Collective Conscious

Matt Ygle­sias:

The answer, I think, is sov­er­eign wealth funds. That’s how they do it in Sin­ga­pore and con­cep­tu­ally it’s the right way to do it. An Amer­i­can ver­sion of Singapore’s Cen­tral Prov­i­dent Fund would be much too large for any mar­ket to absorb, but the US share of world GDP should shrink over time and it’s con­ceiv­able that there would be some way to work this out on the state level to cre­ate smaller units. A fund like that would ren­der the pub­lic list­ing issue irrel­e­vant, since it would clearly have the scale to get in on the pri­vate equity game. This would, need­less to say, entail inject­ing a hefty ele­ment of social­ism into Amer­i­can pub­lic pol­icy but I’m always hear­ing from smart con­ser­v­a­tives how much they admire Singapore.

Peter Frase:

In the sys­tem I’ve just described, cap­i­tal and wage labor still exist, and still define how the econ­omy works. But now each per­son is simul­ta­ne­ously a cap­i­tal­ist and a worker, in some degree or for some part of their life. Think­ing through the inad­e­quacy of such an arrange­ment is, for me, a more acces­si­ble way of think­ing through the argu­ments of peo­ple like André Gorz and Moishe Pos­tone. They argued that the point isn’t to get rid of the cap­i­tal­ist class and have the work­ers take over: the point is to get rid of cap­i­tal and wage labor.

For what it’s worth, I think there are two dis­tinct con­flicts going on here, and that they need to be dis­en­tan­gled before the dis­cus­sion can really pro­ceed. The first is the own­er­ship of cap­i­tal; Ygle­sias and Frase are both cor­rect when they assert that this method of pub­lic own­er­ship is in fact a “social­ist” way of assign­ing to work­ers nom­i­nal own­er­ship of cap­i­tal. On one level this is nice; if prop­erly admin­is­tered (as it is presently in China and Sin­ga­pore), pub­lic own­er­ship can pro­vide the resources to grant gen­er­ous social insur­ance ben­e­fits, infra­struc­ture projects, and so on by way of immense gov­ern­ment sur­pluses as opposed to round after round of Wall Street bonuses.

Frase hits on the sec­ond ele­ment, how­ever, when he assesses Ygle­sias’ pro­posal from the philo­soph­i­cal ground­ing of Marx­ism. In this view, the prob­lem in not just own­er­ship, or even enti­tle­ment to the returns of cap­i­tal, but the fact that the work­ing class is per­sis­tently “exploited” in a very real sense. My take on this is slightly dif­fer­ent from the usual expla­na­tion, but here I go anyway.

Say cap­i­tal­ists con­trol cap­i­tal and labor­ers con­trol labor. In order to make things, cap­i­tal­ists con­tribute some cap­i­tal and labor­ers some labor. In the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, the cap­i­tal­ist pays the laborer a fixed rate for work, and the cap­i­tal­ist owns what­ever is produced.

This arrange­ment is con­sid­ered “exploita­tive” because it asserts that a per­son is free to sell his or her own time/​free will on the open mar­ket, and that the cre­ative out­put of that labor is then owned by the cap­i­tal­ist who bought the time. It doesn’t mat­ter how pro­duc­tive the per­son was — what­ever is pro­duced is owned by the cap­i­tal­ist. It cor­re­sponds almost pre­cisely inversely to John Locke’s orig­i­nal the­ory of own­er­ship, which asserted that one comes to own a prod­uct by virtue of hav­ing sup­plied the labor:

What­so­ever he tilled and reaped, laid up and made use of before it spoiled, that was his pecu­liar right; what­so­ever he enclosed, and could feed and make use of, the cat­tle and prod­uct was also his.

So the arrange­ment of mod­ern cap­i­tal­ism turns right­ful own­er­ship on its head by this view, and nor­mal­izes a sys­tem in which the laborer is expected to sell what can­not be sold — his own time. By con­trast, the cap­i­tal­ist is allowed to keep — in fact is enti­tled to — the prod­uct of his cap­i­tal, which can clearly be sep­a­rated from the cap­i­tal­ist with­out alien­at­ing from him some essen­tial ele­ment of self.

This is what Frase is talk­ing about when he searches for a social­ism that abol­ishes “cap­i­tal and wage labor.” That sort of social­ism is a philo­soph­i­cal the­ory assert­ing that man is insep­a­ra­ble from his labor. With that basis, the only right­ful divided arrange­ment is one in which labor­ers are enti­tled to the profit and prod­uct of their work, and cap­i­tal is rented from cap­i­tal­ists at a fixed rate, and even that arrange­ment is ten­u­ous; the point is the final abo­li­tion of the class division.

That doesn’t get us very far; in the mod­ern world, a com­pletely per­sonal eco­nom­ics in which worker is cap­i­tal­ist, etc etc, seems arti­sanal and out­moded. Cor­po­ra­tions are nec­es­sary to man­age mas­sive global oper­a­tions; economies of scale and of spe­cial­iza­tion demand the sort of billable-​​hour econ­omy that cor­po­ra­tions have proven to be so adept at man­ag­ing. In this market-​​driven con­text, the ques­tion then becomes: is col­lec­tive own­er­ship enough? And in the social­ist frame­work, the answer is really: no. It is a half-​​measure that allows some addi­tional equity through claims on prof­its for labor­ers, but fails to rem­edy the fun­da­men­tal dis­crep­ancy at work beneath the unjust out­comes of the system.