How would Anarchists/Communists deal with the Free Rider Problem?

The issue of Free Riders is frequently brought forward as an argument against Anarchism and Communism. However not only would such societal leeches be fewer but also far less problematic.

Free-rider
Image by schoeband via Flickr

A Free Rider is considered someone who consumes more than he should, or more than what is considered “fair”. In the more extreme case it is someone who contributes nothing but still receives the full benefits of society. In a more mild case, it might be the lazy person who manages to obscure the fact that he’s only working half the time.

Both of these cases are considered a problem because they present a prisoner’s dilemma to whatever they apply. If I work in a factory and can simply slack off half the time, this will bring me the benefit of living a happier, less tiring and stressful job. If this can pass unchallenged it will trigger others in the factory to act in the same way (defect) so as to get the same benefit. When a few people become free riders then it usually does not create an issue as others can cover for their loss without noticeable drawbacks. However when everyone, or a critical mass, defects then everyone suffers.

Free rider then must be somehow convinced or coerced to stop defecting from contributing what is expected of them, and societies have come up with various ways to work around this problem. In a modern nation for example, active coercion is used via the form of taxes to insure that everyone contributes their share. In a theoretical “Anarcho”-Capitalist society on the other hand, this problem is resolved through death ((To be fair, this is the position is espoused by this particular AnCap who seems to be a bit challenged in the empathy department. As such, it does not necessarily mean it’s the position espoused by all AnCaps, so a more accurate description instead of “death” would be “reliance on private charity, but possibly including death where charity is ineffectual”. H/t sblinn)). The question occurs then, how would an Anarchist/Communist society deal with Free Riders.

The way I see it, there’s two necessary conditions that must exist to turn someone into a free rider. These are Incentive and Obfuscation. Incentive is the fact that in a prisoner’s dilemma the best result is when the other side cooperates as you defect. The greater the difference from the result of mutual cooperation compared to cooperation/defection, the greater the incentive to defect. Obfuscation on the other hand is the ability to hide your choice in the prisoner’s dilemma so as to avoid coercion or others defecting with you.

The greater the incentive and the easier the obfuscation, the more free riders you will get in your system until it collapses. A Capitalist system (wether a fascist, democratic or an stateless one) has such a a major issue with free riders because both conditions are high. It is easy to hide the fact that you’re lazy when your co-workers won’t care to give you away and the rewards for doing it are considerate (same pay for less work).  I want to show how in a Socialist society both of these conditions are severely reduced.

Incentive

Lets say we have a factory where our potential free rider is a worker. In a Capitalist run factory he would either be getting the minimum wage (the cost to survive) due to the commoditization of labour, or in the lucky case that the worker is living in a Bourgeois nation, he’ll be getting a decent one. Whatever happens then, the worker knows that he will be getting the same wage and it will also be unlikely that any extra effort will be rewarded.

But this is not the case in a socialist mode of production. Because the workers themselves reap all the fruits of their own labour any slacking at work will come directly out of one’s “paycheck” while any extra effort will increase their reward. Because of this, in our prisoner’s dilemma abstraction of the situation, the reward one receives from cooperating with others within Socialism are approaching the reward one receives via defection. The smaller this difference between rewards becomes, the smaller the incentive for one to defect

Obfuscation

The second condition is how easy it is for a potential free rider to hide the fact that he is slacking about. Within a capitalist company, the limited management finds it very difficult to tell apart who is the slacker as opposed to who is simply slower than others (but still trying) or who is having a bad time. And since other workers generally don’t rat on their colleagues, especially when working conditions are bad, it becomes quite easy to hide the fact that you’re avoiding work, and this only gets easier in direct proportion to the size of the company.

However when you have a company where every worker’s reward is directly affected by every other contribution, suddenly people who take but do not give stand out much more. And because  we’re talking about interactions between equals, workers will find it much easier to speak out and pressure the slacker socially to behave. Whereas it’s easy to hide from ( (or suckup to) the minority of the people who have the power to punish or fire you, it is not as easy to do the same when everyone you work with has a chance to notice, complain and eventually get rid of you.

Now you might have noticed that I’m mostly talking about workplaces as this is the main area where someone might try to free ride, but there’s also the case that one tries to escape working altogether. How can you tell then if your neighbour is contributing his part to the community for all the  benefits he’s getting back? Like the workplace, in a small scale community ((since I generally advocate those I will argue from that point.)) it is very difficult to hide the fact that you never seem to be doing anything. Sooner or later neighbours and other member will start adding 2 and 2 together and come to the right conclusions.

We also should consider that it’s very unlikely that any person would prefer doing nothing for most of his life. I think it’s in our evolved psychology to want to feel productive to some degree. Certainly there are subcultures where it seems as if free riding (on social benefits) is promoted, but how much that is caused by other social conditions is a big argument (ie are people free riding because they can, or are they free riding because the alternative low-paying crappy non-fulfilling jobs are a far worse option?)

Dealing with Free Riders

So I’ve argued how the number of Free Riders within an Anarchist/Communist society would be much lower than what we’ve come to expect from experience, but it’s still conceivable that a number of them will still exist. While it will be easier to be discovered and the rewards of them defecting will be marginal, some may opt for this method. Perhaps they are just that lazy or don’t care what others think etc. How will we deal with them?

Social Pressure

Humans are primarily social animals and don’t really want to live alone. When a free rider is discovered in work, his colleagues can easily make his life miserable by avoiding contact and/or being hostile, depending on how much he is slacking off. This type of pressure works even now to a significant degree and you very often see people quit from nice jobs because of office hostility. If this can work on people who can even be on the right (that is, not being lazy) then it will doubtly work on people who have to face their colleagues and their own conscience.

Outside work, the same thing can happen. Friends & Family will start urging you to do your part or abandon you if you don’t. Social contacts may become hostile and as the information spreads more and more, people around you will do the same. Imagine your grocery store clerk wordlessly giving you your necessities, imagine your postman “forgetting” to bring you the mail. You get the idea. I do not think there’s many who will want to be in this situation, especially if it’s their own fault for wanting to be lazy.

Ostracism

There is always a chance that a free rider will associate with other free riders in order to alleviate the effects of social pressure. As long as food and shelter are always provided, then one only needs to avoid social withdrawal in order to function in society and if they can find other like them, a subculture of free riders may be created that will be more resistant to social pressure.

Hopefully a future society will be a federation of communities whereas people cluster together with whoever they want to associate with. As such, each community will get to decide with whom they want to associate with and provide their communal resources. Were such a group of free riders to appear amidst the community, it would be relatively simple for the productive members of society to refuse to support them. Whereas this is impossible in a tax based welfare system, it would be fairly simple under Anarchism.

Leaving them be

It is very possible that even with the small incentive and low chance to hide, some people might still find a way to free ride in a Anarchist/Communist society and this is unavoidable in any kind of system really. For example in a taxation situation, you still have a lot of people who find a way to hide their true income or simply become invisible and only work through the black market. In the sense that these people keep using public services that the rest of us have paid for, they are free riding.

Well how about simply ignoring them? The number of such undiscovered free riders can never be large enough to be disruptive as this would mean that the method they achieve it would eventually leak to the rest of the community which would then take action. Trying to get rid of them through blanket measures is more likely to do more harm than good, as it may require authoritarian measures and the like.

So in the end you have a very small percentage of any community leeching off somehow in a way that does not incite others to do the same, we simply write it off as part of the waste. Among the people with special needs, the sick, the children and the elderly, a bunch of free riders will never make any difference.

A vulgar right-wing libertarian might here say that as long as there is any waste, as long as any person has the possibility to leech off his hard work, then the system is unacceptable. But the problem is that under Capitalism not only do the free riders abound but they also get to wield all the power. Who are they? Well, as per the initial definition, they are of course the ones who do not contribute anything by themselves and retain all the benefits of society. How do they do that? By simply turning their wealth to more wealth without having to lift a finger. They are the parasitic class who skim all the surplus value without having to break a sweat. They are the Capitalists.

Given the choice of a free rider in an Anarchist society – who can never have anything more than anyone else, nor exert any power over his comrades – and a free rider in a Capitalist society who not only gets to live the good life without even trying, but also get to be more powerful as time passes at the expense of everyone else…well I’d like to think that most can see which is the best choice.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

"This ain't Capitalism"

Whenever suffering and misery happen in a country which consider itself Capitalistic, it is quickly pointed that this is the fault of anything BUT Capitalism. This article explains why this is a fallacy.

Enjoy Capitalism
Image by Jacob Bøtter via Flickr

It’s a recurring theme lately that whenever one will point out sufferring and generally bad stuff happening because of Capitalism, right-wing libertarian apologists will pop-up from the woodwork to point out that “This ain’t Capitalism”. They will claim that the government played too big a role and this we can’t really consider it a fault of the system per se, but must lay all the blame on the government intervention ((The hypocrisy that takes the cake of course is when the same people will blame all the suffering of USSR, Korea and China squarely on Communism without being willing to recognise any other factor other than how those nations defined themselves)).

This is starting to get quite annoying so I think it’s time to explain why I consider this a no-true Scotsman fallacy.

First of all, ‘Capitalism’ as a word is quite recent, only coming into the mainstream vocabulary at the start of the 20th century by Werner Sombart, a Marxian who used it in his critique of the system. Before that, the use of the word had been sporadic and in variants of the root, with the most important being by Karl Marx himself who wrote mainly about the Capitalist mode of Production.

This concept has been expanded in the last century to mean a complete economic system who’s core characteristic is the same Capitalist mode of production that Marx was accurately criticizing. Peripheral to that is the sociopolitical situation within which this mode of production exists. This can range from authoritarian imperialism (Fascism), to libertarian minarchism (The American ‘Libertarianism’).

All of these, are still Capitalism. The means of production (factories, land, labour) are still privately owned and the only thing that changes is the degree of political freedom and interference of the state. But the degree to which these two fluxuate has nothing to do with wether the system is Capitalistic or not.

The Austrian school of Economics is of course the most rabid denouncers of this idea. For them, as long as Capitalism is not absolutely free any government, it cannot be called as such (Merchantilism is apparently the correct word) something of course which is complete nonsense. Even under the most welfare-oriented system, the mode of production still remains in the hands of private owners and as such the core characteristic is fulfilled. To argue otherwise is similar to claiming that someone is not a Scotsman because he puts sugar in his porridge.

Apologists of Capitalism from every school of thought, wether that is that there is too much restriction on Capital or that there is not enough restriction on Capital, will eagerly lay the blame for all the human suffering under the actions (or inactions) of Capitalist regimes on anything else than the economic system itself. It’s too much state intervention. Or too much credit expansion. Or not enough checks and balances. Or too much Greed. Or too much Corruption. Or too much environmental destruction. Whatever. It’s anything and the kitchen sink to blame but Capitalism.

And yet we see the same suffering and destruction occuring to any Capitalist system sooner or later. Wether that is the Free Market Wonder of Chile, the Soaring Growth of India or the State Capitalism of the USSR. No matter how much or how little government intervention there is in the market, the same crises happen, povertry and starvation remain, and people suffer. And the only thing that stays constant, the only common denominator, is the Capitalist mode of production.

This is Capitalism.

Also see: Capitalism: A good word for a bad thing.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Make your avatar a "Hoodie"

The Greek Govt is trying to criminalize attempts to protect one’s identity during social upheavals. This is a call for solidarity.

Last year during the Greek Riots, there was a government suggestion to somehow punish people who cover their faces during protests, in effect making it unlawful to protect your anonymity. Back then along with another person, I took a symbolic solidarity action by taking a picture of myself as a hoodie but as time passed and the riots abated, the issue was forgotten.

However it seems that the Government has not forgotten their plans and has now proceeded to decree that anyone caught “vandalizing”, acting violently or simply disrupting the public peace while wearing a hoodie or otherwise covering their face characteristics will be further charged with 2-10 years of punishment. You read that right, if you go out to protest and you are deemed to be disruptive to the public peace (who will judge that? The cops of course) while covering your face (or not, Greek cops have no problem accusing you anyway, and what is easier to accuse than “covering the face characteristics”) then you can go to jail for 2 years at least.

Wonderful.

As a reaction to this announcement, Plagal, who initiated the action the last time, brought up this symbolic move of picturing yourself in a hoodie once more and urges everyone to do something similar. The reaction this time has been much more positive and many more people have done the same (there’s a list in the link above) which could possibly be due to the fact that another blogger proposed the same thing independently, only she went one step further and proposed the great idea to switch all our avatars to Hoodies in solidarity.

So here we go:

Hoodie Solidarity

I’ve already updated my twitter and facebook avatars and I urge you to do the same in all the places where you commonly hang out. And of course if you’re a blogger upload one in your blog and explain why you did it.

If you live in Greece I furthermore wholeheartedly suggest you start strolling around the city as a Hoodie, just so that you can show your disdain for this new government clampdown of freedom of expression and the right to anonymity.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Ska-P is on tour?! FFFFFFFUUUUUU

Ska-P is coming to Greece and I won’t be around. No vacation allowed in this period 🙁

Ska-P
Ska-P (via last.fm)

I just realized I missed the Ska-P concert in germany after their recent reunion. Now I find out that in mid-May they’re going to be in Greece and specifically in my home city Thessaloniki. To say that I’d like to see them live would be an understatement. Judging by how awesome and dancealicious their songs are by default, their live shows must be amazing fun.

[youtube]4nmO54Tf5vM[/youtube]

So the title of this article goes to the fact that I will lose this concert unless I pull a brilliant plan to somehow be in Greece at this particular Fortunately for me, We (me and the gf) already plan to be there at around this time but we were planning for around June. I need to simply make pull it back a bit.

[youtube]Q-Iv7JqlTjw[/youtube]

I was totally hooked to Ska-P from a colleague a few years ago and I’ve become a big fan since then. By the time I learned about them they had already disbanded but in 2008 they rejoined and brought a new album (which I need to acquire post-haste). Not only do they make awesome music – combining folk, metal and punk in a wonderful mix of Ska – but they also have a very uplifting tone and lyrics centered around liberty, anti-capitalism and racism. Just perfect.

[youtube]cZhl8HU2WQI[/youtube]

So um, yeah. Other than a blatant opportunity for me to post some vids of them in an attempt to hook y’all. This was simply an exclamation on the fact that I may lose my last chance to see them. This must not be.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Quote of the Day: KKE and Slander

Bravo Liana .. Tell us the way, how can a revolutionary party deflect the international slander, when whole communist regimes have succumbed to them? It seems that KKE can make it, because it has the divine favour (something that other communists don’t) and has made a monastery from sinless Shaolin that deflect every intervention.

Quoth Gatouleas

Bravo Liana ((Editor: A well-known repressentative of the Greek Communist Party)).. Tell us the way, how can a revolutionary party deflect the international slander, when whole communist regimes have succumbed to them? It seems that KKE ((Editor: The Greek Communist Party.  Stalinist)) can make it, because it has the divine favour (something that other communists don’t) and has made a monastery from sinless Shaolin that deflect every intervention.

Translated from Greek. Lots of fun and a good article to boot

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Quote of the Day: Obama the Corporatist

[Obama] is not a socialist, as conservatives may be arguing, but he is a corporatist. Using future tax dollars to fund government job programs is one thing. Using future tax dollars to give banks more money to lend out at interest is robbing from the poor to pay the rich to rob from the poor.

Quoth Douglas Rushkoff

[Obama] is not a socialist, as conservatives may be arguing, but he is a corporatist. Using future tax dollars to fund government job programs is one thing. Using future tax dollars to give banks more money to lend out at interest is robbing from the poor to pay the rich to rob from the poor.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

How Epicurism leads me to Anarcho-Communism

I am first an Epicurean and then a Socialist but the later flows naturally from the former due to moral reasoning.

Anarchism/Anarcho-Syndicalism/Anarcho-Communis...
Image by anarchosyn via Flickr

As an Epicurean, I require very little to be content: Food, Shelter, Friends and the absence of pain. All these things have always been generally easy to achieve and as such they are what each person should be able to have. The fact that so many do not is a telling problem of the disfunctionality of our society.

One could ask: “As an Epicurean, why do you care what others have? After all, if you can achieve a state of ataraxia why should you care if others do the same?”. This is really a moral issue and should be looked in this light.

The question is, how do I go from the descriptive “My only needs are those which bring me in ataraxia” to the prescriptive “Everyone should be able to fulfill the needs that bring them in a state of ataraxia“. To go there, we first need to look at my reasons for doing so.

  1. The more people that desire that others are achieving ataraxia, the more likely it is that I will be able to achieve and sustain it through their combined efforts.
  2. Achieving ataraxia allows people to work on achieving the rest of their desires. Since I’m trying to make it so that one of those desires is that everyone is achieving ataraxia, then this helps spread this desire as well as happiness which comes from being in this state.

From these we can see that I have reasons to promote the desire (i.e. it is considered good) that people should be able to fulfill the needs that bring them in a state of ataraxia. It becomes a moral value.

So how does this lead to Communism? Well, Communism has the ideological proposition that everyone should be producing according to their abilities and receiving according to their needs. By itself, the second part of the sentence is not very descriptive as anyone can claim the most extraordinary things as needs. However through the lenses of Epicurism, the needs transform to something objective: The things one needs to be in a state of ataraxia.

Communism then conflates exactly with the moral value I have reached via Epicurism. Each of us should be striving to the best of our abilities to help others fulfil their needs. And since the needs one has on average ((adding the cost of medicine which are more resource intensive but also much smaller in production scale than food)) are the very basic and most easy to create, the effort we would require from each of us for this to be achieved would be minimal.

Of course Communism is more than a ideological proposition. It also proposes the way a society would be organized (Classless & Staleless) which also follow from Epicurism since authority and inequality either lead to emotional pain or to the increased cost of basic needs, making them opposed to the moral value I explained above.

Now to be accurate, I never really moved towards the libertarian socialist quadrant because I looked at the subject philosophically, but rather because intuitively, for someone with an Epicurean mindframe, the concepts of Anarchism/Socialism/Communism fit very well to my moral values.

Only later did it occur to me how much one leads to the other and the dialectic relationship between them. As much as the Epicurean subconsiously espouses the libertarian socialist mindframe, so does the consistent libertarian socialist require an Epicurean thinking to avoid sliding into authoritarianism or crass individualism (ie Capitalism)

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

The Take

The Take is a documentary following the struggle of the workers of a closed factory to take it over and turn into a cooperative.

Reddit recently brought to my attention this little but very uplifting video

[youtube]LPUjR5AReBU[/youtube]

In the comments spgreenlaw mentioned that this was part of a move called The Take. Well, I’ve just watched it and it was brilliant.

The movie is basically about the struggle of the workers of an abandoned factory to take it under worker’s control. It is a real life example of the difficulties that syndicates and cooperatives face when trying to get what most of us would consider as only fair.

If you wish to see what worker’s self-management means and how capitalists will put private property rights over human lives, perhaps you should see it as well.

The perspective behind me

I’ve decided to write a series of pages on the particular philosophies, ideologies and concepts which compose my outlook on life. First comes Epicurism

Taking the idea from the Directionless Bones’ “why” articles, I’ve decided to write a series of pages on the particular philosophies, ideologies and concepts which compose my outlook on life and from which I write on this blog.

I hope these will serve as a second stop for visitors wishing to get a deeper view into my mind and hopefully strike the interest for others to explore them on their own.

The first one I’ve written is incidentally the first label I applied to myself and by far the most important: Epicurism

The value of naturally occuring commodities

Critics of the Labour Theory of Value attack it from the argument that it does not explain the value of natural commodities such as rocks and diamonds. This article explains how it ties in.

Despite their apparent natural beauty, the sec...
Image via Wikipedia

One common vector of argumentation that I see many critics of the LTV take, is to attempt to move the discussion away from commodities created via human labour and to commodities that are naturally occuring on Earth, and then claim that the LTV cannot explain how they can have value. They will bring up diamonds, rocks or simply breathable air to make their point and occasionally change to another commodity if their previous example didn’t work so well.

The obvious trend in all of this of course is that they will avoid using a human made commodity for their argument by any means necessary. Even when you specifically bring up cars or bicycles and other such examples, they will be summarily ignored and the discussion will be shifted once more to natural ones.

The critic then is attempting to use a strawman claim in order to make a Reductio ad absurdum and hopefully confuse the LTV proponent long enough to finish them off with Marginalism. What the critic here fails to grasp is that the LTV is explicitly related to commodities created through human labour. It was never intended to say that human labour is what creates the objective value in everything in the universe, but rather that it is what creates the objective value in everything human-made.

Now it is true that naturally occuring commodities do have a subjective value which occasionally facilitates their exchange. All of this ties perfectly to marginalism which is not at all incompatible with the LTV. However this only explains why something very useful (like air) does not need to be exchanged to get or why something useless to most people can have a far higher price than its cost (i.e. diamonds).

However it is also true that human labour does play a role in defining the exchange value of everything. Namely, since human labour is required to bring any natural commodity to the market, then the equilibrium price (around which the market prices move) is always equal to as much socially necessary labour time required to prepare a commodity for the market.

Lets get an example: The diamond which seems to be a favourite of marginalists of course.

The diamond generally has a very high exchange price which we will hear that the LTV cannot explain as no human labour went into creating a diamond. That is undeniably true. However that does not mean that no human labour went into bringing a diamond to the market. They are not just laying around you know.

The diamond has to be found and dug up (most likely in a horrible Congo mine). That requires quite a lot of labour time from people digging and searching all over the mine. Since this is generally done is inhuman conditions (to achieve low costs), this requires a strong security around the mine to protect against a miner’s uprising, defending against foreign warlords and making sure the workers cannot smuggle diamonds out. Then the gems needs to be transported to the developed nations and an expert needs to cut and prepare them for selling.

All of this is quite a substancial cost which tranlates directly to the price the diamond will fetch at the jeweler’s. This is the equilibrium price of the item around which the selling price will fluxuate depending on how high the demand for diamonds will be. Lacking passive or active coercion, the owner of a diamond will never sell one for less than this price.

We can see then, that while human labour does not play a role in the creation of the objective value of a natural commodity, it does still play a role in defining the exchange value it will achieve. When you have a natural commodity that is not abundant (like air), it is the socially necessary labour time that will define the cost of it and thus the minimum acceptable price.

There is one last point I’d like to raise. While it is true that human labour does not create the objective value in natural commodities, in an abstract sense we can consider that labour in general is what creates it. It’s simply not from humans. What I mean is that in order to have anything other than random collections of atoms in space, something needs to be happening to put them in a human usable form. That something can either be human labour or “natural labour” (Bear with me, this is a concept I am thinking of just now).

Now to give you an example let’s take human breathable atmosphere. One could say that this has a very high subjective value as everyone needs to breathe but this value can’t possibly be linked to the LTV as no human labour was extended to achieve it. And this is true. The zero human labour that is necessary to achieve a breathable atmosphere is precisely the reason why the air if free. If on the other hand our breathable oxygen was running low and we needed to run some kind of oxygen factory to increase it, then certainly all of us would be paying for it, at least via some kind of tax.

However, while the breathable atmosphere does not need human labour to get, does not mean it does not need any labour, as is obvious by looking at any planet other than the Earth. What happens in this case is simply that we have inherited as part of our ecosystem an “automated factory” in the form of plant-life that produces abundant oxygen for everyone. Unfortunately for the Capitalists, the nature of this “factory” and the atmosphere make it impossible to be capitalized (or homesteaded) and by necessity it is socialized.

Breathable air is provided to everyone according to his needs.

tl;dr version:

  • The LTV is meant  to explain the value of human-made commodities
  • Nevertheless, LTV can ties directly to the exchange value of non-abundant natural commodities as well
  • Even naturally occuring commodities require a form of “labour” to be created. This explains their objective value, even though this labour is not exerted by humans.
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]