Does the US Left have a “cancel culture” problem? Or is ‘cancel culture’ just a cynical right-wing bogeyman aimed at disparaging leftists, Millennials, and academia?
Perhaps cancel culture is mostly mirage: the social media shadow of American celebrity obsession, distracting us from the overall healthy left culture on the ground?
Maybe left-wing cancel culture is real, but marginal. Just a crazy niche of fringe folks—better to ignore?
Or is there a genuine ‘there’ there—a problem with significant reach and influence—and if so, what does it consist of?
While we’re by no means settled on the term “cancel culture” and remain open to other possible names for ‘it,’[1] experience and investigation over the past decade have led us to the conclusion that, yes, indeed, there is a ‘there’ there: whatever we call it, ‘cancel culture’ indexes a real problem on the Left. And it is no minor matter, of interest only to the ‘cancelled’; it hinders whole sectors of the organized and movement Left—intellectually, socially, morally, and politically.[2]
How might we define this left cancel culture? It is undoubtedly a tall task, and we do not mean to offer here a monolithic or final definition. Nonetheless, for now, we offer this: that cancel culture on the left can be understood as a bundle of distinct yet interlocking methods that mishandleproblems among regular and working people, as if some regular people are—or are always on the verge of becoming—the enemy (and others, their fragile and helpless victims).[3] This blunt projection of demonization (and blanket victimhood) leads to treating differences, complexities, and conflicts that could and should be approached through reasoned discussion and principled struggle instead as melodramatic antagonisms that demand one or another form of coercion—whether by relying on existing institutional power, or the moral panic of ‘mob rule’.
We might grasp cancel culture here as an expression of punitive (or carceral) thinking within our own social movements, whereby the punishment and purge of individuals comes to symbolically substitute for the collective structural and cultural transformations that liberation ultimately requires. In this sense, cancel culture represents a seeping of ruling class methods of punishment and ‘divide and rule’ into the emancipatory movement, but without access to the resources of the ruling apparatus—a fact which makes cancel culture’s maneuverings in some respects even cruder, more erratic, and less discerning than the more sophisticated attacks of established state power. However genuine the concerns that may animate it, cancel culture remains a grossly inadequate salve for real world injuries and actual domination.
Let us be clear, we are not here making a ‘liberal’ argument: We concede that there are antagonisms in the current capitalist-imperialist world system that are so deeply entrenched that they may indeed require the use of force to overcome and transform them. This is, in other words, not a ‘defense’ of the economic and political Bosses who are positioned to force underlings to endure indignity, exploitation, and abuse—and then to deny them access to institutional recourse. But cancel culture trains us to see virtually all social conflicts, even those among our own comrades, allies, and regular people, through this harshly antagonistic lens. And that’s a problem. Leaping to treat even what may be fleeting (or unsubstantiated) offenses as unquestionable mortal injuries, cancel culture can quarantine and ostracize, but can it understand, let alone heal or transform, the underlying problems to which it responds? Can it attract and sustain the kind of broad mass involvement we need if we are ever to win the deep social transformation our times demand?
The list of fallacies below is an attempt to clarify and compile some of the false assumptions and wrong methods—sometimes held consciously, often unconsciously embedded in existing practices and organizations—that enable ‘cancel culture’ (hereafter CC) and more generally perpetuate the marginalization, divisiveness, and even self-destruction of the contemporary Left. While we’ve tried to represent the operative notions here in a way that shows their serious problems—and with a hefty dose of sarcasm—we’ve also tried to do so in good faith, using language not too far from what perpetuators and participants of CC might recognize as their own, even as the ideological undercurrents we bring out for each are seldom brought to the surface so explicitly.
One last note: It could be pointed out that many of the problematic ideas and practices below are themselves symptoms of deeper issues—from the logistical limitations of contemporary left organizations, to the weakening of the labor movement and other forms of progressive politics based in democratic accountability, to the distortions of corporate social media algorithms, to a sense of despair and suspicion that pervades society generally in this age of compound crises, when an emancipatory path forward may seem in doubt.[4] Nonetheless, though the notions enumerated below can indeed be seen as the symptomatic effects of more fundamental causes, we believe that ideas and methods that take hold of the minds of millions can become causes in their own right—and that many of these fallacies have taken on a life of their own.[5]
And so, we present: 21 Fallacies that Fuel Cancel Culture.
1) Optics are more important than Substance.
We must worry more about how things look from the outside, and less about what’s happening on the inside—be it a meeting, an organization, an event, a relationship, or an artwork. External appearances are not even ‘external’ anymore, since such optics, with the help of social media, quickly become internal factors as well. A tweet from a private meeting can start a public firestorm that will consume an organization even before said meeting is completed. Whereas it might have once been possible to explore the nuances of complex matters internally, admitting rough edges and testing unorthodox interpretations in private before deciding on public positions or precise language for broader consumption, this line between ‘public’ and ‘private’ has collapsed. Anyone attending a meeting might shave a sharp splinter from the draft party platform and send it flying as a deadly public blow dart in an instant. Therefore, we must now hold every ‘private’ gathering—every meeting or seminar, every moment, each sentence—to the same public optical standard we would use for an official press conference. No word, phrase, or idea that can be decontextualized or excerpted—tik tok-ed or tweeted—to imply something ‘offensive’ or ‘problematic’ should be allowed, even in private. The enforced loss of spontaneity (and honesty) is a small price to play for making sure we aren’t made to look like fools or bigots. Better to strangle internal discussion than to take a public dart in the neck.
2) Engagement equals endorsement; Association is complicity.
To engage someone in public conversation means you are endorsing all their (potentially problematic) ideas or associations, or at least making light of them—even those ideas that are not part of whatever conversation occurs. Thus, an interlocutor must be deemed ‘safe’ of compromising statements or associations prior to such engagement. If you or your organization don’t have the time or resources to research all the ideas and statements of a potentially ‘controversial’ person ahead of time, well, then maybe you should just not bother engaging them at all. After all, merely being associated (even privately) with a person deemed problematic is enough to compromise you. It is thus better to cut ties with problem people than to sustain contact with them, since the influence of association can only pull in one direction: the ‘bad’ one. The idea that your engagement might encourage positive change in the person deemed problematic, or at least help keep that person from further sliding in the problematic direction, is naïve, at best. Worse, the idea that such association might help the rest of us better understand the context or incorrect ideas that gave rise to the problem in the first place insultingly implies we don’t already know enough to pass judgment. In short: it’s just not possible to do something good with someone bad. Cut ‘em loose.
3) Conversations can’t change problematic people; Political opponents can’t be won over.
If a person opposes us now, they’ll most likely oppose us forever. It’s not possible that discussion with ‘problematic’ figures might give the person in question a chance to clarify, correct, contextualize, qualify, or walk back troubling ideas. Bad ideas can’t be deflated or improved through engagement or ideological struggle; they must be de-platformed. It’s not possible—or not worth taking seriously as possibility—that such people could have, even at one and the same time, multiple views, values, interests, priorities, associations, or commitments that conflict with one another, with some pointing towards a better way forward, others holding such progress back, or with some ideas being residual remnants reflecting that person’s history, but not necessarily their future. People don’t change. They are static and self-identical. Disregard that dialectical bullshit about people as constantly BECOMING relative to what they HAVE BEEN and what they MIGHT BE. People just are what they ARE. Those the enemy has persuaded are lost to us forevermore. Say goodbye to your Trumpy uncle.
4) Problematic views and acts flow from malice or monstrosity, not mere error.
Why give a person the benefit of the doubt when you can cast them as your conscious and mortal enemy, a living embodiment of all you seek to oppose and destroy? Forget that quaint notion that we should “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance.” It’s best to assume that the do-er of a problematic thing was, at the time of said offense, in possession of all relevant information, the full range of opinion, and had their senses about them, and yet still—even after all of that—pursued this bad idea or act as the one that they still wanted or needed to take. Circumstances don’t mitigate wrongdoing.In the off chance that an offending person was not in sound mind or body at the time of an act in question, well, that’s tough shit: they should have known better than to put themselves in a position where they would be likely to fuck up. If their sources of information, opinion, or logic are flawed, well, that’s their fault too. There is no need to factor where someone has come from into our judgment of them today. Good People don’t make Bad Mistakes, therefore, making an error deemed Bad is proof of being a Bad Person. Talk of mitigation is liberal bullshit that upholds an oppressive order of privilege.
5) People can be reduced to their worst action or idea, without doing them an injustice.
Why assume that something bad someone has said or done was an outlying mistake when it can be seen instead as the expression of their essential being? People’s worst moments express their truest selves. (Indeed, for every shitty thing they’ve done that we’re aware of, there are probably a dozen shittier things still unknown to us—we need to factor in these ‘unknown knowns’ as well.) Further, to call attention to the good work that people have done (or might do in the future) as a matter of contextualizing a misstep is to make light of their shittiness. The aftermath of harm is not a time for ‘balance’ or ‘perspective’—and, let’s face it, these days we are always in the aftermath of harm. The only thing that ought to be discussed once a wrong is reported is that wrong; any other element of a person’s work, character, or history is at best irrelevant. Worse, mentioning the ‘other side’ is insulting and insensitive to those who feel they have been harmed and understandably want ‘justice’. It is fine and just to essentialize those you oppose.
6) The passage of time is irrelevant.
A wrong committed decades ago is just as relevant as one that happened last week. There is no reason to assume that someone who did something shitty years back (be it donning an insensitive Halloween costume or acting like an asshole at a party) has taken time to think about it, or to improve their conduct or philosophy in the interim. Certainly, there is no obligation to investigate whether someone has made steps to improve since those events years ago; it’s perfectly ok to treat them now as if they are the person they were then—or that someone told you they were then, since maybe you weren’t around when whatever went down went down. Since our movement seldom seeks to put people in actual prison—that would mean cooperating with the police state—formal sentencing never occurs…but also must never end. People can and should be banished and branded for life, regardless of what they have done to improve themselves or address the relevant issues. We must assume the worst if we are to keep our spaces safe. People don’t change, so there’s no need to give them a chance to. Debts to victims or to society can never be repaid. But a culture of permanent excommunication will prevent harmful future behavior and help past victims heal.
7) A threat to ideological comfort is a threat to safety.
Being subjected to challenging, provocative, offensive, or incorrect ideas puts the person hearing them in jeopardy. Intellectual discomfort causes harm. Therefore, it is ok—even imperative—to exert prior restraint, up to and including prohibition and exclusion of discomfiting ideas or words (or the people seen as likely to express them). People have a right not to be offended—not just a right to respond reasonably to what offends. Moments of intellectual provocation are not ‘teachable moments’; they are triggers for trauma. Making people think too hard about difficult subjects becomes a kind of violence. In particular, people’s ideas about their own perceived identity or oppression must not be challenged. People from historically oppressed groups especially cannot and ought not be subjected to arguments or debates about such topics, in print or in-person, regardless of the merit or content of the criticism expressed. Ideas that people have grown attached to should be viewed as parts of their physical or spiritual being. For someone to abstract and criticize said ideas—even for purposes of temporary analysis—amounts to a kind of ‘attack.’ Therefore, it is the job of good ‘allies’ to protect oppressed or traumatized people, not only from clear and present physical or institutional attacks, but from intellectual or ‘existential’ ones as well, like, say, someone asking a critical question about a concept or term with which they presently identify. Most certainly, it’s not possible for someone outside of this social group to offer helpful insight on matters pertaining to that group’s current situation, no matter how much genuine study or listening on the topic they’ve done. Immediate experience trumps outside knowledge, period. (Never mind that what counts as ‘experience’ may be at least in part the product of the ideological lenses through which a person has been taught to look.) A corollary: oppressed groups are monolithic, without significant ideological, intellectual, political, or methodological conflicts within their own ranks. So, it’s ok for one spokesperson of said group to give voice to the entire group’s will or interest. Anyone who contradicts such a spokesperson—especially if they do not personally belong to the category in question—is disrespecting or harming the group and needs to shut the fuck up.
8) Complicated things (and people) are compromised and not worth engaging.
How can we learn from people or things (including artworks) that are themselves ‘problematic’? Why not just move on and replace the shitty with something safer? Sure, there may be artworks (or people) that now stand for something offensive but have been deemed ‘brilliant’ in the past. But what does it say about you if you overlook the offensiveness in favor of the brilliance by promoting such content? Are you saying that aesthetic beauty or intellectual rigor or historical influence is more important than keeping our spaces safe and inclusive? How can we reduce the influence of problematic works or people if we keep giving them airtime? If someone is seen to be seriously wrong on 1 out of 10 issues, then their insight on the other 9 things is compromised, if not altogether invalidated by their hypocrisy. Hearing them out on those other 9 issues would only be providing cover for the problematic 10th. You can’t just bracket off the bad parts; they bleed into everything. The bad gobbles up the good. It’s thus not conceivable that a person or group with 9 incorrect ideas might nonetheless have something crucial to teach us regarding the 10th. Wokeness comes in batches—no sense distinguishing all these different aspects. As a corollary, wherever possible, people should declare themselves with clear and easy-to-read labels and signs. If the expressions of such a person appears to be complicated, or not immediately ‘clear’ and on the ‘correct’ side in a way that can fit into, say, a series of rapid-fire tweets, then that person bears the responsibility for any confusion that results. The responsibility certainly does not fall on the viewer or reader to investigate such complexities. Who has time to do close readings these days?
9)To entertain a ‘problematic’ joke or cultural product is never innocent.
Laugh at impure humor and you open your belly to the abyss. To listen to a comedian or other cultural content creator who is pushing values deemed bad is to risk being influenced by that content—how can one be exposed to bad content and not be marked? Even worse, it is to give the impression to those who have already made up their mind about the comedian or cultural producer that you have not made up your mind. Such indecisiveness on your part throws the settled judgements of the offended into doubt—an existential insult. After all, if you trusted and believed in them properly then why couldn’t you take their word for it? Why did you need to go and explore it for yourself? What, do you think that you’re smarter than the rest of us? That your curiosity or ‘complicated’ enjoyment is more important than other people’s right to have their grief-laden verdicts accepted without question? The death of comedy and entertainment is a small price to pay to make sure nobody gets their feelings hurt.
10)Every “micro”-aggression is just the toxic tip of a macro-iceberg.
There are no innocent errors, just instances that have yet to be analyzed and traced down to the deeper danger beneath. The difference between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ aggressions is a microscope; little annoyances or snubs are made of the same stuff as life-threatening mortal violations. It is thus correct to react to a minor offense as if it were a major one—especially if a pattern of minor problems has been alleged. In the latter case, one need not give the offender a chance to correct their behavior before bringing out the big guns: they already have a ‘history of misbehavior,’ after all, and must be condemned for it. Their chance for rectification and improvement has passed (even if this is the first time we’ve communicated our concerns to them). The fact that existing law makes qualitative distinctions between different categories of acts—and that the alleged behavior may not have crossed any legal line—is yet more proof that the Law is a relic of an oppressive order that doesn’t take oppressed people’s wounds seriously. By amplifying and harshly punishing examples of even low-level alleged misbehavior, we amplify the safety of our special spaces (at least for all who have not been flayed alive for past missteps). Fuck fine distinctions and fuck due process.
11)The moral imperative is to eliminate (what might be) evil, even if it means wrecking good work.
Political progress is to be understood not as a complex positive project of building something Good from the mixed materials that now exist, but rather, negatively, as the elimination or exposure of those elements deemed Evil. Better a pure Nothing than a compromised Something. Radical political intervention is best understood as a solvent to burn away the bad rather than as an adhesive or mixing agent that holds things together so that the better can be built. Isn’t it best to purify oneself and others of sympathy for the devil rather than to burden one’s brain or one’s organization with the messiness of sifting through more mixed elements? Tear that shit down. We’ll worry about building things later (maybe).
12) If we deprive badness of a platform, it will lose its platform elsewhere, too.
If we can prevent bad or backward ideas from getting a hearing in ‘progressive’ or ‘left’ platforms, this will prevent their circulation elsewhere. We can meaningfully reduce the circulation and impact of ideas in the ‘mainstream’ by denying them the ‘legitimacy’ provided by left spaces and engagement, however small and isolated the Left may be at present. The possibility that such an approach might rather enable the Left’s own blindness and disconnection from the actual state of ‘controversial’ debates, and thus perpetuate or expand our isolation from people who are already influenced by that ‘mainstream,’ is a secondary or tertiary concern. The further possibility that spending time with someone or something deemed objectionable might actually help us better relate to our neighbor or coworker or family member who has also been exposed to that person or thing, is swallowed up by the danger that such exposure will merely drag us into being ‘like them,’ or else give comfort to the enemy. The related likelihood, that I can only criticize something accurately if I know the object of critique intimately, is eclipsed by the danger that, in giving stuff deemed bad such close attention, you impart the impression that you secretly or not-so-secretly actually like that garbage. Can’t have that. Sure, right now the millions of people watching so-and-so’s podcast or cable show may not be waiting for our permission to do so—or even know that we exist!—but unless we model what a principled refusal to look or listen looks like, how will said millions ever learn to do likewise? If enough of us just close our eyes and block our ears really tight then it will almost be like the big bad wolf outside the door isn’t there anymore.
13) We can win social change without winning over the millions who currently disagree with us.
After all, isn’t righteousness on our side? Aren’t we fighting for the good of the entire planet? Who needs to win over the conservative hicks (or centrist fence-sitters) in a backward country like this one? Or heck, even in our own households, communities, or classrooms? It’s not like revolutions require super-majorities, do they? Can’t a militant minority do the job? It’s not like radical change means you need to win masses of people over.Those who disagree with us are probably stupid and hopeless. (The masses, alas, turned out to be asses.) Best to protect our spaces from such “deplorables.” Wouldn’t building an expanded base end up watering down the purity of our correct politics anyway? Why take the risk that our ever-so-precious conversation or community could be mired with their mess?
14) ‘Digging in’ in the face of CC critique is proof of privileged arrogance and domination.
If someone refuses to give in to criticism and public pressure to retract or apologize, no matter how small the issue was to begin with, their resistance to recanting itself reveals a bigger issue, which may require more extreme response. In particular, for a person associated with a historically dominant group to refuse to admit the validity of criticisms coming from someone associated with a historically dominated group is to engage in an arrogant abuse of privilege, regardless of the merits of the criticism expressed. Such resistance suggests that the refuser disrespects not just their immediate critic, but the group that critic is speaking for and the entire historical experience of collective oppression that has led up to this point. Someone who refuses to give in to group pressure could not possibly be a person committed to the facts as they understand them, nor could they be expressing honest concerns out of their love for the cause; they are merely providing new evidence of how insensitive and domineering they are, a fact which then in turn pretty much settles the question of whether or not they were actually guilty of the precipitating offense in the first place (as if it were in doubt!). Although there may not have been clear evidence for that first catalyzing event (ok, now we’ll admit it!), the evidence we gather from the accused’s resistance itself is retroactive, since resistance to the group itself proves that the person is the type to commit those other egregious errors as well. (Never mind that the extreme group response itself may be what pushed the targeted person to double-down in self-defense in the first place.) Corollary: Even a false accusation can be of use; it helps us see who is willing to go along with the group, and who is not. If someone ‘digs in’ and disputes the nature a ‘minor’ offense, they are merely revealing that the problem goes deeper, as we predicted. A micro-violator who is stubborn about their problematic millimeter might as well be demanding our most precious mile.
15) The open exchange of ideas is not to be trusted.
“Free speech” is an oppressive concept, a chimera that elides the actual-existing power dynamics that rule our world. Face it: beneath every invocation of “freedom” is the reality of power. Considering the compromised nature of discourse, then, it’s preferable to use force to shut down purveyors of bad ideas, if we can, rather than to use reason, argument, or evidence to refute the ideas themselves. Why debate when you can de-platform! The fewer people are exposed to those bad ideas, the better. Let’s be honest: We don’t trust people to sort truth from lies, even with our help. And if we’re really being honest, we’re not sure we can unpack and criticize the specific ideas of our enemies effectively anymore, anyway, since we’ve pretty much limited our intake of them to second-hand snippets and soundbites for years. (Not everyone has the luxury of spending endless hours in the library, dude.) Therefore, we’re justified shutting down misleaders in advance to protect the herd. Why initiate or allow complex debate and discussion that is just likely to confuse people? Or even worse, to lead our group to lose its clarity, unity, and focus? If our organization admitted that it didn’t yet have a clear, single, united view on something important, well, wouldn’t that make us seem indecisive and weak? How can we be the vanguard of the revolution if we admit we’re still thinking things through? Airing important differences aloud impairs our movement.
16) Opinion and rumor about certain things must be accepted as fact.
The statement of a strongly held feeling about another’s wretchedness, even if lacking substantiation, can be enough to decide the truth of a matter—at least for now. And since there is no obligation on the rest of us to investigate said ‘truth of the matter’ –since we’re all busy and life is hard, and investigations are difficult, and our activist organizations don’t have the resources of the state to call upon—it’s fine to let such strongly stated assertions stand as accepted truth…pretty much indefinitely. Furthermore, it’s improper to point out that a second-hand (or third- or fourth-hand) account is not a first-hand one. This is not the time to distinguish between hearsay and solid evidence! Similarly, it’s not ok to ask for evidence or substantiation in the wake of an unproven claim on a sensitive topic. What’s wrong with you, do you not believe INSERT SPECIAL CATEGORY OF PERSON HERE? It’s better to uncritically accept and quickly act upon serious but unsubstantiated rumor than to subject oneself or one’s organization to the messiness, discomfort, uncertainty, or complexity of pursuing an actual investigation.
17)Accusers (even third-party ones) are always reliable—so due process need not apply.
It’s not necessary to hear ‘both sides;’ when we’re dealing with an iteration of systemic oppression, one side is more than enough. Aggrieved people don’t lie, dissemble, or exaggerate. In fact, the experience of being aggrieved necessarily improves moral character. All that violence and systemic injustice and desperation a person may have been exposed to doesn’t leave any compromising psychic wounds. Aggrievement and oppression, however, do make people more vulnerable to harm, especially when others doubt or question their honesty or reliability. Thus, denying aggrieved people the fullness of human complexity, including the potential to be dishonest or just confused, is less bad than making it seem like you don’t take their every word for gospel. It follows that accusers or allegers need not—indeed, should not—be made to go on the record in detail. (We must ‘believe survivors,’ yes, but without requiring them to be specific about what exactly we’re being asked to believe.) It goes without saying that the accused need not have the right to confront their accusers, or even to know the specifics of what they are being accused of. (Habeas corpus is so 20th century and so ‘bourgeois state-y’—forget that liberal crap about it being a product of historical struggles against state repression.) It’s more important to protect the anonymity of accusers, and even 3rd or 4th hand rumor-ists and gossips, than it is to provide the accused a fair chance to address what’s been said about them. Transparency just doesn’t apply to those who circulate charges—that would put them at risk, since, after all, we must assume that all who have been alleged to have caused harm in the past are out to perpetrate even greater harm in the future. The sheer possibility of retaliation, which can never be fully ruled out, means that we must not demand accountability from accusers, or from those who speak in their name. Thus, it’s perfectly ok to weaponize defamatory gossip behind the back of the accused, to work to exclude them from spaces (including online ones), or even to go after their livelihoods, rather than to try and clear things up through more direct two-way communication. Further, since we cannot expect the actual victim to take on the burden of speaking up, anyone speaking in their name or on their unconfirmed behalf must be treated with all the deference owed to the actual alleged victim. The fact that some who speak in the victim’s name may not be authorized to do so and may even be weaponizing the situation for their own ends is outweighed by our belief that Excommunicating Perpetrators objectively helps Victims In General to heal and feel safe. Forget the lessons of the ‘telephone game’ we learned in kindergarten; second- or third- or fourth-hand allegers should be treated as if they are giving reliable first-hand accounts. There are no misunderstandings, only survivors and perpetrators: Which side are you on?
18) Exaggeration in the cause of social justice is necessary.
Emotional amplification, public dramatization, or even deliberate exaggeration is justified in cases where someone is speaking out against injustice or alleged wrongdoing. Feelings of aggrievement are to be validated, not questioned or fact checked. The more passionate someone is in denunciation, the more trustworthy they become. No Investigation? No Problem! Amplifying what might have occurred is more important than figuring out what actually did. (Never mind that mounting evidence shows that mental health problems in this country are at an all-time high. And never mind that COINTELPRO in the 60s and 70s routinely organized campaigns of false accusation to wreck radical organizations and defame left leaders.) Let’s face it: in these crazy media days, one needs a bullhorn to break through the noise, a sledgehammer to knock down the wall of indifference. Nuanced accounts of complex interactions won’t cut it. We need to Go Big to grab people’s attention and make things stick. Therefore, rounding up the rhetoric regarding particulars is not only permissible; it is necessary. We must cherry-pick the statistics and images that best fit our worldview, even if they bestow a misleading picture of the whole: how else to dramatize the essence of evil and get people caring about a system of oppression whose effects are often diffuse, subtle, and uneven? Sure, our exaggerations may lead to the proliferation of factual inaccuracies in the short term—maybe even a simplistic sense of the overall situation—but, in the long term, the heat and attention created by our maximalist presentation will lead to more people getting involved, therefore illuminating other abuses elsewhere. (Those who burn out on the melodramatic framing weren’t really committed to the cause in the first place.) Whatever harm is done to people who are tarnished, indeed slandered and defamed, by broadcast falsehoods in the process, is not our concern. It will be worth it in the long run. Can the harm done to an accused wrong-doer ever really be compared to that of the harm-sufferer, even if the harm in question remains unsubstantiated? In contrast to the longstanding judicial principle that “Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent be convicted,” we affirm that “Better 10 men ruined by false accusations than one victim be doubted.” (No men in this society are “innocent,” anyway.)
19)Vengeance arcs toward justice.
Sure, we might be a little rough or excessive sometimes, but the arc of retaliation bends towards righteousness. (Or at least towards what feels righteous.) When in history have regular people’s urge to vengeance led them astray? It’s wrong to tell those who are feeling the need to strike back or destroy that they should channel that rage in a more constructive, reasonable, strategic, or fair manner. That’s tone-policing. Better to encourage righteous rage and fan the flames, wherever they lead. Tailing spontaneity and immediate emotion is the way of the future: as evidenced by what goes viral on our corporate-owned social media feeds. In times of big changes and sweeping historical crisis, it’s bourgeois and oppressive to be worried about the fate of just one individual (or other individuals who happen to be connected personally to that one individual). If we need to go a bit overboard in punishing a particular person in order to send a message to others and make our group’s militant morality absolutely clear, so be it. We were never going to win over everyone anyways. And you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Individuals are disposable.
20) Hyper-sensitizing individuals will lead to collective liberation.
In the struggle to radically uproot vast systems of oppression, we prioritize tenderizing individuals, one by one. If some people must be broken like eggs, others must be taught to think of themselves as fragile eggshells. Our goal is to make as many people as we can as sensitive as possible to the myriad offenses that exist in the world today—especially those ‘small’ offenses they experience directly, at the hands of other regular individuals on a day-to-day basis or on social media. As ‘micro’ offenses rather than macro- ones—papercuts not limb loss, bad word choices more than cluster bombs—such offenses may not be immediately obvious. Training people to see how small affronts and slights are actually BIG ones is thus crucial work, much more important than training people to work through the smaller stuff charitably, in light of the truly humongous threats all poor and working people now face. Similarly, training people to focus primarily on the offenses that affect them personally is more important than encouraging them to struggle in solidarity against the oppression of others, let alone spending time studying more abstract things like History or Social Theory that may take them away from their immediate self-interests. Focusing on other people’s oppression leads to ‘savior’ complexes, but teaching people to amplify all the many small slights they themselves experience personally: that’s the road to liberation. Each molehill, when inspected properly, reveals a mountain. Who is to say that the Big Crises we all share are more important than the millions of tiny ones that divide us and make us unique?
21) Fuck it, let’s be honest: Radical change ain’t happening in the USA (unless built upon its smoldering ashes).
Contrary to our at times ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, we don’t really feel it is possible to change this country in a deep or transformative way. So, let’s just enjoy our moral superiority, our exclusive ‘movement’ spaces, and our curated media feed until the ship goes down or the smoke of the last forest fire consumes us. In the meantime, the best we can probably do is kneecap every ‘privileged’ or ‘problematic’ person, project, or institution we can reach. Sadly, the real big oppressors—the Dick Cheneys of the world—are generally protected behind bunkers of money and armed security: the best we can do is to take aim at whatever dick we can reach. All we’re really good for, here and now, is to fuck this bad shit up, while keeping enclaves of righteousness alive—maybe for after the fires burn out and we re-emerge from this cave. Most Americans are so complicit (settler colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, etc.) that they can’t really be part of any positive solution, anyways. So, if we end up tearing down our former comrades and driving away potential recruits or allies…No. Big. Deal. (Never mind the fact that capitalism is increasingly wrecking their lives and futures, too.) Let’s be clear: We didn’t start this fire. So, is it really fair to expect us to take responsibility for putting it out? Such a responsibility is a burden that oppressed and aggrieved people especially should not have to bear (even if there is no one else to bear it). Who the fuck are you to suggest otherwise?
IN CONCLUSION
‘Cancel culture’ teaches its adherents to focus on weaknesses of people in order to tear down their strengths, rather than uniting with people’s strengths to overcome those weaknesses, in light of the common threats we all face. It trains people in suspicion, fear, hyper-sensitivity, and overreaction, and thrives on decontextualization and sensationalism. It teaches people to weaponize vulnerabilities and to instrumentalize others as means to an end, rather than treating them as human ends in themselves. It traffics in moral posturing more than political strategy, expressing a burning impatience with wrongdoing in the world—this is its positive aspect—but too-often directing that impatience against regular people, against comrades, and often against intellectual discussion or due process itself: all things we need if we are to change the world for the better. Unable to strike meaningfully at the heights of the system, CC tends towards ‘horizontal violence,’ with callous disregard for those it harms or the work it wrecks.
To be sure, cancel culture did not come out of nowhere. It is inseparable from the habits encouraged and enabled by corporate social media: Hasty generalization, reduction of complexity, public virtue signaling, echo chambers discouraging dissent, the fear of false ‘friends,’ and the rapid dissemination of unreliable information are all key features of its function. It takes advantage of the impunity of the online troll and the connectivity of social networks to pursue all-spectrum bullying. At the same time, CC reflects the sad sobering reality that in the contemporary USA, the ‘muck of the ages,’ the impurities and damage of capitalism, empire, male-domination, racism, narrow individualism, etc. have indeed marked us all, in one way or another. But rather than finding in this common state of imperfection a basis for humility, compassion, and mutual improvement, CC seizes upon the faults of others as if those who have strayed thereby become irredeemable monsters—infiltrators to be purged, punished, or eliminated from pristine existing spaces. Faced with a complex world of developing human beings, always operating in conditions not entirely of their own choosing, cancel culture insists on Angels and Demons. It thereby discourages genuine openness, intimacy, trust, friendship and understanding, while silencing those who don’t abide its wild swings of judgment.
As we’ve seen above, cancel culture traffics in guilt by association, expresses cynicism about people & their potential to change, and embodies an anti-intellectualism mired in narrow identitarianism, as well as deeply problematic notions of evidence & epistemology. It also evinces a profound lack of strategy, for which it substitutes performative moral panic and self-righteousness. At times, to be sure, cancel culture is instrumentalized deliberately to forward individual careers, or to deliberately destroy movement-organizations, whether by those with personal vendettas or in the employ of the enemy state (see COINTELPRO). Such deliberately destructive actors, however, could not succeed without the help of many well-intentioned people, who, nonetheless, tacitly enable cancel culture’s destructive practices. Even as, on some level, they may know better.
By helping to surface left cancel culture’s fallacious methods here, we hope to contribute to an increasingly conscious and collective process of thinking through and beyond the present impasse. Together we can and must develop the theory, the practice, and the sustaining infrastructure that can move beyond cancel culture, re-ground left movements and organizations, and thereby give us a fighting chance to build the culture of respect, debate, and comradeship we will surely need for the struggles to come. We need movements that can build effective resistance to the current unjust and unsustainable world system, that can shepherd broad popular forces capable of defeating the ruling-class agenda, that can help people to grasp the world’s problems in their genuine complexity, and that can nurture into existence a new world that will be more reasonable, just, and free than the one we have now.
In that spirit, the Red Goat Collective welcomes all manner of thoughtful responses to this polemic, at the email address below (or elsewhere). We also welcome stories of how ‘cancel culture’ has played out in readers’ own circles, as well as resources and reflections to help our movements and organizations develop alternative methods for dealing with the challenges we face. Thank you for reading. And for continuing the discussion.
[1] Other candidates include: culture of disposability, culture of excommunication, carceral culture, leftist purge culture, call-out culture, the neoliberal personalization of politics, left authoritarianism, cannibal leftism, culture of shame or disgrace, culture of suspicion, sectarianism, “woke” mob rule, moral panic, culture of escalation, de-platform culture, the proverbial “circular firing squad,” and good ol’ fashioned Calvinist Puritanism.
It also should be said that many of the ideas examined below can be found in some form on the Right (or the Liberal-Center) as well. (See for instance the current reactionary campaigns to keep children ‘safe’ from “Critical Race Theory,” as well as the bipartisan Cold War history of anti-communist blacklisting.) To those who would dismiss our critique here as being ‘one-sided’ for bypassing the ’real threat’ from the Right, we point out the following: while some (but not all) the ideas criticized below may be found on the Right (or in the Center), those bad ideas are largely compatible with the Right and Center goals of maintaining or deepening the current unjust social order. Such ideas clash, however, with the Left’s historic mission of universal emancipation and global human flourishing; we thus direct our critique where prevalent ideas and practices stand in the way of our ostensible goals. We would further add that such obsessive fears of the Right, however understandable, at times work to suppress critical discussion on the Left about some of the fallacious methods we examine below—as if to engage in serious self-critique within our movements would be to give quarter or credence to right-wing attacks, rather than a way of inoculating against them.
[3] We should note here at the outset that we are thus not primarily concerned with the ‘cancelling’ of those who truly do sit atop oppressive hierarchies, and who use the power and privilege of their position to take abusive advantage of those who have no choice but to suffer their domination. We are instead mainly concerned with the way in which methods that might be appropriate to conditions of truly systemic oppression and desperation—where people have next to no other options, where the stakes of inaction are high, and where the structurally exploitative commitments of the offenders are unapologetic and clear—have been taken up against our fellow working-class people, middle-class comrades, movement leaders and allies. Taken up: as if the things that divide us, despite our roughly common class position,are just as incommensurable and beyond reasoned resolution as those that stand between us and imperialist-capitalist class elites. Taken up: as if we could ever have a chance of overthrowing our true ruling-class enemies and transforming current oppressive social conditions, without learning somehow to live, grow, work, and struggle alongside other roughly regular people, people with whom we will undoubtedly have all manner of disagreements—some of them serious—but whose common interests and concerns nonetheless remain our best leverage for realizing serious social change of this world.
[4] Arguably, the entire phenomenon is shaped (albeit unconsciously in some cases) by the verdict that universal liberation, popular transformation, and social revolution beyond capitalism and its structuring inequalities are no longer possible. With the horizon of revolutionary abundance thus ruled out, all that remains for such a ‘Left’ are fights for small reforms, coupled with rhetorically inflated yet imaginatively impoverished, often inward-looking, competitive clashes over the scarce discursive space and social resources still allowed us by our capitalist overlords.
[5] Readers seeking a straightforward set of “alternative” methods or substitute approaches to the problems that ‘cancel culture’ mishandles will not find such a positive guidebook here, though we believe that better ways of handling genuine movement challenges are embedded throughout the critique. We certainly welcome the process of creating such alternative and improved methods in the days to come. In the meantime, we believe that clearly identifying, exploring, and establishing the validity of criticizing these problematic ideas and practices publicly and forcefully can be a key step in building the intellectual and social space within which new and better organizational and cultural approaches can incubate. The process of developing new methods of work must, in the end, be a collective and inclusive endeavor. (One such archive of methods is the work of Mariame Kaba, compiled in her 2021 book We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1664-we-do-this-til-we-free-us).
Το περιοδικό Wallpaper παίρνει συνέντευξη από τον Anish Kapoor στο στούντιο του στο νότιο Λονδίνο πριν από μια μεγάλη αναδρομική έκθεση σε δύο χώρους κατά τη διάρκεια της 59ης Μπιενάλε της Βενετίας, όπου ο καλλιτέχνης θα μυήσει τελικά τον κόσμο στα Vantablack γλυπτά του.
Πορτρέτο του Anish Kapoor από τον George Darrell, 2021
Η τέχνη του Anish Kapoor σπάνια είναι εύκολη στο μάτι, αλλά είναι δύσκολο να σταματήσεις να την κοιτάς. Καθεμία από τις πολλές αίθουσες στο αχανές στούντιο του καλλιτέχνη, στο νότιο Λονδίνο, περιέχει πολύ διαφορετικούς Kapoor. Κάποιοι ρεαλιστικοί, ακατάστατοι, με ανυπάκουες επιθυμίες να προβάλουν, κάποιοι να αντανακλούν, να παραμορφώνουν και να λυγίζουν αυτό που γνωρίζουμε ως σωματικότητα και κάποιοι άλλοι να προσποιούνται ότι αυτή δεν υπάρχει.
Εδώ είναι ένας τόπος παραγωγής αλλά και πειραματισμού με την μέθοδο δοκιμής και λάθους. Για έναν καλλιτέχνη που έχει κερδίσει το βραβείο Turner και φέρει το τίτλο του Ιππότη, με συχνά επταψήφια νούμερα στις δημοπρασίες, είναι εξαιρετικά αξιοσημείωτη η προθυμία του να μας δείξει έργα του σε εξέλιξη – με τον όρο βέβαια να μη τραβήξουμε φωτογραφίες.
Ξεναγούμαστε στο στούντιο του Kapoor ενόψει της κορυφαίας στιγμής του στη Βενετία, όπου, κατά τη διάρκεια της 59ης Μπιενάλε της Βενετίας, ο καλλιτέχνης θα παρουσιάσει δύο ταυτόχρονες σόλο παραστάσεις. Η πρώτη θα λάβει χώρα στη διάσημη Gallerie dell’Accademia, όπου ο Kapoor, ο οποίος εκπροσώπησε την Βρετανία στη Μπιενάλε της Βενετίας το 1990, θα γίνει ο πρώτος Βρετανός καλλιτέχνης που θα τιμηθεί με ξεχωριστή παράσταση. Η δεύτερη θα ξεδιπλωθεί κατά μήκος του καναλιού στο Palazzo Manfrin του 18ου αιώνα, το οποίο, μετά από πολλά χρόνια χηρείας, εξαγοράστηκε από το Ίδρυμα Anish Kapoor για να γίνει η έδρα του μόλις θα ολοκληρωθούν οι εργασίες αποκατάστασης.
Υπάρχει ποιητική συμμετρία σε αυτές τις παραστάσεις. Τον 18ο αιώνα, ο Κόμης Manfrin, πλούσιος, γεννημένος στην Κροατία, έμπορος καπνού, μετέτρεψε τον πρώτο όροφο του Palazzo Manfrin σε δημόσια γκαλερί έργων τέχνης. Το Palazzo Manfrin έγινε ένα από τα κύρια τουριστικά αξιοθέατα της Βενετίας, που επισκέφτηκαν διασημότητες της τέχνης όπως ο Λόρδος Μπάιρον, ο Τζορτζ Ράσκιν και ο Εντουάρ Μανέ. Μετά τον θάνατο του Manfrin, η συλλογή πουλήθηκε, και πολλά αριστουργήματα – συμπεριλαμβανομένου του έργου του Τζορτζιόνε, La Tempesta – κατέληξαν και παραμένουν στη συλλογή της Accademia.
Και στους δύο αυτούς χώρους, ο Kapoor, μέσα από εμβληματικά ιστορικά έργα και νέους, αόρατους πίνακες και γλυπτά, θα καταθέσει την σκέψη του, μέσα από αυτό που έχει ήδη συμβεί, για το τι μέλλει να συμβεί.
Παρά την προφανή επιτυχία του στην αγορά, ο Kapoor δείχνει ελάχιστο ενδιαφέρον να «παίξει το παιχνίδι». «Ο καλλιτέχνης είναι, κατά κάποιο τρόπο, σε ένα υψηλό επίπεδο, ο κοσμικός ανόητος, σε ένα λιγότερο υψηλό επίπεδο, απλώς ένας ανόητος», ειρωνεύεται κατά τη διάρκεια της ξενάγησής μας ο kapoor. «Είναι δουλειά μας, αποστολή μας, να επιτρέψουμε τη μισή-σκέψη, τη μισή-κατασκευή. Στον σημερινό κόσμο της τέχνης, η αγορά έχει κατακτήσει τα πάντα. Πρέπει να υπενθυμίζουμε στους εαυτούς μας ότι δεν είμαστε κατασκευαστές εμπορευμάτων. Η (εταιρεία) Louis Vuitton το κάνει καλύτερα.»
Ο πρώτος χώρος του στούντιο στην ξενάγησή μας είναι σαν ένα σφαγείο, χαοτικό κόκκινο: «το χρώμα της εσωτερικότητας». Οι τοίχοι και τα πατώματα ματωμένα. Υπάρχουν κομμάτια σωμάτων με το δέρμα ανοιχτό ή που δεν είχαν ποτέ δέρμα. Το δέρμα κρέμεται και ντύνεται σε δομές που μοιάζουν με σκάλες, πάνω από λίμνες από αστραφτερή ρητίνη που μοιάζει με αίμα. Το κεντρικό έργο είναι ένα εξαιρετικά τεράστιο ατσάλινο γλυπτό. Δεν υπάρχει περιθώριο παρερμηνείας γύρω από το προφανές. Μοιάζει με αιδοίο – ένα επαναλαμβανόμενο θέμα στα έργα του Kapoor. Όταν επισκέφτηκα για τελευταία φορά το στούντιό του τον Σεπτέμβριο του 2021, ήταν γυμνό, τώρα περιέχει ένα σφαιρίδιο από ματωμένη σάρκα. Αυτό το κομμάτι προορίζεται για το Palazzo Manfrin – η αποστολή των έργων στη Βενετία δεν είναι ποτέ μια εύκολη υπόθεση, αλλά σε δυόμισι τόνους, αυτό θα είναι το μέγα εγχείρημα.
Σε ένα άλλο δωμάτιο προβάλλει αυτό που φαίνεται να είναι η ανεστραμμένη ενσάρκωση του «βουνού της τρελής σάρκας» του Σαίξπηρ, ένα άλλο τεράστιο γλυπτό που θα εκτεθεί στην κιονοστοιχία του Palazzo Manfrin.
Οι πίνακες του Kapoor, που εκτέθηκαν για πρώτη φορά στη Modern Art Oxford πέρυσι, εκφράζουν παρόμοιο βάθος αίματος και βίας. Τα βαθύ μωβ, τα λευκά και τα περισσότερα κόκκινα στο όλο φάσμα απαθανατίζουν ένα ανθρώπινο σώμα που έχει βεβηλωθεί πριν προφτάσει να γίνει σώμα, ίσως ακόμη πιο σαρκώδες, αιματηρό, αρχέγονο, ανατομικά φρικτό σε σχέση με τα έργα του Φράνσις Μπέικον που κυριαρχούν σήμερα στη Βασιλική Ακαδημία του Λονδίνου.
Σε ένα άλλο δωμάτιο, η διάθεση αλλάζει ξανά με τα καθαρά, αναστοχαστικά έργα του Kapoor, όπως αυτά που συχνά βρίσκουν τον δρόμο τους σε δημόσιους χώρους και στο Instagram. Εν μέρει η επιστήμη, εν μέρει η τέχνη, η κοιλότητά τους προκαλούν ένα είδος ιλίγγου, περιβάλλοντας το σώμα, τεντώνοντας και αναποδογυρίζοντάς το και μπερδεύοντας αυτό που ξέρουμε ότι είναι σωματικότητα. Αυτά τα «μη-αντικείμενα» διεισδύουν στην ανθρώπινη επιθυμία για να τα δει κανείς υπό νέες προοπτικές, μέσα από τα μάτια κάποιου άλλου.
Είναι δύσκολο να αποφύγεις τα γυναικεία μοτίβα που υφαίνουν τόσο ελεύθερα εσωτερικά και εξωτερικά το έργο του Kapoor. Μερικές φορές είναι λεπτά, μερικές φορές κραυγαλέα. Είτε έτσι είτε αλλιώς, ο Φρόιντ θα ήθελε το έργο του να έβγαινε (να δημιουργείτο) από αυτά τα στούντιο. «Ποιά είναι αυτή? Τι είναι αυτή? Είναι η μητέρα μου; Νομίζω βέβαια ότι είναι μια συνεχής, βαθύτερη επιδίωξη, αλλά και πάλι δεν ξέρω την απάντηση. Ποιος νοιάζεται τώρα!» αναφωνεί ο Kapoor, στεκόμενος μπροστά σε ένα έργο που μοιάζει με γιγάντιο μαύρο αιδοίο σκεπασμένο από ένα σχηματισμό όρχεων.
Στο τέλος, ήρθε η ώρα για το σόου μαύρης μαγείας, γνωστό και ως έργα «Vantablack», «Anish Kapoor black» ή «τα μελανότερα μαύρα» έργα (ή κατά τους πολέμους λαϊκής κουλτούρας, το θέμα μιας μακροχρόνιας, βιτριολικής αντιπαράθεσης με τον καλλιτέχνη Stuart Semple, αφότου το στούντιο του Kapoor αγόρασε την αποκλειστική άδεια για καλλιτεχνική χρήση). Μετά από πολλά χρόνια φήμης, δυσφήμισης, προσμονής και μυστηρίου, αυτά τα έργα θα εμφανιστούν δημόσια για πρώτη φορά στη Βενετία. «Υπήρξε αυτή η γελοία διαμάχη σχετικά με το ότι αν έχω τον έλεγχο του χρώματος», λέει ο Kapoor. «Είναι απολύτως απλό: δεν είναι χρώμα. Είναι μια τεχνολογία. Και είναι εξαιρετικά περίπλοκη και εκλεπτυσμένη».
Για όσους από εμάς δεν έχουν διδακτορικό στη νανοτεχνολογία, το Vantablack είναι ένα εμπορικό σήμα για έναν τύπο «σούπερ μαύρης» επίστρωσης, που αναπτύχθηκε για στρατιωτική χρήση μυστικότητας και μη εντοπισμού από τη Surrey NanoSystems με έδρα το Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο. Όταν εφαρμόζεται σε μια επιφάνεια, το υλικό γίνεται ένα δάσος από κάθετα σωματίδια που απορροφούν το 99,8 τοις εκατό του ορατού φωτός. Όταν το φως χτυπά το Vantablack, αντί να αναπηδήσει, παγιδεύεται, μετατρέπεται σε θερμότητα και δεν φεύγει ποτέ. Όπως ισχυρίζεται ο Kapoor, το υλικό αυτό είναι «πιο μαύρο από μια μαύρη τρύπα».
Το δωμάτιο είναι ένα πλέγμα από γυάλινες θήκες γεμάτες με μαύρες φόρμες σε λευκό φόντο (όπως σημειώνει ο Kapoor, ένα είδος φόρου τιμής στο Μαύρο Τετράγωνο του Kazimir Malevich). Ομολογουμένως, αυτές οι φόρμες είναι πολύ μαύρες και, ακόμη και από κοντινή θεώρηση, πολύ επίπεδες. Αλλά κοιτάξτε ξανά και μετακινηθείτε στο πλάι των γυάλινων κουτιών και κάτι μαγικό συμβαίνει πράγματι. Αυτό που είχε δύο διαστάσεις έχει τώρα τρεις ως σχήματα που έρχονται φαινομενικά από το πουθενά.
Τα άδεια έργα Vantablack του Kapoor δεν δείχνουν κανένα ενδιαφέρον για το περιβάλλον τους, δεν αντικατοπτρίζουν τίποτα και δεν αναγνωρίζουν καμία σκιά. «Αν τα βάλεις σε μια πτυχή, δεν μπορείς να δεις την πτυχή. Επομένως, η πρότασή μου είναι ότι αυτό το υλικό είναι πέρα από την ύπαρξη», μας λέει ο καλλιτέχνης.
Είναι ένας τολμηρός ισχυρισμός, αλλά και αυτό είναι ένα τολμηρό υλικό που φτάνει στην καρδιά της τέχνης ως ψευδαίσθησης, την raison d’être της Αναγέννησης. Η συγγένεια του Kapoor με την περίοδο αυτή, και την Βενετία ως πληρεξούσιό της, είναι σαφής. Μοιράζονται μια εμμονή με το χρώμα, την προοπτική, την πνευματικότητα και την οπτική θεατρικότητα: «Υπάρχουν αυτοί οι παράξενοι υπέροχοι, ισχυροί παραλληλισμοί που νομίζω ότι είναι εντελώς σύγχρονοι», λέει ο Kapoor. «Κοιτάξτε αυτόν τον ματωμένο κόσμο στον οποίο ζούμε.» Αλλά υπάρχει μια βασική διαφορά: ενώ η Αναγέννηση προσπάθησε να συλλάβει την πραγματικότητα, το έργο του Kapoor προσπαθεί να την καταβροχθίσει ολόκληρη.
Anish Kapoor’s work will be on view at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia and the Palazzo Manfrin from 20 April – 9 October 2022 in conjunction with the 59th Venice Biennale.
«Θα έπρεπε να σκεφτόμαστε λίγο περισσότερο για τις συνολικές συνέπειες της στροφής της Ευρώπης προς τον μιλιταρισμό αλλά και το εάν αυτό θα κρατήσει. Διότι πρέπει να σκεφτούμε πόσο καιρό χρειάζεται για να χτιστεί ένας στρατός.»
«Μέχρι να βρεθεί ένας διαφορετικός τρόπος για να καταθέτεις, υπάρχει ένα πρόβλημα με τη θέση περί τέλους του δολαρίου. Δεν σχετίζεται με ισορροπία ισχύος ανάμεσα στις κυβερνήσεις αλλά με το γεγονός ότι κάποιος χρειάζεται τραπεζικά περιουσιακά στοιχεία.»
«Ενώ πρακτικά έχουµε ξεφύγει από την Covid, στην ουσία ζούµε τον σαρκασµό του παραλόγου: όλοι µοιάζουν να είναι πάρα πολύ απασχοληµένοι, είναι ενθουσιασµένοι και όλοι ξεχνάνε ότι έγινε όλο αυτό εδώ και δυο χρόνια» τόνισε σε συνέντευξή του στο Documento ο Μαρκ Μπλάιθ, καθηγητής ∆ιεθνών Οικονοµικών στο Πανεπιστήµιο Μπράουν, ο οποίος βρέθηκε στην Αθήνα προσκεκλημένος σε εκδήλωση του mέta, του Κέντρου Μετακαπιταλιστικού Πολιτισµού του ΜέΡΑ25, για τα 20 χρόνια από την εισαγωγή του ευρώ στη ζωή µας. Ο πανεπιστηµιακός µίλησε στο Documento για τις προκλήσεις που αντιµετωπίζει το ευρώ µετά τις αλλεπάλληλες κρίσεις χρέους, πανδηµίας, ενέργειας, γεωπολιτικής, αλλά και για την ελλοχεύουσα επιστροφή του στασιµοπληθωρισµού. Επίσης απάντησε στο αν παρατηρεί την ανάδυση ενός νέου οικονοµικού µοντέλου µε στοιχεία κεϊνσιανά και κατεύθυνση µιλιταριστική. Οσον αφορά το µέλλον του δολαρίου, ο καθηγητής του Πανεπιστηµίου Μπράουν υπογραµµίζει ότι µέχρι στιγµής δεν σκιαγραφείται κάποια εναλλακτική, δηλώνοντας πως «µέχρι να βρεθεί διαφορετικός τρόπος για να καταθέτεις υπάρχει ένα πρόβληµα µε τη θέση περί τέλους του δολαρίου».
Σε προηγούµενη συνέντευξή σας περιγράψατε την ΕΕ ως «θέατρο του παραλόγου» (shit show). Γιατί;
Επειδή η ΕΕ είναι ένα µόνιµο θέατρο του παραλόγου. Μια καλή σύγκριση είναι η Ουκρανία. Ολοι είναι πολύ ενθουσιασµένοι που ο πόλεµος στην Ουκρανία ενοποίησε την Ευρώπη ξαφνικά. Είναι οι ίδιοι άνθρωποι που θέλουν να καθίσουν τον Πούτιν στο εδώλιο για εγκλήµατα πολέµου – γεγονός που ενδεχοµένως να είναι τελείως δικαιολογηµένο. Βέβαια, είναι οι ίδιοι άνθρωποι που ξοδεύουν σχεδόν 800 εκατ. την ηµέρα για πετρέλαιο και αέριο. Υπάρχει µια συνεχής υποκρισία. Αν γυρίσεις ένα χρόνο πίσω και λίγο πριν από την περίοδο της Covid, θα δεις ότι είχαµε µια «χαµιλτονιανή στιγµή». Το Ταµείο Ανάκαµψης που απαρτίζεται από 750 δισ. ευρώ, τα οποία θεωρητικά θα κάνουν τη µεγάλη διαφορά, αποτελεί την αρχή της δηµιουργίας ενός κυρίαρχου εργαλείου κοινού δανεισµού. Φυσικά κάτι τέτοιο δεν ισχύει. Τα µισά χρήµατα ακόµη δεν έχουν δοθεί, πόσο µάλλον να δαπανηθούν. Ενώ πρακτικά έχουµε ξεφύγει από την Covid, στην ουσία ζούµε τον σαρκασµό του παραλόγου: όλοι µοιάζουν να είναι πάρα πολύ απασχοληµένοι και, ενθουσιασµένοι έπειτα από δύο χρόνια, ξεχνάνε ότι έγινε όλο αυτό. Ελπίζω ότι δεν θα γίνει έτσι και µε την Ουκρανία. ∆ιότι η διαφορά της Ουκρανίας µε την απάντηση της ΕΕ στην πανδηµία είναι ότι άνθρωποι πεθαίνουν εξαιτίας του πολέµου και η κατάσταση µπορεί πολύ εύκολα να ξεφύγει. Εντούτοις υπάρχει µεγάλο θέµα µε την επιτελεστική απόδοση «δράση σε ευρωπαϊκό επίπεδο». Λέγοντας επιτελεστική εννοώ ότι «σε βλέπουν να κάνεις κάτι». Πριν από µερικά χρόνια, όταν είχαµε το επενδυτικό σχέδιο Γιούνκερ, περιλάµβανε 300 δισ. ευρώ που έπρεπε να ξοδευτούν και όριζε και πού. ∆εν ξέρω τι συνέβη ή τι έγινε, αλλά νοµίζω ότι αν είχαν ξοδευτεί αυτά τα χρήµατα, όλοι θα το ήξεραν. Ωστόσο κανείς δεν το θυµάται. Πράγµατα ανακοινώνονται, άνθρωποι αναλαµβάνουν να κάνουν πράγµατα που θα έχουν τόσο µεγάλο αντίκτυπο και η ζωή φαίνεται να συνεχίζεται κανονικά.
Η ευρωζώνη από το 2010 χαρακτηρίζεται από αλλεπάλληλες κρίσεις: από την κρίση δηµόσιου χρέους στην κρίση της πανδηµίας, της ενέργειας, τη γεωπολιτική κρίση και τώρα ο κίνδυνος επιστροφής του στασιµοπληθωρισµού είναι µεγάλος. Μπορεί το ευρώ να υπερβεί τις προκλήσεις αυτές;
Είναι σαν να λες ότι οι ΗΠΑ είναι πολωµένες, τα πάντα είναι πολιτικοποιηµένα, οι ∆ηµοκρατικοί θα χάσουν και να ρωτάς αν το δολάριο µπορεί να κάνει κάτι γι’ αυτό. Γιατί να πιστεύεις ότι το δολάριο µπορεί να κάνει κάτι γι’ αυτό; Αλλά ναι, υπάρχει ένα δοµικό στοιχείο στο ευρώ που δεν βοηθάει. Μολαταύτα, αν η κριτική είναι ότι δεν θα κάνουν ένεση ρευστότητας, τότε έχουν αποδείξει πως µπορούν να το κάνουν. Εννοώ ότι ο λόγος για τον οποίο ολόκληρο το οικοδόµηµα κρατιέται όρθιο από το 2012 τουλάχιστον είναι η ΕΚΤ. Ενα απλό παράδειγµα αυτού είναι η Ιταλία. Ο µόνος λόγος που τα ιταλικά οµόλογα πωλούνται είναι ότι είναι τόσο περιορισµένα. Απλώς επειδή η ΕΕ έγινε ο αγοραστής έσχατης λύσης του ιταλικού χρέους καθ’ όλη τη διάρκεια της πανδηµίας. Το πρόβληµα είναι εάν η Ευρώπη επισήµως βγαίνει από την ύφεση και ξεκινάει να µεγεθύνεται κυρίως στον βορρά ενώ η Ιταλία όχι. Σε αυτό το σηµείο η ΕΚΤ θα συνεχίσει να αγοράζει τα οµόλογά της; Μετά οι επενδυτές θα αρχίσουν να απαιτούν περισσότερα για να κρατήσουν χρέος. Οπότε υπάρχει µια συγκεκριµένη υποδοµή στην Ευρώπη που δεν βοηθάει, αλλά είναι αυτή η αιτία για τα πράγµατα που υπογράµµισες; Οχι. Επειδή οι ΗΠΑ έχουν όλα αυτά τα πράγµατα και δεν έχουν το ευρώ.
Η εισβολή της Ρωσίας στην Ουκρανία µεταµόρφωσε την αµυντική πολιτική της Ευρώπης. Ο καγκελάριος Σολτς έχει ήδη εξαγγείλει αύξηση των αµυντικών δαπανών κατά 100 δισ. ευρώ, άλλες χώρες θα πράξουν προς την ίδια κατεύθυνση και άλλες πρόκειται να ακολουθήσουν. Παρατηρείται η ανάδυση µιας κεϊνσιανής πολεµικής οικονοµίας λόγω του πολέµου;
Είναι καλό ερώτηµα. ∆εν ξέρω, για να είµαι ειλικρινής. Να µερικοί λόγοι που κάτι τέτοιο δεν θα συµβεί. Τα δισεκατοµµύρια ευρώ θα ξοδευτούν σε µία κατηγορία: στα πυροµαχικά. Που είναι εκπληκτικό. Προφανώς τα πυροµαχικά είναι πολύ ακριβά. ∆εν ξέρω πόσες θέσεις εργασίας δηµιουργούνται, δεν ξέρω ποιο είναι το δηµοσιονοµικό επακόλουθο αυτού. Θα εκπλαγώ εάν είναι τόσο µεγάλο. Αλλά ας υποθέσουµε ότι είναι, κυρίως στο περιεχόµενο και το εύρος. Τότε αυτό που θα έχεις είναι ένα χαλάρωµα και οι δηµοσιονοµικές δοµές θα βρίσκονται σε δεύτερη µοίρα. Υπάρχει µια σειρά από επιχειρήµατα που είναι αποδεκτά κατά µήκος του πολιτικού φάσµατος, ξεχνώντας τους παράλογους στόχους για τα ελλείµµατα που η ΕΕ προσποιείται ότι εφαρµόζει από την κρίση και έπειτα. Συνεπώς, µε έναν τρόπο ανοίγεται ένας βαθµός ευκαµψίας. Από την άλλη, εξαιτίας της τεράστιας έλλειψης προσφοράς λόγω της Covid και τώρα του πολέµου, η κρίση συνεχίζεται πλέον µε τον πληθωρισµό. Συνακόλουθα, εάν ο πληθωρισµός κάνει τους φτωχούς φτωχότερους, τότε η απάντηση των κεντρικών τραπεζών είναι η αύξηση των επιτοκίων, γεγονός που καθιστά τον δανεισµό ακόµη πιο ακριβό. Ολα αυτά ενώ κάνεις τους Γερµανούς φτωχότερους φτιάχνοντας στρατό. Νοµίζω ότι κάναµε αυτό το πείραµα παλαιότερα και δεν πήγε τόσο καλά. Εποµένως, θα έπρεπε να σκεφτόµαστε λίγο περισσότερο για τις συνολικές συνέπειες της στροφής της Ευρώπης προς τον µιλιταρισµό αλλά και το εάν αυτό θα κρατήσει. ∆ιότι πρέπει να σκεφτούµε πόσο καιρό χρειάζεται για να χτιστεί ένας στρατός. Παραδείγµατος χάριν, η συµφωνία AUKUS προέβλεπε την παράδοση πυρηνικών υποβρυχίων το 2036 και έχουµε 2022. Πάντοτε αυτά τα πράγµατα θέλουν χρόνο και υπάρχει διόγκωση του κόστους. Μπορεί να περάσουν και 20 χρόνια για να εµφανιστούν αυτά τα υποβρύχια. Ετσι, για να κατασκευάσεις όλα αυτά τα πράγµατα χρειάζεσαι πολύ χρόνο, ενώ ο µόνος τρόπος που µπορείς να το διατηρήσεις αυτό είναι εάν οι σχέσεις µε τη Ρωσία γίνουν αµετάκλητα κακές, κάτι το οποίο είναι πολύ επικίνδυνο. Αν είναι να έχεις ανεπανόρθωτη επιδείνωση στη σχέση µε τη Ρωσία για ένα µεγάλο χρονικό διάστηµα, χωρίς να τινάξεις τον κόσµο στον αέρα, αυτό είναι ένα άσχηµο σηµείο και εκείνη τη στιγµή νοµίζω ότι δεν θα χρειάζεται να ανησυχούµε πόσο θετική θα είναι η δηµοσιονοµική ώθηση.
Η Ρωσία από εδώ και πέρα θα ζητάει να πληρώνεται σε ρούβλια για τις εξαγωγές του φυσικού αερίου, βγαίνοντας από το σύστηµα πληρωµών του δολαρίου και του ευρώ. Το παγκόσµιο νοµισµατικό σύστηµα µετασχηµατίζεται; Βλέπουµε ότι έχουν γίνει συµφωνίες µε τους Κινέζους, τους Ινδούς και τους Τούρκους. Μπορούµε να πούµε ότι παίζεται ένα παιχνίδι εναντίον του δολαρίου;
∆εν ξέρω αν όλοι παίζουν το παιχνίδι εναντίον του δολαρίου. Γιατί η Ινδία να παίζει παιχνίδι εναντίον του δολαρίου; Είναι πολύ χαρούµενοι να λαµβάνουν πληρωµές σε κάτι διαφορετικό από το δολάριο και όλοι βρίσκονται σε συναγερµό επειδή ακόµη και τα αποθεµατικά της κεντρικής τράπεζας σε δολάρια µπορούν να κατασχεθούν. Τα παραχθέντα εµπορεύµατα πρέπει να πληρωθούν σε ευρώ, να τα περάσεις από το παγκόσµιο σύστηµα και αυτό σε κάνει ευάλωτο. Υπάρχουν λόγοι που οι άνθρωποι θα διαφοροποιηθούν. Ωστόσο είµαι πολύ σκεπτικός σχετικά µε το αν θα υπάρξει τέτοιου µεγέθους εξέγερση εναντίον του δολαρίου. Νοµίζω ότι αυτό υποδηλώνει έναν ορισµένο βαθµό πολιτικής ενότητας εναντίον των ΗΠΑ που δεν υπάρχει. Το δεύτερο πράγµα που µε κάνει λίγο σκεπτικό, όπως έχουµε ακούσει πολλές φορές στο παρελθόν, είναι πως το τέλος της αµερικανικής ηγεµονίας µε τον ένα ή τον άλλο τρόπο είναι κάτι κοινό. Αλλά αν το σκεφτείς, υπάρχει ένα θεµελιώδες πρόβληµα για το ευρώ. ∆εν έχει να κάνει µε τις κυβερνήσεις αλλά µε τις επιχειρήσεις και τα άτοµα. Υπάρχει το εξής δίληµµα: φαντάσου ότι είσαι αµερικανική ή ινδική επιχείρηση που πουλάει προϊόντα στην Κίνα ή τη Ρωσία και πληρώνεται σε τοπικό νόµισµα. Αυτό είναι εµπόδιο, όχι κάποιο ατού. Τι θα το κάνεις αυτό το νόµισµα; ∆εν µπορείς να το βάλεις στο τραπεζικό σου σύστηµα διότι θα χάσεις πολλά από τη µετατροπή. Το πιο εύκολο που µπορείς να κάνεις είναι να αγοράσεις ένα επενδυτικό αγαθό. Η µεγαλύτερη χρηµατοπιστωτική αγορά είναι η αµερικανική. Η αµερικανική χρηµατιστηριακή αγορά είναι δέκα φορές µεγαλύτερη από την κινεζική. Ακολούθως είναι πολύ εύκολο να έχει καταθέσει κάποιος σε δολάρια. Με το να κατέχεις περιουσιακά αγαθά σε δολάρια δεν υπάρχει ρίσκο. Μέχρι να βρεθεί ένας διαφορετικός τρόπος για να καταθέτεις, υπάρχει ένα πρόβληµα µε τη θέση περί τέλους του δολαρίου. ∆εν σχετίζεται µε ισορροπία ισχύος ανάµεσα στις κυβερνήσεις αλλά µε το γεγονός ότι κάποιος χρειάζεται τραπεζικά περιουσιακά στοιχεία και αυτό είναι το οικουµενικό µέσο, καλώς ή κακώς.
Αθήνα, Γιάννενα, Καλαμάτα, Κοζάνη, Θεσσαλονίκη, Τρίκαλα είναι οι έξι ελληνικές πόλεις που η Ευρωπαϊκή Επιτροπή (ΕΕ) επέλεξε να συμμετέχουν στο πρόγραμμα «100 κλιματικά ουδέτερες πόλεις έως το 2030».
Τι σημαίνει όμως «κλιματική ουδετερότητα»;
Η κλιματική ουδετερότητα, σύμφωνα με την ΕΕ, αφορά τη μετάβαση σε μια οικονομία με μηδενικές εκπομπές αερίων του θερμοκηπίου. Συνεπώς οι έξι ελληνικές πόλεις σκοπεύουν να δημιουργήσουν οικονομίες που θα μηδενίζουν τους ρύπους. Στόχος είναι η πράσινη ανάπτυξη.
Είναι, λοιπόν, προφανές γιατί η «κλιματική ουδετερότητα» είναι σημαντική. Είναι, όμως, εφικτή σε μια οικονομία που θέλει διαρκώς να μεγαλώνει; Σε μια οικονομία όπου οι κυβερνήσεις θέλουν το ΑΕΠ κάθε χρόνο να αυξάνεται;
Γνωρίζουμε εμπειρικά ότι όσο αυξάνεται το ΑΕΠ, τόσο αυξάνονται οι εκπομπές αερίων του θερμοκηπίου. Μέχρι στιγμής, καμία οικονομία στον δυτικό κόσμο δεν έχει πετύχει να μεγαλώνει ενώ οι ρύποι μειώνονται. Κανένα δυτικό κράτος ή πόλη δεν είναι κλιματικά ουδέτερη. Πώς θα τα καταφέρουν οι έξι ελληνικές πόλεις, μαζί με τις άλλες 94, μέχρι το 2030;
Η συνηθισμένη απάντηση είναι μέσω της υψηλής τεχνολογίας. Έξυπνες πόλεις, μεγάλες ανεμογεννήτριες στα βουνά, ρομπότ στα εργοστάσια και στους δρόμους και όλα θα πρασινίσουν. Δείτε το πράσινο «θαύμα» της Κοπεγχάγης ή κάποιας άλλης πόλης της βόρειας Ευρώπης, οι υπέρμαχοι της «πράσινης ανάπτυξης» θα πουν.
Αυτό που δε λένε, εσκεμμένα ή μη, είναι ότι τα απανταχού πράσινα «θαύματα» δεν υπολογίζουν τις εκπομπές αερίων του θερμοκηπίου σε άλλα μέρη του κόσμου. Αν το έκαναν, δεν θα ήταν καθόλου πράσινα. Η κατασκευή, συντήρηση και απόρριψη των σύγχρονων τεχνολογιών περιλαμβάνουν σημαντικά ποσά ενέργειας, τοξικά απόβλητα και εργασία υπό απάνθρωπες συνθήκες.
Το πράσινο «θαύμα» της Κοπεγχάγης βασίζεται σε ρύπους και αρκετές φορές σε παιδική εργασία σε άλλα μέρη του κόσμου, συνήθως στην Αφρική και στη ΝΑ Ασία.
Από την έκθεση του Βασίλη Κωστάκη “Η υλικότητα του άυλου” στο Berkman Klein Center του Harvard (ΗΠΑ) το καλοκαίρι του 2018-Αναφορά πηγής.
Συνεπώς, η Κοπεγχάγη δεν είναι κλιματικά ουδέτερη. Η βιωσιμότητά της βασίζεται στη μιζέρια ανθρώπων και στην καταστροφή τοπικών οικοσυστημάτων μακριά από την «πράσινη» Δανία. Στην εποχή της κλιματικής κρίσης, το τοπικό είναι παγκόσμιο και το παγκόσμιο τοπικό. Όλα είναι διασυνδεδεμένα.
Πώς μπορούμε να αντιμετωπίσουμε τα προβλήματα αυτά;
Δεν υπάρχει χρυσή συνταγή, αλλά υπάρχουν αρκετοί τρόποι που συνδυαστικά θα μπορούσαν να πρασινίσουν τις οικονομίες μας εδώ στην ΕΕ και χωρίς την υποβάθμιση οικονομιών και οικοσυστημάτων αλλού. Για παράδειγμα, δείτε τις προτάσεις για ανάπτυξη ενεργειακών κοινοτήτων στην Ελλάδα ή τις προτάσεις για πάρκα ανοικτής τεχνολογίας.
Πρώτος στόχος του παρόντος άρθρου είναι να αναδείξει τη σκοτεινή πλευρά της κλιματικής ουδετερότητας.
Δεύτερος στόχος είναι το κάλεσμα σε δημόσια συζήτηση και πειραματισμό προς μια αληθινά δημοκρατική κλιματική ουδετερότητα.
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*Ο Βασίλης Κωστάκηςμελετά θέματα οικολογίας και τεχνολογίας ως καθηγητής στο πανεπιστήμιο του TalTech και ως ερευνητής στο πανεπιστήμιο του Harvard. Είναι μέλος του Συμβουλευτικού Σώματος του mέta. Το παρόν δημοσιεύεται κάτω από την άδεια CC BY-SA 4.0 που ενθαρρύνει τον διαμοιρασμό και την αναδημοσίευση.
Η κατάσταση δείχνει πώς η αναδιοργάνωση της εβδομάδας εργασίας μπορεί να βλάψει τα συμφέροντα των εργαζομένων εάν δεν έχουν λόγο στη διαδικασία
Οι Ρουμάνοι νομοθέτες ζήτησαν ένα τριήμερο Σαββατοκύριακο — αλλά με την υπάρχουσα εβδομάδα εργασίας των 40 ωρών πλέον στριμωγμένη σε τέσσερις βάρδιες, σύμφωνα με το jacobinmag.com.
Το τριήμερο Σαββατοκύριακο ακούγεται σαν ευλογία – ένα κομμάτι της εβδομάδας για να κάνουμε αυτό που πραγματικά θέλουμε. Με την αύξηση της εργασίας από το σπίτι και τη νέα τεχνολογία που επιτρέπει τη μετατόπιση των προτύπων εργασίας, δεν είναι περίεργο που οι απαιτήσεις για τετραήμερη εβδομάδα εργασίας έχουν δημιουργήσει έλξη σε όλο τον κόσμο.
Ωστόσο, υπάρχει μεγάλη ποικιλία στην πρόθεση – και το αποτέλεσμα – τέτοιων έργων. Ενώ τα αριστερά κόμματα σε χώρες από τη Βρετανία έως τη Χιλή ζήτησαν συνολική μείωση του χρόνου εργασίας, το Βέλγιο έχει εισαγάγει μια εθελοντική τετραήμερη εβδομάδα εργασίας, αλλά χωρίς αλλαγή στις συνολικές ώρες. Πειράματα στην Ισλανδία καθώς και πιλοτική έρευνα στην εταιρεία χρηματοοικονομικών υπηρεσιών της Νέας Ζηλανδίας Perpetual Guardian απέδειξαν ότι η συντόμευση της εβδομάδας εργασίας είναι ωφέλιμη για τους εργαζόμενους, ενώ τονίζει επίσης τα πλεονεκτήματά της στην αυξημένη παραγωγικότητα.
Αλλά η ιδέα ότι πρόκειται για ένα μέτρο φιλικό προς τις επιχειρήσεις έρχεται σε αντίθεση με τα όρια της πρότασης. Τον περασμένο μήνα, Ρουμάνοι βουλευτές από κεντροδεξιά και δεξιά κόμματα παρουσίασαν νομοσχέδιο για την αλλαγή της εβδομαδιαίας εργασίας σε τέσσερις ημέρες και της τυπικής εργάσιμης ημέρας σε δέκα ώρες. Οι “χορηγοί” της προτεινόμενης νομοθεσίας είπαν:
Αφού ο εργαζόμενος περάσει την περίοδο προσαρμογής, θα συνειδητοποιήσει ότι έχει ένα παρατεταμένο Σαββατοκύριακο στη διάθεσή του, στο οποίο θα ξεκουραστεί πολύ καλύτερα, λαμβάνοντας υπόψη το τριήμερο ρεπό. Παράλληλα, σε μακροοικονομικό επίπεδο, θα υπήρχε αύξηση της κατανάλωσης και σιωπηρά των πωλήσεων και των κερδών στη δημόσια εστίαση, τις υπηρεσίες και τον τουρισμό, λόγω του παρατεταμένου Σαββατοκύριακου.
Είναι λοιπόν καλύτερο για όλους; Όχι ακριβώς.
Δεκάωρες βάρδιες
Ο ρουμανικός νόμος προτείνει τρεις ημέρες άδειας, οι οποίες θα δώσουν στους εργαζόμενους περισσότερο χρόνο ανάπαυσης με τις οικογένειές τους και περισσότερο χρόνο για κατανάλωση.
Ωστόσο, η υπόσχεση ότι αυτό το πρόγραμμα θα είναι πιο ξεκούραστο αντικρούεται από τη μαρτυρία εργαζομένων σε εστιατόρια στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες που προσπάθησαν να κάνουν δέκα ώρες εργασίας και βρήκαν το πρόγραμμα «πολύ εξαντλητικό». Παρά τους ισχυρισμούς εταιρειών όπως η WeWork και η Hourly, η έρευνα δείχνει ότι οι άνθρωποι που εργάζονται δέκα ή περισσότερες ώρες την ημέρα έχουν αυξημένο κίνδυνο να αναπτύξουν προβλήματα υγείας στην εργασία.
Στη Ρουμανία, τα πιλοτικά παραδείγματα στο Perpetual Guardian και ενός στη Microsoft Japan περιλαμβάνονται συχνά σε άρθρα που υποστηρίζουν τη νέα μεγαλύτερη εργάσιμη ημέρα. Αυτό που αφήνουν εκτός είναι ότι αυτές οι εταιρείες μείωσαν τον αριθμό των εργάσιμων ημερών, ενώ παράλληλα μείωσαν τον συνολικό χρόνο εργασίας, πράγμα που άφησε πράγματι περισσότερο ελεύθερο χρόνο στους εργαζόμενους.
Χωρίς σαφή μείωση των συνολικών ωρών εργασίας, η αλλαγή της δομής της εβδομάδας εργασίας σε τέσσερις ημέρες αντί για πέντε μπορεί στην πραγματικότητα να προκαλέσει μεγαλύτερη ζημιά στον εργαζόμενο. Ο Jonathan Malesic, συγγραφέας του The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives, είπε στο Healthline ότι «Το να δουλεύεις αυτές τις δύο επιπλέον ώρες κατά τη διάρκεια της ημέρας είναι πραγματικά δύσκολο. Η παραγωγικότητά σας μετά την όγδοη ώρα στη δουλειά πιθανότατα μειώνεται, αλλά το άγχος όχι». Το πείραμα στην Ισλανδία ήταν επιτυχές ακριβώς επειδή δεν βασιζόταν σε επιπλέον χρόνο εργασίας κάθε εργάσιμη ημέρα.
Επίσης κρίσιμο είναι το ερώτημα ποιος αποφασίζει. Ενώ τα συνδικάτα συμμετείχαν στο πρόγραμμα υλοποίησης της τετραήμερης εβδομάδας στην Ισλανδία, στη Ρουμανία, δεν ζητήθηκε η γνώμη τους για τη δεξιά νομοθετική πρόταση. Ο Bogdan Hossu, πρόεδρος του συνδικάτου Cartel ALFA της χώρας, είπε στον Jacobin ότι η ρουμανική πρωτοβουλία είναι ασέβεια προς τους ανθρώπους που πολέμησαν και μάλιστα θυσίασαν τη ζωή τους στις ιστορικές μάχες για το οκτάωρο εργάσιμο. Ενώ κάποιοι δείχνουν ότι ο Χένρι Φορντ επιβάλλει τις οκτάωρες εργάσιμες ημέρες ως μέρος της εφαρμογής του για επιστημονική διαχείριση, ο αγώνας για μικρότερες ώρες πηγαίνει πίσω στον δέκατο ένατο αιώνα, όταν η εργατική τάξη πλήρωσε το τίμημα με αίμα για αυτήν την απαίτηση.
Ακόμη και εκτός από αυτή τη σημαντική ιστορική κληρονομιά, ο Hossu λέει ότι «η αλλαγή της κανονικής εργάσιμης ημέρας σε δέκα ώρες θα αλλάξει τον τρόπο με τον οποίο δίνονται τα μπόνους υπερωριών και επίσης το μέγεθος της εργασίας που κάνουν οι άνθρωποι κάθε μέρα». Σε μια χώρα όπως η Ρουμανία — όπου η πλειονότητα των μισθών δεν ανταποκρίνεται στο κόστος ζωής και όπου το 35 τοις εκατό των εργαζομένων εργάζεται περισσότερες από σαράντα ώρες την εβδομάδα — η ευκαιρία να κερδίσετε επιπλέον εισόδημα προέρχεται από υπερωρίες. Η υπερωριακή εργασία δεν πληρώνεται σε όλες τις περιπτώσεις, αλλά όταν οι εργαζόμενοι επιλέγουν οικειοθελώς, ενδέχεται να παραμείνουν δύο ώρες παραπάνω και να αμείβονται ανάλογα.
Αλλάζοντας την τυπική εργάσιμη ημέρα σε δέκα ώρες χωρίς να απαιτείται να πληρωθούν οι δύο πρόσθετες ώρες ως υπερωρία, θα μπορούσαμε να καταλήξουμε σε μια κατάσταση στην οποία οι πιο ευάλωτοι θα πρέπει να εργάζονται περισσότερες από δέκα ώρες την ημέρα ή ακόμη και να εργάζονται την πέμπτη ημέρα για να αντέξουν οικονομικά να ζήσουν. Έτσι, οι εργαζόμενοι καταλήγουν με περισσότερο άγχος και περισσότερες ώρες εργασίας συνολικά.
Μαθήματα Γαλλικών
Μια ενδεικτική περίπτωση των περιορισμών των νομοθετικών περιορισμών στον χρόνο εργασίας προέρχεται από τη Γαλλία, η οποία ξεκίνησε τη διαδικασία μείωσης της εβδομάδας εργασίας σε τριάντα πέντε ώρες κατά μέσο όρο το 1998. Η αλλαγή επέτρεψε ευέλικτες ρυθμίσεις εργασίας, με εταιρείες όπως η εταιρεία αποσκευών Samsonite να επιλέγουν να εργάζονται μικρότερες εβδομάδες το χειμώνα και μεγαλύτερες το καλοκαίρι όταν η ζήτηση για τα προϊόντα τους είναι μεγαλύτερη.
Η επιβολή μιας μέσης εβδομαδιαίας εργασίας τριάντα πέντε ωρών επέτρεψε μεγαλύτερη ευελιξία, αλλά δεν μείωσε πλήρως τις συνολικές ώρες που εργάστηκαν πραγματικά οι άνθρωποι. Οι Γάλλοι εργαζόμενοι κατά μέσο όρο δούλευαν περίπου τριάντα έξι ώρες την εβδομάδα πέρυσι, αν και η οικονομική κρίση μείωσε τον συνολικό μέσο όρο μέσω της αύξησης των θέσεων μερικής απασχόλησης. Στην πραγματικότητα, η εβδομάδα εργασίας για τους εργαζομένους πλήρους απασχόλησης είναι περίπου τριάντα εννέα ώρες την εβδομάδα, με οτιδήποτε υπερβαίνει το όριο των τριάντα πέντε ωρών να υπολογίζεται ως υπερωρία.
Πέρα από τα προαναφερθέντα οφέλη, η έρευνα για το χάσμα συντάξεων μεταξύ ανδρών και γυναικών υποδηλώνει ότι η μείωση της εβδομάδας εργασίας μπορεί να είναι επωφελής για όσους εγκαταλείπουν το αμειβόμενο εργατικό δυναμικό για να φροντίσουν τα μέλη της οικογένειας (κυρίως γυναίκες). Στη Ρουμανία, το χάσμα στις συντάξεις είναι περίπου 25 τοις εκατό. Αυτό οφείλεται κυρίως στο γεγονός ότι οι γυναίκες εγκαταλείπουν πρόωρα το εργατικό δυναμικό ή δεν εργάζονται ποτέ επίσημα, καθώς η διαφορά στις αμοιβές μεταξύ των δύο φύλων στη χώρα είναι από τις χαμηλότερες στην Ευρώπη (2,5%). Ο κίνδυνος φτώχειας για τις γυναίκες που διεκδικούν συντάξεις είναι πολύ υψηλότερος από ό,τι για τους άνδρες (28,5 τοις εκατό έναντι 16,4 τοις εκατό), δείχνοντας πόσο επιζήμιο μπορεί να είναι μακροπρόθεσμα η ύπαρξη εκτός του αμειβόμενου εργατικού δυναμικού.
Ενώ ορισμένες φωνές ζητούν ένα καθολικό βασικό εισόδημα, η Ρουμανία είναι πολύ πίσω στις απαιτήσεις για βασικές εγγυήσεις πρόνοιας, με την ακρωτηρίαση του συστήματος υγειονομικής περίθαλψης και εκπαίδευσης ως αποτέλεσμα δεκαετιών νεοφιλελεύθερων πολιτικών. Προτού φτάσουμε σε ένα σημείο όπου μπορούμε να εξασφαλίσουμε σε όλους ένα σταθερό εισόδημα ανεξάρτητα από το καθεστώς απασχόλησης, η συντόμευση της εβδομάδας εργασίας θα μπορούσε να βοηθήσει στη μείωση της πίεσης στους ώμους των γυναικών.
Υπάρχουν όμως άλλα προβλήματα με αυτή τη νομοθεσία. Ακριβώς επειδή κάποιος φαινομενικά αναμένεται να εργάζεται τέσσερις ημέρες την εβδομάδα δεν σημαίνει ότι δεν θα χρειαστεί να απαντήσει σε τηλεφωνήματα, να ολοκληρώσει πρόσθετες εργασίες το Σαββατοκύριακο ή να εμφανιστεί στο γραφείο εάν το αφεντικό του το ζητήσει. Το νομοσχέδιο της Ρουμανίας βασίζεται σε προηγούμενες συζητήσεις σχετικά με την εργασιακή ευελιξία που προέκυψαν κατά τη διάρκεια της πανδημίας, όταν ορισμένοι εργαζόμενοι βρέθηκαν στο σπίτι, υποχρεωμένοι να φροντίζουν τα παιδιά και να τα βοηθούν στο σχολείο.
Οι Ρουμάνοι που είχαν την ευελιξία να εργάζονται από το σπίτι τους άρεσε κυρίως: το 70 τοις εκατό όσων είχαν την ευκαιρία να μεταφέρουν το γραφείο τους στο σαλόνι τους ανέφεραν την ικανοποίησή τους. Ωστόσο, παρά τις εκκλήσεις για πιο ευέλικτες εβδομαδιαίες εργασίες, η ευρύτερη πραγματικότητα είναι ότι οδεύουμε προς μια μόνιμη οικονομία που εδραιώνει και εμβαθύνει «την καταπάτηση των αφεντικών και των δυνάμεων της αγοράς στην ιδιωτική μας ζωή». Προκειμένου να επιτευχθεί καλύτερη ισορροπία μεταξύ επαγγελματικής και προσωπικής ζωής, η μείωση της εβδομάδας εργασίας θα πρέπει να συνοδεύεται από νόμους για το δικαίωμα αποσύνδεσης, όπως αυτοί στο Βέλγιο και την Πορτογαλία, οι οποίοι απαγορεύουν στα αφεντικά να στέλνουν μηνύματα στους εργαζόμενους κατά τον ελεύθερο χρόνο τους.
Η έρευνα που διεξήχθη στη Νέα Ζηλανδία, της Microsoft στην Ιαπωνία ή στην Ισλανδία ώθησε τον βουλευτή από την Καλιφόρνια Mark Takano, ο οποίος τώρα έχει την υποστήριξη πολλών ομάδων, συμπεριλαμβανομένου του Ινστιτούτου Οικονομικής Πολιτικής και του Congressional Progressive Caucus, να προτείνει την καθιέρωση της τετραήμερης εβδομαδιαίας εργασίας και τη μείωση συνολικός χρόνος εργασίας έως τριάντα δύο ώρες. Σύμφωνα με το νομοσχέδιο, κάθε επιπλέον ώρα εργασίας πάνω από το όριο των τριάντα δύο ωρών θα πρέπει να αντισταθμίζεται ως υπερωρία, δεδομένης της εμπειρικής έρευνας που υποδηλώνει ότι ο ίδιος αριθμός εργασιών μπορεί να ολοκληρωθεί σε λιγότερο χρόνο.
Καθώς το κίνημα για τη μείωση της εβδομάδας εργασίας γίνεται πιο δημοφιλές σε όλο τον κόσμο, θα πρέπει να ρωτήσουμε αν αυτό μπορεί να σημαίνει κάτι περισσότερο από μια αναδιάταξη του υπάρχοντος βάρους του μόχθου και του άγχους. Η συσσώρευση σαράντα ωρών εργασίας σε τέσσερις ημέρες δεν είναι ελκυστική για τους εργαζόμενους που θα είναι πιο επιρρεπείς σε ατυχήματα και θα πρέπει να κάνουν οδυνηρά μεγάλες βάρδιες που κάποτε θα αποζημιώνονταν ως υπερωρίες. Μια ξεκάθαρη λύση θα ήταν να μειωθεί η εβδομαδιαία εργασία σε τριάντα δύο ώρες και να οριστεί η μέγιστη υπερωρία σε οκτώ ώρες την εβδομάδα.
Με βάση προηγούμενα παραδείγματα, αυτό θα έκανε τους εργαζόμενους πιο ευτυχισμένους, θα τους έδινε περισσότερο ελεύθερο χρόνο και θα τους επέτρεπε να ξεφύγουν από τον έλεγχο του αφεντικού τους λίγο περισσότερο.
Ο Δήμος Αθηναίων παρουσιάζει στη Δημοτική Πινακοθήκη στο Μεταξουργείο την εικαστική έκθεση: ΑΝΘΕΚΤΙΚΟΤΗΤΑ / ΣΥΜΠΟΝΙΑ [RESILIENCE / COMPASSION]* 4 Μαΐου – 12 Ιουνίου 2022, με ελεύθερη είσοδο
Στην καρδιά του χειμώνα, ανακάλυπτα επιτέλους πως φύλαγα μέσα μου ένα αήττητο καλοκαίρι. Αλμπέρ Καμύ, Το καλοκαίρι
Η μεταβιομηχανική, μετα-πανδημική πόλη καταγράφει στον ιστό της μια σειρά απωλειών, προϊόντων μιας πολυεπίπεδης κρίσης (περιβαλλοντικής, οικονομικής, μεταναστευτικής, κοινωνικής και αξιακής). Η ανάγκη υπέρβασης της αίσθησης της απώλειας που εγγράφεται στο αστικό σώμα, μεταφράζεται στην απαίτηση για γρήγορη ανάκαμψη ή επαναφορά σε συνθήκες σταθερότητας. Η ιδιότητα της resilience, που αποδίδεται στην ελληνική γλώσσα ως ανθεκτικότητα ή επανατακτικότητα, βρίσκεται την τελευταία 15ετία στην καρδιά του ακαδημαϊκού και δημόσιου λόγου σε σχέση με την οικολογία, τον αστικό σχεδιασμό, τη βιώσιμη ανάπτυξη και την αειφορία. Η ανθεκτικότητα συγκροτείται ως ένα κανονιστικό ιδεώδες, τόσο στο πλαίσιο των κοινωνικών και τεχνο-οικονομικών συστημάτων, όσο και για το άτομο, που οφείλει να ανακάμπτει γρήγορα, να επανευρίσκει τον εαυτό του, να επανακτά τις δυνάμεις και τις δεξιότητές του, ξεπερνώντας πλήγματα, δεινά ή απώλειες. Ωστόσο, η έμφαση στην ανθεκτικότητα ως “το σύνολο των προδιαθέσεων, ιδιοτήτων και συναισθημάτων” που βοηθά τα άτομα να επιβιώνουν έχει δεχτεί κριτική, εφόσον φαίνεται να καθιστά το άτομο μοναδικά υπεύθυνο για την ευημερία του, αγνοώντας το ρόλο των δυσμενών κοινωνικών συνθηκών. Περαιτέρω, αρκετοί επισημαίνουν ότι, παρότι η “ανθεκτικότητα” είναι κεντρικός όρος στην ακαδημαϊκή βιβλιογραφία, η έλλειψη κοινώς από δεκτού ορισμού και κριτικής εξέτασης του θεωρητικού πλαισίου, εξυπηρετεί την ατζέντα νεοφιλελεύθερων πολιτικών. Η πανδημία του Covid-19 κατέστησε τις συνθήκες καθημερινής ζωής ακόμη πιο περίπλοκες και επώδυνες για μεγάλη μερίδα του παγκόσμιου πληθυσμού, που αντιμετώπισε το άγχος της κοινωνικής απομόνωσης, την ανεργία, τους μαζικούς θανάτους και το φόβο. Είναι, επομένως, ξεκάθαρο ότι χρειάζεται να κατανοήσουμε τους μηχανισμούς προετοιμασίας, ψυχικής και συναισθηματικής, για ακραίες συνθήκες. Πώς, όμως, θα πρέπει να νοηθεί η ανθεκτική ζωή; Πώς υπερβαίνουμε τη μελαγχολία, τη θλίψη, τα εμπόδια, τις κρίσεις και τα τραύματα που κληρονομούνται στην μεταβιομηχανική, μεταπανδημική ευρωπαϊκή πόλη; Μπορεί μια κριτική προσέγγιση της ρητορικής και των πολιτικών της ανθεκτικότητας να οδηγήσει σε μια νέα αντίληψη για την ανθεκτική ζωή σε ένα ριζικά διαμορφωμένο κόσμο, που υπερβαίνει διαιρέσεις, ανισότητες και ρατσισμούς –εν’ ολίγοις, σε ένα ριζικά δημοκρατικό κόσμο; Μπορεί η συμπόνια, νοούμενη ως ένα πολιτικό συναίσθημα που ενθαρρύνει τους πολίτες να νοιάζονται και να αναλαμβάνουν την ευθύνη για τους συμπολίτες τους που υποφέρουν, να αποτελέσει στοιχείο προσωπικής και συλλογικής ανθεκτικότητας? Μπορούν οι τέχνες να λειτουργήσουν ως μια σπουδή στην ανθεκτικότητα, νοούμενη ως συναισθηματική χειρονομία που επιτρέπει τη θέαση νέων δυνατοτήτων και επαναπροσδιορισμού της πραγματικότητας? Η προτεινόμενη εκθεσιακή διοργάνωση προσκαλεί Έλληνες και Κύπριους εικαστικούς, επιχειρώντας να διερευνήσει τους συσχετισμούς ανάμεσα στη ρητορική της ανθεκτικότητας, την οικολογία, τον αστικό σχεδιασμό, την αειφορία και την κοινωνική οργάνωση. Οι συμμετέχοντες εικαστικοί καλούνται να διερευνήσουν τους τρόπους με τους οποίους η καλλιτεχνική χειρονομία μπορεί να συμβάλει στην κατανόηση της ανθεκτικότητας εντός ενός συμπονετικού και παρηγορητικού λόγου, που μπορεί –εντέλει – να συγκεράσει το ιδιωτικό με το συλλογικό. Διανοίγοντας ένα διάλογο ανάμεσα σε καλλιτέχνες και φιλοσόφους, η παρούσα πρόταση επιδιώκει να τονίσει τη σημασία μιας διαφορετικής κατανόησης του ρόλου της ανθεκτικότητας (ως έννοια, ρητορική και διαδικασία) στην αισθητική και καλλιτεχνική εμπειρία.
Αμέσως μετά την ολοκλήρωση της πρώτης φάσης του Ios Art Residency, ο εικαστικός κι επιμελητής του προγράμματος, μιλά γι αυτή τη νέα κι ενδιαφέρουσα πρωτοβουλία.
Η διοργάνωση που πραγματοποιείται για πρώτη φορά φέτος από το σωματείο Save Ios φιλοδοξεί να εντάξει το νησί της Ίου στον Ελληνικό εικαστικό χάρτη, φέρνοντας στο προσκήνιο θέματα όπως οι περιβαλλοντικές και πολιτιστικές επιπτώσεις της ανάπτυξης των νησιών.
Τί είναι το Save Ios και ποιος ο σκοπός του; Γιατί δημιουργήθηκε το Ios Art Residency;
Το σωματείο «Σώστε την Ίο (Save Ios)» έχει ως βασικό του σκοπό την προστασία του φυσικού και ανθρωπογενούς περιβάλλοντος της Ίου. Μεγάλο μέρος του νησιού έχει αγοραστεί από εταιρείες ιδίων επιχειρηματικών συμφερόντων. Οι εταιρείες αυτές προωθούν μια ανάπτυξη εντελώς ασύμβατη με την Αιγαιοπελαγίτικη φυσιογνωμία του νησιού – τόσο με την μορφή των έργων που κατασκευάζουν, όσο και με τις εκτεταμένες περιβαλλοντικές καταστροφές που προκαλούν, οι οποίες τιμωρήθηκαν πρόσφατα στα δικαστήρια. Οι εκάστοτε κυβερνήσεις έχουν υποστηρίξει την κατάσταση αυτή, εντάσσοντας μάλιστα επενδυτικά σχέδια των εταιρειών στην κατηγορία των «στρατηγικών επενδύσεων». Δικαιολογούν τις αποφάσεις τους στο όνομα της «ανάπτυξης», έστω και αν αυτή συνοδεύεται από καταστροφές μοναδικών τοπίων και πολιτιστικών χαρακτηριστικών, και έστω και αν τα οφέλη για την εθνική οικονομία σε όρους δημιουργίας ποιοτικών θέσεων εργασίας είναι ελάχιστα.
Το σωματείο μας αντιμάχεται αυτόν τον παραλογισμό, με δράσεις που λαμβάνει σε νομικό επίπεδο, σε επικοινωνιακό επίπεδο, και άλλες. Μια από τις επικοινωνιακές του δράσεις είναι το Ios Art Residency, με το οποίο επιδιώκουμε να ευαισθητοποιήσουμε το κοινό, τόσο τους κατοίκους της Ίου όσο και τους επισκέπτες της, για την ευθραυστότητα του Κυκλαδίτικου τοπίου και τις επιπτώσεις της ανθρώπινης παρέμβασης σε αυτό.
Ποιος πιστεύεις είναι, ή θα πρέπει να είναι, ο ρόλος των εικαστικών πρωτοβουλιών στην Ελληνική περιφέρεια;
Οι δράσεις τέτοιου είδους στον τομέα των εικαστικών ενεργοποιούν μια συνθήκη εξωστρέφειας αλλά και σύνδεσης του κέντρου με την περιφέρεια. Σημαντικός παράγοντας σε αυτό είναι ο διάλογος και η ανταλλαγή απόψεων με τους καλλιτέχνες, τους κατοίκους και τους επισκέπτες, δημιουργώντας ερεθίσματα σχετικά με την αναγκαιότητα αλλά και τους τρόπους εξασφάλισης της πολιτιστικής βιωσιμότητας ενός τόπου. Το εικαστικό τοπίο της χώρας διευρύνεται με αυτόν τον τρόπο μέσα από ένα σύστημα εκφραστικού περιεχομένου που ενισχύει την δυναμικότητα του και εξελίσσει τις αισθητικές αξίες του. Τα προγράμματα φιλοξενίας προσκαλούν καλλιτέχνες και από το εξωτερικό, προσελκύοντας το ενδιαφέρον για την Ελλάδα και ενισχύοντας την παρουσία της στα διεθνή πολιτιστικά δρώμενα.
Ποιο το θέμα του Ios Art Residency;
Το πρόγραμμα φιλοξενίας τον Απρίλιο, αλλά και η έκθεση που θα πραγματοποιηθεί τον Αύγουστο, έχει τίτλο Μικρο-ιστορίες ενός ευμετάβλητου τοπίου. Πραγματοποιείται με την υποστήριξη του Δήμου Ιητών και υπό την Αιγίδα και την υποστήριξη του Υπουργείου Πολιτισμού και Αθλητισμού. Ο βασικός στόχος του είναι η δημιουργία ενός ξεχωριστού και σύγχρονου τρόπου αφήγησης, η προαγωγή της βιώσιμης ανάπτυξης του νησιού και η καλλιέργεια της περιβαλλοντικής και κοινωνικής ευαισθησίας των κατοίκων και των επισκεπτών του. Ειδικότερα το Ios Art Residency #1 στοχεύει στη δημιουργία ενός ισχυρoύ πολιτιστικού νοήματος σε σχέση με την αλληλεπίδραση της ανθρώπινης δραστηριότητας και του φυσικού περιβάλλοντος, τις γεωπολιτικές έννοιες πίσω από τη διαλεκτική ξηράς-θάλασσας, και τις σχέσεις εγγύτητας με τη φύση.
Γιατί επέλεξες σαν έναν από τους κεντρικούς άξονες του προγράμματος το περιβάλλον και την βιώσιμη ανάπτυξη;
Τα νησιά των Κυκλάδων (καθώς και πολλά άλλα ελληνικά νησιά) δέχονται τεράστιες οικιστικές πιέσεις καθώς οι τιμές για πολυτελείς κατοικίες έχουν εκτοξευθεί. Αν δεν υπάρξει η απαιτούμενη προσοχή και προστασία, τα νησιά θα χάσουν την μοναδική τους ομορφιά και φυσιογνωμία, χωρίς παράλληλα να διασφαλιστεί η οικονομική βιωσιμότητα των τοπικών κοινωνιών. Η ανάπτυξη που προστατεύει το περιβάλλον είναι μονόδρομος για τις ευαίσθητες αυτές τουριστικές περιοχές. Είναι επίσης εφικτή, καθώς, π.χ., χώρες όπως η Γαλλία και η Ιταλία έχουν καταφέρει να προστατεύσουν όμορφα τοπία και παραδοσιακούς οικισμούς σε περιοχές με υψηλή τουριστική ζήτηση. Αυτό θα πρέπει να επιδιώξουμε και στην Ελλάδα, παρά τις ισχυρές πιέσεις που μπορούν να ασκούνται από ιδιωτικά οικονομικά συμφέροντα. Με το Ios Art Residency θέλουμε να τονίσουμε τις παραπάνω θεματικές.
Ποιοι εικαστικοί συμμετέχουν στη φετινή διοργάνωση;
Έχουμε προσκαλέσει για δύο εβδομάδες τον Απρίλιο του 2022 τρεις εικαστικούς καλλιτέχνες, τη Δήμητρα Κονδυλάτου, τον Ορέστη Μαυρουδή και τη Φωτεινή Παλπάνα να γνωρίσουν την Ίο από κοντά, να ανταλλάξουν απόψεις με τους κατοίκους της και μέσω της επιτόπιας έρευνας να παράγουν νέα έργα με τα μέσα της επιλογής τους. Τα έργα θα φιλοξενηθούν στο πλαίσιο μιας Έκθεσης Σύγχρονης Τέχνης και διάρκειας ενός μήνα, τον Αύγουστο του 2022, αποτελώντας την αφορμή για μια δημόσια συζήτηση σχετικά με την αναγκαιότητα αλλά και τους τρόπους εξασφάλισης της περιβαλλοντικής και πολιτιστικής βιωσιμότητας του νησιού.
Σε τι διαφοροποιείται το Ios Art Residency από τα άλλα προγράμματα φιλοξενίας που πραγματοποιούνται στην Ελλάδα;
Το ιδιαίτερο τοπίο και η ιστορία του νησιού είναι στοιχεία πολύ σημαντικά που καλούνται να διερευνήσουν οι καλλιτέχνες στην διάρκεια της φιλοξενίας τους. Επίσης η προσέγγιση στο ειδικότερο πρόβλημα της “ανάπτυξης” της Ίου που επισημάνθηκαν στην αρχή και οι κίνδυνοι που ελλοχεύουν, διαφοροποιούν τον λόγο που δημιουργήθηκε αυτό το residency σε σχέση με άλλα προγράμματα φιλοξενίας.
Ποια η αλληλεπίδραση του προγράμματος με την τοπική κοινωνία;
Για το Ios Art Residency η καθημερινή πρακτική της τέχνης έρχεται να λειτουργήσει ως ένας ανοιχτός διάλογος με την κοινωνία, να θέσει ερωτήματα σχετικά με την αειφόρο εξέλιξη του τόπου και να διερευνήσει τις δυνατότητες της περιβαλλοντικής αναγέννησης σε αλληλεξάρτηση με τις κοινωνικό-οικολογικές αξίες. Λαμβάνοντας πάντοτε υπ’ όψιν το τοπικό, κοινωνικό και ιστορικό πλαίσιο της περιοχής, το Ios Art Residency φιλοδοξεί να λειτουργήσει ως ένα πεδίο συστηματικής έρευνας και διαλόγου για την Ιο και την ευρύτερη περιοχή των Κυκλάδων.
Πώς βλέπετε τη συνεργασία με άλλες πρωτοβουλίες εκτός Ίου;
O σκοπός μας από την αρχή είναι να συνεργαστούμε κάποια στιγμή στο μέλλον και με άλλες παρόμοιες αξιόλογες προσπάθειες που συμβαίνουν στις Κυκλάδες. Περισσότερο για να δημιουργηθεί ένα δίκτυο και μια γέφυρα που στόχο έχει την μεγαλύτερη ευαισθητοποίηση για το περιβάλλον των νησιών που αυτή τη στιγμή κινδυνεύουν περισσότερο από ποτέ.
Ποιο θα ήθελες να είναι το μέλλον του Ios Art Residency;
Το Ios Art Residency φιλοδοξεί να διευρύνει το πεδίο δράσης του και σε άλλες μορφές τέχνης όπως ο χορός, η μουσική, η performance και η λογοτεχνία. Θέλουμε επίσης να μεγαλώσει ως προς τον αριθμό των συμμετεχόντων του, όπως και με την συμμετοχή ξένων καλλιτεχνών, ώστε να υψώσει την φωνή του με στόχο την προβολή και την προστασία του φυσικής ομορφιάς της Ίου.
Μία έκθεση και μία σύγχρονη επιμελητική προσέγγιση γύρω από την εργασία
Το πολιτικό με την ευρεία έννοια, οι δομές που διαμορφώνουν την κοινωνικό-οικονομική πραγματικότητα και η διάθεση για μία ορατότητα κρυμμένων ή μη θεσμικών όψεων της ζωής και της καλλιτεχνικής δημιουργίας είναι το πεδίο γύρω στο οποίο κινείται η ενότητα των εκθέσεων με τον τίτλο «Waste/d» που έχει αναλάβει η ομάδα της Προσωρινής Ακαδημίας Τεχνών (η ιδρύτρια του Eλπίδα Καραμπά, ο Βαγγέλης Βλάχος, η Δέσποινα Ζευκιλή και η Γιώτα Οικονομίδου) ως μέρος του ομώνυμου ερευνητικού εγχειρήματος και στο πλαίσιο της νέας συνεργασίας της με τον μη-κερδοσκοπικό χώρο State of Concept Athens. Ειδικότερα, οι πολλαπλές σημασίες του «waste/d» ως απόβλητου, αποκείμενου, περιττού, πλεονάζοντος ως κοινωνικό φαινόμενο και ως σύγχρονο υποκείμενο (ο άνθρωπος που τίθεται στο περιθώριο, που προσδιορίζεται σε σχέση με το αντίθετό του) αποτελούν το γενικότερο πλαίσιο γύρω από το οποίο οργανώνονται τρεις διαφορετικές, διαδοχικές εκθέσεις/αφηγήσεις.
H έκθεση εντάσσεται στις δράσεις του «Waste/d Pavilion» που προέκυψε με την ένταξη του ερευνητικού προγράμματος Waste/d στο Ευρωπαϊκό Πρόγραμμα European Pavillion κατόπιν πρόσκληση του ινστιτούτου σύγχρονης τέχνης State of Concept. Η πρώτη έκθεση της σειράς που άνοιξε (στην state of concept) πραγματεύεται το waste/d στην εργασία. Αποτελεί μία έκθεση «Για την Εργασία, περί της Εργασίας, από την Εργασία», φράση με την οποία ο πιο ιστορικός καλλιτέχνης της έκθεσης, ο αμερικανός Fred Lonidier, συνδικαλιστής και μέρος της πολιτικά ενεργούς ομάδας καλλιτεχνών του San Diego την δεκαετία του εβδομήντα (ανάμεσά τους οι Μartha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Allan Kaprow) περιγράφει την δουλειά του. Το έργο του L.A Public Workers Point to Some Problems (1980) έδωσε ένα βήμα τους εργαζομένους δημόσιας υπηρεσίας του Λος Άντζελες για να εκφράσουν τα προβλήματά τους ως αποτέλεσμα της οικονομικής κρίσης της δεκαετίας του εβδομήντα και τις τότε περικοπές στον δημόσιο τομέα. Από τα πιο δυνατά έργα της έκθεσης, εν μέρει και διότι επιτρέπει στον θεατή να κατανοήσει κανείς την σημερινή κατάσταση πιο ιστορικά, το έργο αντιπροσωπεύει και το λογοκεντρικό στίγμα της ομαδικής αυτής έκθεσης. Τα έργα που παρουσιάζονται βασίζονται σε αφηγήσεις και προϋποθέτουν την ανάγνωση (κειμένων στο ίδιο το έργο ή κειμένων που συνοδεύουν το έργο) ή την ακρόαση αφηγήσεων από την πλευρά του θεατή και έχουν σε διαφορετικό βαθμό έντονο τον χαρακτήρα του έργου-ντοκυμαντέρ. Τυπικό παράδειγμα στην έκθεση είναι η παρουσίαση συνεντεύξεων Γεωργιανών οικιακών βοηθών που έγιναν στο πλαίσιο μίας συνεχιζόμενης έρευνας των Λώρα Μαραγκουδάκη και Τατιάνας Μαυρομάτη και που στην προκειμένη παρουσίαση αναδεικνύει τις εργασιακές συνθήκες σε σχέση με το φύλο και την εθνική καταγωγή του εργαζόμενου.
Σε γενικές γραμμές, η έκθεση εκφράζει μία σαφή προσέγγιση της τέχνης ως φορέα πολιτικού νοήματος και συμβάλλει στην πρόσληψη του καλλιτέχνη ως ερευνητή ακόμα και ακτιβιστή και της τέχνης ως ένα πεδίο συνάντησης με καθώς και υποδοχής ερευνητών από άλλα πεδία. Το βίντεο του Aλβανού καλλιτέχνη Armando Lulaj για παράδειγμα βασίζεται στην κρυφή βιντεοσκόπηση, από μία ακτιβίστρια, της εισβολής αστυνομικών δυνάμεων στο Εθνικό Θέατρο της Αλβανίας στα Τίρανα που είχε καταληφθεί από ακτιβιστές καλλιτέχνες.
Από μία άποψη η έκθεση θα μπορούσε να ιδωθεί στην κατεύθυνση της σύγχρονης τάσης που υποστηρίζει την δυναμική της τέχνης και έξω από το καλλιτεχνικό πεδίο, ένα επιχείρημα που στην υπερβολή του έχει εύλογα τους επικριτές του. Από την άλλη όμως, ο τρόπος παραγωγής της έκθεσης, το επιμελητικό σχήμα της Π.Α.Τ και το μοντέλο δράσης της αμφισβητεί τους θεσμικούς μηχανισμούς παραγωγής τέχνης και γνώσης γενικότερα και θίγει ζητήματα γύρω από τί φανερώνει και τί αποκρύπτει μία έκθεση σύγχρονης τέχνης. Στην έκθεση το Σκιώδες Περίπτερο στον υπόγειο χώρο της γκαλερί λειτουργεί ως ένα αναγνωστήριο με δευτερογενές υλικό σημαντικών και ιστορικών έργων που λόγω προϋπολογισμού δεν μπόρεσαν να συμπεριλάβουν οι επιμελητές. Η έκθεση επομένως δείχνει μία διάθεσηαυτό-κριτικής αλλά και αίσθησης ευθύνης απέναντι στο τί καθιστά προσβάσιμο. Εμμέσως θέτει επίσης το ερώτημα τί μπορεί να σημαίνει η συνεργασία μίας κολεκτίβας με ένα ινστιτούτο σύγχρονης τέχνης όπως το the state of concept.
Με αυτά τα δεδομένα το πρώτο «επεισόδιο» του Waste/d δεν μπορεί να ιδωθεί μόνο ως μία παρουσίαση σε έναν χώρο τέχνης αλλά ως μέρος ενός συνεχόμενου ερευνητικού εγχειρήματος που έχει αναλάβει η Π.Α.Τ και που δεν διερευνά μόνο θέματα όπως η εργασία η τεχνολογία και το σώμα και η γλώσσα (τα θέματα στα επόμενα επεισόδια του Waste/d) αλλά αφιερώνεται και σε μία θεσμική κριτική. Ασχολείται δηλαδή μεταξύ άλλων με το πώς παράγεται η γνώση και πώς συναρτάται ο δημόσιος λόγος σε σχέση με φορείς εξουσίας. Διερευνά επίσης ανοιχτές μορφές επιμελητικής και καλλιτεχνικής δράσης ως εναλλακτικές μεθόδους παραγωγής γνώσης και πρόσβασης σε εμπειρίες που βρίσκονται στο υπόβαθρο όσων επικρατούν. Λειτουργεί και ως μια «προσωρινή», ευέλικτη και ανοιχτή «ακαδημία», μία πλατφόρμα που προσκαλεί ερευνητές, καλλιτέχνες κλπ σε διάλογο, κοινές δράσεις στις παρυφές του εξω-θεσμικού, εντός και εκτός μίας «γκαλερί». Πειραματίζεται έτσι εμμέσως και με τις «πολιτικές» δυνατότητες της τέχνης ως προς την συγκρότηση του δημόσιου λόγου.
Κατά κάποιον τρόπο επομένως, στο υπόβαθρο της έκθεσης υπάρχει μία πρόθεση δράσης καθώς και η έννοια κοινότητας και της συνεργατικότητας και διεπιστημονικής αντίληψης της τέχνης. Αυτά είναι γνωρίσματα και του τρόπου παραγωγής των ίδιων των έργων που παρουσιάζονται. Στη γραμμή της παράδοσης μιας πολιτικής στάσης σε σχέση με την καλλιτεχνική δημιουργία και την παραγωγή, εκείνο που περισσότερο πάντως κάνει το Waste/d είναι ότι θέτει με κριτική ματιά ερωτήματα λειτουργώντας ως ένα εργαστήριο ιδεών, γεγονός που όμως ο θεατής της έκθεσης δεν εξυπακούεται ότι θα γνωρίζει.
Περισσότερο αποκομίζει πληροφορίες γύρω από τις κρυφές και αποκείμενες πλευρές της ζωής των εργαζομένωνκαι μπαίνει σ’ έναν προβληματισμό γύρω από τις πολλαπλές πτυχές του Waste/d. H ανάγνωση του όρου είναι γενική και αυτό φαίνεται σε έργα όπου το πλεονάζον, περιττό δεν είναι τόσο διακριτό. Το βίντεο Umpire Whispers (2010) για παράδειγμα της Παλαιστίνιας καλλιτέχνιδος Juliana Manna, προβάλλει κοντινά πλάνα ενός ανδρικού και γυναικείου σώματος, ενός προπονητή και της αθλήτριάς του που κάνουν ο ένας μασάζ στον άλλο. Το έργο μιλά για μία σχέση εξουσίας και την ανατροπή του και εντάσσεται στην έννοια του waste/d ως αυτό που ακριβώς επειδή «πετιέται» ή θεωρείται ανάξιο λόγου ή αποδεκτό, περιθωριοποιείται και δεν γίνεται ποτέ ορατό. Εμμέσως μιλά επίσης για το πώς η εργασία και οι επαγγελματικοί ρόλοι συμπλέκονται με συναισθηματικές καταστάσεις οδηγώντας έτσι σε μία παγίδευση, σύγχυση ρόλων, ίσως και μίας αλλοτρίωσης. Αυτό το στοιχείο είναι έντονο στο Στη Σκιά της Σεζόν (2021)της Δήμητρας Κονδυλάτου ένα βίντεο που εμμέσως μιλά για την εργαλειοποίηση από την τουριστική βιομηχανία αξιών όπως η φροντίδα, η φιλοξενία και γενναιοδωρία και το τί μπορεί να σημαίνει αυτό ως προς τον αυτοπροσδιορισμό των ανθρώπων – κυρίως των γυναικών – που εργάζονται στον τομέα αυτό.
Δεν είναι ίσως τυχαίο ότι οι «γυναικείες» ιστορίες έχουν πρωταγωνιστικό ρόλο, γεγονός που δίνει στον «πολιτική» της προσέγγιση μία φεμινιστική χροιά στην έκθεση και εστιάζει στις έμφυλες διακρίσεις στην εργασία. Η εργαζόμενη γυναίκα, εργάτρια απασχολεί και τον Ege Berensel στο έργο του Strike and Wedding (2019) που βασίζεται σε ξεχασμένα τεκμήρια-καταγραφές – από μια φωτογραφική κολεκτίβα – των απεργιών και συνεργατικών δράσεων γυναικών που εργάζονταν σε μία κλωστοϋφαντουργία της Τουρκίας. Το γυναικείο στοιχείο υπάρχει και στο Cyber-Eco–Feminist Goat Path: Towards West Attica my Hometown (2022) σε επιμέλεια Ξένια Καλπακτσόγλου και της καλλιτέχνιδος Πέγκυς Ζάλη, ένα εννοιολογικό εξελισσόμενο έργο που ανασυστήνει μία διαδρομή στην Δυτική Αττική επισημαίνοντας σταθμούς ως τόπους συνάντησης παράλληλων διαδρομών προσωπικών (η διαδρομή που παίρνει ο καθημερινός εργαζόμενος) και εμπορικής ή οικονομικής φύσης (όπως για την μεταφορά προϊόντων).
Η έκθεση συνδέει το προσωπικό, τις ιστορίες των ανθρώπων, την καθημερινότητα που σταδιακά υφαίνει έναν τρόπο ύπαρξης και μία αντίληψη του εαυτού με όσα την διαμορφώνουν, ειδικά στο χώρο της εργασίας. Προς αυτή την κατεύθυνση κινείται και το ηχητικό έργο του Νίκου Αρβανίτη.
Ο σπονδυλωτός της χαρακτήρας, οι αναφορές της σε συνέργειες την καθιστούν τμήμα μίας έρευνας και της προσδίδουν μία ζωντάνια και μία ένταση. Λειτουργεί σαν ένα μικρή συλλογή ιστοριών που εντάσσουν το μερικό στο γενικό. Αντιπροσωπεύει μία σύγχρονη επιμελητική πρακτική και οδηγεί την σκέψη στο τί συνιστά ένα έργο τέχνης και ποιοι φορείς παράγουν γνώσεις και επικοινωνούν πληροφορίες (στις 19 Μαΐου η Τίνα Πανδή και η Μαρίνα Μαρκέλλου θα μιλήσουν για την συγκρότηση των θεσμών στην Ελλάδα). Οι εκδόσεις της Π.Α.Τ που συμπληρώνουν την έκθεση καθώς και το δημόσιο πρόγραμμα της συστήνουν ένα φιλόδοξο «πείραμα» που δημιουργεί γέφυρες και εγείρει το «πολιτικό». Η έκθεση λειτουργεί μέσα σε αυτό το πλέγμα και με έναν τρόπο «προσκαλεί» τον θεατή να γίνει μέρος του, να συμμετάσχει σε μία νοερή κοινότητα καλλιτεχνών, ερευνητών και διανοητών. Είναι απαιτητική και εν μέρει δύσκολη, κάτι που η σχετικά μαζεμένη κλίμακά της και οι συνάφειες των έργων μεταξύ τους, εξισορροπεί. Η συνέχειά μέσα από τα επόμενα κεφάλαια, θα ολοκληρώσουν ένα κύκλο έρευνας που ίσως δημιουργήσουν νέες συνέργειες και ορατότητες.
WASTE/D PAVILION, episode 1 στην State of Concept Athens, ως 21/5.
Editor’s Note: discussion topics include monopoly & oligopoly, how to regulate monopoly in capitalism, how to regulate monoply in parecon, how to organise strategic & essential sectors (like health) in parecon.
[After The Oligarchy] Hello fellow democrats, futurists, and problem solvers, this is After The Oligarchy. Today I’m speaking with Professor Robin Hahnel.
Robin Hahnel is a professor of economics in the United States, and author of many books, but today I’m interviewing him as co-originator with Michael Albert of the post-capitalist model known as Participatory Economics (or Parecon).
Today’s conversation is in association with meta: the Centre for Post-capitalist Civilization. This is the third in a series of interviews with Professor Hahnel about participatory economics, and in particular his latest bookDemocratic Economic Planning published in 2021. If you haven’t watched the first two interviews check them out here.
It’s an advanced discussion of the model proposed in that book so I recommend that you familiarize yourself with participatory economics to understand what we’re talking about. You can do that by visiting participatoryeconomy.org. You can also read Of the People, By the People (2012) for a concise introduction to parecon. And Professor Hahnel has a new book coming out in a few months called A Participatory Economy (2022).
Robin Hahnel, thank you for joining me again.
[Robin Hahnel] Great to be with you again.
[ATO] The next question is a bit different, it’s about monopoly and strategic sectors. For example, what about natural monopolies in parecon? These would be things like electricity, [methane] gas, water, sewage, transport, communications, health, mining, etc. These are sectors of the economy, these are production processes, where … electricity production and distribution is a classic example; it doesn’t make sense for there to be three companies with three different electrical grids, for example. And which are also of strategic, vital, importance. That society be provided with a reliable supply of electricity, where there aren’t blackouts, where it has an appropriate cost, and so forth. So, there are sectors like this which are natural monopolies, and either you end up with a situation – where you have a market system – private monopolies, or a situation where the solution is for the state to take control of these and nationalize them.
So, is there any opportunity in parecon to charge monopoly rents? And what if natural monopoly worker councils don’t treat indicative prices parametrically? Let’s deal with the first question then come back to the second. And if you could just explain what a monopoly rent is to people.
[RH] We have an answer. Every economist knows that only if you have competitive market structures could you make any case that you’re going to get efficient outcomes. As soon as you have a market structure that’s not competitive in a capitalist economy, what will happen is in the most extreme cases a monopoly, and a natural monopoly is sort of the most likely real world example to end up with, one company is the only company that’s producing this product.
As soon as you have that, there is a perverse incentive for that company to produce less than the socially optimal outcome, and therefore to drive its price up. So, two things happen. It reduces the amount that it supplies. That also means it reduces the number of units it’s going to sell, so that’s a negative effect on revenues. On the other hand, every unit it does sell is going to sell at a higher price, and that’s a positive effect on revenues. And the problem is the positive effect is larger than the negative effect leading to a predictable sub-optimal level of output.
Now there are two solutions to this in a capitalist economy. One is to nationalize the natural monopoly and not have it maximize profits but to maximize net social benefits, that is produce the amount that actually is the efficient amount. And the other solution is to regulate the monopoly and say well there’s only one of you but we’re going to set up a regulatory agency. And the regulatory agency’s job … Most people think the regulatory agency’s job is to keep them from price gouging but what economists understand is, no, the regulatory agency’s job is not really to keep them from price gouging, it’s to force them to produce more than they would otherwise be willing to produce if they weren’t regulated. And then the price will take care of itself.
That’s how it works, and one of the problems that defenders of modern market capitalist economies are faced with is in theory they know their economy is only efficient if all industries are competitive. But in reality, what has happened over time is the number of non-competitive industries, and it’s usually not a monopoly, a natural monopoly, it’s an oligopoly. But the same logic applies to oligopolies and economists all know this. So, on the one hand in the real world markets become less and less competitive, and yet defenders of market capitalist economies continue to insist that these are the most efficient economies.
We have a solution in a participatory economy. And the solution takes a very simple form, which is any worker council in our economy is supposed to take the indicative prices as givens.
[ATO] Can you just explain to people briefly what the indicative price is?
[RH] Right, so for instance if you have a natural monopoly let’s choose electricity. During the planning procedure that natural monopoly is quoted a price per watt of electricity and then responds with its output proposals.
[Editor’s Note: During annual planning, worker councils and consumer councils make production and consumption proposals for the year. These proposals are aggregated by the Iteration Facilitation Board (IFB) which feeds back new ‘indicative prices’ to producers and consumers according to a rule chosen to encourage the balancing of supply and demand. This continues for a number of rounds (iterations) until a feasible plan is reached.]
Now, the thing that a monopoly does that’s inefficient is it doesn’t look at market price and take it as a given. Instead, what it does is it asks well wait a minute I’m looking at the entire demand curve. I’m not going to take the price I’m quoted as a given because I can see that if I reduced my supply I could drive that price higher. So, in effect what monopolies are doing is they are not taking prices as givens. They are recognizing that their monopoly status permits them to affect what the price is going to end up being.
These are worker councils in a participatory economy, and there just happens to be one that’s producing electricity in a given region. They don’t have stockholders that are telling them to maximize profits, instead they are certainly supposed to be obeying the rules of the system and one of the rules is when you make your proposals you respond to indicative prices as the given price. You do not calculate ‘but I could affect that price by my response in this round’. Aha, what would prevent one from doing it?
[ATO] Yes, exactly.
[RH] And our answer is a worker council might try and do that, so let’s not be naive and consider it to be impossible. Oh, but it would be it would be anti-social behaviour, it wouldn’t be nice, you’re not supposed to. Let’s take the hard-nosed I-don’t-want-to-be-naive attitude toward this.
If you take the hard-nosed attitude in capitalism you either nationalize or you regulate. When you take it in our system, there is also a response to prevent the behaviour but it’s a different response. The different response is if we catch you doing that it’s against the law. The question becomes devising whatever penalties there would be for a worker council that was doing that. Essentially we have a system that has rules, and one of the rules is when you participate during the annual planning process you are directed, explicitly, to take these prices as givens when you’re doing these various responses. If it’s discovered that you’re not doing that then you’re basically not participating in the annual planning process in good faith and according to the terms of being allowed to participate.
Basically, there have to be rules for who gets to participate in the annual planning process. One is you have to be an approved worker council. And suppose one way you can get disapproved is oh when the industry checked you out when you said you wanted to be a worker council, you said you wanted to be a worker council producing steel but you have no engineers. I mean, in your group and you don’t have any qualified engineers, you have no credibility. So you can be disapproved as a worker council to take part in the annual participatory planning process because you don’t have any credibility that you could actually do what you’re making these proposals about. So we’re not going to let you mess up our planning process.
Another way you can get disapproved is – we talked about it before – that you said you were going to make the shoes people wanted and but you kept sending the yellow toed shoes even though nobody was picking them up, and you just didn’t care. So you can get disapproved as being a worker council for that kind of behaviour.
This is another kind of behaviour you can get disapproved for. If you’re caught during the planning process trying to manipulate the modifications of the indicative prices in the way that monopolies do in capitalist economies, if you’re caught doing that then that’s grounds for some sort of penalty, or fines, or reprimands, or you can simply be decertified as a worker council that we’re going to allow to participate.
[ATO] That makes sense but can I just ask to my mind the hard bit there is not deciding what the penalties are, it’s …
[RH] How do you know if a worker council is doing that?
[ATO] Yes, and can I just elaborate that on a little bit? Why do I think that that might be difficult, or why am I having trouble imagining that? It’s that …
[RH] I can answer your question. Why would you think it might be hard to identify that? It is hard to identify. It’s the same hard job that regulatory agencies have when they regulate natural monopolies. I’m not claiming that it’s not a hard job, but it’s the same kind of hard job that we have to deal with through regulation [in capitalism].
When you nationalize you don’t have stockholders who have an incentive to try and get higher dividends. When you regulate in capitalism you still have stockholders, so the regulators have an opponent that has a clear incentive. I don’t think in the participatory economy there is a clear incentive for the worker councils to engage in this kind of illegal behaviour that is of the same magnitude that there is for a natural monopoly that we have allowed to be a privately owned, a for-profit corporation. Because we have those in the united states
[ATO] Look, we’re dealing with a hypothetical perverse incentive which I think it is reasonable to say would not be on the same order of magnitude as exists under capitalism. Because you have much stronger forces driving things towards that kind of strategic behaviour, trying to hack the system basically. But I think you make a fair point about saying well look this is just the problem of regulation. And I think that that pretty much is the answer to that.
The reason I thought it would be difficult is just because essentially it’s saying that there is a rule that you cannot engage in, effectively, strategic behaviour. You need to take these prices as givens, these indicative prices as givens, and it just seems to me that it’s very difficult to ascertain what is genuine, legitimate, engagement with [the planning process]. What that proposal would be and then what is an illegitimate proposal.
[RH] I’ll admit to some propagandistic element to the response that I’ve given to this question in the past. Because one of the things that I’ve done – and I don’t think it’s totally illegitimate – one of the things that I’ve done is say hey in market systems you really have a serious problem with lack of competitive market structures. And one of the advantages of a participatory economy is we don’t have to worry about the fact that maybe we would have industries where the number of worker councils is not sufficiently large so that you would call the industry competitive.
And particularly when we when you look at the modern trend, and it basically is a modern trend in technology, where the efficient number of firms in an industry from the point of view of technology shrinks. It has been shrinking over time. So, if you’re looking ahead and you see the reality of where the technologies are leading us, well then if you have a system where there is no problem when there’s a monopoly, and there is no problem when there’s oligopoly, it doesn’t matter to us if the industry structure doesn’t have many, many, many, many, worker councils in it.
We have an answer. And I’ve portrayed that as an advantage. But in an attempt to be brutally honest with people, I believe what we have is a system where the incentive to try and manipulate a price on the part of a worker council in the participatory economy would be far less than the incentive to do so for a capitalist firm. And then I think we also then face a situation that is no different from the situation that regulators face [today] which is we would have to detect whether or not a worker council is behaving in that way. We would have to suspect it, we would have to do an investigation, we’d have to look and see. And in that case, the actual policing, you’re policing against agents who have a less powerful incentive to misbehave. And yet you still have to have policing, and the policing probably doesn’t look that different from the kind of policing that takes place [in today’s] regulation.
Because there’s an accusation, and there’s an investigation, and there’s a finding. The accusation has to be somebody thinks there’s reason to believe that a worker council that is the sole supplier of something is not taking the price signals being set out on the rounds of the annual planning procedure as indicative and givens, but is manipulating. They are participating in annual planning by sending responses that are an attempt to manipulate what that next price signal is going to be. You have to be willing to put worker councils on some sort of trial, which is what regulators do. It’s not really called … I mean, regulation isn’t usually a court case. It’s not part of our judicial system. But it effectively is its own judicial system. That’s what regulation is about.
So, I make no claim that in a practicing real world version of participatory economy that you would not … You would have to have procedures for triggering an investigation when there’s any suspicion that this is going on. Now, you don’t have to be suspicious if there are three thousand worker councils who are putting in proposals about shoes. But it would be wise to every once in a while to be suspicious about the only worker council that is supplying electricity. Whether you call that a regulation or whatever you call it is a question of semantics.
[ATO] Can I ask a follow-up question about that? And then another question about monopoly but in a different direction.
The follow-up question is about the SB/SC = 1 constraint [for an enterprise]. The break-even constraint, social responsibility constraint, the idea that a production proposal by a worker council must represent at least not being a greater cost to society than it is a benefit.
[Editor’s Note: In Parecon, an enterprise must have Revenue ≥ Cost. Otherwise, during the annual planning process, its production proposal will not be approved. In other terminology, this is equivalent to requiring that an enterprise achieve Social Benefit ≥ Social Cost, or SB/SC ≥ 1].
What is meant to happen is that if that SB/SC ratio is less than 1, the proposal will be denied. But I’m just wondering in the case of – you gave the example there – if you have 3,000 worker councils producing shoes, if one worker council’s proposal is denied, no problem, there are 2,999 to replace them. But if you have one worker council which is producing, say, bauxite, in practice how can their production proposal be denied? Because who takes their place? That just means that the bauxite production grinds to a halt for that year. So, how to approach that?
[RH] Well that’s interesting so you’re basically saying our procedure says you haven’t made an acceptable proposal yet …
[ATO] Yes.
[RH] And the workers at the bauxite mine, their response is … It’s ‘make my day’, I’m thinking of the Clint Eastwood movie. But that’s not really the right one, it’s not ‘make my day’ … ‘Yeah, so what? Yeah, so whatcha gonna do?’ Well, we’re not going to be able to let those workers be the sole producer. They’re not going to be the ones making bauxite anymore.
This is always a delicate question that socialists never liked asking about their economy, which is ‘well, but is it going to be okay for workers to go on strike in your economy?’ The answer in theory is there never would be a reason for workers to go on strike, because as long as workers are doing reasonable things and they’re being rewarded reasonably, then there would never be any reason for them to go on strike. And somebody who’s a very real world oriented person would say ‘yeah, but what if they do anyway? And do your police beat them over the head or what?’.
[ATO] Yes, that’s a good question.
[RH] So, I think in effect you’re asking me a question where you’ve got some workers at a bauxite mine and they know they’re doing something that’s socially irresponsible, and now we’re into policing and punishing in the real world. I think those are important issues and it’s important to handle them well, but I get to excuse myself as but I’m just the economist. I’m not in charge of a humane system of criminal justice.
[ATO] Well let me refocus the question because I’m not really talking about that. I’m not talking about what the punishment is. The solution there is – in the abstract, nothing about the practicalities – according to the rules of parecon, proposals where the SB/SC ratio is less than 1 are considered socially irresponsible. There’s an appeals process, but assuming that the appeals process doesn’t grant the appeal, that it’s actually a bad proposal, it’s an ineffective use of resources; the solution there is if you have this worker council, they’re totally intransigent and they’re not willing to change anything, well that worker council needs to go and needs to be replaced by somebody else who is given the legal right to use those resources.
[RH] Right. And you posed an example that’s particularly difficult. The answer when there are other worker councils in the industry is well we know these other worker councils can manage to use these resources in a way that is socially efficient. And so the fact that you can’t, we have somebody else who can.
Remember, in a participatory economy nobody owns the bauxite deposit. That’s something that worker councils that are going to propose to be mining operations, they are bidding for the right to use [those resources].
So, basically we are saying well you can’t make good use of it but we already know there’s some others who can. Now, you made a particularly difficult example because in your example there is no other worker council that can readily step in and use this resource better than you apparently can. Because our other response is also to say well why wouldn’t you have a trial period where you got a bunch of worker councils, they’re doing the same kind of thing and this one just can’t get a proposal in that seems to be socially responsible. There has to be some reason for that. So, you can let them operate for a period of time, and you can send people from the other worker councils in the industry that seem to know how to do this better over to work and find out what’s going wrong there. And you can send some of them over to the exemplary [enterprises] that are having no problem.
But you’ve created a situation in which none of those things can happen because there’s only one, which is why it becomes a police issue immediately. It’s why the logic leads to a police response.
[ATO] Well, let’s try to avoid that for for the moment. You raised a good point there which is … The issue is the show must go on. Whether it’s bauxite or whatever it is, this must continue to be produced. If we’re wanting to produce it … it could be, well hopefully not natural gas, or fossil gas, people talk about ‘natural gas’, it’s the branding it makes it sound warm and bucolic. But anyway, the show must go on. It’s unrealistic to expect that we can bundle together a worker council, and swap these guys out and swap these guys in, in the month, few weeks, or whatever, of the annual planning procedure.
Now, what you could say is maybe it’s the case that …
[RH] I have an answer. Suppose their proposal is one where their social benefit to social cost ratio (SB/SC) is only 0.8. And we can’t replace them with another worker council during the month of December. One answer is that your average income is only 0.8 compared to worker councils in every industry that have an SB/SC ratio of 1. I mean, that’s one of the advantages of essentially connecting those SB/SC ratios to the average income of a worker council. So they would continue to produce and they would be punished through lower average consumption for their members for the fact that we couldn’t replace them.
[ATO] Can I make a recommendation in addition to that though?
I think that is good but what I was going to say was: it’s decided in the planning procedure there isn’t an alternative, it’s not practical, we cannot substitute a more efficient worker council for this inefficient worker council in this small time period. So what we do is we say look you will continue to produce for the next year. However, at that point you will be replaced. We’re going to make preparations to replace you next year, and your income will be lower.
In that case it gives them an opportunity to get their act together, it enforces the constraint. Because we need to avoid that slippery slope of ‘now we can get away with production proposals in the red and just take lower income’. That might be something that could work and then if they don’t get their act together, well you’ve had a whole year to find a replacement if necessary.
[RH] I’m very happy with this solution. I think we now have a solution to the problem of what about a bunch of workers who are very, very, stubborn. I mean they might feel that they had legitimate grievances over long periods of time, and therefore they have got what we might call attitude problems. And I think we have a solution that didn’t require a billy club.
[ATO] Well that’s always good. I mean, we’ve had plenty of that in human history, so if there’s one problem that doesn’t involve smashing in somebody’s skull with a truncheon. I can tell you that those truncheons hurt a lot.
[RH] You know, as soon as I said ‘billy club’ I thought that there are so many words that you never think about. And then clearly there must be some historical reason that these things in some people’s culture got called billy clubs. And you know what’s wonderful about the internet? You can google it and find out why was that called a billy club? And I’m sure there was some strike someplace where the word billy came out of.
But yes, it’s a problem that will probably arise from time to time and leftists have to learn how to cope with being able to think in very utopian ways about better futures and at the same time not lapse into pretending that in real world practice problems won’t arise that are going to require responses. Leftists haven’t been very good at that historically. That’s one of our failings. One of our failings is on those grounds.
[ATO] Absolutely. It’s equally important to be visionary and pragmatic. There’s an unfortunate tendency, and it’s understandable, for us to polarize into either being almost totally visionary or almost totally pragmatic. And, really, being purely visionary isn’t that visionary and being purely pragmatic isn’t that pragmatic. So we either say here are my ideals and so help me I will not compromise on them for any reason, even if that means that they’ll never actually be implemented. And on the other hand we say we say look this is the real world, and in the real world you’ve just got to leave your principles at the door in order to create a principled society, and just be as brutal in implementing that as possible.
It is very difficult but we need to do that and we’re running out of time as a civilization. So we really better start doing it.
So, the last question about monopoly is: aren’t there some goods or services, or sectors, that are so important that they demand additional oversight and control by society as a whole? Healthcare is an example. And that is a case where the need to provide an excellent service preponderates over worker council autonomy, or at least it is very important. Energy is another example because of climate change. And the usual socialist solution is nationalization. So is this the parecon solution? And what, if any, differences are there?
[RH] Let’s do schools, and clinics, and hospitals, rather than an electric utility monopoly. Think of all the constituencies involved with schools. You have the teachers, you also have the actual students, who might be kindergarteners and who have parents.
When we’re making shoes, there are the workers in the shoe factory, and then the other people involved are the people who want shoes and wear shoes and the consumers who buy the shoes. Now, the consumers who buy the shoes, they want quality and they want variety. So it’s not like they don’t have an interest in what’s being produced. But their interest is rather easy to identify. And we can figure out how to get that interest represented in a more or less straightforward way; whereas the workers’ interest is in they don’t really much care whether they make yellow shoes or red-toed shoes, but they do care about how they make it and the work process.
But it’s a more complicated situation when you think of schools. And the consumer in this case, the students, and perhaps their parents depending on age, they should be more involved in the actual decisions about the workplace. Not that the teachers shouldn’t be involved, but it’s a more complicated situation.
And I would argue that health care is somewhat similar. Now, one way to think about this is that the consumer’s interests just dig deeper into the production process, and you have to figure out how to accommodate that differently. So, the procedures we use for deciding how to make shoes are probably going to be somewhat different than the decisions we make about how to run our schools and how to manage our schools, and how to manage our healthcare industry.
There’s no need to get into the sorry state of the healthcare industry in the United States, which is an abomination. And we don’t even have to get into the difference between the Canadian healthcare system, which is a thousand times better, and the UK healthcare industry which goes back to right after World War II.
[ATO] I think it was 1948, yes.
[RH] Okay, 1948. I mean, the Canadians don’t have a National Health Service the way that the UK does, and there are lots of people who study the pros and cons of those different models.
What you’re asking is, well, what would it look like in a participatory economy? My sense is that you still have worker councils. That’s the sensible way to enfranchise the teachers, the doctors, the nurses, etc.
Now, in the case of both of those you don’t have paying customers. So the students aren’t paying, and the patients aren’t paying. Paying in the sense that they’re not [paying at the point of consumption] …
I was in Cuba and during a visit my wife had to have an appendectomy. And at the end of it I told him ‘look, I’ve got I’ve got health insurance back in the United States. So give me a bill and I will take it back with me, and I’ll find out how much my health insurance pays for this. And I’ll send you the money. There’s no reason that your Cuban medical service should provide this to my wife without compensation.’ And they said ‘oh fine’. And then we’re leaving the hospital and all of a sudden, we were out the door and I realized they hadn’t handed me a bill. So I walked back in and said ‘hey, remember you’re going to give me the bill and I’m not going to actually pay it right now? But when I get home I’ll file this through my insurance and we’ll see what they [say].’ And they acted very embarrassed and said ‘well we understood, and when we told you that we thought we could do it. But we have no way of doing it. We have no charges for any of these things, so we didn’t know how to draw up the bill.’ At which point I just thought ‘god this is wonderful, exactly how it should work’. So I am imagining something that’s like that. The students aren’t paying.
But that’s not an answer to the question well where is the demand going to come from for education and for healthcare services? And the answer is for the healthcare services, it has to come from consumer federations. It’s basically being paid for as a public good through our consumer federations. And for education, it has to come from … Well, it’s public education. Where do public schools get their money? They get it from tax dollars as part of the quote-unquote, in our case, local political system. France has a national educational system so it’s not a question of local government funding local education, it’s national, whether it’s elementary or whatever. All those options are available. But, in any case, whether it’s local government, state government, or national government, it’s government. And that’s what’s determining the total demand for educational services.
My answer is I still think we have worker councils. How those in the worker councils in these two areas relate to their ‘customers’, those they serve, is more complicated. And that extra complication needs to be reflected in a greater level of participation about the particulars. I mean, we want parents going into elementary schools and participating in PTAs [Parent-Teacher Associations] about how the school is running, and whether it’s running well, and is running in the way that they feel their kids [need]. But the people who wear the shoes made in my worker council, we don’t need them coming into the shoe factory. And I don’t even want them coming to my worker council meetings. So, there’s the difference. That you actually want consumers present during the meetings that are talking about what’s being produced and how it’s being produced in these settings, whereas that’s not necessary for so much of the economy.
[ATO] Yes exactly. I was going to say, we were talking before in our last interview about worker self-management, and you were talking about the notion proposed by some people about having external board members in an enterprise. So you have the workers – the worker council – and then there are seats on the board of that enterprise of people who don’t work there.
[RH] And I’m opposed to that in general, but here’s the situation where obviously it has to be.
[ATO] Yes. In the case of, say, health, this is a life-or-death matter. It’s extremely important, really one of the most structuring factors in people’s lives is their health. So, this is a case, as opposed to, say, shoes. I mean, we all want to get the shoes that we want, but it’s just not as high a priority as health, for example. Same thing with education, schooling.
[RH] I think the general principle that we’re always shooting for is decision-making input in proportion to the degree that you’re affected. I think that’s the right goal to shoot for. But we’re picking cases in real economies where applying that principle comes to rather different conclusions about who is involved and precisely how they’re involved.
I would say the same thing about patient care, that one of the problems is that patients are too disenfranchised in a lot of medical systems. Even in terms of how many times a day is somebody checking on me when I’m lying in the bed, or whether or not I’m allowed to go down to the cafeteria, and things like that. I think one of the places where most current medical care systems fail us, from the perspective of the people having decision-making input in proportion to the degree they’re affected, is precisely that patients in healthcare systems are too disenfranchised and too uninvolved in the decision-making process. And one would hope to seek ways to correct that.
[ATO] I think that is a formulation which makes sense. It’s nice to summarize that in a general principle, and I think it clarifies things.
Now, to keep going and maybe do one question about competition. But I don’t want to …
[RH] I remember the question about competition now and I liked it. By the way, I was thinking about my answer to the competition question. My facetious answer was going to be well doesn’t it always just come down to what words you use to describe it? On the one hand, you can call it socialist emulation, and then, on the other hand, you can call it competition. But I do think there’s a very real issue. Because, ultimately, it’s a question of in one’s own mind what does one think one is doing? Do I think I’m competing with you? Or do I think that I am basically engaging in behaviour so that you and I can figure out how we best want to cooperate?
I don’t want to pretend things are what they’re not by putting prettier words on them. On the other hand, this is a case where I really do believe that we’re going to start doing things in a certain kind of way, and in capitalism we do things in a way where people are very aware that what they’re doing is competing against one another. They’re not competing with one another they’re competing against other. And yet, the goal in my mind is always no we don’t want to set things up so that that’s people’s perception of what they’re doing. The world doesn’t have to be that nasty, it doesn’t have to be that oppositional, confrontational, antagonistic.
[ATO] I think that’s part of it, though, if you don’t mind me coming in. Look, I think this is a very important topic and we can schedule a discussion and start with this. But what I’d say to that is that you make a very interesting point, I think that’s a very good point. But I’d say that there’s also the matter – and I think this is perhaps more important – that there are objective patterns, relationships, behaviours, which we could group together and we could call that competition. We could call it whatever we wanted, but we could call that competition and we could call something else cooperation. And that there are objective characteristics here that might be of interest to us, that we might think are beneficial. For example, to make it concrete, we might say we want cooperation if enterprises have knowledge about a production process; that it would make sense, in the ideal case, if this was shared.
[RH] They would share it immediately.
[ATO] Yes. And that this would make society more efficient and therefore raise the standard of living. The point for me is that I think they’re related. Even if people feel like they’re competing, that act of cooperation, objectively you might say, it’s still happening. Now, I think the two go hand-in-hand. So. I think that there are other elements.
[RH] That’s probably a good subject for to beat around for 20 minutes or half an hour at least, so let’s do another session.
[ATO] Okay, that’s good.
[RH] The other thing is, besides Saint Patrick’s Day, we’re in the middle of March Madness and I think I’m winning my betting pool. I have to go check on all the basketball scores.
[ATO] Well, just in terms of sport, Ireland beat England in rugby last week in Twickenham in England, so that’s really …
[RH] All the Irish are very happy at the moment.
[ATO] Yeah, that’s the match of the year.
[RH] But can you beat the South Africans and the Kiwis in rugby?
[ATO] Well, sometimes. But, you know, as long as you beat the English, that’s fine in my book.
[RH] Oh, I understand, yes. My approach to sports is also like that. In American football we always play my arch-enemy twice in a 16-game season. So there are 16 games and we play the arch-enemy twice and, in my mind, if we win two and lose 14 it’s been a totally successful season. It was the right two.
[ATO] Yeah no exactly, those are the ones that count.
[RH] I am very vengeful in my sports attitudes. I do have to admit to that.
[ATO] Well that’s what it’s about. And particularly if you’re a leftist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and everything, that’s your opportunity to just be as kind of bigoted and primitive as you want, and just it’s all just about destroying the enemy.
[RH] Well, I mean, there was no greater empire by a smaller little country than the English empire at one point, in fairly recent history. And so as an absolutely committed anti-imperialist, with enough Irish ancestry so that I can throw that in the boot, I am always willing to kick the English. Always willing to kick the English.
[ATO] That’s gas.
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Editor’s Note: Discussion includes optimal and efficient production plans in Parecon, accounting of benefits and costs, enterprise incentives, worker control, and satisfying consumers.
[After The Oligarchy] Hello fellow democrats, futurists, and problem solvers, this is After The Oligarchy. Today I’m speaking with Professor Robin Hahnel.
Robin Hahnel is a professor of economics in the United States, and author of many books, but today I’m interviewing him as co-originator with Michael Albert of the post-capitalist model known as Participatory Economics (or Parecon).
Today’s conversation is in association with mέta: the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation. This is the third in a series of interviews with Professor Hahnel about participatory economics, and in particular his latest bookDemocratic Economic Planning published in 2021. If you haven’t watched the first two interviews check them out here.
It’s an advanced discussion of the model proposed in that book so I recommend that you familiarize yourself with participatory economics to understand what we’re talking about. You can do that by visiting participatoryeconomy.org. You can also read Of the People, By the People (2012) for a concise introduction to parecon. And Professor Hahnel has a new book coming out in a few months called A Participatory Economy (2022).
Robin Hahnel, thank you for joining me again.
[Robin Hahnel] Great to be with you again.
[ATO] Last time we were talking about production units and we’re going to continue talking about production units, as in worker councils, as in enterprises. And the first question is a follow-up to part of our discussion last time, and we were talking about social costs and social benefits, and the incentives of worker councils in parecon.
So let me frame the matter by presenting my understanding of our last interview. This is going to be a bit technical for viewers but we will break it down and it will be understandable. So I asked you, essentially, ‘wouldn’t we want worker councils to strive for a social benefit much greater than a social cost rather than merely the social cost equalling the social benefit – or having a social benefit to cost ratio of one? Because that means producing the greatest net social benefit. And, if so, what will make worker councils do that?’
‘Social Benefit’ is Revenue. ‘Social Cost’ is Cost.Net Social Benefit: Revenue – Cost.‘Social responsibility’ constraint is breaking even. Revenue ≥ Cost.
And you replied, basically, ‘no, we want worker councils to produce up until the marginal social benefit is equal to the marginal social cost. Because if the social benefit is greater than the social cost then there is still some net social benefit to squeeze out by producing another unit (like producing another chair). And this terminates when the marginal social benefit is equal to the marginal social cost, which is when the social benefit the social cost ratio equals one (SB/SC = 1).’
‘Marginal’ refers to the last chair produced, the last tomato, the last dental filling.Total Net Benefits are maximised when Marginal Benefit equals Marginal Cost.The quantity output when Total Benefit = Total Cost is different to when Marginal Benefit = Marginal Cost.
That’s a mouthful. So, this is my understanding of what was said at the time. Please correct me if I misinterpreted what you said during that interview because it seems to me that maybe there was a miscommunication. Because it seems to me that if you keep producing chairs up until the marginal social benefit of that chair is equal to the marginal social cost, that’s the point at which social benefits minus social costs is the greatest. But that’s not going to be the same as the social benefits divided by the social cost equal to one, that there is parity between social costs and social benefits. So could you just clarify or respond to that please?
[RH] First of all, I want to thank you for asking the question and probing on this. Because it is a little complicated and it forced me to go back and rethink through. So let me just see if I can lay it out there on in a straightforward way. What I’m going to lay out there is standard and then I’m going to explain why the way we model something is different from standard. And that’s I believe where the sort of miscommunication comes in.
So you’re absolutely right that the general efficiency criterion is you want total social benefits minus total social costs to be as large as possible. You want to maximize, as you’re saying, the difference between total social benefits and total social costs. I mean this principle is we call it the ‘efficiency criterion’ and applies to anything. Anything you’re doing, you want to do it so as to maximize the benefits to any and all people over all time periods minus the cost to any and all people of overall time periods.
Toy example illustrating Marginal Benefit and Marginal Cost. Here Net Total Benefit is maximum when Marginal Benefit = Marginal Cost.
Now, mathematically what that is equivalent to is you want to keep doing something up to the point where the last little unit of whatever you did generated exactly the same amount of social benefits as it did increase social costs. So saying you want to maximize the difference between total social benefits and total social costs is the same as saying you want to keep doing something up to the point where the marginal social benefit of the last little bit of it you did is exactly as big as the marginal social cost of the last little bit you did. That’s just mathematics.
Here’s where things get a little complicated. When we’re talking about social benefits, then the context in which I’m always talking about it is I’m thinking of a particular worker council or a particular consumer council. Then you have to ask well the social benefits in the mathematical pure sense includes everybody, which means it includes the council that we’re considering. So social benefits are usually thought of as being social benefits for others, for everybody else other than the worker council; and social costs are usually thought of as being only the social cost to those who aren’t in the council.
I mean one thing that’s always a little bit delicate or complicating is these social costs that we’re thinking of cost a society something that a worker council does. That includes the opportunity cost – traditionally, as everybody does it – of using scarce labour in that worker council. If you have you have a certain amount of engineers and carpenters in an economy, any time one worker council uses them they can’t be used in another worker council. And that we traditionally call an ‘opportunity cost’. So standard treatments will include the opportunity cost of using engineers or carpenters in any workplace, in any worker council. It doesn’t usually include something that mainstream economists call the ‘disutility of labour’. So there’s a scarcity cost to using labour but in addition – for labour, unlike other inputs – there’s also not just an opportunity cost, performing the activity might be more or less pleasurable, or more or less unpleasurable.
Usually, traditionally, when we’re talking about social costs for a workplace we include the opportunity costs of using these different categories of labour but we don’t really include the disutility. Or at least it’s possible not to include that part. Now, for two particular reasons, that I’m going to come to in a minute, we chose to model worker council and consumer councils in a particular way.
For consumer councils it’s very straightforward and easy to understand. A consumer council should maximize what economists call their utility, their well-being, their satisfaction from the activities they engage in. And for a consumer council we usually think of the activities of people are engaging in as what are called consumption activities. So the whole idea is you want your consumer council to maximize the well-being they get out of their consumption activities. Oh, but it’s subject to a constraint. And I’m going to use this phrase to describe the constraint: broadly speaking I would say as long as what they’re consuming is socially responsible. And in the case of a consumer council what social responsibility amounts to is well it would be irresponsible if the social cost to society of their consumption activity was larger than what we consider to be their fair income. So for a consumer council we basically have this set up where what we want them to do is to maximize their well-being as long as they’re being socially responsible. As long as the social cost of society of their consumption activity is what I would call justified or warranted by the income that they fairly have. And for us that income for some of them it’s their income from work, and for some of them it’s their social security payment or their childcare allowance or whatever it is.
We wanted to model worker councils exactly in the same way. We wanted to say, hey, these are people, these are humans engaged in a human activity. It happens to be an activity we think of as work or production rather than consumption. But the worker council is a bunch of people engaged in an activity and we want them to maximize the satisfaction or utility they get from engaging in their activity as long as their activity is socially responsible. So, we modelled worker councils as maximizing … Now, in their case it may be maximizing the satisfaction you get from the work process that you engage in. What it may amount to is minimizing the disutility of your labour. But still, it’s the same sort of … I mean where we had reasons, basically underlying methodological reasons, for wanting to view the entire thing in this way, sort of very symmetrical to what it is that consumers are doing.
So for a worker council what we said is we’re going to assume that what they’re going to try to do is to maximize their utility subject to the social responsibility constraint. Now, for us the social responsibility constraint is: nobody should object to them doing what they want to do as long as what they’re doing is not making anybody else worse off. So we model their social responsibility constraint as: worker council do whatever you want, as long as the social benefits – and now these would be the social benefits to any and all other people – are at least as great as the social cost to any and all other people. And that’s the way we set up our procedure. That’s the way we set up our model.
And when we say that the annual participatory planning procedure will achieve an efficient outcome, or in economist language a Pareto optimal outcome under certain assumptions, what we mean is if worker councils do this and if consumer councils do this, we can prove that the outcome will be socially efficient. It will be a Pareto optimum. Now you might ask well why did we want to model things this way? And this is where I thank you for forcing me to think back why decades ago we did this.
It was for two reasons. We actually believe in self-management. I think there’s long been a divide between anti-capitalists, between the anarchists and the socialists, or on the question of socialism how libertarian a socialist are you. And I think we’re firmly in the camp of feeling that there is a very important, great, value put on doing things in a way that provides workers and consumers with self-management. So if you’re thinking in terms of self-management, then the idea that we want people, we want workers and consumers to be doing whatever they want as long, as they’re behaving in socially responsible ways is in our mind the right way to look at it.
And the other thing is – I now recall when I was thinking back over it – we felt like there was an advantage to reminding people that basically any and all human activity is similar in a certain kind of way. That any and all human activity basically has the same purpose which is maximizing human well-being, whether it’s work activity or its consumption activity. What we’re trying to do, or what we think as libertarian socialists we should be trying to do, is to maximize human well-being, but we want to leave that to the people whose well-being it is to decide what gives them well-being and what does not. So we want them to self-manage their own search for well-being, provided that it’s being done in socially responsible ways.
When I thought back over it I thought well Robin why did you set up the process and the formal treatments in a way that, quite frankly, is not common, that is not the standard way in which it’s done? And that’s why I was thanking you for reminding me of that, because now I remember that’s why we did it this way. And actually I was happy to discover that I think I am as comfortable, if not more comfortable, now as when we made those decisions back decades away ago about, well, why don’t we analyse it this way.
You’re correct that the constraint for the worker council just says you’re not making anybody else any worse off than they would have been had you not done what you just said you wanted to do. And that’s different from maximizing for any and all people the difference between total social benefits and total social costs. But in a sense what we’re saying is we’re actually concentrating on a part of benefits or cost that doesn’t really usually get considered when people talk about social benefits and social costs. And that’s the actual well-being and the size of the actual well-being or the quantification of well-being or utility of the workers in the workplace where whatever is going on is going on.
So that’s my very long answer to what I think was a very perceptive and probing question on your part.
[After ATO returns from dealing with food poisoning]
Nobody’s going to believe that that you’re not vomiting today because you were overly excessive in St. Patrick’s day yesterday. I mean it’s there’s just no credibility there whatsoever.
[ATO] I know, and the funny thing is you know I’m the one Irishman who basically doesn’t drink. I mean, I drink sometimes but …
[RH] No, I know when you told me … I mean, I didn’t tell you how disgusted I was when you said you drank non-alcoholic beer that’s just an abomination in my book.
[ATO] Well look, when I’m at home I just prefer to drink non-alcoholic beer.
I actually feel much better now, alive, and I can think and everything, which is good because this is probably the most complex topic that we’ve talked about. And I’m sitting there thinking ‘don’t get sick’.
So, let me let me respond to what you said and then I’ll pose some questions. Thank you very much for that explanation, for clarifying that, and I think saying it in an understandable way. It’s very interesting, what you were saying. And I think that this has very deep significance for an economy, for participatory economics.
There are a few things that occur to me. I’ll start with the one that’s most obvious to me. One might immediately hear this and say ‘yes, worker self-management is very important. Maximizing – if we want to put it this way – the utility of workers in the production process or minimizing disutility, this is very important, and this is something that should be done.’ But one might say that imposing the constraint that the worker council must be socially responsible as meaning social benefits must be at least equal to social costs – breaking even, basically – it might be necessary, it might be the minimum, but it might not be sufficient or desirable in terms of how we want an economy to function. In the sense that if everybody’s breaking even all the time, assuming that that was the case, would we not want there to be a more efficient use of resources?
You understand what I’m getting at, so how would you respond to that?
[RH] You may be right. And you forced me to think about some things that I had not necessarily thought about before. If you’re an academic and you’ve published something, and somebody comes up with something, the first instinct is oh my god, I need to go and check and make sure that what was actually published is still correct, or else if I’m an honourable person I’d have to issue a retraction. And so I skedaddled over to make sure that my proof that the planning procedure was pareto optimal still held, and I let out a huge sigh of relief when I discovered no, no, what we’re talking about now does not negate the proof that the planning procedure will be pareto optimal under the setup of the model.
But I would say yes, thinking out loud about it could be that the constraint should just be that the marginal social benefits have to be equal to the marginal social cost. That that’s the constraint under which the worker council is trying to maximize their satisfaction and their pleasure from work. And I suspect it would work out very much this the same.
The other thing is this particular issue had come up as a somewhat divisive issue amongst all of us who in some way or another support the model. but in a different way and for a different reason. The discussion there had to do with what should the average effort rating be for workers in a council. Figuring out within a council – and I think you have some questions on this subject coming up anyway – but within a council you know it’s very clear-cut what we’re proposing and what we have suggested would be a reasonable way of trying to decide if there’s any differences in the efforts and sacrifices that that workers within a worker council are making.
But we have conceded the get-go there needs to be a cap on average effort ratings for every worker council. Or else there’s going to be a tendency for every worker council to say why should I be judging my work mates harshly? It’s just easier for me if we can all award each other very high effort ratings and then we’ll all have very high consumption allowances. So there’s that perverse incentive, and you eliminate that perverse incentive completely if you cap the average effort rating in every council.
But that doesn’t tell you what the cap has to be. Any cap will accomplish that goal. And the question then is well for two worker councils who have the same social benefit to social cost ratio it would seem clear they should have the same cap. And we don’t want any worker council proposal to be accepted if the social costs are actually higher than the social benefit. But that leaves open the possibility that we’d have some worker councils where the social benefit the social cost ratio is exactly one, and then maybe some other worker councils where the social benefit the social cost ratio is 1.05.
And so the debate, that’s sort of an unsettled debate amongst advocates for a participatory economy model, is well should the average effort rating of that second worker council be five percent higher than the average effort rating for the first worker council? And, in theory, if the reason that the ratio is 1.05 in one of the worker council, if the reason for that is that the workers there are sacrificing more or just working harder, putting out more effort, then it would be a good idea. And some of us have said we should do that. On the other hand, there’s been debate and controversy over whether or not that would be a good idea.
One of the very important issues that would presumably influence your view on that subject is well just how accurate do you think our indicative prices are at measuring these opportunity costs and the relative values of these different things? On the one hand, if you think this system is going to do a really good job of getting the indicative prices right, then you could make the case well the only reason that one worker council would have a higher ratio than another has to be because they were putting in extra efforts and then it’s warranted. On the other hand, if you think well these are good reasonable estimates, the indicative prices are the best we can do, but they’re not going to be that good, then there are some people who feel well the whole idea that you would propose that some worker councils have a higher average effort rating than others maybe isn’t such a good idea.
So, in that context there’s been a lot of discussion about this. And depending on which one of us you talk to, you get a slightly different view about where to come down on this issue. But you’ve raised this whole social benefit to social cost ratio as a constraint for a different reason, and basically I think of merit some thought
[ATO] They’re very closely connected. I mean, the topic that you raised there is directly connected. And it’s actually the second question. Reading through Democratic Economic Planning, I noticed that a number of times the fact that worker councils had an average effort rating cap proportional to the social benefit to social cost ratio – which you could take as one measure of economic efficiency, so that their average effort cap is tied to their production efficiency – seemed to actually be doing important work multiple times in the system. There might be a criticism or a concern that somebody might have and one of the replies might be well the fact that worker councils have their effort rating cap proportional to this SB/SC ratio will deal partially with that. And so, the second question there I was talking about is the ‘size six purple women’s high-heeled shoe with the yellow toe’ problem, which I think is a brilliant name.
[RH] Yeah, I think it’s a brilliant name too. But every time I talk about it, when I have to talk about it I can’t remember it. So I’ve created something that in writing I think is very felicitous but now I feel like I’m plagued by the fact that I’m going to embarrass myself because I can’t remember it. But anyway, go ahead.
[ATO] Yeah, it’s memorable but I can never remember it. It’s a bit like Chinese Whispers, every time another word is added on or deleted.
Anyway, the idea of that is it’s a question about basically why will a worker council produce exactly the kind of good to the level of specificity that consumers want. So, somebody doesn’t just want a shoe but they want a size six purple shoe which is a women’s shoe, a high-heeled shoe, and it’s got a yellow toe. That’s a wider discussion but part of the response to that on page 167 of Democratic Economic Planning is that there’s an incentive to produce the right shoe because otherwise the worker council would get a lower social benefit to social cost ratio.
Why would they get a lower ratio? It’s because less people would purchase the shoes that they produce and therefore their social benefit would be less. And therefore that SB/SC ratio would be lower. Just to explain to people. That’s obviously only true if that holds, if that effort cap is actually proportional to that SB/SC ratio.
[RH] No, that’s a good point.
[ATO] There are several other times where that occurs. It slips my mind now. So there’s an issue of fairness like you’re bringing up there about do the indicative prices capture all of the information that we want such that we can say a worker council’s effort rating will only be greater if the expenditure of sacrifice of the workers is actually greater. Okay, that’s one issue. But then there’s this other issue of overall though are we going to end up with a society that functions, according to other metrics, like we want. And I think those are important as well.
[RH] I do think that there is rather clearly an incentive for worker councils to produce the shoes that it turns out people want. And this is a legitimate issue. One of the criticisms of the centrally planned Soviet type economies was that there was just no incentive for the producers to actually produce the kind of products that people wanted. And so another way of putting it is socialists have to own up to that and people should scrutinize to see whether or not we have a more adequate response given the history.
And my point has simply been, look, I think it’s still clearly in the interests of a worker council to produce things that people went and took off the shelves at the consumption centre instead of left there. Because if it’s left there, then the question becomes we approved you to use these socially costly productive inputs based on the assumption that you were going to generate a certain amount of social benefits as outputs. So that’s the basis upon which you were approved to go ahead and do what you’ve done.
But if it turns out that what you claimed you were going to generate in social benefits was actually not the case, because when there were clear signals that people wanted red toes not yellow toes you just decided you didn’t care and you kept supplying the yellow toes; the answer to that is well when worker councils deliver stuff to distribution centres, if those distribution centres discover that the stuff is still sitting on the shelf, and it could sit on the shelf for two different reasons (1) it actually was defective or low quality or (2) it was a yellow toe and nobody wanted yellow toes. And it doesn’t make any difference, the whole point is that you didn’t deliver what we were counting on and approved you for.
So in the end when you’re looking to see whether a worker council has fulfilled its responsibility, in the end the proof is in the pudding. In the planning phases we were all taking everything on good faith, but in the end if it turned out that you weren’t in good faith then you will end up getting penalized by what we’ve proposed.
Now, there are two possibilities. One is the only thing that matters is whether your SB/SC ratio is one or higher. It could be that you were approved because it looked like it was one, but now at the end of the year we discover it was not one, it was less than one. Well, in that case there’s going to be some sort of penalty and the penalty will have to be that the average income that you get to distribute amongst yourself is less than it would have been. The other penalty is if you get caught doing this time after time after time, well then you might have your approval to participate as a legitimate trustworthy worker council in the entire planning procedure challenged, if this turns out to be a problem.
So there are there are ways of handling this. If we had a system where your average income for the year depends on that SB/SC ratio, it doesn’t matter if the plan you submitted is one where it would have been 1.05. If it turns out not to be 1.05, then the average income from for your enterprise isn’t 1.05 anymore. It’s whatever it turned out to be.
[ATO] I would query whether the only important point is that people are only getting income in proportion to the sacrifice that they make. Now, I actually think that in general the parecon argument of remuneration according to sacrifice is a very good argument. But what I mean is that there are many factors to consider. And I’m not actually saying this to disagree with what you said, but just to comment on it.
If we have a socialist society which cannot, for example, provide proper consumer goods to people that is a disaster for so many different reasons. But it’s also a social harm. I mean, the goal of an economy is to satisfy the wants and needs of people. It’s not necessarily unfair to consider that a worker’s council’s income will be slightly bigger to satisfy that need. Now, for me I suppose that the question is limiting that to make sure that you don’t have a society where people are getting paid according to how much they produce and that is the main norm.
[RH] First of all, I completely agree with you. One of the failures of – I mean, we can debate whether to call it socialism or not – one of the failures of the existing socialist societies. That was one compromise in terms of language: let’s just call in the existing 20th century socialist economies, that way you can say well they were existing but they weren’t really socialist.
Whatever you want to call them, it is clear that one of their failings was that consumers were disenfranchised to an extent that was highly undesirable. So, on the one hand, it’s important for us to look and see whether or not our actual proposals for how a participatory economy would operate meet up to the challenge of making sure that consumers have been fully enfranchised. But that was certainly a goal that we had firmly in mind. Now just because you think you have a goal friendly in mind doesn’t mean you propose something that would achieve it, I understand that. And that’s one of my admonitions to everybody that’s in this line of work, which is there are two steps, not one. The first step is being very clear about what you’re trying to achieve, and the second is just because you’re clear about what you want to achieve doesn’t mean what you’ve proposed will actually achieve that.
And so the hard work comes from testing to see. And what we’re talking about here is basically testing whether or not what mainstream economists call consumer sovereignty would be an adjective you could just you know that you could you could realistically ascribe to a participatory economy. But there’s a lot of features you know where I think that it measures up.
We have consumer federations – we have empowered consumers by basically giving them these federations that will go to battle on their behalf when products are not what the consumer expected. So instead of individual consumers – we’ve talked about this – having to go to the complaint department at the department store of a multinational corporation to get satisfaction over the fact that the damn thing didn’t work, and I should get all my money back, all you have to do is just say no this is unsatisfactory and give it back to the consumer federation. And my consumer federation goes to the worker federation to settle the issues.
I think that’s an important thing when we’re talking about the coloured toes on the footwear that are coming out of the worker council. Clearly if the red toes are not being picked up and the yellow toes are, and one of the worker councils just doesn’t respond and continues to supply the red toes, well there are procedures where you don’t get credit for that. If you deliver something that’s defective, if you deliver something that wasn’t the colour people wanted, then you’re not going to get credit for that as part of the social benefits that you generated, to be compared with the cost of the inputs, and the machines, and the things that you used to do it.
Now, exactly how they’re going to be penalized, that’s where we’re talking about the sort of nitty-gritty details and the pros of cons of penalizing one way or another. But one way or another there’s going to be a penalty for that, for any worker council in a participatory economy. And I think that’s the important thing for anybody looking at the system and asking ‘do I think this system would be satisfactory from the point of view of embodying the principle of consumer sovereignty?’. We have answers, even if those answers in some cases are multiple and there’s disagreement about whether this way to do it or that way to do it would be a little bit better, what the pros and cons are.
[ATO] I just want to make one clarifying remark on that and then we can move on to another question. We were joking about the name ‘size 6 purple women’s high-heeled shoe with the yellow toe’ problem. I just wanted to make a comment that the purpose of that particular example was to pick something that was deliberately finicky and to think about whether parecon will be able to handle such finicky preferences. But that’s not what the stakes are it’s not just …
[RH] Well, let me clarify. This is a ticklish subject because it can get me into hot water with feminists so I want to defend myself. You don’t realize that there would be feminists who would already have taken umbrage at the example we picked.
I would just like to go on the record as saying I don’t think that’s finicky at all. I don’t think it’s finicky, and I am completely in sympathy with – who was John Stuart Mill’s mentor? – Jeremy Bentham. Jeremy Bentham’s attitude was push-pin versus poetry, we are not going to sit in judgment about what people’s consumers preferences are. So I think for somebody to have particular preferences over their shoe is absolutely fine, they have every right to have that, and the business of the economy is to satisfy that, not to in judgment on it.
So I was just trying to pick an example where there were multiple details.
[ATO] Yes.
[RH] Where the thing could differ. So there were multiple details where the thing could differ, and that example was intended to help us think through the problem of broad categories during planning versus we actually have to have detailed production and delivery. And how can you how can the necessary detail actually get taken care of if the planning was done at the level of broader categories such as women’s dress shoe? Without reference to colour, without reference to heel, without reference to all these other sort of details.
And the answer was the details get filled in during the year when the discovery process: I sent these things over, I sent over as many yellow as red toes because I had no other information to go on. But now we get feedback during the year, the yellow-toed shoes are going like hotcakes and the red-toed shoes aren’t. As long as that information is communicated to the worker councils making the shoes, and as long as there are incentives for them to respond in the perfectly obvious way that you would want them to respond to that information, then we’re okay. That’s my way of thinking about it. Then we’re okay.
But if the system isn’t communicating that information, or if there’s no incentive for the worker councils to respond to the communication of the information about whether yellow or red is more what the consumers wanted, then we have a problem. So that’s the way that I think that that should be thought about.
[ATO] Yes, that’s very important context. And the issue of categories of goods and services in parecon is a huge topic, it’s very important. I would recommend that if people want to read about this topic in particular that they – in addition to Democratic Economic Planning – should read Anarchist Accounting by Anders Sandström and he really goes into detail and it’s worth reading.
And I just want to say yes, the way you phrased that I used the word ‘finicky’, you put it in a much more neutral and I think accurate way. I just want to make it very clear I am clearly no stranger to peculiar sartorial tastes …
[RH] Point well taken! Your listeners can’t see you but I’m seeing you on a video screen and man this guy dresses funny folks, he does.
[ATO] Well, they can see me on YouTube.
And I certainly would not pass judgment on women for liking shoes any more than any other person, which of course is ludicrous. What I more mean is I’m thinking of the person who might be listening in and thinking oh well look we’re talking about shoes, whether men or women, or what colour stripes they have, compare this to climate change or compare this to all these big issues. It can seem like that might just be finicky or a little bit trivial – consumerist problems.
I just wanted to make the point that – I think you made a very good point there, which is that look we have these preferences and that’s fine and we need to deal with that. But also I want to make the point in addition to that which is look if you don’t like the example of the purple shoe with the yellow toe, this applies across the board. You can think about any kind of consumer good, and even intermediate goods. The point is that goods and services when they’re delivered need to be what people want, whether that’s something used in the production process or that’s a final good used by a consumer. And that could be a shoe, it could be something that this hypothetical person might think is much more important. So the issue can’t be dismissed really, that’s the point I wanted to make.
But just to move on …
[RH] Let me say something on what you just covered before you move on. This is relevant to what we’ve just been talking about.
In some ways, I think that socialists may try to make a virtue out of the failure of centrally planned economies to provide consumers with the variety of choices the consumers wanted. And they sort of portrayed this as oh well that’s only bourgeois individualism. I mean the truth of the matter is that if we give you a good working shoe, there’s no difference between one working shoe and another. And it’s only in capitalism, when you have profit maximizing enterprises that are trying to prey [on consumers], that they’re the ones who are creating these notions in your head that their working shoe might be a little bit better or different than somebody else’s working shoe.
I think that if there’s actually a difference in the cost of society of making one working shoe compared to another that’s fine. And if you want the one that’s a little more expensive, we’ll charge you for that one. And if you want the one that’s a little less expensive, we will charge you less for that one. So you can decide how finicky you are about your working shoe. But it shouldn’t just be us telling you that you have no preference over what working shoe that you’re getting. Because we have a historical responsibility to own up to mistakes, I think this is an important thing to go on a record on [about]. I think we need to go on record, people have a right to hear us go on record, and we’re attempting to do so on that subject.
[ATO] Yeah, there’s a space somewhere between consumerist insanity and brainwashing, and distortion of the human personality, and really the manufacture of infinite desires and cravings, and homogeneity and dissatisfaction of human wants and needs in consumer goods. There’s a rich space there and somewhere in the middle in that space is where we want to be.
[RH] And you could argue that we’ve created a society where seeking pleasure in some areas has been precluded, like seeking pleasure in self-managed work, and therefore people therefore seek pleasure in other areas. And that might be being overly concerned about slight differences in the things they’re consuming. So you can recognize that that may have happened in capitalism, and that’s part of the reason that people do pay as much attention to [consumer goods]. But anyway we’re on the same page about the fact that the job of the economy is to give people what they want.
[ATO] Indeed.
Just about the social benefit and such cost issues again. If we just briefly touch on this, you were talking about modelling using a socially responsibility constraint of social benefit divided by social cost is equal to one – social benefit equals cost – as simulating a kind of possible but conservative case. A kind of worst case scenario of the scenarios where things would actually function in parecon.
And I just briefly want to talk about something which is very important, which is the difference between modelling a participatory economy (as in simulating it), to designing a participatory economy (as in how it’s supposed to work, how it’s intended to work), and the actual behaviour of a participatory economy. And I plan to ask several questions at a later time about the simulations in Democratic Economic Planning, so we can talk at length then. But if you just want to comment on that difference.
[RH] This has to do with the sort of worst case scenario. I think there’s a useful purpose to modelling something where you assume an actor will do what is in that actor’s individual self-interest. And that’s not because people always choose to behave in their own individual self-interest. People often take the interests of others into account when they choose what to do. But I’m interested in evaluating what kind of behaviour institutions are going to generate or what is the effect of an institution. And if I want to know what the effect of an institution is, one way to answer that question is well in the context of that institution what would it be in the self-interest of actors to do?
So I don’t think of it as a predicting issue. I don’t think of it as we’re trying to predict what people are going to do. And I certainly don’t think that people are homo economicus. I don’t think humans are little self-interested machines. But I do think that what we’re doing is designing economic institutions. And if you want to know what kind of behaviour an economic institution is going to generate or encourage, then the way to do that is to say well what would be rational behaviour for actors in their own self-interest if you put them in that context? So that’s the reason that I do that kind of modelling and that’s the way I interpret what it is that I’m doing.
You can also see it as a kind of a worst case scenario, that here we have these institutions and what’s the worst case scenario behaviour that they could generate, that could come out of this? And in some sense the answer to that I think is well if everybody behaved in their own self-interest this is what we would get. And if we can design institutions so that even in a worst-case scenario what we get is something that looks like it would be fair or looks like it would be efficient, well then in some sense that makes the argument more powerful.
Because I know that a lot of people from the socialist tradition take umbrage at the whole idea that we’re going to be modelling things in ways in which we’re thinking about people behaving in selfish ways, whether it’s workers in their councils or consumers. That somehow, if you do that, you are maligning the best of humanity. And just despite the world’s sorry history, I continue to have great faith in the best of humanity, and I see it operating every day despite all sorts of disincentives to behave in solidaristic ways. But that’s not my point it’s not a comment about humanity. It’s a comment about what we need to take into account when designing institutions.
[ATO] Last time you were saying that in a particular modelling and simulation exercise you decided to impose a constraint that for a firm social benefits had to equal at least equal to social costs and that the workers would try to maximize their utility, or minimize their disutility of working. And what you’re saying there is you weren’t necessarily saying this is how I think humans behave or this is how parecon is designed to operate, but you’re saying if this happened in parecon what would be the consequences? Would it still function?
And in engineering terms you can think about that as a kind of fail-safe. Everybody knows the word fail-safe. So if you’re designing an airplane, for example, if you’re designing, say, sensor for an aileron, if that fails is it going to just lock into a position that it sends the plane into a nosedive? Or is it just going to settle into some kind of neutral state where at least it doesn’t cause a catastrophe? And it’s a similar idea.
[RH] I think that’s a very apt analogy. I think that’s exactly right.
The other thing about the modelling was again it’s a case of a worst case scenario or it’s pushing something to the limit. In my view, one of the big errors that socialism made historically was in not taking seriously enough the importance of people engaging in self-management, particularly workers. so if you want to counteract that mistake, one way to do it is to say we want the workers and the council to do whatever they want and we want consumers to do whatever they want. Well, that can’t exactly be true. We can’t really just let everybody do exactly what they want. That doesn’t work. It wouldn’t be right, it wouldn’t be efficient, it wouldn’t be fair. It would be wrong for all sorts of reasons.
But what if we simply say the only constraint that you have to deal with when you are deciding what you want is you can’t make everybody else worse off? And that’s essentially why the social benefit to social cost ratio has to be at least one. That’s basically what that constraint comes down to. So I’m not really saying that’s the way we want to run the economy, but at least it puts us in a situation where we’re almost going to the opposite extreme from what I view as being one of the historic errors that socialism made in terms of not taking nearly seriously enough providing opportunities for [worker self-management].
Consumers have had their defenders. It’s interesting that given the history of our economies, and because we’ve had market economies the whole idea of consumer sovereignty, nobody should be dictating to consumers what they what they consume they should be deciding what they want to consume, that’s a very, very, popular idea. That part has sunk in.
But the whole idea among socialists at least that workers in their own councils should be in charge of deciding what they do … And one manifestation of this we’ve talked about was the [Pat] Devine – [Fikret] Adaman proposal, where the workers in the councils don’t even get to sit down just amongst themselves to even begin the discussion about what they want to do. We have to have these other affected parties that are on the board of directors, etc. So, in part it’s sort of a response to that, as recognizing from history that we have under-provided adequate ways for workers in their workplaces to make their own decisions, to talk about things amongst themselves before they have to deal with anybody else, and make their own decisions about what they want to do as long as they’re being socially responsible. Why not? So that was the motivation for modelling it exactly in that way.
[ATO] Thank you for watching. If you got anything from this video, then please press the Like button, consider Subscribing, and, if you really enjoyed it, then make a reaction video of you half watching it while playing a computer game.
There’s a lot more to come. We’ll keep exploring better futures for humanity until we get there. And as always I want to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. This channel has a wonderful audience and there are usually some very interesting comments under the video, so let’s continue that.
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