Labour power over business

In teh previous article I argued that in a non-reciprocal gifting economy work conditions and business practices would be improved. I want to explore one of the consequences of this in more detail: labour power over business.

At this point, I have largely been comparing a non-reciprocal gifting economy to a liberal market economy (which I've often characterised as an exchange economy). I've been critiquing the liberal market economy and proposing a non-reciprocal gifting economy as an alternative. But there are other critiques of liberal market economies and other alternatives, the most well-known being various forms of socialism. So here I want to have a quick aside and raise a couple of comparisons to at least some forms of socialism. This isn't meant to be some sort of comprehensive critique of socialism, but rather a quick look at how some things are similar and some things are different regarding one of the most commonly recognised principles that underlies many forms of socialism.

So what is socialism?

"Socialism" is a word that applies to a huge variety of economic models, all of which have some sort of "family resemblance" - that is, we might not be able to find a core set of criteria that covers everything that people call "socialism", but we can probably find some recognisable features between different varieties, enough to consider them members of the same family of ideas.

There's no "one true socialism", however, and different people who call themselves socialists often disagree about what socialism is and who is a socialist. I'm not going to make an exhaustive survey, but it is worth noting that there are socialists who imagine an economy without money, and socialists who imagine economies with markets and various forms of money. There are socialists who think large-scale revolution is the path to a better economy, and socialists who think gradual form is more realistic. There are socialists who are happy with various hierarchical institutional structures, even if temporarily, and socialists who are always against them. And so on. So whatever comparison I make about socialism here, I am sure that there will be a variety of socialist who will disagree with the framing in some manner or another. But I don't think that is a worry: the point is to make one particular - and I think interesting - point of comparison.

For this article, I'll consider some very broad, partly ambiguous variety of socialism, just to give us a starting point, and I'll propose the following as the most relevant criterion: the workers own and control the means of production. Now, that's not enough to properly define a model of socialism, but it is enough to make the comparison I want to make.

So what does it mean? Well, roughly, the "means of production" are the things that allow industry and productivity. For example, tools, factories, machinery, equipment, materials, and so on. And "own" means "has exclusive control of". So if someone owns the means of production it means that they have exclusive control of tools, factories, machinery, and so on.

The socialist critique of the liberal market economy is the one, relatively small group of people own the means of production. This relatively small group is still enormous, because there are a lot of people in the world, but they form a relatively small proportion of the population overall. And they get to decide how the means of production are used, and so they use them for their own purposes and to further their own interests. But to have them used at scale, they need workers. These workers need money to live, and the people who own the means of production generally have money (that's both how they got the means of production as well as the exchange-value of the means of production), so the owners hire workers. Because the owners have the most control (they have the means of production, after all), and because they are interested only in things that are to their own benefit, they take most of the rewards of this productivity. The result is high inequality, worker exploitation, and a problematic society - not too dissimilar from the critique of the exchange that I have been making (and I have made it in the context of such earlier work).

The remedy for a lot of socialists, in one manner or another, is for the workers to own the means of production themselves. This has a few consequences. First, it means that workers will use this productivity to further their own interests, rather than the more exclusive interests of the previous owners. Second, it means that there will no longer be a distinction between owners and workers - rather than two classes of people whose interests diverge because of their different relationships to power, there will be one class of people, the worker-owners. Third, it means that the means of production won't be owned by a small group of people who function as individuals and follow their individual interests, but collectively by the workers to follow their collective interests.

The idea is that the use of resources directed to the interests of the few over the many - a type of domination - leads to an unsustainable, dysfunctional, exploitative, destructive society full of suffering, and that the remedy - the use of resources directed to the interests of society in general - will lead to a better future. I do not necessarily disagree.

Critiques

There are a lot of critiques of different models of socialism, including of particular socialist regimes, the notion that humans are greedy, that socialism is inherently authoritarian, and, of course, the economic calculation problem, which was initially aimed squarely at crtiquing centrally controlled economies. Some of these critiques hold water, and others are much weaker, including some that are fundamental misunderstandings or misrepresentations of the core concepts.

I want to focus on just two general ideas at the moment, which relate to the notion of collective ownership.

The first is a question about what constitutes the means of production, and therefore what can or cannot be owned by an individual ("personal property") or a worker-run business ("common property" or "collective property"). Socialists identify it as a problem if an individual (and here we also mean an exclusive group of people such as the owners of a corporation) owns the means of production (making it "private property"). If there is a nice, clear answer to what constitutes the means of production, then this is all sorted out neatly and we can easily say what an individual can own as personal property, and what they cannot own as private property and which should instead be collective property.

One example that is often used (at least, wherever I have been reading things) is a toothbrush. If the toothbrush is for brushing one's own teeth, then it is personal property. But if it is used to create something productively, such as polishing metal jewelry, then it is part of the means of production and should be collective property. It is therefore the function, and not the physical form of the property itself, that causes it to be part of the means of production or not.

Now, I wrote earlier that what constitutes work might be somewhat ambiguous, but this presents a problem for this classification. It means that there might be some confusion over what constitutes the means of production, and therefore whether it is able to be someone's personal property or private property. Whether this is likely to be a practical issue, I don't know, but it is certainly a problematic conceptual issue to me.

The second critique I want to raise is that of how collective property is administered. The critique goes something like this: people need to monitor, maintain and make decisions about collective property, and getting everyone together to make all those decisions all the time - presenting information about the state of the property, the capacities of it, the ideas about its use, and so on, and then deliberating collectively about what to do next - is too time consuming. It can't be that everyone can monitor all the property all of the time to ensure that it is being used as it was collectively directed to be used. So, in some manner or another, collectively property needs an administration team, and this administration team will end up forming an exclusive group - one that has access to all the information and information distribution and exert undue influence on decisions. And what if the collective determines to do something with the property that the worker does not like? Are they in some manner bound by the collective decision because they participated in it (e.g. by voting)?

I'm not here to make any claims about whether these are insurmountable problems for various models of socialism or not. They may well have elegant solutions. But I do think that there is a parallel between the goals of a non-reciprocal gifting economy and the goals of socialism, and so it may be of interest to socialists and others alike to see how a non-reciprocal gifting economy engages with the sort of concepts in this area.

Comparison with a non-reciprocal gifting economy

The way I see it, the biggest issue in this context is ensuring that resources are not directed towards the interests of the few, and that productivity is not done in a manner that exploits or harms the workers. The socialist answer is for the workers to control the means of production, though the method of that control, and the potential ambiguity about the means of production, mean that this is not necessarily straightforward to conceive of or implement.

A non-reciprocal gifting economy, I think, simply doesn't have this problem. Having already taken away exchanges and exchange-value, the new economic context is one where businesses are not just not motivated to pursue exploitative approaches, but where the workers hold the power to determine the shape and success of the project.

If workers do not believe in the project, they will not participate. If the conditions are poor, they will not participate. If things start well and then change, they will not participate. If they have suggestions about new approaches, changes in practices, moral concerns, or anything else, the owners will need to listen, or the workers will not participate. Without the workers, the project will not get done (unless the owners are the only workers required for the job). The workers hold the power to direct things in the manner that they choose. And not just the workers in this particular business, but the workers that provide this business with resources. If a dubious project needs wood, it will have to convince a lumber business to supply them with wood, and if the workers of that business are unconvinced, the lumber business owners will want to listen. The workers don't fear unemployment, and they don't get rewarded extra for putting their morals aside, and so convincing them that the project is a good idea is the fundamental motivation for someone to work in this particular business.

There is no need to put in place any particular conception of property, nor any particular admnistrative structure to oversee the use of that property. Instead, workers can join businesses whose administrative structures they like, and some workers may like democratic workerplaces and others may like workplaces run by visionaries witha tightly controlled team (though one, of course, they can exit if they change their mind). There is no need to discern which toothbrushes are part of the means of production and which are not, not only because it can be ambiguous what constitutes work or production, but also because things that are not being used are not a benefit but a cost, and are likely to be passed on to someone who can use them rather than being hoarded.

So I make this comparison for two reasons: one, I think that a non-reciprocal gifting economy can achieve many of the fundamental goals of socialists and therefore might be quite palatable to them, and, second, I think that these goals can be achieved in a rather straightforward and elegant manner that doesn't involve attempting to enforce any particular division of property types of administrative hurdles - these things can be left as they are, transformed not by internal changes, but by changes in the context around them.