Barry, I was very interested to read your post below,
because it is challenging, but also because it is in a way
diametrically opposed to what I have been emphasising
(basically "each according to his/her work). I don't have
much time to respond right now, but I do hope that you will
continue the engagement nevertheless.
I think many people on this list would agree that there is a
labour surplus, but without necessarily agreeing with the
conclusions that you derive from this. For example, I find
it hard to regard as a 'solution' your radical separation of
production from distribution. The idea of dividing humanity
into a group of producers and a large unproductive group
while relying on technology to keep up a high level of
productivity seems a rather contrived and unbalanced
solution to me. Instead of focusing on the productive and
creative powers of humanity as part of the solution, it
reckons that a small group of productive and creative
individuals will design the life support for the majority
who will then play no further role in the production
process. They will simply be the recipients of a certain
distributed product. What will be the politics of this sort
of society? In such a radical division of humanity what
sorts of consciousness will define the doers and the
receivers? Will it be egalitarian in any way? This is hard
to imagine.
Sentences such as the following seem curiously to take
certain historical phenomena as given, whereas there surely
is some basis for questioning them: " when we create nearly
full employment our powerful technology and out large supply
of workers will always consume far too many resources for
such hyper-activity to be sustainable." Is technology then
some external force which impinges on humanity in a one-way
determinism, as your formulation suggests to me, or is it
something that we can create and control?
Obviously you do not subscribe to the labour theory of
value. What sort of economic theory supports statements such
as the following: "Our present views rarely include any
awareness that wealth comes from nature and inheritance more
than from any work we do."
But above all for me the stress that you put on unearned
income is most bizarre, even while your critique of growth
can and should be accepted. Also I think that your approach
of starting from the labour surplus and then not adopting a
position on population is strange, because if you are
assuming a static population, against the current and
empirically observable pattern - in other words stasis is
something to be achieved - then why would you not try to
achieve negative population growth, which would seem to be a
more direct and more coherent way of addressing your problem
of economic growth and labour surplus, no? If you are
putting so much stress on highly productive technology,
which is somehow taken as an extra-human given, why don't
you look at the technology of reproduction? In both cases
they are matters of human choice and agency. Neither the
population level nor the level of productivity is an
external fact of nature - they are effects of human
relations and actions.
Tahir
>>> "Barry Brooks" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 09/06 6:11 AM >>>
We need to find what kind of economy can provide people's
needs without making too much pollution and without running
out of resources rapidly. Our present consumer economy has
many nice features, yet it is basically at odds with
resource stewardship.
Labor has been surplus relative to local natural
resources for a long time. In today's crowded world
migration can no longer provide an escape from depleted
local resources, and imported resources are no longer
abundant and cheap. Even though we face a growing shortage
of resources we still pretend that labor shortage is
limiting production. Our fear of labor shortage is
obsolete. Since the dawn of the industrial age it has been
necessary to constantly find ways to increase consumption in
order maintain full employment.
The left and the right agree that jobs are the only
acceptable way to dole out money to the masses. Yet, when
we create nearly full employment our powerful technology and
out large supply of workers will always consume far too many
resources for such hyper-activity to be sustainable. Only in
our dreams is there no conflict between expanding the
economy to make jobs and contracting the economy to conserve
resources.
Our present views rarely include any awareness that
wealth comes from nature and inheritance more than from any
work we do. To make our system work under present conditions
we must admit that human labor is no longer scarce because
machines with computer control can replace most paid labor,
even in services. We should expect to shift our dependence
from wages toward unearned income as automation replaces
more human labor. Our system already has unearned income,
but for now it is only for a few. Changing that is the key
to becoming sustainable. Unearned income can end our
dependence on jobs and growth.
Whether our goal is to preserve the present pecking order
or to help improve the lives of the poor, we must have a
sustainable system for anything to really matter to anyone.
Excess growth is the cause of our high consumption, and high
consumption is the reason our economic system is not
sustainable. Growth is the common problem of all classes!
True conservation cuts consumption and that cuts
production and that cuts real paying jobs and profits. No
one supports a sustainable economy. Without true
conservation we can continue to squander scarce resources to
exercise all our surplus labor. Without conservation we can
have our giant SUVs. That is our plan, left or right.
There are four basic ways, I can think of, to conserve
resources: increased efficiency, increased durability,
recycling and by doing less. Durability allows doing less
without having less. Efficiency allows using less in what we
are doing. We can make deep cuts in consumption without
sacrifice by designing new products to maximize their life
time, efficiency and reparability.
Durability will make it possible to stop the waste and
pollution that are making our economy unsustainable.
Because durability has been neglected we have a lot to gain
when we starting using durability to conserve.
Conservation of perishables using recycling and
efficiency are already our goals, but the use of durability
to conserve has had little notice. Yet, a stable population
could use a general increase in durability to cut its
resource consumption to very low levels while maintaining
high living standards.
If we could somehow accept unearned income for all
classes then we could adjust the dole to stabilize wages.
(No more tight money.) This will provide a mechanism
allowing us to match the labor force to the real need for
labor, instead of making jobs to match the labor force,
regardless of the consequences.
Barry Brooks
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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