This is Richard Wolff from Democracy At Work responding to another Ask Prof Wolff question
from our Patreon community. This one comes from “It Thing” and asks very interesting questions
about the relationship between an individual and society with particular reference to an imaginary
socialist society where all things are democratic—including
the workplace in the form of worker co-ops and so on as we have been discussing those questions.
It Thing pushes further and wants to know what do we do with the following three examples:
a musician whose music is so beloved that he, she, or they are recipients of a huge amount of
outpouring of gifts, money, and wealth by the people who appreciate the music.
Excuse me. Second example: a carpenter and associates who build a fantastic
mansion at a time and place where there are a lot of folks who don't have much in the way
of housing. And finally, a person who simply doesn't want to work
admits to being selfish but doesn't do it—won’t participate. And It Thing asks me to comment on
all of these and I want to comment on all of them all at once with a basic argument.
We live in a society that has worked very very hard to cultivate—in the transition from the
feudalism that existed before modern capitalism in most parts of the world to the modern capitalism
that dominates the world today—there's been this extraordinary effort to raise
individualism to the reigning philosophy, the dominant ideology, [or] the cult-like
commitment of so many. In other words, the effort has been to move away from thinking about how
societies shape the individuals born and raised into them, to imagine instead that that society
is the product of those individuals who have certain “innate qualities” perhaps inherited,
perhaps somehow ingrained in some almost racial kind of uniqueness, but whatever the case is,
to run the logic from individual to society rather than from society to individual.
So let's take the example of the musician. Well let's see. The society literally
created that musician. It created those moments that that musician was lucky enough to have
where they encountered perhaps as children a mentor, a parent, [or] a relative
who loved them, who attended to them, and who also loved and attended to music—building
a connection that enabled this individual to cultivate and become a great musician. Along
the way there were countless encounters that encouraged and developed these capabilities.
It's not a question of “at this moment how did you acquire the instrument you play
or the particular skill you have?” It's the fact that society produced you from the beginning—when
other people literally produced you to every step since then when you were shaped in your feelings,
your sensibilities, your hopes, your dreams, [and] your aspirations by the encounters
and the social context of those encounters that shaped who you would encounter,
when you would encounter, why you would encounter, and all the rest.
Yeah, of course there will be taxes and of course there will be welfare,
not in the ways that capitalism did those things; they were done then to support capitalism
in a new democratic worker co-op based society. Taxes and welfare will be used for other purposes,
to support a socialism and therefore to be very very different.
But the best way I think I can conclude this commentary is to go back to Ancient Greece
to Plato and Aristotle. They wrote about markets. That's right, back then there were experiments in
market relationships. And both Plato and Aristotle didn't like markets. [They] were very critical
and for the same basic reason that refers to your question.
The reason was that markets in their view destroy social cohesion. They undermine community. They
make every relationship among people a question of “how little can I give up for how much can I
get in return?” And that makes everybody else an instrument and that makes the relationships
amongst us very transactional, very self-serving, and therefore very limited,
very disappointing, and producing a deeply lonely population. That criticism still applies.
The reason you tax and have welfare is to hold your community together to make it a community of
happy, healthy, [and] satisfied people at least up to a basic shared foundation. And that's because
you want every individual to be able to find and cultivate his, her, [or] their particular loves,
passions, and skills, and you need that kind of society to give them that chance. Don't get
caught up in the so-called conflict between the individual and the society. Face the fact—and
that's what I think it is—that the society shapes the individual who reacts back
to change the society that made him, her, [or] they what they are. And that back and forth
is what we need to cherish and value and not allow either the kind of extreme individualism of the
dominant ideology today or the loss of respect for the individual that can happen on the other side.
This is Richard Wolff hoping that this commentary was of interest and asking as always that you
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