Greetings Economists, On Dec 5, 2007, at 9:49 AM, Jim Devine wrote:
The old USSR also was quite authoritarian, from what I've heard and read.
Doyle; The main authoritarian time was before WWII. Given the second world war the conditions made things war like. So I would qualify your statement. you, The trouble is that it took away the whip of hunger -- or the fear of bankruptcy and spinning into the vicious circle of poverty -- that motivates workers to labor under capitalism (especially at the lower levels of the class system) and under other economic systems where workers lack other reasons to work hard. [At higher levels of the class system, the fear is not that of falling into poverty as much as falling down the hierarchy.] Doyle; These are very broad strokes about how people feel. We say people are motivated (read - some feeling of such and such moves them to act). I'm going to die whether or not I feel hunger. I have reasons to act based upon how I feel about dying. The issue to me is this is knowledge production. Lets take a given work place, the supervisor goes about making sure the work is done like the plan says. And finds a slacker somewhere and gives them direct knowledge input about how he feels about the current difficulty making a widget. That information may seem like hot air from the supe, but the issue is a piece of how human social organization works. Go face to face and exchange feelings. Most people would feel rightly there is more to life than the face to face with the supe. In other words, this distilled knowledge production is inadequate motivator. One could make an avatar cartoon that interacts with employees more or less automatically when things don't go right making widgets. Perhaps make the process more efficient than live supervisors. Too much time wasted on coffee drinking at the cooler by supes is a good place to cut the budget. The avatar is always there 24/7. On a larger scale 'moral' is really a word that refers to emotion structure in a very very loose sense. There is no detail there that accounts for variable human emotion structure in their cognition. It's a system based upon sometimes ancient knowledge production techniques. In particular and the law or legal systems reflect this, the interactivity of the law as a means of asserting moral relations is awful. Homosexuals are morally wrong is the latest example popping up in the morass of moral analysis. This lack of accounting for how feelings work in terms of knowledge production is where these arguments fall apart. One can say in capitalism there is moral hazard, but the concept is not so different from folk psychology. The argument is plain enough, in socialism we don't have moral hazard because the emotion structure is built upon equality, and works that way to exclude something that accompanies hazard. Hazard is used by capitalism to structure inequality into how people feel. The generality of economic talk though doesn't give us a means to understand what materially emotion structure knowledge really does. Families manufacture moral structure in the home. Not in the sense of fear of parents whipping children, as day to day activity that shapes how children learn to act in the real world with strangers. A system of social isolation as practiced in big cities truly exposes people to moral hazard in many ways in which augmented emotion structure might be a key socialist innovation. We assume a united working class, but what unites or binds humans is emotion structure. Not in the sense of frenzied mass rallies, but the connection provided by language and feeling. I don't think people need a whip (terror) to work. I think it is a barbaric practice in relation to understanding how emotions build connection. thanks, Doyle Saylor
