From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Tue Oct 29 2002 - 16:53:03 MST
On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 12:22:42PM -0500, Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
.....
> And, there is where the socialist is really going to have to watch the
> work force. People intuitively think that working slower is easier but when
> they slow down things get tougher.
You've got a bit of a motivational headache here; you seem to be
conflating "socialist" with "dictator in charge of command economy".
Lemme give you a brief picture of a socialist enterprise that's active
just up the road from where I live.
About a hundred people work in this building. It's one branch of a large
concern with several dozen other branches around the UK. It is, in point
of fact, a department store -- one of the largest, most high-valued
chains in the country. The workers there are efficient, courteous, and
helpful, and the goods are competitively priced -- if you can find the
same items on sale anywhere else in the city they'll match on price,
and they provide an extended warranty service on top of whatever the
manufacturer normally offers.
Did I say "socialist"? Yes: this business, the John Lewis Partnership,
is jointly owned. All the permanent staff are shareholders. It's a
worker's co-op. And it's one of the leading retain chains in the UK.
"Worker control of the means of production" means, basically, that when
the enterprise makes a profit, the workers share in it. Nothing more,
nothing less. If you worked for a dot com and had stock options, you
were participating in a socialist scheme.
(With me so far?)
The headache of socialism is that the term has been used to cover a wide
range of sins -- including the communist program, which went far beyond
worker participation in ownership, and including a number of failed,
dictatorial attempts to enforce joint ownership by effectively ensuring
that nobody had a stake in anything.
It's extremely noteworthy that all the failures of socialism have involved
attempts to impose it from the top down, by government fiat. The successes
are all bottom up.
(Here's a big clue: you seem to have been working on the misguided
assumption that I'm a statist. I'm not ...)
It's also noteworthy that stakeholder participation is mostly opposed
only by people who already have an extremely large stake. A curious fact
of human nature is that people define wealth and status in relative
terms. Because the perception of wealth -- if not its fact -- is relative,
people who already have a pile may in some cases feel threatened by
the prospect of other people acquiring their own pile. There's also the
instinct towards collective self-defense, which crops up quite clearly
in rhetoric about the need to keep the uppity workers under control. It
seems fairly clear to me that a well-motivated work force with a stake
in the profits will out-perform a bunch of serfs: which makes it rather
peculiar that conservative interests seem obsessed with forcing liquidity
in the labour market by applying the stick and not the carrot.
> But may whatever Gods you worship help you if you either coddle the
> worker or try to speed him up by becoming a thug.
I dunno about you, Ron, but I am both a worker _and_ a boss -- I'm self-
employed. Funnily enough, I find that having a share in the profits of my
enterprise is a rather potent motivating force. How about you?
-- Charlie
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