Why Not Socialism? by G.A. Cohen

That’s a lovely post, Harry. Buying a copy of Karl Marx’s Theory of History as one’s graduation present brought a smile to my lips. I think I bought LP recordings of Beethoven’s last quartets. Much as I admire Jerry Cohen, I think I got the better deal

Unfortunately, the book isn’t released in the UK yet (Jerry himself never saw a final copy). I’m hoping get one in the next few days and to post something here. Since I haven’t read the book, it would be premature to respond to Gintis, but Jerry’s acceptance of a personal prerogative in other writings would seem to be in tension with Gintis’s account. Gintis’s final, sub-Nietzschean, para seems to conflate the desire to achieve excellence (and perhaps to be honoured for that) with the securing of material advantage over others as a consequence.

I was lucky enough to be in his Fall 08 course in Columbia. We were an odd mix of lawyers-to-be and philosophy students, analyzing every chapter of Rescuing Justice and Inequality. I will never forget Jerry’s patience, analytical wit and careful consideration to all of our ideas and opinions. Of course, I will never forget the jokes, or impressions. The Crooked Timber and its commentary on Jerry has been a wonderful medicine for us who will miss not having the opportunity to meet him again. I can’t wait to get my hands on Why Not Socialism. Can’t wait.

Gintis is an extraordinary reviewer on Amazon. Whatever you think of his particular reviews (I’ve found some better than others) the fact that he has several hundred (I believe), and that they are nearly all fairly substantive, is pretty amazing. I suspect I’ll share many of his worries when I read the book, as they sound quite a bit like the worries I’ve had when reading much of Cohen’s other work.

Harry- have you read Alec Nove’s _The Economics of Feasible Socialism_? If so, I’m curious what you think of it. (I hope this won’t take us too far off topic. Ignore this if so.) I ask because it was reading that book that made me realize that I wasn’t a socialist in any very strong sense. (I think there are weak enough senses in which I’d still qualify, but I’m not sure how useful that sense is in most cases.)

The problem with a camping analogy is that we often go camping with family or self-selected friends that we treat as kin or close to kin.

That doesn’t quite obtain in his other non-camping examples, e.g. a rescue operation when a building goes up in smoke. The interactive behavior we see there does not rely upon some pre-established notion of kinship.

Our brains are, to a crude first approximation, wired to find and establish kinship relations with the people around us. We learn from our society who is and is not “kin” according to rather arbitrary rules — rules which are mutable and (this is important to me) education-dependent. This not only makes friendship possible, but (when amply and appropriate developed) allows a human being to relate compassionately to the other human beings in her/his midst. Put more simply, you are not my brother-kin because I have learned to not regard you as my brother-kin, not because of any inherent characteristic of you or of me.

Put another way, what’s stopping me from learning to recognize you as a distant kin? I don’t have to deeply connect with you; I just have to have some feeling of communal obligation to serve you when you are in need of my service, together with some sense of joy when I do successfully serve you.

This idea bears further discussion and I look forward to it here. Surely my crude point needs a lot of refinement… must go teach, but I am looking forward to this thread!

Socialism socialism socialism!

You see, “socialism” works … once the technical obstacles are overcome.

The problem with a camping analogy is that we often go camping with family or self-selected friends that we treat as kin or close to kin.

boy/girl scouts, militaries, archeology/paleontology expeditions, many other examples

That some of these might be “self-selected” or initiated toward a common particular social purpose I think is not a serious objection.

I hate posts like this, where intersting books are discussed which we, ordinary inhabitants of the Low Lands, cannot buy. Still, a nice person sent me an electronic copy of (a draft of?) the book, so I have access to the content, I suppose. ONly not the smell and the feeling of holding the book. And the “cover”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/images/0691143617/sr=8-1/qid=1251828166/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=266239&s=books&qid=1251828166&sr=8-1 ! What a beautiful cover! Harry, you should have made a link to the picture of the cover. I’ll buy it as soon as it’s on sale here.

Since all you socialists are reading this thread: whatever else theoretically or philosophically has there been published on socialism in recent years that we need to read?

That’s wonderful Chris.

Socialism!

(sorry, I just needed to have a try – by the way, Harry: you convinced me, I’ll buy when I can)

Nope, soc1al1sm it still has to be for me. But if you wait long enough you’ll find a very, very interesting post just one (or two) up from this one.

It’s too bad seeing Gintis being so hard on Cohen. Gintis has spent ages trying to develop the very hypothetical social technologies that Cohen wants — Bowles and Gintis on education, their work developing the theory of the democratic firm, and their recent stuff on reciprocity.

For laughs check out Gintis debating Mark Levin’s fans (a right-wing talkshow host I’d never heard of before).

boy/girl scouts, militaries, archeology/paleontology expeditions, many other examples

That some of these might be “self-selected” or initiated toward a common particular social purpose I think is not a serious objection.

I think it’s a very serious objection. Historically, the biggest obstacle to sozialism has been resentment of “welfare queens” or the equivalent. The salient characteristics of a welfare queen (other than mythicality) are that she is (1) undeserving, and (2) Not Like Us in some unspoken, but readily understood by the audience, way. Ingroup members may get unconditional help, but outgroup members are suspected and begrudged even the most necessary medical procedures, crumbs to the starving, etc.

If we could figure out a way to get people to see all humanity as the ingroup, then IMO sozialism would find much less resistance (at least, the sozial democratic welfare types, not necessarily an actual command economy, but who really wants that anyway).

So the experience of going camping with ingroups doesn’t say much.

Forming peer-groups is automatic (and malleable), as you say, but most people will never be in our peer group, due to the limits of time, presence, and memory… How to cultivate and strengthen this unnatural response is pretty much the central problem of practical morality.

I think we’re in loose agreement, but I will insist that “peer group” is not the same as “kin” — for example, I have hundreds of “kin” but a peer group of maybe eleven or twelve people, and the two don’t really coincide. Surely you agree, for example, that it’s possible for two individuals to regard each other as “kin” despite never having met. Not true for peer groups (or at least it wasn’t true before the Internet, but that’s a whole different story).

@28: I think they’ve got some kind of complicated post-processing turned on that’s attempting to remove and then re-insert formatting tags (can’t remember what I was trying to do when I decided that was probably the problem) in a script or something that doesn’t understand recursive inclusion of one tag inside another very well.

That’s a very good point, Chris. But in partial (devilish) defense of (a better version of) Gintis’ argument one could say that some forms of excellence require conspicuous uses of resources that are incompatible with egalitarian distributions.

Should we really be looking to philosophers for suggestions as to how human societies might be
better organised ? If I understand Gerry Cohen’s last major philosophical work correctly, the answer is ‘no’. What will sadly be his last book, sounds like the kind of story, some members of a Russian obshchina might have been telling themselves 100 odd years ago, when they got into their crazy heads to try to refashion the whole world in the image of their face-to-face place of abode.

I used the “s” word in my post awaiting moderation.

So, if the group has to be small, is social1sm possible on a small scale, in a village, as a coop, kibbutz, or something? And if it is possible, then at some point, with, say, a few thousand people involved, shouldn’t it be enough? Why do you care how other communities are organized; just find one that suits you.

From the link in 38, which is worth following:

“It may be thought that with the recent collapse of the Soviet Union, Marx’s socialist philosophy and economics are of no significance today. I believe this would be a serious mistake for two reasons at least. The first reason is that while central command socialism, such as reigned in the Soviet Union, is discredited–indeed, it was never a plausible doctrine–the same is not true of liberal socialism. This illuminating and worthwhile view has four elements:
(a) A constitutional democratic political regime, with the fair value of the political liberties.
(b) A system of free competitive markets, ensured by law as necessary.
(c) A scheme of worker-owned business, or, in part, also public-owned through stock shares, and managed by elected or firm-chosen managers.
(d) A property system establishing a widespread and a more or less even distribution of the means of production and natural resources. (On these features, see John Roemer, Liberal Socialism [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994])
—John Rawls”

I’m sorry, but looking around our current neoliberal oligopoly, with trillions to investment banks and nothing o far to healthcare, the fantasy of d) being derived from the first three, especially a) noted as considered ethically primary, is why I find left-liberals and especially John Rawls, more than a little absurd. Point d) should be both temporally and morally primary we should not try to adjust socialism to fit liberalism, but adjust liberalism to allow socialism.

I am also seeing quite a few recent Marxian books in my library, although many of them have more to do with Gramsci. The reasons for this may be for a different post.

Finally, it was a great joy for me to see at Mark Thoma’s, after a post discussing JS Mill’s foundations of social science in positivism, to see a group of continental commenters come round to mention an alternative tradition derived from Schlegel. Love these internets.

“had I not gone to LA when I did, and developed the way I did, I’d not have met my wife and had my kids. “

Au contraire, you have no proof of this claim, nor could you have. Had you chosen not to go to LA, or not to go when you did, you may well have met the same woman somewhere else, still married her and still had your kids. You could even have met her and married her on the very same days that you did meet and did marry her, only elsewhere.

It is completely consistent with our life experience that our fates are pre-determined, as random as they look, or (less strongly) that the final outcomes of our lives are independent of the decisions we make during their course (ie, the pinball machine theory of life: that the ball always ends up at the bottom of the tray, regardless of what plays we make during the game or how long we play).

because some economists had invented clever ways of harnessing and organizing our capacity for generosity toward others.

Charity is a fine principle, but it doesn’t extend very well to building furniture or farming oats. Once again, you need a New Soviet Man for that sort of thing, and that went rather badly last time.

People have been calling it the “camping trip” book; he uses the conceit of a camping trip to demonstrate that organizing social life around the two principles that, for him, define socialism – a very stringent version of equality of opportunity, and a very demanding principle of community – is very appealing to most people in some circumstances.

Who has ever organised a camping trip around a principle of equality of opportunity?

I’m not the world’s biggest camper but I have been on a few and I’ll admit being pushed to think of examples of when ‘equality of opportunity’ seemed to be an issue–either consciously or unconsciously–for anybody.

I think I have a rough idea of what is being talked about here, and I take the point that on a camping trip people share their stuff, help out with the chores, there’s no buying or selling, people co-operate and fulfill themselves by themselves and with others, and so on. Great. So far so nice and socialist as far as I’m concerned. But ‘equality of opportunity’? Where does that come in? ‘You’ve had your ten minutes in the shower–I don’t care if you haven’t finished–it’s my turn now?’ Or what?

I find it conceivable that we may one day develop this dramatic new moral sense and leave behind current ways of co-ordinating action. But I doubt such a sense will be developed through aggressive state intervention as Marxists (originally?) thought. And I don’t think such a theory can guide any useful actions for changing contemporary politics where notions like maintaining the rule of law and a productive market order are rather more pressing. It may guide individual actions in new and interesting ways.

ingrid robeyns: whatever else theoretically or philosophically has there been published on s…..ism in recent years that we need to read?

He’s an anarchist rather than an s-wordist, but David Graeber is both smart and funny. I’d recommend Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire; if you like that, then Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams is longer and chewier (and engages with Marx much more directly).

The following words from the Gintis review seem worthy of comment, and perhaps of a post at some later stage:

bq. Everyday observation, reinforced by a huge body of empirical evidence—see my book, Bounds of Reason (Princeton, 2009) for details—that unless there are safeguards against the free-rider tendencies of the selfish, the natural tendency for the majority to cooperate will be undermined, and cooperation will unravel. Moreover, the larger the group, the harder it is to identify and punish the free-riders, even though most people are willing to incur personal costs to do so. Markets work because they discipline firms, who then discipline workers, thus solving the free-rider problem.

Cf also the mentions of “welfare queens” etc. in the Holbo McMegan thread,

Much of the commentary that we read is produced by people with satisfying careers who think insufficiently of the lives of the people who produce the material and service goods they consume. Those people often work long hours in unsatisfying jobs (indeed they are “disciplined” by markets and firms to do so) at the expense of realizing their full human possibilities. (Does this sound familiar?) And they are still better off that those who are excluded from the labour market, the unemployed, some of who — other poor people — get stigmatized as “welfare queens”, “free riders” etc.

One might say, and not only rhetorically, that the real free riders, who benefit from the toil of others, and from a system that coerces others to toil are those whose ownership of the means of production exempts them from the burden of labour, and those who are employed on fat salaries (McMegan, Jonah Goldberg, half of academia) to produce guff berating “welfare queens” etc.

As I said above, I haven’t yet received my copy of Cohen, but I did watch his “against capitalism” broadcast from the 1980s the other day. The way that capitalism gets millions of people to endure unsatisfying work for most of their lives for little pay was central to that critique, as it was to Marx’s.

And they are still better off that those who are excluded from the labour market, the unemployed, some of who—other poor people—get stigmatized as “welfare queens”, “free riders” etc

who are in turn better off than people working in factories in China … the fact that so very goddamned many people are required to be paid in jobs loosely definable as “disciplining the workers” (which includes people charged with producing homilies aimed at making the overseers feel good about themselves) really does look like the sort of thing that a technological fix ought to be available for, and ought to be welcomed if it were invented.

“So, if the group has to be small, is social1sm possible on a small scale, in a village, as a coop, kibbutz, or something?”

I’ve heard others tell me that in the corporate world, groups need to stay under 150 to “perform” well. No clue if this has been confirmed by research or what “perform” means.

The first kibbutz started with just a handful. My kibbutz, considered the first real kibbutz, started with around 200, but the population fluctuated significantly due to malaria before the swamps were drained. It is one of the few kibbutzim that still function. Before we left, everything was still fairly communal, but provided for everything and there was room for a cash allowance to boot for discretionary spending. They “privatised” the food at one point and as a result almost no one showed up for dinner at the communal dining hall. Breakfast and lunch was still fairly popular, so they continued to serve meals. The big decision these days is to begin to pay salaries commensurate with jobs. Of course most of those who have positioned themselves are pushing for it, but really the place is run by a group “The Parliament” that will reap all the benefits for themselves and their families as they have been doing quietly all this time anyway.

They have a very successful high tech factory. Same situation… some have positioned themselves for privatisation in the near future. As it is now, there is a huge layer of management, most of whom really don’t do much at all… and then almost everyone else is either a paid outside employee — engineers, administration, assembly people.

As is the case with almost all of the kibbutzim, they would never have lasted as long as they did without heavy government subsidies. Those that developed successful factories and then broke up are basically nice little factory towns now. Plenty of corruption is often involved in the sale of the property and means of production.

I always saw the problem as: Kibbutzniks will always want to leave or live in a non-egalitarian fashion as long as they have the opportunity. No option to do this, then no problem exists. My big dream was always to be able to order a pizza at any hour, but when we went out to eat pizza, it tasted that much better. Now, in the city, it’s no big deal, and of course the pizza is just ok unless you’re really hungry. A simple view, but maybe important.

Thanks to the link in 30 I could read the book I cannot order yet. And despite Harry’s excellent efforts I have decided not to buy it when I can order it.

On reflection I think Harry quoted Cohen defeating the point of his book: “I’m not outdoorsy, or, at any rate, I’m not outdoorsy overnight-without-a-mattress-wise.”

Taking the analogy to heart there first is the choice to go camping and then there is camping. In the extension Cohen makes in the latter chapters that choice is no longer there. It is replaced by a promise. Taking it back to the analogy it’s maybe something like the father saying: “It will be a lot of fun, son. I did it with my father. Didn’t want to go at first but loved every minute of it. It is a life-changer.” – but with the son fleeing the communal site during the first night (to be eaten by a pack of wolves or some such typical camping horror I had the fortune never to be forced into).

Or as Patrick @ 38 has it:

we shouldn’t try to adjust soz1alism to fit liberalism, but adjust liberalism to allow soz1alism.

Which is I think exactly capturing Cohen’s point (even if he would argue it doesn’t but it is very possible that even eminent people have it wrong when they think they have it right – in fact, it is specifically when eminent people think they have it right that they are getting it wrong). As he’s saying himself (I can’t cut and paste from the google website): it’s about ‘design’, the technology ha’s looking for is not the technology of dsquared @ 57 but the technology that will allow to go for a good design without the drawbacks of central planning.

It’s the Soviet Union but then in an economically prosperous version

That’s not good enough. Liberalism comes first – and I’m sure it is our best bet to discover some technology (like the one we’re using now) that allows people to share without worrying about an emotion they like when they gamble and win.

Jerry’s own estimate was that this version of his essay was about “30% different” from the previously published version.

At the time of his death, Jerry had plans and papers for future publication, which I’ll be looking after now.

Bob @ 54:

Yet Marx did rely on anthropological and psychological presuppositions and assumptions about “human nature” as, of late and in different ways, both Martha Nussbaum (in Frontiers of Justice, 2006) and Jon Elster (e.g., in Making Sense of Marx, 1985: 61-92, and his essay, ”Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,’) well appreciate. For a helpful discussion of Marx and his conception(s) of human nature (in addition to the first Elster reference above), please see W. Peter Archibald’s Marx and the Missing Link: Human Nature (1989).

Ingrid,

I agree with your remark with regard to most of the Real Utopia volumes. A nice introduction to the sorts of topics that need to be treated under this rubric of ‘second-best socialism” (e.g., ‘market socialism’) that many folks might not be aware of is Diane Elson’s article, “Market Socialism or Socialization of the Market?” in New Left Review, 172 (November/December 1988): 3-44.

Doing your work better than others was simply not necessary as everyone would get the same reward anyway. In this way, rather conscientious and excellent people started shirking at work, as they knew their efforts to be excellent would not be rewarded.

But then doing a job well can be its own reward (says the guy commenting from work). I’m generally a happier person when I’ve worked efficiently all day than when I’ve shirked. And then there’s that bit from Ivan Denisovich where Ivan deplores the masonry of the prisoner who laid the previous section of bricks for the prison wall, and his essential humanity asserts itself as he proudly evens it out with his addition.

And my ma13 enhanc3nemt aid will be called Publica.

Eastern Bloc regimes never seemed to have much trouble motivating some groups of workers to go beyond the call of duty; specifically, secret policemen, border guards, and censors seem to have put in a lot of time without making a profit. Well, without *officially* making a profit – but it was quite rare that they made a profit by doing what they were supposed to be doing, rather than subverting what they were doing officially. And a hell of a lot of ordinary citizens made quite a lot of effort to help them spy on their friends, for surprisingly little material reward.

This isn’t as shallow as it sounds. Clearly, it was possible to motivate people; it was done. The problem was that so much of this labour was allocated to evil and usually fairly unproductive aims, and that this actually went up over time.

Chris – good points, but then we’re not talking about the kind of social1sm that one gets ‘under’ – merely social democracy as it functions, more or less, in western Europe; so where’s the beef?

BTW, it isn’t ‘rentiers’ any more, it’s ‘savers’, who are apparently an entirely innocent breed…

#70

1. The point I was making about free riders giving lectures on the importance of disciplining free riders doesn’t depend on any such comparison for its truth.

2. Whatever the general benefits that capitalism brings, it can hardly be denied that it has a systemic propensity to use labour-saving innovation in ways that don’t relieve workers of the burden of labour.

Tim Minchin – If I Didn’t Have You (or Just the Lyrics)

Back on the core topic, I haven’t yet read the book, but:

1. Democratic So-shall-he-zoom (at least of a 2nd-best variety) doesn’t necessarily depend on individual cooperative tendencies in daily life – just the willingness to vote for a system on the basis of mature reflection – almost a kind of Odyssean tying-to-the-mast kind of commitment.

2. Depending on what you mean by So-shall-he-zoom, presumably the point some are making is that free-riding (not to be confused with widespread choice of leisure over other goods _per se_) might, via the prisoner’s dilemma, give rise to – aaargh! – one of those suboptimal outcomes (as opposed to one of countless incommensurable Pareto-optima). That could as necessary be dealt with by non-private-market incentive structures – insofar as those are considered compatible with So-shall-he-zoom, of course.

3. Only if that is not possible for whatever reason does the issue of ‘human nature’ (which we of course know all about now – as according to some did Adam Smith) arise. And before we even get to altruism such things as public service ethoi, professionalism and the enjoyment of work well done come into play (mpowell – have you considered a career change?). These are all routinely frustrated by management under capitalism, at a terrible cost in demoralisation and (I’m going to say it) alienation.

The ‘profit’ (or ‘wage’ as we proles call it) motive needn’t be replaced by some kind of permanent Dunkirk spirit for for people still to go to work. _Maybe_ people don’t work as hard if they don’t have payment by results (as most don’t really).

But first, that isn’t necessarily a problem – presumably (by the economists’ own logic) they benefit from not working so hard. Hard work never killed anyone, they say – but as the standard retort goes, it has crippled millions, and long hours on the career-advancement treadmill affect families, etc etc.

Furthermore, if one has to be at work, it is much more pleasant to immerse oneself in something interesting and challenging (not of course in the management-speak sense synonymous with ‘gruelling’) [edit: @67 makes same point]. Skiving (without detection) can actually be as hard and stressful as getting on with the job – and often makes the day go more slowly, which most people – Dunbar in Catch-22 excepted – do not relish, and regard as an indicator of not having fun.

If jobs were chosen by satisfaction (which is plausibly well-correlated with aptitude) rather than remuneration, a lot of people would probably be happier and more productive – and it’s noticeable that the best paid jobs are largely more fulfilling, enjoyable and high-status, though the last of those is certainly not independent of pay/profit levels, given the money-fetish that’s currently prevalent. Of course we still need those toilet-cleaning robots, too.

4. Even if routine impersonal altruism were required by So-shall-he-zoom, I’m not convinced that it isn’t possible to foster such an outlook (in the relevant sense) through education/socialisation, and without Strauss/Ingsoc/McCarthy- style mythmaking. Though there is considerable potential for extreme creepiness there of course.

(Before anyone else is rude enough to point it out, I do realise that ‘So-shall-he-zoom’ as punny substitute for the S-word fails in a number of ways, including being irritating, inadequately homophonic, and of at-best-tenuously relevant content. That bold experiment at least has failed.)

Before anyone else is rude enough to point it out, I do realise that ‘So-shall-he-zoom’ as punny substitute for the S-word fails in a number of ways,

On the contrary, I was quite pleased by it. But then, I am also irritating, inadequately homophonic, and at-best tenuously relevant. :-)

Maybe people don’t work as hard if they don’t have payment by results (as most don’t really).

Yep. And we can probably get by as a species working less hard than we do, if we share resources according to a reasonable scheme. People can work a little and get by with the basics, or work ‘more’ and get more luxury goods. Taking leisure time to be a luxury good, we can envision some rough equality of satisfaction resulting. So-shall-he-zoom, in its intuitive form, is just not that hard to comprehend as an appealing ideal.

An extract from Why Not Socialism? appears this week in the New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/09/camping-trip-others-community

Tim W: If jobs were chosen by satisfaction . . . toilet cleaning robots

A.S. Byatt makes the same point in Babel Tower, I think fairly definitively. Socialism doesn’t work because nobody likes to clean toilets. (I can’t persuade myself to agree with Ursula Le Guin that “making order where people live” is sufficiently satisfying when that means cleaning their toilets.)

I’m still confused here, some of the commenters seem to be saying that ‘social1sm’ = ‘France’. Is the argument then over whether that’s a good or a bad thing?

Meanwhile, Tim, I think your plan falls down at the first hurdle. If zooming requires “the willingness to vote for a system on the basis of mature reflection”, how can we ever hope for that to happen? Especially since ‘vote’ actually means ‘acquiesce in a major reshaping of social mores and economic opportunities, carried out over a number of years, in the teeth of determined ideological opposition’…

PS: maybe even better: so-shall-(s)he-zoom, ‘cause we want equality of zoom, don’t we?

Yeah, I was thinking that. Also cool: the change of gender, when back-translated, gives us socialschism. Commence jokes, please.

Socialism doesn’t work because nobody likes to clean toilets. (I can’t persuade myself to agree with Ursula Le Guin that “making order where people live” is sufficiently satisfying when that means cleaning their toilets.)

That’s what the tenth-day rotationals are for on Anarres, no? Every tenth day you do a different job from your usual. I do know some folks who do cleaning as a sort of ten-day rotational job and enjoy it (not necessarily toilets in particular, but even fun jobs have parts that are less fun that you nevertheless do to get the job done).