A new Communist Manifesto

Echoed at <a href="http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.com/2011/11/towards-new-manifesto.html&quot;?ecologicalheadstand.

The flip side of the question of “abolishing work as a necessity” is the distortion of both classical political economy and neoclassical economics by the orthodox push back against the very idea of emancipation from dominated labor. Both traditions contain strands that point in the direction of emancipation but a self-styled orthodoxy has labored tirelessly to suppress those possibilities. The same is true of “orthodox” Keynesianism, something Keynes himself was worried about. For the orthodox it’s all about accumulation, accumulation, accumulation.

Fascinating and full of great lines and revealing throw-away thoughts. But I think there is reason to believe that the claim that ‘we have enough by way of productive forces’ on the global scale. The mean average global income is still pretty low, a quick googling suggests $9,000 per capita. So even with a truly egalitarian distribution of the fruits of industry, human life would remain fairly materially cramped.

In other words, we are still living in the realm of necessity. A & H jumped the gun by about 150 years.

At some point there’s an absolute level of subsistence above which material comfort has been achieved, making further production unnecessary? That’s the claim is it?
Against this is the claim that demand is limitless because human dissatisfaction is inexhaustible.

There are all kinds of reasons to bemoan market failures. Intelligent collective actions to remedy these failures have moral force behind them. But the second claim is psychologically convincing, while the first just isn’t.

But the second claim is psychologically convincing

It’s curious, then, just how many billions of dollars and gobs of person-hours are expended on constantly telling us that our dissatisfaction is inexhaustible.

“$9,000 per capita, $36K for a family of 4. Sounds high enough to me.”

Is that the right way to read this stat? I would have assumed that they were refering to workers not all humans. If you are right at 36k per family of four we could all live very well.

Well, according to wikipedia world’s nominal GDP is over 60 trillion USD. 7 billion people. So yeah, it’s about $10K/head.

@ mds vs. bert: The notion that demand is limitless seems to me deeply perverse and pernicious. Unlimited consumption, like unlimited economic growth, is pathological. Humans are two-legged creatures, with the same organs, very similar metabolisms, and a brain mass and neuron count within fairly strict parameters. What each of us needs in order to flourish is not identical, but neither is it infinite in quantity or variety. mds is right: the manufacture of appetites is in flat contradiction to contemporary economic ideology.

sandwichman @12 makes a crucially important point. The amount of useless economic activity (an impossible concept, if one accepts the fiction of “effective demand,” as in contemporary economic ideology) is colossal. There really ought to be a research institute devoted solely to toting up and reporting on the amount of economic activity (including large swatches of defense, insurance, financial services, advertising, marketing, communications, luxury goods, corrections, and law) that amounts to stealing milk from Third World babies.

Like others, I think that on the order of $10,000 a year should be sufficient all genuine material human wants. I tend to think this is because happpiness or wellbeing come from our exiswtence as reasoning, social beings, not as material ones. If you think of the moments you’ve been happiest, or what;s most important to you, you’ll think of relationships with other people, or with yourself through the exercise of some skill, etc. Cliche but true. All material goods can do is remove sources of unhappiness, and once the big ones are gone, you’re done. Being too hot or too cold can make you miserable, but you can’t get more happy by being more and more at the right temperature. And so down the line.

Interestingly, according to Richard Wilkinson, a per-capita income of $10,000 is right about where life expectancy becomes much more weakly correlated with GDP.

Might “all genuine human wants” include yet more healthcare (for, say, particularly expensive-to-treat genetic conditions) or, say, more education? It seems a little ambitious to assert that all needs above $10,000 a year are not ‘genuine’.

In 1956, “we have enough”.
So, look around you and make a list of what you wouldn’t miss.
Start with the computer you’re looking at, but don’t think you can get away with stopping there.
I don’t think this needs to be A vs B.
Any halfway generous reading of #7 will see that I’m not interested in a fullthroated defence of market forces. Rather, I’m rejecting self-deluding utopianism. A different thing entirely.

What Nick L and mpowell overlook is that MOST production today is not oriented toward satisfying human needs. It is directed toward concentrating the accumulation of capital and guarding the institutions that further that concentration. With transition to production for need instead of for greed, current technological capacity would be more than adequate.

This is an important point if true, I just don’t believe it. Less than 5% of US GDP is spent on defense. Of course, quite a lot more is spent on arguably unproductive activities like civil legal work, advertising and sales. It would be interesting to see an estimate of how much this really is, but I would not agree that this represent an effort towards the aggregation of capital. Maybe some of law, but marketing, advertising and sales is how our economy functions. A marxist can propose that he has a better economic system for allocating goods and resources and helping people make purchasing decisions in mind which will eliminate this waste (and I’d disagree, but at least it’s an argument), but that’s different than claiming these are explicitly efforts towards aggregating wealth. People at the tops of organizations spend a lot of effort making sure they stay there, and if you take their pay as a measure of their productivity I guess you could argue that quite a lot of productivity is wasted in this effort, but I think most of the work is done by the rest of the people in the workforce and I don’t believe their efforts are so oriented.

I’m not going to get into the debate on the actual numbers. That’s pretty tricky when you talk about what that means as far as purchasing power since a big expense, health care, has a price which is directly related to someone else’s income. I’ll just point out that even if you think 9K/year is enough (by the way, I have never spent less than $600/month on rent even as a grad student with roommates which would soak up 70% of this total), people still have to work a lot to get that. So there’s no life of leisure to contemplate unless you are willing to advance the claims made by Sandwichman that a significant portion of this really is wasted.

It’s not that $10K/year is going to make you happy. It’s that it seems that it should be enough to remove the basic sources of unhappiness: hunger, physical discomfort. And provide some basic opportunities, like books, some transportation, etc.

“It would be interesting to see an estimate of how much this really is…”

IIRC the figure is about 15% of GDP would be enough income to raise everyone above the (current) poverty level. Double that and you’re still at less than a third of GDP.

The question, obviously, is not whether you could live reasonably in a rich country today on $10,000 a year, but whether a country where per-capita income is $10,000/year has enough material resources in principle to provide a reasonable life for everyone.

A country like Brazil, South Africa or Thailand (all around $10k per capita) is certainly rich enough to provide reasonable quality housing, food, transportation, etc. to all its citizens, and to provide universal education and healthcare. I certainly know people from middle-income countries like this, not at all members of the elite, who don’t consider life in the United States to be at all preferable to life at home.What genuinely necessary goods are these countries simply too poor to produce?

Are we enriched by our encounters with objects?

But you seem to be suggesting instead that a level should be fixed at which all human needs should be declared met.

What I’m suggesting is this. There are material needs — for food, protection from the elements, mobility, etc. And then there are other kinds of needs, social or moral — meaningful relationships, useful work, a chance to develop one’s capacities, etc. Love and work, basically. A society that’s organized around maximizing material production may not do very well in meeting the other kinds of needs. Ours pretty clearly doesn’t. So if we think — and we really should think — that there is a declining urgency of material needs, whether or not we can identify a point of absolute satiation, then as we grow richer we should reorient our institutions from producing more, to supporting more fulfilling lives. We should ask less, what organization of production will maximize the amount of stuff our labor produces, and more, what organization will maximize the opportunity for people to derive satisfaction in their working lives, conditional on some adequate level of total output.

There’s no conflict with continuing progress in science — if anything, science is already organized much more around intrinsic motivation than most of the rest of our society.

@34:

Das Subjekt.

‘False consciousness’ was always a particularly evasive way of preferring theory to human reality.

This is the human reality where we’re all materially richer than people in 1956 were because our inexhaustible dissatisfaction means we all can own $300 netbooks, I take it?

mds, I responded to one piece of snark because George seemed to think you’d made a point. You can stick your second piece of snark up your arse.

I was thinking in terms of $9k per household. If $9-10k is genuinely per capita then that clearly makes a big difference. Although that has to cover all public goods like education, policing and health as people have pointed out.

Life in middle-income countries is much more liveable on a modest income (equivalent to minimum wage in the North) because most middle-income countries are very unequal and therefore labour-intensive services are cheap. I’m currently living in such a country, and it makes eating out, travel and other such luxuries very affordable. Very nice for local middle class people and expats. But if the world was more equal then these kind of services would be expensive, as they are in places like Switzerland and Sweden – obviously still better for the poor in middle income countries though!

This is the problem with this kind of static comparison – it assumes that prices would remain constant after redistribution. In actual fact because of the inelasticity of demand for primary commodities, in a more equal world the prices of many staples such as fossil fuels, grain and cooking oil would rise significantly.

Achieving that $10k per capita would involve pretty big distributive transfers away from populations in the North, and giving up the standard of living they have come to enjoy would be difficult for those populations to say the least. If the whole world were like Europe in the 1950s I think A & H would be more or less right. But as their note that they know nothing of Asia suggests, the fact that huge parts of the world remain underdeveloped means that issues of material scarcity and distribution are going to remain with us for a very long time.

the fact that huge parts of the world remain underdeveloped means that issues of material scarcity and distribution are going to remain with us for a very long time.

Oh sure. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the problems of scarcity have been solved everywhere. When I say that economic life in the rich countries no longer needs to be organized around the production of ever more stuff, I’m not denying that there are big parts of the world where more stuff really is needed.

On the non-gender specific pronoun thing I reckon that instead of coming up with a whole new scheme for the neutral pronoun you’d just make the, currently male, pronoun the non-gender specific one and invent new ones for male people.

Man = person of any gender
Woman = person of female gender
Wereman = person of male gender

Apparently “were” meant a male man in Old English.

The awesome thing about this is that it retcons all the current literature to be non-gender specific. And it would make me a wereman. Raowr.

I don’t have any idea what the male equivalent of “he” or “him” would be but it wouldn’t matter as much if it was clumsy since you don’t need to refer to specifically male pro-people all that often.

Presuming I get to wave my magic wand to equalize global consumption and discard most of the FIRE sector while I’m at it… It seems that this equalization will fix many more problems than just the most obvious ones like “the world’s poorest are currently at risk of literal starvation.”

For example, one person worries about the viability of organic agriculture with flattened income distribution. But if organic agriculture is (implicitly) always a niche choice for high-income people, what is the point? We only have the one planet. If you can afford “wise” consumption only due to others’ relative deprivation, it does no good. It’s like buying a bunch of carbon credits and claiming that your net emissions are now below those of an Indian farmer; it might work as a mathematical abstraction, but it seems extremely dubious as a moral or practical proposition for environmental improvement. Let’s you and he first have equal opportunities to consume, then we’ll work out how to have organic food without making the hard parts someone else’s problem.

I’m not sure that income equalization would be mostly bad even for relatively wealthy people, like the median American. Americans’ high incomes haven’t protected them from rising-even-faster costs of education and health care. Income flattening is going to tame those costs even if it raises the prices of most consumer goods. There’s also no doubt some psychological benefit to workers in eliminating the incentives that currently exist to chase cheap labor around the globe. How many hamburgers or $2 t-shirts would you trade for higher employment and job security, both for yourself and your whole society?

If an hour of labor pays approximately the same everywhere and in every field of employment, jobs that are now low-status and low-pay would receive a fairer share of effort to make them less strenuous and inefficient, and/or they would be done less. This in turn should improve how things are generally done in addition to how they are compensated. Would toilet exteriors retain so many muck-trapping features if even doctors and senators were expected to clean them (or pay someone else for cleaning at the same rate they are paid)? Would consumer electronics be discarded after 2 years, and built around that expectation, if everyone in the production chain were paid at the same rate as the devices’ buyers and designers?

If equalized consumption drives up the prices of fossil fuel, good. It will make it easier for non-fossil alternatives to displace them. For that matter, I understand that in poor rural areas of the world fossil fuels are often used as an (expensive, hazardous) compensation for the lack of reliable electrical infrastructure. The poorest people may pay several times what middle-class Americans do for basic things like a liter of clean drinking water or an hour of reading light at night. They don’t even have the option to cook with electric heat, but contribute to deforestation, spend substantially more labor, and risk respiratory disease cooking over wood fires indoors. Who would tolerate this insane state of affairs, other than people too deprived to have any other option?

Yes, “man” originally referred to all human beings (cf. anthropos, homo), but its drift into specifying male vs. female (and male adult vs. male juvenile) human beings should tell us something, namely, that however much word usage contributes to shaping consciousness, social practices matter at least as much and affect word usage. As long as the male human being remains, implicitly, the unmarked version of “human being” in social practice, it won’t matter much what new terms we adopt. Pretty soon, whatever word for “human being” we use (too bad that’s such an ugly and awkward phrase) will usually be understood (implicitly, unconsciously) to refer primarily to the male human being. (Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also try to effect change by changing our use of words.)
Speaking of which, my very first reaction to reading the extract above from the Horkheimer-Adorno exchange (inclined though I be to take both men’s thinking seriously): while these two “were” were chattering away, women were changing their babies’ diapers (well, in theory), others were doing their laundry, other were keeping their homes clean and tidy, others was getting their meals ready…. Others, including other “were,” were growing their food, getting it to market…. (Btw, the sing. is wer.)
What a strange launching pad this particular exchange is for a vitally important conversation to be had about work (as activity as well as product), about social relations, about individual aspirations (and their sources), about the social conditions that construct our frameworks (limiting them without utterly limiting them — think how infinity sets work), and much more (including equity), most of these being questions both men engaged passionately.

FWIW:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_human_needs

The radicalism of capitalism is the big insight of Marx.

You do remember that he was in favor of overthrowing it, right?

If you are right at 36k per family of four we could all live very well.

Well, those of us in families of four might. Economies of scale are quite powerful at the household level (four people don’t need four stoves or refrigerators or bathrooms), but should everyone be forced to live in groups? Even people who can’t find anyone they particularly want to live with?

BTW, at 36k per family of four, I’m assuming you’re practicing some basic degree of economizing like buying all your cars used (for example), right? How does everyone do that at once?

Try living alone on $9k and I don’t think you’ll find it all that pleasant. If you’re in the First World you can only avoid homelessness based on public goods and subsidies, which only works if someone else is making more and paying net taxes; if you’re in the Third World prices are lower, but the public goods suck, possibly including public safety and the stability of the political system (i.e. you could be killed in a civil war at any moment).

Chris and Steven, you are missing the point. Nobody is saying that an individual in today’s rich countries can meet all of their material needs on $10,000 a year. The claim is that a society whose per capita income has reached that level has sufficient resources to meet all of its pressing material needs and can be organized to reduce the amount of alienating and unpleasant work instead.

It’s reasonable, for instance, to say that in much of the contemporary United States every household needs to own a car. But that’s a result of how we’ve set up our our built environment. It doesn’t mean that one or more cars per household is a universal human requirement.

Lemuel –

Who’s including cars? $10.8k works out to $900 a month – median rent in the U.S is $651, and even trailers average at $410 a month. So you’re starting out house-insecure (housing costs above 30% of income), and at best have $490 for food, clothing, transportation, and all other necessities (or $16 a day).

What I’m asking is to pull out the unspoken calculations behind the $9-10k number – what level and quality of public goods are we assuming (health care? education? housing? social insurance?), and what change in the price level are we assuming? MPAVictoria seems to be suggesting that there will be a price fall, but are we sure? Will it be enough?

Even in households of 4, $36k is only 1.6 times the poverty rate. A sudden shock – the loss of a household member, an injury or illness, a sudden unexpected expenditure (car/heater/fridge breaks down, a missed payment leads to penalties) – easily pushes a household back under that line.

That being said, GDP/capita in the US is much higher than that and it would be possible for everyone here to live comfortably

OK. I don’t want to get fixated on the number. Let’s put it this way. Per capita GDP in the US grows around 2% annually, so it doubles every 35 years. We can use all of this growth to produce more stuff. Or we can use all of it to reduce working hours (and to reorganize work in less productive but more fulfilling ways). Or some mix. Historically, we’ve chosen all or almost all more stuff, and no or almost no more leisure. The essential point of the H&A position, as I understand it, is that no longer makes sense. We should be devoting much more of the gains from technological progress to reducing work instead. Personally, I think the material standard of living of 1975 but with everyone working half the hours, would be much more conducive to freedom and happiness than what we have now. Even if you don’t want to go that far, I think the logic of moving somewhat in that direction should still be convincing. But there are strict limits on how much you can make that choice individually, it’s really something we have to decide as a society.

And if you could also deal with all the waste in our current system, both unneeded production and unused capacity, then we could have the 1975 standard of living for much less than half our current workhours.

Anyway, focusing on the same country over time should avoid some of the confusion here. Ordinary Americans in 1975 had access to all the necessities of life, and that didn’t depend on a vast poor underclass to provide them, as you might argue for Brazil today.

js, only in certain ways. Marx was about the fulfillment of capital. F