A More Efficient Method?

What follows is a conditional. If you reject the antecedent, then obviously you reject the entire conditional.

Let us assume that you are a member of a large-scale libertarian socialist society. Almost all the world runs along collectivist or similar lines in some way or another, and runs well enough that no one is starving or suffering due to systemic failures. But you get a good idea. Well, two good ideas. The first is some very efficient new method for producing some desirable good or service. The other is that, since the idea is yours, you're going to see if you can't use it to benefit yourself more than other people. What's to stop you? Surely there's nothing wrong with hiring some workers on relatively exploitative terms (although probably still far, far less exploitative than those in modern society) and produce said good or service to the net benefit of all society! Why would anyone be opposed to that, so long as everyone involved agrees to the arrangement?

This was a question I was unable to answer in a recent conversation. However, having had time to reflect, I have not some several answers.

Let's start with the least obvious: if you try to create a subset of society where such exploitation is driven by anything other than survival necessity, you will inevitably be reintroducing all the problems of classism and authoritarian hierarchy — in this case, though, those are your problem, not the workers' problem. In capitalism, exploitation works out fine because workers have pretty much no other choice except to participate in a capitalist economy. If they lose or leave their job at a capitalist firm (and a magnanimous welfare state won't subsidize their unemployment) all they can do to survive is get another job at a capitalist firm (which might be a firm where they are their own boss, but that doesn't really change their relationship with the material wealth of society). In a libertarian society, if they are dissatisfied with work at your firm, they can simply leave and go work anywhere else in a voluntary organization. That is, unlike in capitalism, there is almost no cost to leaving your job, outside of purely physically practical considerations. So unless your hypothetically superior good or service is SO desirable, and SO beneficial to the people working for you (not to mention society at large), then there is little chance that people will be willing to continue working under inferior conditions. It is easy, when one holds the mistaken belief that we currently live in a free society, to forget that there are huge social and economic impediments against most people actually improving the conditions of their lives, set up both consciously and implicitly by capitalists and the institutions which they support and which support them. Such barriers would not exist in a free society, so there would be nothing to stop brain-drain (and hand-drain, as it were) away from any given exploitative firm and towards voluntary, libertarian firms.

A second reason this would be unlikely to work is illustrated best by the results of the Ultimatum Game. Expanded to a larger society, it seems highly unlikely that a group of people would be willing to bequeath to any one individual so large a share of their collective wealth that a productive firm could be established with the resources. On a smaller scale, it seems unlikely that you would find many people who would be willing to work for a firm where they would earn relatively less than another worker, even if they (somehow) earn more than workers in other firms (again, without the societal and institutionalized economic coercion of capitalism). (That this entirely begs the question of what they are earning in a largely collectivist society without large-scale fiat currencies is left aside for the purpose of this discussion.)

A final reason this is unlikely to arise is the lack of institutionalized secrecy in a free society. If you were the manager of a firm which had a superior method of production, the only way to keep it from being copied by anyone and everyone (including all the libertarian, collective firms in that particular line of business) would be to keep it completely secret — high fences, pledges of confidentiality, dark windows. But whatever facility you use to run your firm would be owned by society at large — after all, outside of a capitalist system (including state capitalism), no one seriously thinks of a factory, a storefront, or a suite of industrial machinery as belonging to a single individual for their personal use. And outside of a society with capitalist-style property rights, you would have no right to stop people entering your factory or store or whatever to observe your methods and use them elsewhere. After all, if your firm can produce SUCH excess wealth that it's worth reinstating exploitative labor relations for, then everyone else will want to use it too. And since no capitalist firm is an island, huge chunks of the rest of society will have to be involved in you establishing your firm (building your factory, supplying your raw materials, etc, etc.). So, pretty soon, workers will have no reason to stay with an exploitative firm to produce that exact good or service, and will instead move to collective ones the first instance the exploitation outweighs the benefit.

There are probably other reasons besides the idea stated at the beginning of this post wouldn't work in a free society, but those three are the ones that I was able to articulate to myself in the last couple of days. They are, like any highly hypothetical discussion like this, premised on many assumptions which not everyone agrees with, including, I'm sure, the person who raised the hypothetical scenario in the first place. But they are all, I believe, answers consistent with the view of society, politics and ethics I advance.

The Institutional Imperative, Part 1

[Got my first really good night of sleep in a week today, so I'm finally back to blogging. Did y'all miss me?]

An institution is, loosely defined, a formal system for organizing human effort which has a permanent nature independent of the people who make it up. The reason for forming an institution is so that there is a centralized, legalistic authority which can make decisions necessary for completing the work the institution was established to do. Institutions are the traditional way of solving societal problems, from governing people and resources at the largest scales to running the local girl's hockey team.

However, as Clay Shirky so eloquently points out in this TED talk, institutions have a big problem. No matter what problem an institution is formed to solve, that problem is never the number one priority of the institution. Whatever the nominal prerogative of the institution is, its main priority from the moment it is actually formed becomes self-preservation. No matter what problem the institution sets out to solve, the institution can't work to address that problem if it no longer exists. It's that election-year mentality that says that it doesn't matter how poorly the incumbent governs because if they don't win, they won't get to govern at all.

This is what I call the institutional imperative. It is an inherent feature of any institutional organization. And it is the reason for a great deal of the problems in the world. It is responsible for the inhumanity of modern corporate capitalism, in which individuals are powerless to stop the cold financial logic of human exploitation and environmental destruction. It is likewise the feature which I believe is chiefly responsible for the counter-revolutionary fervor of the Soviet system and its descendants, whose inhuman slaughter of their own populations was truly inhuman.

Marxist Leninism, which seeks to destroy class distinctions and the State through a specific series of political events (which are, it should be noted, completely opposed to both the spirit and letter of Marxian Communism as an ideological system) is incredibly vulnerable to the prerogative because it is so blind to it on principle. Its very goal was to transfer all power into a single institution, the Communist State, so that it could be eliminated with a single blow once the proletariat was organized for self-sufficiency. What it tragically ignored was the intermediate step of getting power from the many varied institutions of contemporary society into the single Communist State. Because its nominal goal was the ultimate elimination of the State, it was ideologically impossible for Communism to admit that any state established by a Communist Party was going to suffer from the institutional imperative, and have as its first priority its own survival. More and more repressive measures were necessary to maintain the "revolutionary" government, because if it ever fell, they could never achieve the revolution.

This mad state of affairs was largely possible only because many people immediately assume that institutions are the only way to organize human labor, be it in a State, a corporation, a trade union, or a bureaucracy. In fact, this is assumed completely implicitly by most. People are almost never taught to consider the possibility that there are non-institutional solutions to societal problems. Although I will not go now into the alternatives, it should at least be recognized that there is such an assumption, that institutions have this feature which dictates a large chunk of their behavior, and that such behavior can be hugely destructive to humanity and the world.

Why I No Longer Argue with Libertarians

There is an important distinction between lower-case L libertarians, of which I am one, and capital L Libertarians, of which Ron Paul is one. The former is simply the philosophical position that liberty ought to be maximized. In practice, this implies the elimination of coercive State government and exploitative capitalism (setting aside anarcho-capitalism, whose coherence I will address in future). The latter is an American invention, and is a hybrid of Austrian economics and Randian political philosophy (if it can be called such). To compare and contrast these two positions: the former is anti-State and anti-capitalist; the latter requires a state to enforce property rights, and is extremely pro-capitalist and against government intervention in the economy. The former is generally strongly federalist and socialist; the latter largely individualist and laissez-faire. Both oppose the intervention of any form of government into people's private lives, as well as some measure of positive enforcement of certain rights, although both view liberty as essentially negative (although many would argue that the distinction is meaningless).

There is another important distinction that needs to be made. It is between what I will term capital C Capitalism and lower-case C capitalism. Capital L Libertarians are also, necessarily, capital C Capitalists. That is, they hold the belief that capitalism is a desirable state of affairs, and a positive good for the world. Lower-case C capitalists are merely those people who own capital. They are business owners, CEOs, managers, bankers. Lower-case C capitalists can be Libertarians, conservatives or liberals, progressives or reactionaries. The former is an ideological position; the latter is a position in society.

Left socialists often rail against Libertarianism, which is fun to do, no doubt. However, Libertarians  don't actually matter in society. Maybe in the future, when the Libertarian Party has a majority in the Senate, we can worry about their ideas. The real opponent of the left, though, is not the Capitalist Libertarian. The real opponent is the capitalist. So while it's intellectually interesting to get into shouting matches with the local Randroids, anarchists and other leftists should really save their energy, both physical and intellectual, for opposing actual capitalism! Arguing against right-wing Capitalists is easy. What's hard is convincing a liberal capitalist why stateless socialism is desirable (not to mention feasible). That's why I'm not gonna argue with Ron Paul supporters and Ayn Rand fans anymore. It's a waste of breath, both on principle and in effect. My task from now on will be to convince capitalists of their error.