this is a response to a member of our
patreon community del Seibel my
apologies if I've got the pronunciation
wrong I'm happy to answer this question
from Dell because it's important and I'm
quite sure that many of you will be
interested here's the question
in the socialist economy based on worker
coops it is reasonable to assume that
some worker coops will be more
successful than others for reasons of
skill access to resources good luck
any number of reasons and so the
question that bothers Dell and rightly
so is would that mean that some worker
coops reward their members generously
with high incomes and others with low
incomes
presumably in a socialist economy this
is a problem and that's of course one of
the reasons why our socialist economy
attracts people because it's a problem
for them and so Dell wonders how do you
deal with this if you don't want
inequality to either diminish or
undermine a socialist economy so besides
saying to Dell good question good
thinking let me try to respond the first
thing is to understand that throughout
human history long before there was
capitalism or socialism human beings
worried about these kinds of questions
human beings understood and by the way
how do we know this Aristotle and Plato
five thousand years ago in ancient
Greece talked about it and we have the
record so we long but in many other
societies there are likewise evidences
that extreme differences in wealth and
income are often not even extreme by
modern standards but modest differences
were thought to and these are the words
of Plato
Aristotle threatened social cohesion no
way to say that is undermine community
undermine the glue that holds people
together in town and village and in
society as a whole and therefore had to
be dealt with and there were ingenious
methods the one I like to remind people
of is the idea of Jubilee that has many
forms and existed in many cultures where
every few years sometimes as short
periods is every five years sometimes as
long as every 50 years that would be a
reshuffling of everybody's resources so
that nobody could become rich for all
that long before the resources the land
the tools the animals were reshuffled
and the rich became not so rich and the
not so rich became rich etc etc to make
it less of a hardening of differences
especially across the decades or across
the generations so there's nothing new
here but it doesn't mean it isn't an
urgent problem my answer would be the
following in a socialist society one of
the ways you deal with inequality is you
change from private consumption to
collective consumption what do I mean
instead of everybody having a private
park or going for a picnic to a private
park which can charge money and thereby
exclude people you have what indeed many
American cities and towns have a public
park or maybe a dozen where people can
go no matter how much income they have
or don't have no matter how much wealth
they own or don't and can have a picnic
with their children and their friends
and their pets whenever they want to
it's a way of collectively consuming a
meadow a parkland well now suppose as
socialists have always been interested
in you use the same principle for a
whole host of other
kinds of consumption housing is provided
as a collective good you draw lots or
straws for which apartment you get you
can appeal and you can try again and get
a different apartment you will get an
apartment according to how many children
you have or how many rooms you need or
what you need an apartment for which can
change etc and suppose transportation
were provided as a public good
Kansas City recently decided to charge
nothing for all of their public
transportation
it becomes thereby a collectively
consumed good not a privately consumed
good transportation health care housing
and how about this which exists in a
number of countries leisure vacation
resorts that everybody has access to on
a schedule that you can choose etc etc
all kinds of things can be done that way
and that means there's less left for the
unpleasantness let's call it of people
having different capacities to pay for
them
second you can reward people not just
with money when they work hard but with
leisure it's something we ought to have
done long ago you become more productive
you and your co-workers in your
enterprise ok your workday is reduced by
an hour or a half hour or an hour and a
half or a day of the week you are
rewarded in a personal way but not with
money with time and as you get older you
understand that it's the time that is
the more valuable here's another way you
pay people extra for their extra success
whatever its causes but you don't pay
them in the conventional way by putting
more cash
into their personal envelope no you put
more cash into the collective envelope
of that workplace and it is put together
with other people who have this kind of
an extra because they're extra skilled
or they work harder or they've been
lucky or whatever the usual combination
is it goes into a fund for the benefit
of the community but it's a fund that
will have a little plaque on it saying
this playground this swimming pond
this local amenity was provided by the
skilled extra work of these workers in
this enterprise in this coop in other
words yeah you're rewarded but your
reward is linked to you personally yes
but also to you as a benefactor of the
larger community you know in capitalism
we let very rich people decide whether
or not they want to give a benefit to
the community and then we put their name
all over it don't we this is a socialist
alternative its collective its social
it's much more generically organized
little with less left to the voluntary
decision of the rich individual and more
something we collectively impose on
ourselves there are other ways but have
no fear in a socialist economy that is
conscious and committed to not allowing
extremes of unequal wealth to develop
they have many many weapons and I
haven't even gone into redistributive
divisions of property different kinds of
tax systems different kinds of public
spending those two are available and in
a socialist society built on and
committed to values of collective
solidarity it should be much easy
that it has been in capitalism to get
the commitments of hard-working people
to share and to live in a community that
shares and that takes care of one
another so I'm hopeful that these kinds
of problems that you quite rightly raise
will find their solutions in a way
that's consistent with socialist values
thank you for your question and of
course as usual our thanks to the entire
supportive patreon community