Comrade-Z
18th March 2013, 23:15
The workplace to those who work it!: A market-socialist proposal for ending wage-slavery
When radical leftists speak of wage-slavery, part of the intention is to draw analogies between the unfreedom of chattel slavery and the unfreedom of wage-slavery. Subjectively, there are similarities in the experience of each. The main difference, of course, is that wage-slaves find themselves enslaved not to a single human master, but to a class of capitalists who collectively monopolize the means of fending off hunger, want, and ruin.
However, part of the use of the wage-slavery concept could also be to draw analogies between the post-emancipation goals of slaves and the post-emancipation goals of wage-slaves. As wage-slaves, we still haven't figured out what we plan on doing after our emancipation. How are we going to run society without capitalists? People debate various schemes (such as ParEcon), but there are not really any concrete schemes out there that fill us with much confidence that they will definitely work.
On this point, I propose that we should take inspiration from the straightforward slogan of pretty much every land-reform effort ever: The land to those who work it! Historically, whether it was the 40 acres and a mule that African-Americans never got, or the landed estates that the (formally) emancipated Russian serfs had to pay indemnities on for decades afterwards, reality has usually fallen far short of the ideal. But the ideal was always an elegantly simple one: the landor whatever the means of production in questionshould go to those who work it. And when this means of production was land, and when it actually was given to those who worked it...things worked. Economies did not collapse. Ex-slaves and ex-serfs did not become lazy bums. The land continued to be worked, and quite efficiently too. And the standard of living and level of freedom of the ex-slaves and ex-serfs improved dramatically.
If we apply this idea to wage-slavery, we have good reason to think that it will work, and that it will result in an appreciable improvement in the standard of living and freedom of the ex-wage-slaves.
Naturally, the idea of the workplace to those to work itgiving workers legal ownership of the means of production at which they happen to be working at the time of the emancipationrequires that there still be private property, a free market, and money after this emancipation. The point of this article is not to rule out the possibility of a completely communistic system without property or exchange where people took what they needed and provided to others what they saw fit to produce. Let us simply table this discussion of the plausibility of pure communism* for later discussion and at least try to find a form of emancipation from wage-slavery that we know will work, even if it is not ideal.
Having workers take over the workplaces at which they currently work would mean that, for smaller enterprises, everyone would directly vote on decisions in their workplace...such as workplace improvements (We need chai tea in the breakroom...), production improvements (We should put barcodes on all of our merchandise to speed the retail process along...), sales decisions (We should sell these shoes for $30...), profit share compensation for each job class (Typists each get 6 unit points of profit out of a current employee total of 200, or 3% of weekly profits...)...in short, everything that the boss currently decides. For larger enterprises, members might decide to elect instantly recallable delegates to workplace workers' councils to decide these things.
Otherwise, workplaces would function like workplaces do now. They would purchase raw materials (except for labor), produce commodities to sell on the market, and try to turn a profit that would then be shared out among the employees as they themselves saw fit.
At first glance, most communists would balk at this seemingly reactionary idea. You'll just turn every worker into a scheming, conniving, and inefficient petty-capitalist, they'll say. Capitalism would inevitably re-assert itself in no time! And indeed, the history of worker cooperatives, and even the self-management schemes of Tito's Yugoslavia, suggest that workers, when simply turned into owners of their workplaces amidst a continuing market economy, usually end up becoming petty-capitalists. Over time, new hires are hired on as ordinary wage-slaves with no say in the cooperative. The ownership and leadership of these enterprises usually becomes hereditary rather than elected. A generation later, hardly a trace of worker self-management remains.
Very well; let us learn from these mistakes. Law No. 1 after Emancipation: It is forbidden to enter into collective labor that habitually utilizes a common means of production (this excludes activity that uses only personal property, or services that a single person performs for another as an isolated, one-time event) without each member having an equal democratic say in the operation of that means of production and the distribution of the fruits thereof. Any person caught hiring someone without giving that person an equal say in the running of the enterprise, after a short apprenticing period delimited by law (say, a maximum of two weeks for any job), or any person caught working without demanding an equal say in the running of the enterprise, will be severely penalized (maybe fined and given probation for a first offense, then incarceration for repeat offenses). Trade unions might also see it fit to penalize such members and enterprises.
This takes care of formal power inequalities, but what about informal ones? What about a possible black market of workers who are so desperate for jobs that they will secretly agree to unequal power in the workplace in exchange for a wage (rather than a profit share), all the while playing along with superficial rituals of workplace democracy for the government or trade union inspectors? This is analogous to asking how we prevent people in the present from becoming so desperate that they sell themselves into slavery in order to get a bite to eat.
For one thing, it would be below the dignity of even the most starving homeless person in our present society to do such a thing; so would it be for someone to hire him/herself out as an unequal wage-slave in an enterprise after the emancipation.
Second, police and the legal system will not enforce slave contracts in the present era, just as the legal system would not enforce wage-slavery agreements after emancipation. So the employer of black market wage-slaves after the emancipation had better hope that the wage-slaves are a well-behaved lot because the state will not intervene (as it does now) to crack down on those workers if they get unruly; rather, the state, being alerted to their predicament, will actually legally enforce their equality and profit-sharing in that workplace that is guilty of the offense of employing them as wage-slaves.
Third, a worker would have to be really, really desperate to submit themselves to the humiliation of wage-slavery after the emancipation. In order to make sure no worker is ever that desperate, we would also have to have a Universal Basic Income, financed by taxes on the profits of workplaces. This Universal Basic Income might include housing, healthcare, and food. (These sectors of the economy might be simply run by the local and/or central government, rather than by the worker-owner cooperatives being described). Consider this Universal Basic Income Law No. 2 after Emancipation.
Although this arrangement will not produce perfect equality of living conditions among workers (some worker-owners might work at enterprises that are more profitable than others), nobody will starve, and more importantly, there will be relative equality of economic power among all workers everywhere. Every worker-owner will have proportional control over a means of production.
Over time, workers will compete to be accepted on at the more profitable companies. Worker-owners will try to do a good job at their work to make their enterprises profitable. The whole system has incentives that will be conducive to its efficiency.
Very well...this all sounds nice for a static economy...but what about a modern economy with technological innovations, with new start-ups and bankruptcies? What happens to workers who want to move on from an inefficient and relatively unprofitable business at which they unluckily happened to be working at the time of emancipation?
Let's see...we have already established that new hires must get completely equal ownership rights as existing hires at the new company, so these workers will be entitled to that at their next job as well. But what about the assets from the previous workplace? If we allow workers to simply pocket the cash from liquidating the means-of-production assets of failing firms, then workers will have an incentive to get hired onto a firm, declare a firm failing, liquidate the durable assets, and move on to the next business. Likewise, how is new investment to be handled? If a worker wants to launch a new start-up firm with some comrades, should we expect them to invest their own personal money, when a group of new hires might theoretically take over the business, kick the original founders out, sell off the durable assets, and move onto dismantling the next start-up? And how would one disentangle the personal money invested by the employees in an enterprise from any existing capital stock that they inherited when getting hired on at the enterprise? If we tried to keep track of this, the more recent hires would tend to have less personal money invested in a company than the more veteran hires. Veteran hires would have more of a financial stake in the company, and would (understandably) demand more control over production. This would eventually amount to the re-institution of capitalist shareholding.
This leads us to Law No. 3 after Emancipation: Worker-owners of enterprises have usufruct rights of the enterprises they control; that is, they are entitled to day-to-day control (usus) of the enterprise and the fruits (fruct) of the ongoing operations of that enterprise. They are also responsible for paying for the ongoing operating expenses of the enterprise out of the gross income of the enterprise (for example: the toilet paper in the employee bathroom). The fruits that the worker-owners of enterprises are entitled to are the net profits after subtracting ongoing habitual operating expenses from gross income.
The durable means of production of those enterprises (for example, the toilet in the bathroom) must not, however, be alienable. That is to say, the durable means of production of an enterprise (to be defined by law and government inspections) would belong to a separate accountessentially a non-transferable endowment. Any money from disinvestment (selling off parts of the durable means of production of an enterprise, such as the coffee maker in the break room) would go not to the current members of the enterprise, but into the endowment account. This money could be spent on purchasing other durable means of production (such as a toaster oven for the break room) for the enterprise, but not for funding the personal consumption of current members.
Likewise, current members would not be expected to divert any portion of personal wealth from ongoing profits towards investment in new capital equipment or the endowment fund (as any such money thus diverted would no longer be retrievable for personal consumption). In fact, they wouldn't be allowed to divert personal funds into the endowment fund even voluntarily, for the simple reason that the enterprises that agreed to voluntarily put some of their ongoing profits and personal wealth into the endowment fund for developing the companies' means of production might be able to expand more and out-compete companies that did not. In these successful companies, though, a feeling of possessiveness would grow towards the means of production in which the workers had personally invested. The existing worker-owners would, over time, agitate for legally revising the non-transferability of the endowment fund in favor of something like capitalist shareholding, which would disadvantage new hires and lead eventually to the restoration of capitalism.
No, instead, any new investment money would have to come from the government (via taxes) and be deposited into each enterprise's endowment fund (perhaps on an impartial basis, such as per number of registered workers at the enterprise, to avoid government corruption and favoritism in this highly sensitive lever of financial influence). If an enterprise completely shuts down, all funds collected in the endowment from selling off the remaining capital assets go back to the government. In addition, the government should be able to be petitioned with plans for new enterprises. In cases appearing to warrant it, an endowment with start-up capital funds would be given to the petitioning worker-owners to use for purchasing initial durable capital goods for the means of production (but not for pocketing for personal consumption). Direct ballot initiatives could also decide on funding such start-up projects. After start-up, these new enterprises would receive periodic endowment deposits from the government as any other enterprise.
In this way, individual enterprises would be responsible for operating businesses and accruing the resulting profits in a decentralized way (unlike under traditional state-socialism), but the government would be the sole legal investor in any means of production.
Government inspectors would be required to spot-check each company's accounting books from time to time to make sure that the number of employed workers was not being over-reported (if the government decides to use that as a criterion for how much to invest in each enterprise's endowments), and to make sure that money was not being diverted from the means-of-production endowment to the operating profitsand thus the personal consumption of the individual members. Are there ways this system could be abused? Sure. An enterprise could say, Oh, that machine broke during regular operation, and it had to be replaced with funds out of the endowment when in reality that machine never broke, and the enterprise's current members simply pocketed the endowment money. Such corruption might be rare or widespread, depending on the thoroughness of the government inspections, the culture of the new emancipated society, and the level of material desperation of its worker-owner members (which would presumably be low, with the Universal Basic Income in effect and a productive, technologically advanced infrastructure at our disposal).
The ability of the government to abuse this inspection power to oppress certain workers unfairly would depend on the transparency of the government bureaucracy and the political process. Obviously, we would want it all to be very transparent to public scrutiny, and we in the modern world would never tolerate anything like the secret police of the traditional state-socialist societies. At the first sign of any such bureaucratic degeneration, I would expect immediate working-class uprisings in defense of the emancipation.
As with the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1863, a final question arises for our emancipation: do we compensate the former owners of the means of production? In my opinion, no. It would be like compensating former Southern slave-owners for their loss of slaves. If anything, they should have to pay us reparations. Only if we were feeling extraordinary pity towards the former capitalists, we might say yes.
However, the way in which we compensated the former owners in this case would be important. If we take out government loans to pay them off, they are in effect still functioning as capitalists; their money is still making more money, using the living labor of present and future taxpayers to fund their wealth. Instead, if we decide to compensate the former owners at all, it would have to take the form of a single, one-time payment in printed (and thereby devalued) currency. That way, they get to fund personal consumption at higher rates than others for some time, but eventually this wealth (already significantly devalued by inflation) will run out; their compensation does not become capitalmoney that makes more money by exploiting ongoing labor. If they want new wealth to replace wealth spent on ongoing personal consumption, they will have to work in a cooperative enterprise for it as a democratic worker-owner like everyone else. For the rest of the population, the value of their (much more meager holdings) also goes down with the devaluation, but more importantly, they now own the means of production, guaranteeing them the ability to make more wealth in the future. (Using made-up math, it might look something like this after the compensation and devaluation of the currency: Worker A owns $1,000. Capitalist A gets paid $1,000,000 in compensation for his/her enterprise (paid for by printing money). A loaf of bread suddenly costs $500 after inflation (which then, after that one-time printing of currency, stabilizes). But Worker A now earns $100,000 dollars a week from the ongoing operation of the enterprise that he/she now owns).
In conclusion, we know that markets work, more or less. We know that giving the means of production to those who work it has worked in the past. When paired with a democratic, transparent, instantly recallable, multi-party government in the political sphere, there is no reason I can see for why the economic system outlined above wouldn't workwhy this form of emancipation from wage-slavery wouldn't successfully dodge the twin perils of past efforts at emancipation: Leninist corruption, and reversion to capitalism.
And after this emancipation, we worker-owners will have practically all the leisure time in the world to figure out how pure communism might workand, more importantly, we will control the resources needed for trying out experiments in it. Perhaps what I have outlined above is the real transitional stage to communism that socialists have always searched for (if I may be so bold). Please point out any flaws in the above ideas in the comments below.
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*I could not resist offering some thoughts on this issue, so I have put this at the end. Regarding the plausibility of pure communism, we might conjecture that people won't become lazy bums when we take away direct work incentives, that people will still produce things to share. Just like ParEcon, it might work. The point is, we simply don't know. It really hasn't been tried, except maybe in embryonic form among the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War. Any speculation about how well a completely communistic system of production and exchange would function is, right now, just thatspeculation. To most people at the current time, it will seem like implausible speculation. Even I am skeptical, and I used to be a confidently convinced anarchist-communist a few years ago. As I have since realized, even primitively communistic hunter-gatherer societies had prestige, shame, and reputation as forms of social currency to incentivize socially-useful behavior. The more you take away impersonal forms of social currency, the more you lean on personal forms of social currency; speaking as someone who has participated in a number of collective projects during my years of activism, I can tell you that at its worst this personal form of social currency can start to feel like something out of Arthur Miller's The Crucible or Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Lettereveryone looking over each other's shoulder to make sure that everyone is doing what they are supposed to be doing, and using shame and guilt rather than money to incentivize conformity to social expectations of work. My suspicion is that a purely communistic society that gets rid of impersonal incentives for work is going to end up relying, whether the people in it consciously realize it or not, on these implicit personal incentives. And I'm not sure that that is much of an improvement over impersonal incentives. The former actually sounds a lot more passive-aggressive than money, which at least is upfront about giving people incentive to work, or else...
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Note: This article is of my own authorship.
When radical leftists speak of wage-slavery, part of the intention is to draw analogies between the unfreedom of chattel slavery and the unfreedom of wage-slavery. Subjectively, there are similarities in the experience of each. The main difference, of course, is that wage-slaves find themselves enslaved not to a single human master, but to a class of capitalists who collectively monopolize the means of fending off hunger, want, and ruin.
However, part of the use of the wage-slavery concept could also be to draw analogies between the post-emancipation goals of slaves and the post-emancipation goals of wage-slaves. As wage-slaves, we still haven't figured out what we plan on doing after our emancipation. How are we going to run society without capitalists? People debate various schemes (such as ParEcon), but there are not really any concrete schemes out there that fill us with much confidence that they will definitely work.
On this point, I propose that we should take inspiration from the straightforward slogan of pretty much every land-reform effort ever: The land to those who work it! Historically, whether it was the 40 acres and a mule that African-Americans never got, or the landed estates that the (formally) emancipated Russian serfs had to pay indemnities on for decades afterwards, reality has usually fallen far short of the ideal. But the ideal was always an elegantly simple one: the landor whatever the means of production in questionshould go to those who work it. And when this means of production was land, and when it actually was given to those who worked it...things worked. Economies did not collapse. Ex-slaves and ex-serfs did not become lazy bums. The land continued to be worked, and quite efficiently too. And the standard of living and level of freedom of the ex-slaves and ex-serfs improved dramatically.
If we apply this idea to wage-slavery, we have good reason to think that it will work, and that it will result in an appreciable improvement in the standard of living and freedom of the ex-wage-slaves.
Naturally, the idea of the workplace to those to work itgiving workers legal ownership of the means of production at which they happen to be working at the time of the emancipationrequires that there still be private property, a free market, and money after this emancipation. The point of this article is not to rule out the possibility of a completely communistic system without property or exchange where people took what they needed and provided to others what they saw fit to produce. Let us simply table this discussion of the plausibility of pure communism* for later discussion and at least try to find a form of emancipation from wage-slavery that we know will work, even if it is not ideal.
Having workers take over the workplaces at which they currently work would mean that, for smaller enterprises, everyone would directly vote on decisions in their workplace...such as workplace improvements (We need chai tea in the breakroom...), production improvements (We should put barcodes on all of our merchandise to speed the retail process along...), sales decisions (We should sell these shoes for $30...), profit share compensation for each job class (Typists each get 6 unit points of profit out of a current employee total of 200, or 3% of weekly profits...)...in short, everything that the boss currently decides. For larger enterprises, members might decide to elect instantly recallable delegates to workplace workers' councils to decide these things.
Otherwise, workplaces would function like workplaces do now. They would purchase raw materials (except for labor), produce commodities to sell on the market, and try to turn a profit that would then be shared out among the employees as they themselves saw fit.
At first glance, most communists would balk at this seemingly reactionary idea. You'll just turn every worker into a scheming, conniving, and inefficient petty-capitalist, they'll say. Capitalism would inevitably re-assert itself in no time! And indeed, the history of worker cooperatives, and even the self-management schemes of Tito's Yugoslavia, suggest that workers, when simply turned into owners of their workplaces amidst a continuing market economy, usually end up becoming petty-capitalists. Over time, new hires are hired on as ordinary wage-slaves with no say in the cooperative. The ownership and leadership of these enterprises usually becomes hereditary rather than elected. A generation later, hardly a trace of worker self-management remains.
Very well; let us learn from these mistakes. Law No. 1 after Emancipation: It is forbidden to enter into collective labor that habitually utilizes a common means of production (this excludes activity that uses only personal property, or services that a single person performs for another as an isolated, one-time event) without each member having an equal democratic say in the operation of that means of production and the distribution of the fruits thereof. Any person caught hiring someone without giving that person an equal say in the running of the enterprise, after a short apprenticing period delimited by law (say, a maximum of two weeks for any job), or any person caught working without demanding an equal say in the running of the enterprise, will be severely penalized (maybe fined and given probation for a first offense, then incarceration for repeat offenses). Trade unions might also see it fit to penalize such members and enterprises.
This takes care of formal power inequalities, but what about informal ones? What about a possible black market of workers who are so desperate for jobs that they will secretly agree to unequal power in the workplace in exchange for a wage (rather than a profit share), all the while playing along with superficial rituals of workplace democracy for the government or trade union inspectors? This is analogous to asking how we prevent people in the present from becoming so desperate that they sell themselves into slavery in order to get a bite to eat.
For one thing, it would be below the dignity of even the most starving homeless person in our present society to do such a thing; so would it be for someone to hire him/herself out as an unequal wage-slave in an enterprise after the emancipation.
Second, police and the legal system will not enforce slave contracts in the present era, just as the legal system would not enforce wage-slavery agreements after emancipation. So the employer of black market wage-slaves after the emancipation had better hope that the wage-slaves are a well-behaved lot because the state will not intervene (as it does now) to crack down on those workers if they get unruly; rather, the state, being alerted to their predicament, will actually legally enforce their equality and profit-sharing in that workplace that is guilty of the offense of employing them as wage-slaves.
Third, a worker would have to be really, really desperate to submit themselves to the humiliation of wage-slavery after the emancipation. In order to make sure no worker is ever that desperate, we would also have to have a Universal Basic Income, financed by taxes on the profits of workplaces. This Universal Basic Income might include housing, healthcare, and food. (These sectors of the economy might be simply run by the local and/or central government, rather than by the worker-owner cooperatives being described). Consider this Universal Basic Income Law No. 2 after Emancipation.
Although this arrangement will not produce perfect equality of living conditions among workers (some worker-owners might work at enterprises that are more profitable than others), nobody will starve, and more importantly, there will be relative equality of economic power among all workers everywhere. Every worker-owner will have proportional control over a means of production.
Over time, workers will compete to be accepted on at the more profitable companies. Worker-owners will try to do a good job at their work to make their enterprises profitable. The whole system has incentives that will be conducive to its efficiency.
Very well...this all sounds nice for a static economy...but what about a modern economy with technological innovations, with new start-ups and bankruptcies? What happens to workers who want to move on from an inefficient and relatively unprofitable business at which they unluckily happened to be working at the time of emancipation?
Let's see...we have already established that new hires must get completely equal ownership rights as existing hires at the new company, so these workers will be entitled to that at their next job as well. But what about the assets from the previous workplace? If we allow workers to simply pocket the cash from liquidating the means-of-production assets of failing firms, then workers will have an incentive to get hired onto a firm, declare a firm failing, liquidate the durable assets, and move on to the next business. Likewise, how is new investment to be handled? If a worker wants to launch a new start-up firm with some comrades, should we expect them to invest their own personal money, when a group of new hires might theoretically take over the business, kick the original founders out, sell off the durable assets, and move onto dismantling the next start-up? And how would one disentangle the personal money invested by the employees in an enterprise from any existing capital stock that they inherited when getting hired on at the enterprise? If we tried to keep track of this, the more recent hires would tend to have less personal money invested in a company than the more veteran hires. Veteran hires would have more of a financial stake in the company, and would (understandably) demand more control over production. This would eventually amount to the re-institution of capitalist shareholding.
This leads us to Law No. 3 after Emancipation: Worker-owners of enterprises have usufruct rights of the enterprises they control; that is, they are entitled to day-to-day control (usus) of the enterprise and the fruits (fruct) of the ongoing operations of that enterprise. They are also responsible for paying for the ongoing operating expenses of the enterprise out of the gross income of the enterprise (for example: the toilet paper in the employee bathroom). The fruits that the worker-owners of enterprises are entitled to are the net profits after subtracting ongoing habitual operating expenses from gross income.
The durable means of production of those enterprises (for example, the toilet in the bathroom) must not, however, be alienable. That is to say, the durable means of production of an enterprise (to be defined by law and government inspections) would belong to a separate accountessentially a non-transferable endowment. Any money from disinvestment (selling off parts of the durable means of production of an enterprise, such as the coffee maker in the break room) would go not to the current members of the enterprise, but into the endowment account. This money could be spent on purchasing other durable means of production (such as a toaster oven for the break room) for the enterprise, but not for funding the personal consumption of current members.
Likewise, current members would not be expected to divert any portion of personal wealth from ongoing profits towards investment in new capital equipment or the endowment fund (as any such money thus diverted would no longer be retrievable for personal consumption). In fact, they wouldn't be allowed to divert personal funds into the endowment fund even voluntarily, for the simple reason that the enterprises that agreed to voluntarily put some of their ongoing profits and personal wealth into the endowment fund for developing the companies' means of production might be able to expand more and out-compete companies that did not. In these successful companies, though, a feeling of possessiveness would grow towards the means of production in which the workers had personally invested. The existing worker-owners would, over time, agitate for legally revising the non-transferability of the endowment fund in favor of something like capitalist shareholding, which would disadvantage new hires and lead eventually to the restoration of capitalism.
No, instead, any new investment money would have to come from the government (via taxes) and be deposited into each enterprise's endowment fund (perhaps on an impartial basis, such as per number of registered workers at the enterprise, to avoid government corruption and favoritism in this highly sensitive lever of financial influence). If an enterprise completely shuts down, all funds collected in the endowment from selling off the remaining capital assets go back to the government. In addition, the government should be able to be petitioned with plans for new enterprises. In cases appearing to warrant it, an endowment with start-up capital funds would be given to the petitioning worker-owners to use for purchasing initial durable capital goods for the means of production (but not for pocketing for personal consumption). Direct ballot initiatives could also decide on funding such start-up projects. After start-up, these new enterprises would receive periodic endowment deposits from the government as any other enterprise.
In this way, individual enterprises would be responsible for operating businesses and accruing the resulting profits in a decentralized way (unlike under traditional state-socialism), but the government would be the sole legal investor in any means of production.
Government inspectors would be required to spot-check each company's accounting books from time to time to make sure that the number of employed workers was not being over-reported (if the government decides to use that as a criterion for how much to invest in each enterprise's endowments), and to make sure that money was not being diverted from the means-of-production endowment to the operating profitsand thus the personal consumption of the individual members. Are there ways this system could be abused? Sure. An enterprise could say, Oh, that machine broke during regular operation, and it had to be replaced with funds out of the endowment when in reality that machine never broke, and the enterprise's current members simply pocketed the endowment money. Such corruption might be rare or widespread, depending on the thoroughness of the government inspections, the culture of the new emancipated society, and the level of material desperation of its worker-owner members (which would presumably be low, with the Universal Basic Income in effect and a productive, technologically advanced infrastructure at our disposal).
The ability of the government to abuse this inspection power to oppress certain workers unfairly would depend on the transparency of the government bureaucracy and the political process. Obviously, we would want it all to be very transparent to public scrutiny, and we in the modern world would never tolerate anything like the secret police of the traditional state-socialist societies. At the first sign of any such bureaucratic degeneration, I would expect immediate working-class uprisings in defense of the emancipation.
As with the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1863, a final question arises for our emancipation: do we compensate the former owners of the means of production? In my opinion, no. It would be like compensating former Southern slave-owners for their loss of slaves. If anything, they should have to pay us reparations. Only if we were feeling extraordinary pity towards the former capitalists, we might say yes.
However, the way in which we compensated the former owners in this case would be important. If we take out government loans to pay them off, they are in effect still functioning as capitalists; their money is still making more money, using the living labor of present and future taxpayers to fund their wealth. Instead, if we decide to compensate the former owners at all, it would have to take the form of a single, one-time payment in printed (and thereby devalued) currency. That way, they get to fund personal consumption at higher rates than others for some time, but eventually this wealth (already significantly devalued by inflation) will run out; their compensation does not become capitalmoney that makes more money by exploiting ongoing labor. If they want new wealth to replace wealth spent on ongoing personal consumption, they will have to work in a cooperative enterprise for it as a democratic worker-owner like everyone else. For the rest of the population, the value of their (much more meager holdings) also goes down with the devaluation, but more importantly, they now own the means of production, guaranteeing them the ability to make more wealth in the future. (Using made-up math, it might look something like this after the compensation and devaluation of the currency: Worker A owns $1,000. Capitalist A gets paid $1,000,000 in compensation for his/her enterprise (paid for by printing money). A loaf of bread suddenly costs $500 after inflation (which then, after that one-time printing of currency, stabilizes). But Worker A now earns $100,000 dollars a week from the ongoing operation of the enterprise that he/she now owns).
In conclusion, we know that markets work, more or less. We know that giving the means of production to those who work it has worked in the past. When paired with a democratic, transparent, instantly recallable, multi-party government in the political sphere, there is no reason I can see for why the economic system outlined above wouldn't workwhy this form of emancipation from wage-slavery wouldn't successfully dodge the twin perils of past efforts at emancipation: Leninist corruption, and reversion to capitalism.
And after this emancipation, we worker-owners will have practically all the leisure time in the world to figure out how pure communism might workand, more importantly, we will control the resources needed for trying out experiments in it. Perhaps what I have outlined above is the real transitional stage to communism that socialists have always searched for (if I may be so bold). Please point out any flaws in the above ideas in the comments below.
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*I could not resist offering some thoughts on this issue, so I have put this at the end. Regarding the plausibility of pure communism, we might conjecture that people won't become lazy bums when we take away direct work incentives, that people will still produce things to share. Just like ParEcon, it might work. The point is, we simply don't know. It really hasn't been tried, except maybe in embryonic form among the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War. Any speculation about how well a completely communistic system of production and exchange would function is, right now, just thatspeculation. To most people at the current time, it will seem like implausible speculation. Even I am skeptical, and I used to be a confidently convinced anarchist-communist a few years ago. As I have since realized, even primitively communistic hunter-gatherer societies had prestige, shame, and reputation as forms of social currency to incentivize socially-useful behavior. The more you take away impersonal forms of social currency, the more you lean on personal forms of social currency; speaking as someone who has participated in a number of collective projects during my years of activism, I can tell you that at its worst this personal form of social currency can start to feel like something out of Arthur Miller's The Crucible or Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Lettereveryone looking over each other's shoulder to make sure that everyone is doing what they are supposed to be doing, and using shame and guilt rather than money to incentivize conformity to social expectations of work. My suspicion is that a purely communistic society that gets rid of impersonal incentives for work is going to end up relying, whether the people in it consciously realize it or not, on these implicit personal incentives. And I'm not sure that that is much of an improvement over impersonal incentives. The former actually sounds a lot more passive-aggressive than money, which at least is upfront about giving people incentive to work, or else...
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Note: This article is of my own authorship.