Goodman and Goodman—Surpluses

Paul and Percival Goodman
Communitas
(1960)

[57]
CHAPTER 3
Industrial Plans

These are plans for the efficiency of production, treating domestic amenity and personal values as useful for the end, either technically or socially. ...

Yet every use of men is also a moral plan; if it seems not to be, that itself is morally problematic. ...

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... the moral-technical motivation for a kind of industrial planning springs up in a different context altogether [than that of underdeveloped or emerging countries], precisely in the most advanced and overdeveloped technologies with a vast economic and technological surplus. This is technocracy. It is the cultural emergence of engineers' values against traditional humanist or business values, as so ably championed by Veblen. In contrast to the achievements of science and engineering, the ordinary standards, expressed in the system of consumption and especially of amenity, seem irrational, a mere cultural lag. Then it is felt that by social devotion to efficiency we can liquidate the cultural lag. But the only thing that can be efficiently planned is production and the physical parts of life most like machine products.

...

[77] In general, Fuller's plans amalgamate technical, ethical, and metaphysical principles. Thus, mass production is the new phase of Christianity where all men are again brothers. The obstacle to happiness is the clinging to material, especially landed, property; progress consists in "ephemeralization," dematerializing, and impermanence or process of experience and control.

Well, the millennials are hard at work on this, aren't we?

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Social Insurance vs. the Direct Method

elementary subsistence and security cannot be neglected by any social order; they are political needs, prior to economic needs. So the governments of the most highly capitalized states intervene to assure elementary security which is no longer the first business of the economy. And the tack they take is the following: to guarantee social security by subsidizing the full productivity of the economy. Security is provided by insurance paid in the money that comes from the operation of the whole economy. The amazing indirectness of this procedure is brilliantly exposed by the discovery of a new human "right"—as if the rights of man could be so easily amended. This is the "right to employment," failing which one gets the insurance. Full employment is the device by which we flourish; and so the old curse of Adam, that he must work in order to live, now becomes a goal to be struggled for, just because we have the means to produce a surplus, cause of all our woes. This is certainly out of human scale, yet the statesmen of America and England talk this way with absolute conviction; and anyone who spoke otherwise would be voted out of office.

The immediate result of such a solution, of insurance, social credit, or any other kind of give-away money, is to tighten even closer the economic trap. Whatever freedom used to come from free enterprise and free market—and they are freedoms which were indeed fought for with blood—is now trapped in regulation and taxes. The union of government and economy becomes more and more total; we are in the full tide toward statism.

Of course. But how is what follows below supposed to take hold if not also in a profoundly statist fashion?

This is not a question of anybody's bad intentions,

PHEW!!

but follows from the connection of the basic political need of subsistence with the totality of an industrial economy.

So much for the indirect solution.

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[illustrations]

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The direct solution, of course, would be to divide the economy and provide the subsistence directly, letting the rest complicate and fluctuate it at will. Let whatever is essential for life and security be considered by itself, and since this is a political need in an elementary sense, let political means be used to guarantee it. But the rest of the economy, providing wealth, power, luxury, emulation, convenience, interest and variety, has to do with varying human wishes and satisfactions, and there is no reason for government to intervene in it in any way. The divided economy has, therefore, the twofold advantage that it directly provides the essential thing that is in jeopardy, without having to underwrite something else; and it restricts the intervention of government to this limited sphere.

Up to, say, sixty years ago, more than half of the productive capacity of our economy was devoted to subsistence; subsistence could be regarded as the chief end of the economy; and whatever their own motives, most enterprisers served the subsistence market. Now, however, in the United States less than a tenth of the economy is concerned with subsistence goods. ... Except for the biological and political factors involved, the economic machinery could roll almost as usual though everybody were dead of starvation, exposure, and disease. When the situation is viewed in this way, one of the causes is at once clear why prosperity and surplus lead precisely to insecurity: namely, that too few people are busy about subsistence, and as we know from recent farming history, those who are busy about it try to get out of it; there's no real money in meat and potatoes.

But once the economy would be divided as we are suggesting, the very techniques of industry that, when applied incidentally to subsistence, lead to insecurity, would, applied directly to subsistence, produce it with an even smaller fraction of the social labor than at present.

Probably there are various political means by which this

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small fraction could be effectuated, and we will soon develop an obvious one, direct state production of subsistence by universally conscripted labor, run as a state monopoly like the post office or the army, but paying not money but its own scrip, exchangeable only for subsistence goods made by the same enterprise.

I volunteer. But seriously, anybody for statism?

(This is a vast undertaking. It would be apparently simpler to effect approximately the same end by using private semi-monopolistic concessionaires in the state non-profit subsistence-business. But if indeed the production cost is absolutely minimum and the types absolutely standard and non-competitive, how could a private firm profit? Further, it is intolerable, and unconstitutional, to have to work for a private concessionaire. Therefore we prefer the state production—taking over relevant private plant and building its own plant—because of its purity of method. It takes subsistence out of the economy. Subsistence is not something to profit by, invest in, to buy or sell. On the part of the consumer, it is not something to choose or reject or contract for or exchange his labor for, but simply work for.)

On whatever method...there is one principle: to assure subsistence by specific production of subsistence goods and services rather than by insurance taxed from the general economy. This involved a system of double money: the "money" of the subsistence production and consumption and the money of the general market. The subsistence-certificates are not money at all, for by definition a man's subsistence leaves nothing to exchange; this "money" is like wartime ration stamps, which are likewise not legally negotiable. A man's right to life is not subject to trade.

A major moral advantage of this proposal is that every person can know that the work he does for a living is unquestionably useful and necessary, and unexploited. It is life itself for himself and everybody else. In our times of so much frivolous production and synthetic demand, and the

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accompanying cynicism of the producers, the importance of such a moral cannot be overestimated.

Another consequence: To everyone, but especially to the small wage earner, the separation of his subsistence, employing a small fraction of his labor time, from the demands and values of the general economy employing most of his labor time, would give a new security, a breath of freedom, and the possibility of choice. He is independent. He has worked directly for what he absolutely needs; he does not feel the pressure of being a drain on society; he does not fear that his insurance payments will cease. By the same token, people in general, including the small enterpriser, would be more fearless, for their risks are less fatal. But indeed, these things imply a change of social attitude so profound that we must think deeply about both the dangers and the opportunities.

The retrenchment of government from economic interference in the general part, again, might go very far, relaxing the kinds of regulation that are now indispensible... For where the prospective wage earner has a subsistence independently earned, the conditions under which he agrees to work can be allowed to depend on his own education rather than on the government's coercion of the employer.

Let us sum up by contrasting the actual plans offered by present-day governments with the plan here suggested. They propose:

Security of subsistence.
A tax on the general economy.
Necessity to maintian the economy at full production
    to pay the tax: therefore, governmental planning,
    pump-priming, subsidies, and made work; a still
    further tax, and possibly a falling rate of profit.
Insistence on the unemployed worker's accepting the
    third or fourth job available, in order to prevent
    a continuing drain on the insurance fund.

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Protection of the workers thus coerced by regulating
    the conditions of industry and investment.

Against this we propose:

Security of subsistence.
Loss to the industrialist and merchant of the sub-
    sistence market and a small fraction of the social
    labor.
Coercion of a small fraction of the social labor to produce the subsistence goods and services.
Economic freedom in all other respects.

Now financially, the choice between these two plans would depend on the comparison between the insurance and subisidied tax and the loss of labor time and market. ... Socially and morally, however, there seems to be no comparison at all: our way is direct, simple, liberating, and allows people a quiet interim to make up their minds about things.

...

[200] The [subsistence] minimum is based on a physiological standard, heightened by the addition of whatever is necessary to give a person a true possible freedom of social choice, and not violating our usual mores.

If freedom is the aim, everything beyond the minimum must be rigorously excluded, even if it should be extremely cheap to provide; for it is more important to limit political intervention than to raise the standard of living.

...

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Teacher! Today Again
   Do We Have To Do What We Want to Do?

Now supposing such a system of assured subsistence with almost complete freedom of economic ties were put into effect. No doubt for millions of people, no matter how much they might resist the idea in prospect, the first effect would be immense relief, relief from responsibility, from the pressure of the daily grind, from the anxiety of failure.

But after this first commonplace effect had worn off, the moral attitude of a people like the Americans would be profoundly deranged. They would be afraid not only of freedom and leisure, which release both creative and destructive drives nicely repressed by routine, but especially of boredom, for they would find, or imagine, themselves quite without cultural or creative resources. For in our times all entertainments and even the personal excitement of romance seem to be bound up with having ready money to spend, Emotional satisfaction, too, has been intricated into the motion of the entire productive machine, it is bound up with the Standard of Living. Movies cost money, bars cost money, and having a date costs money. ... Apart from these, as everybody knows, there is nothing to do but hang around. (Sports do not cost money, sex does not cost money, art does not cost money, nature does not cost money, intercourse with people does not cost money, science and god do not cost money.)

The Americans would suddenly find themselves "rescued" from the physical necessity and social pressure which alone, perhaps, had been driving them to their habitual satisfactions. They might soon come to regard commercial pleasures as flat and unpalatable, but they would not suddenly thereby find any others. They would be like the little girl in the progressive school, longing for the security of having her decisions made by the grown-ups, who asks, "Teacher, today again do we have to do what we want to do?"

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Would it be a salutary boredom to make these persons do what they want to do with their time, to discover what they want to do with their lives, rather than following widely advertised suggestions? And not for a couple of weeks of vacation—likewise organized into profit-bearing routines—but year after year. Or would the effect be like the unemployed adolescents on the corner who hang around, apparently unable to think up anything?

We are asking, in the framework of this model proposal, an intensely realistic question about the actual situation in our country. For indeed, in our surplus economy, millions really are technically unemployable—there is no necessary work for them to do, no man's work. If automation were allowed its full headway, these millions would become many millions. Because they are really economically unproductive, they have no culture and no resources of leisure, since culture grows from productive life. At the same time, each one of these people, no matter how he hangs around or perhaps spends his time in getting quasi-visceral "kicks" or being "cool," must also feed his face and come in out of the rain. It is this actuality that our scheme of a divided economy addresses and draws in black and white: we provide the subsistence part in an efficient, honorable, and compulsory way; and we leave open the horrendous question: then what?

The moment when large numbers of people first discover clearly and distinctly that they do not know what they want to do with their time, is fraught with danger. Some no doubt will at once follow any demagogic or fanatical leader who happens to come along with a time-consuming and speciously thrilling program. (Street-gangs on a mass scale.) How to protect the commonwealth against these bands of bored prejudice? Others, having lost the thread of compulsory mental activity, will wander in the maze of idle idiocy that we associate with degenerate rural classes, except that the food would be even worse, across the counter in a government store.