>>> Jim Devine clip
But instead use simpler terms: as Marx pointed out, under wage labor, some sort of reserve army of unemployed is needed to motivate people to work. ^^^ CB: This is from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie. Marx means that the bourgeoisie hold that some unemployment is needed to motivate wage-laborers to work. Marx isn't endorsing isn't putting this forth as a Communist perspective ^^^^^ [We're not talking about white-collar professionals here, but production workers.] The relative ease of getting and keeping a job in the old USSR was an important part of the very-common saying back then that "we pretend to work and they [the government] pretends to pay us." ^^^^^ CB: Actually work was done at a worldhistoric rate in the SU. It industrialized much more rapidly than the advanced capitalist countries had. Then after the capitalists' Nazis destroyed practically all that had been constrcuted through socialist motivation methods, moral success, not hazard and enormous , enormous amounts of work, labor,not pretend labor in the least, they built it all up again through work, work, work. To say that they pretend to work in the SU flies in the face of overwhelming material evidence to the contrary: The gigantic production and accumulation of use-values which was the SU. The facts are completely against the socalled common saying, the commonality of which joke we only have evidence from from lots of anti-Sovieteers walking and talking after the fall of the SU. The benefits of "no poverty, free rent, free health care, free child care, free workers' vacation resorts, free college" were "moral successes," as Charles points out, to the extent that they were realized in practice. ^^^^ CB: It was substantially, though of course not perfectly realized in practice. It was real enough so as to be a historic first aspects of socialism realized. &&&&&&&& The trouble is that it took away the whip of hunger -- or the fear of bankruptcy and spinning into the vicious circle of poverty -- that motivates workers to labor under capitalism (especially at the lower levels of the class system) and under other economic systems where workers lack other reasons to work hard. [At higher levels of the class system, the fear is not that of falling into poverty as much as falling down the hierarchy.] Another thing that undermined the incentive to work was the "they pretend to pay us" clause: the money paid to workers -- often using piece-rates and other incentives of the sort that capitalists also use -- was often worthless, because there were not enough products on the shelf to buy. (That's why there was a lot of hoarding of money under the old USSR at its peak: there wasn't enough to spend it on and prices weren't allowed to inflate.) People also spent much too much time waiting in line trying to get products. As I understand it, this time further subtracted from work-time. Now, people do not always require a reserve army of unemployed workers to scare them to work. If workers are not simply responding to orders passed down from above (from the CEO and his underlings or from the Party-state's GOSPLAN) but actively participate in decision-making in a democratic way, then they are motivated to work, since they are working for themselves. They become more like white-collar professionals and small businesspeople, who do a lot of their work simply because they love their jobs. Of course, there are other substitutes for the reserve army of the unemployed. Having an authoritarian government can scare people into working, while breaking independent (non-company, non-government) unions and undermining labor rights. (Michal Kalecki wrote about this, back in the 1930s.) Under capitalism, this is often combined with the reserve army. When Milton Friedman's favorites took over Chile, they didn't just impose higher unemployment rates. They also tortured and/or killed a lot of people. The old USSR also was quite authoritarian, from what I've heard and read. Another proposed substitute is "moral incentives": people are encouraged to work hard -- or to make other sacrifices -- for the Motherland, the Fatherland, or the Homeland, as the case may be. This typically works at the beginning of a revolution, at least if the revolution is popular, or some other event that stirs the national soul (as it were). (A lot of people in the US were willing to make sacrifices after 911.) If the people don't control the government -- or other organization that invokes such moral incentives -- the ability to use this technique fades over time. --- Jim Devine / "The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too." -- Oscar Levant
