optimal level.
I’ll make this my last comment on the efficiency element of this discussion. Efficiency isn’t the reason I favour strict equality over parsoc and as far as I know it isn’t the reason you favour parsoc over strict equality. You have persuaded me a little on this issue, as I just explained, but I’d rather discuss what we see as the crucial pros and cons of our two systems that lead us to choose one over the other. Unless you have a burning desire to discuss efficiency further.....
I expressed concern in my previous posting that a competitive dynamic might take hold within a system that is intended to be egalitarian, such as parsoc. In response you have suggested that in order for parsoc to have been adopted in the first place, most people must have come to believe in an egalitarian ethic. You seem to suggest that this grassroots belief in maintaining equality, combined with parsoc’s institutions will be enough to maintain equality.
The first thing I’d like to do in response to this is to distinguish two types of person with regard to their support of equality. Let us define an egalitarian as a person who would vote for an egalitarian system such as parsoc or strict equality in a referendum or election. Let us define a group of people within this group as “egalitarian saints” (a phrase inspired by Hahnel’s “revolutionary saints” comment that you quoted earlier in this discussion). An egalitarian saint will not only vote for an egalitarian system in a referendum or election but would also refuse an opportunity to legally gain greater wealth, status etc. than his or her peers. If we think of the number of people in Britain who would vote for the National Health Service to continue, and then think of the number of these who, if the NHS didn’t exist, would actually personally give serious amounts of their money so that poor people in their neighbourhood could get healthcare, we see that egalitarian saints are likely to represent a small fraction of egalitarians.
Let’s suppose that egalitarianism is on the rise. At some point in the future, egalitarians will find themselves in a majority for the first time. At this point we would hope that a referendum or election would take place which establishes something radically egalitarian such as parsoc or strict equality as the political and economic system of the country or region or whatever. At this point, however, only slightly more than half of the population would be egalitarians and I would suggest that only a small fraction of those would be egalitarian saints. So most people, at the point when society adopts parsoc or strict equality, would be trying to maximise the amount of wealth, status etc. that they have compared with their peers, to the extent that institutions allow them to do so. Also, I think it follows from this that the vast majority of workplaces, towns, regions etc. would be trying to maximise their wealth, status etc. compared with their neighbours, again to the extent that the institutional structures allow this. We won’t be seeing people or groups of people donating wealth, status etc. to worse-off neighbours purely in the name of equality unless forced to.
So I think that at this crucial point in the future it will really be down to the institutions to keep society equal (as Hahnel suggests with his “revolutionary saints” comment). While broadly being enthusiastic about parsoc, I do question whether its institutions can do this job.
There are two ways in which parsoc falls short, in my opinion. The first is that its institutions don’t try to extend equality to all the areas that strict equality does. For example, unlike strict equality, it allows relatively hard-working people to attain greater comfort and status outside of work than their peers, through higher income. It also doesn’t appear to do much to equalise the power, status or comfort of non-workers with those of workers. A large chunk of society are currently students, retired, unemployed or sick. Under parsoc they might still be fighting for equality of power, status or comfort.
Now, you might argue that guaranteed equality can only go so far, and, indeed, even strict equality draws the line somewhere, not compensating for problems that individuals have in their personal lives, for example. However, I think that parsoc doesn’t go far enough and allows inequality and the competitive culture that goes with it to keep their grip on society in the areas just mentioned. I fear, as I state in point 5 of my Strict Equality vs Parsoc article, that this competitive behaviour will inflict more damage on the environment and create a competitive culture which might leak into large scale political choices.
The second way that parsoc falls short is in the area of enforcement. Parsocists seem reluctant to make its institutional features the law of the land. This means that the equality that they talk about - equality of desirability and empowerment of job (balanced job complexes) and equality of pay for a given amount of effort - may not be universally applied. Hahnel even goes as far as to deviate from these principles himself in the passages I quoted from in my last posting. In a world where egalitarian saints are in a minority, hierarchies will tend to spring up everywhere. Laws and courts are, in my view, the best way to deal with this. Better than Shalom’s elected politicians who might well identify with one group against another as elected politicians often do.
You might want to look at my second reply to Joe, above, where I also talk about this enforcement of equality issue, as well as my Strict Equality vs Parsoc article, which summarises my main arguments in this debate, if you didn’t read these things already.
Finally, with regard to those quotes from Hahnel in my last posting, if I do misunderstand him, as you claim, then please explain my misunderstanding using the passages I refer to, not from another page in the book, as he may just be contradicting himself a bit (I think he is).
Talk to you soon, mate.
Mark replied....
Hi Kuan -
“You seem to suggest that this grassroots belief in maintaining equality, combined with parsoc’s institutions will be enough to maintain equality.”
Actually I would more than just suggest it. My claim is that there is no other non-authoritarian means of getting to, and maintain, a participatory society other than popular support for the systems values and institutions.
I assume the same is true of your system. If enough people in society decided they don’t want strict equality anymore then your system would also brake down and would be replaced by some other system.
“There are two ways in which parsoc falls short, in my opinion.” -
“The first is that its institutions don’t try to extend equality to all the areas that strict equality does. For example, unlike strict equality, it allows relatively hard-working people to attain greater comfort and status outside of work than their peers, through higher income. It also doesn’t appear to do much to equalise the power, status or comfort of non-workers with those of workers. A large chunk of society are currently students, retired, unemployed or sick. Under parsoc they might still be fighting for equality of power, status or comfort.”
In a self-managed economy like parecon any concerning tendencies towards concentrations of power would be addressed by the workers council. If this fails and elitism continues to develop then the system fails.
In a parecon those who can’t work get the equivalent consumer credit as the average wage. Same with students and the retired I imagine.
“The second way that parsoc falls short is in the area of enforcement. Parsocists seem reluctant to make its institutional features the law of the land. This means that the equality that they talk about - equality of desirability and empowerment of job (balanced job complexes) and equality of pay for a given amount of effort - may not be universally applied.”
I assume that a successful revolution would result in a new constitution made-up of new rights and responsibilities. More specifically we can imagine new laws that grow out of the economic sphere that express these rights as legal obligations for all workplaces. In a parecon this could included a legal obligation to institutionalise BJC’s which would outlaw the hierarchical division of labour making it impossible for the capitalist / coordinator class to legally mount a counter-revolution. Presumably part of the role of the police in a parsoc would be to use their legal power to protect the people against such organised economic crime. I see no reason why this couldn’t happen in a parsoc.
I look forward to that drink.
End of Mark and Kuan’s discussion