Originally published at: Income in a Post-Capitalist Society: Who Decides? - Participatory Economy
The question of income in a socialist society has been debated for a long time, going all the way back to Marx’s famous slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, published in his Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875. What anti-capitalists all agree on is the need to…
Nice Post Jason. Under the “power via democratic headings” I would suggest adapting Sociocracy as a means for decision making. I’ve written a brief article about this that I could share with you if you like.
Under “Deciding Income for Work” I’d go for a balanced approach. For example, industry standards would likely emerge at the societal level for how typical jobs are enumerated. That information could be shared with workplaces to aid in the decision making process taking into account unique aspects of each workplace.
Under “Deciding income for needs” I would suggest that to the extent possible, public goods should have some kind of price tag attached to them and people who don’t work would receive a direct payment. It might take into account variabilities in costs between different locations. For example rural vs urban issues where public transportation is more cost effective in urban areas. People need to make choices. We dont want to create a free ride economy at the expense of those working. As for decision making processes, same as above, where the societal provides input and perhaps even upper and lower bounds, leaving the ultimate decision with the locals.
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Thanks Claude. Yes, please do share your article you’ve written about sociocracy. I am a fan of sociocracy and I think it is a detailed self-governance system which workplaces could choose to use. I like your suggestions, and the main point I was aiming to make in the article is that these are all options for the society to choose within the federational structures and planning procedures.
I would suggest referring to mechanism design and implementation theories to investigate this problem.
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Great article! From a practical perspective, it seems pretty clear the authority to decide incomes needs to be split between social and workplace levels, rather than granted exclusively to one or the other, because there are critical issues each level is exclusively able to address. On one hand, as you acknowledge, only the social level can adjust pay to ensure enough people are willing to do vital-but-sucky work, for instance sewage maintenance. On the other - and this is a point your article misses - many vital skill distinctions are not visible and cannot practically be made visible at a social level because they are too granular. The social level cannot decide the appropriate wage (or opportunity cost of labour!) for the handful of people who know how to make such-and-such bespoke system work, because there are too many bespoke systems and most of them are run on implicit knowledge and particular personal relationships. The social level cannot help but ‘see like a state’ because of the scale at which it makes decisions. So individual workplaces need to have the flexibility to adjust socially-determined pay levels to hire and retain people with vital skills and relationships.