Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!laura From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) Newsgroups: net.politics.theory Subject: Re: What is socialism? Message-ID: <5132@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Thu, 28-Feb-85 23:37:14 EST Article-I.D.: utzoo.5132 Posted: Thu Feb 28 23:37:14 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 28-Feb-85 23:37:14 EST References: <325@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP> <711@ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA> <190@ubvax.UUCP>, <736@ucbtopaz.CC.BerkRe: What is socialism? Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 144 Tony Wuersch has attempted to put forward a definition of exploitation. Unfortunately, I think that it has holes. What I want to be able to do is to tell when a person is being exploited, as oppposed to being foolish, or a victim of adverse circumstances, or merely having different tastes than I have. Here are the problems that I think that I have found. A person is exploited if her unequal relationship to someone else forces her to make decisions which leave her worse off than if she and that someone else were on an equal footing. Okay. We have several problems right off the bat. First of all, how do I tell when a person is ``forced to make a decision''? Socialists in general do not accept the libertarian idea of coercion, so I can't use that. Also, what is ``equal footing''? How do you know when people are on ``equal footing''? The final problem is ``who decides when se is worse off''? I still don't know how to tell whether she has made her decision because she was exploited or because our tastes differ. Is my taste for the music of the Grateful Dead somethng which places me on an unequal footing with those who do not appreciate it and therefore make the decisons to not go to Dead concerts? This is not what I would call exploitation -- but your definition does not seem to exclude it. I do not mean this as a facetious example -- the problem is that if I can do something like this with your definition then you can use it to call anything that you do not like exploitation. This is what I want a precise definition to avoid. "Decisions" are like choices in a game where both of the unequal participants compete. Compete for *what*? In the case of property differences, if a person lacks property and has to make hard life choices that she wouldn't have to worry about if she and someone else had equal property holdings, then she's exploited. Why are you considering property so important? People have varying notions about property. [Listen up, Richard Carnes, 'cause not every libertarian you will meet is interested in amassing property. I'm not.] For instance, what I value is not property, but time. Property is a hassle to take care of and, if you get a lot of it, you end up worrying about it. All of these hassles I have decided that I don't want. So -- I work on contract. When the contract is over, I collect the cash, and spend it on books and food and wine -- and I don't work until the money starts to run out which tells me I have to go work again. This gives me lots of time to think in, and write and meditate in, and hack code for fun, and read usenet, and post -- which is what I want. *But*, if I had as much propery as (say) my grandfather the farmer did -- then I wouldn't have to make some of the choices I have had to make. I have lived on peanut butter and kraft dinner a lot -- but this does not make me feel exploited with respect to my grandfather the farmer. He had the hassle of being a farmer, which I don't want. People who are interested (obsessed?) with amassing property will find my attitude towards posessing it abhorrant. Tastes vary. I think that it would take a gross distorting of the meaning of the word to make me ``exploited''. Now, if someone forced me to work more, or to posess more property in order to make me ``equal'' with someone else, *that* I would call exploitation. Would you? If people are choosing to live in ways I'd find abhorrant, then they would (I presume) still choose to lead their abhorrant lives if they and I were on an equal footing. Then they aren't exploited. Aha! But the question *was*, how do you tell? People who are unlucky are not exploited if they could have been just as unlucky in a fair game. Of course, the comparison between chances in one game and chances in another can only be done when more than one case is involved (distributions and all that). My problem is figuring out whether the game was fair in the first place. I infer that socialists have difficulty among themselves over this one. In the real world, where most competitive situations involve risk and chance, one can't say in a particular case that exploitation is going on. But one can say that exploitation is going on if many cases are compared and the differences between group outcomes correspond to inequalities in important resources. Once a finding of exploitation has been made, the inference can then be made that each member of the exploited group is exploited as an individual. This is where I think things get sticky. I never want to make that generalisation from the group to the individual -- I think that such generalisation must go the other way. You have not defined ``important resource'' which is a problem -- who decided what is important? Also, you have left out the possibility that groups may have different standards and values as to what is important. If most of society values dilligence, and some ethnic group values giving up and trying tomorrow, then, in a society where dilligence is rewarded in cash the members of that ethnic gorup will have less cash. It would be easy to say that they are exploited -- but perhaps they merely consider the val;ues held by most of society to be foolish. Would it be better to force them to adopt the beliefs of the majority in order to get an equal footing? Or to make the rest of society pay them more as they are in correspodence with their beliefs? In the context of socialism, people are exploited by capital if they would be better off (would choose to live a different and more satisfied life) in a situation where capital differentials were (more or less) eliminated, i.e. in socialism. Whether Same problem. Who gets to say whether their lives would be more satisfying? How can one tell? they would be better off is a pragmatic, historical question, a question of what the alternative socialist system would look like in a given period of history and political-economic development. But the value-judgement -- this has to be done by real individuals -- whose tastes vary. The power of Marx's vision was that he saw a time when the capitalist economy would be so advanced and there would be so much potential opportunity for all that the exploited would clearly see that it was in their interest to throw off the shackles of capital for a society where those shackles would no longer exist. At that point, the non-exploited and exploiting classes would present an obstacle to change that perhaps only revolutions would be able to overcome. Until we can come up with a way to tell who is exploiting and who is exploited there is no way to try to avoid this. I am interested in ``the shackles of capital''. What do you propose to replace it with? Laura Creighton utzoo!laura