Incentives

 There is a certain gap in socialist thinking, and I've never understood—despite a lifetime of reading leftist authors and identifying personally with the left—exactly how it is supposed to be bridged. Simply put, it's the familiar problem of "incentives." 

Historically, most socialist governments have arisen in underdeveloped countries that want to industrialize. Elected socialists have not been willing to accept an equality of poverty and call it socialism. 

But industrialization and development (or really, even just maintaining an advanced economic condition) require a great deal of thankless, backbreaking labor of the sort that most people want to avoid. 

Socialist regimes therefore face the problem of how—if they have eliminated competition for wages and the profit motive—they are going to incentivize people to do this thankless labor. 

To be sure, there may be solutions to this—but they quickly carry a regime outside of doctrinaire socialism. 

One could imagine a model of industrial democracy, for example, which ensured workers an equity stake in their firm. But this would require preserving enough of the market economy and capitalist structure to permit firms to compete against one another for profit, if people are going to have a motive to ensure the relative success of their firm. 

Likewise, one could tie different levels of wages to economic production. 

This, in effect, is what a character recommends in Donald Barthelme's novel Paradise. After defending a general principle of egalitarianism, another character asks: "You want an across-the-board standardization of profit? Where do you get your incentive?" 

To which Barthelme's other character replies: "Say three tiers of incentive tied to productivity. So there'd be a meaningful variation but not flat-out rape, if you know what I mean." 

And sure, something like that might be an improvement on the gross inequalities of our current system. But you see how quickly—after even one question—we have to start making accommodations in our socialist program for motives of profit-taking. 

Some classical socialists would say at this point that the whole notion of "incentives" is bourgeois thought. We need to get out of the whole framework of self-interested "economic man" and start thinking about the new "socialist man." 

But if people are not going to be motivated by a desire for money, what is to motivate them? 

Historically, in human societies, there have been at least three motives that can compel people to cooperate with one another in large-scale, complex activities for prolonged periods of time. 

One motive is economic gain—the benefit of a bargain or exchange. In other words, the market. 

A second motive is fear of punishment—the coercion and violence of the state or of quasi-state actors can be used to force people to labor on behalf of some larger group effort. Hence the slavery that built the pyramids, the serfdom of medieval Europe, and the gulag terrorism of Stalinist regimes. 

A third motive does exist, to be sure. Sometimes, human beings do in fact cooperate for altruistic reasons. They labor on behalf of shared ideals or out of a feeling of love and affection for others. 

This third motive is the basis for all utopian, voluntaristic, and anarchist visions of the future. 

But throughout human history, pure altruism has been hard to sustain for prolonged periods, in the absence of all other motives. It requires a burst of religious or idealistic or revolutionary energy that can burn out quickly. 

Where altruism and love have survived as motives for longer periods is typically only among small groups of genetically-related individuals. Kinship groups, clans, small-scale village communities—Gemeinschaften, in short, to use Tönnies's term—can cooperate with one another over centuries with little state coercion or market exchange getting involved. 

But these communities often compete violently with each other for resources (hence clan warfare), even in the absence of a state structure. 

Moreover, there has never been a historical model of a Gemeinschaft that operated on the scale of a modern society, made up of millions of genetically unrelated strangers. 

So, if we want the benefits of a division of labor and modern industry, etc., we are back with the same question as before: what is to motivate people? 

We can accommodate parts but not all of the profit motive, as Barthelme's character suggests above. We can endow prizes and dispense ribbons in Stakhanovite fashion for high-productivity workers. 

But what most socialist regimes end up doing in practice—once the allure of yet more ribbons starts to pall—is to turn to the second motive mentioned above: coercion, violence, fear, state terrorism. 

But it has never made sense to me that socialist governments would find this a morally superior way to incentivize labor. 

For centuries, after all, it has been the Left's justified critique of capitalism that it amounts to slavery by another name—"wage slavery"—because the vaunted "freedom of contract" it promises to workers is really just the freedom to choose between starvation and toil—which is really no choice at all. 

As Shelley wrote in that classic proto-socialist work The Masque of Anarchy: 

`What is Freedom? -- ye can tell

That which slavery is, too well --

[...]

`'Tis to work and have such pay

As just keeps life from day to day

In your limbs, as in a cell

For the tyrants' use to dwell[.]

These are valid points. But if coercing labor through the fear of starvation is a form of slavery, then it hardly seems like an improvement to replace the fear of slavery with the fear of violence, punishment, imprisonment, beatings, etc. 

Then, we've just replaced "wage slavery" with literal slavery. We've merely substituted economic coercion for state coercion; fear of hunger for fear of the lash, the knout, or the jailer. 

Even some of my very favorite democratic socialist writers—my personal heroes; the people one most associates with the values of Western liberalism and freedom—have been strangely confused on this point. In Bertrand Russell's essay "In Defense of Socialism," for instance, he writes: "In so far as work has to be enforced, it will be enforced by the criminal law, not by economic sanctions." 

The criminal law, of course, means state violence. The use of fear. The forcible deprivation of liberty. 

Why exactly should that be preferred to the fear of starvation? 

It seems to me that if our objection to inequality under market conditions is that it amounts to "wage slavery," then turning citizens into chattel slaves who work under merely physical compulsion or the threat of a prison sentence is scarcely an improvement!

Arthur Koestler is more honest and clear-headed about all this. In The Yogi and the Commissar, he rightly observes that Soviet authoritarianism had its roots in the breakdown of "incentives" to collective labor that the state encountered, once the profit motive had been removed. 

He says that if socialist governments are to avoid devolving into slave states that rule through terror, they have to give people new incentives beyond the market or what Russell calls "the criminal law." 

These "revolutionary incentives," as Koestler calls them, ought to include "voluntary discipline [...] consciousness of responsibility toward the community [...] international class solidarity [...] a spirit of fraternity among equals," etc. 

But where are these new revolutionary motives to come from? If people already have them, then why aren't we living in a socialist utopia already? People could just lay down their arms in the economic struggle here and now. Why do we need a revolution? 

And if people do not yet have these revolutionary motives, then something needs to inspire them. In short, socialism calls for a spiritual, emotional, and ethical remaking of human beings as we have known them. 

But this sounds a great deal like the "utopian" or anarchistic socialism that Marxists have always rejected. Marxism was supposed to be the "scientific" and materialistic socialism that dispensed with religious or moral motives, and which was bound to arise solely out of the operation of the economic laws of humankind, which assumed a basically selfish class interest. 

All hitherto existing history according to Marx had been a history of selfish classes fight each other for a piece of the pie; why was the socialist future suddenly supposed to give birth to a new human nature? 

Koestler recognized that this was a flaw in the Marxian theory that had never been addressed. He repeatedly faults the Soviet model for giving up on reforms that were originally intended to limit coercion, and replacing them with forms of labor discipline and punishment which—Koestler notes—gave to the worker even less control over his own destiny than he had enjoyed under capitalism. 

For Koestler—at least in his younger leftist popular front era—the answer was to put the need for new spiritual values front and center in the program. And if this was denounced as "utopian" and "sentimental," then so be it. 

"If this seems utopian, then Socialism is utopia," he writes in The Yogi and the Commissar. "There is a vacancy in every living soul," he adds, "[...] If the Socialist idea cannot fill this vacancy and quench our thirst, then it has failed in our time. In this case the whole development of the Socialist idea since the French revolution has been merely the end of a chapter of history, and not the beginning of a new one." 

Echoes here of the Apostle Paul: "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised [...] If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. [...] If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied."

In both cases, there is just a hint in the passage that perhaps the author was entertaining the very possibility that they most wanted to disclaim. There is perhaps a reason why Koestler, by the time he wrote his Reflections on Hanging a decade or so later, had shrunk his political ambitions to something more manageable than a sudden comprehensive spiritual overhaul of human nature. 

As a young communist, and later as a post-communist Popular Fronter, Koestler wrote, he had been animated by a "hopeful belief in the salvation of mankind by a world revolution." By the time he wrote his book on capital punishment, he "aim[ed], more modestly, at saving thirteen wretches a year from the pain and terror" of the hangman.

I find myself agreeing with Koestler on just about everything, and have long done so. Like him, I think the answer for the left is probably to shrink our ambitions. Instead of trying to comprehensively change human nature by creating new incentives that have never before been observed to operate on a large scale, try to make people a little bit more generous; a little bit more decent. 

And in the meantime, even if we probably still need some economic and profit incentives in society to make it function, that doesn't mean that society needs to be this grossly unequal. It could be a little more fair; a little more just. 

So too, even if we probably need some state with some police and prison powers (the second motive), that doesn't mean it needs to be as brutal and horrid as it is in our society. We don't need a death penalty or police violence or exorbitant prison sentences. 

If we too, like Koestler, have had to part ways with our belief in an imminent world revolution and full-scale transformation of human nature, that doesn't mean we have to settle for things as they are. We can still make this world better than it is currently. 

But with ever more Democratic primary candidates expressing an interest in socialism tout court (viz. events this week in the New York primaries), I fear the left is drifting back into the habit of dreaming of single, all-encompassing transformations of human nature, without ever explaining how it is supposed to work. 

If we are all going to be democratic socialists again, then someone needs to resolve this apparently quite serious problem in the heart of socialist theory. Otherwise, the same pattern with repeat. A socialist government will take power claiming to replace economic motives with altruism. But when altruism proves too weak or fleeting or unpredictable to sustain the level of economic productivity that the society demands—the state will start relying on coercion instead. 

And then, all we've managed to do in abolishing "wage slavery" is to introduce regular slavery in its place.