This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work responding to another Ask Prof Wolff
question. This one comes, as many do, from our Patreon community, in particular from 'Vidit.'
Then it asks a question many have asked: what is the place in a future socialist society for
an individual? And the individual that it wants us to think about is the individual who doesn't want,
for all kinds of reasons, to work as part of a group; an individual who wants to be working
as an individual alone. You might call that a self-employed person.
And the first way to answer this question is to be sure we all stay
in the world that it really is and not the one that propaganda recommends to us.
If you, like I, have grown up in a Cold War United States, then you know we have been treated for 70
years with 'capitalism is wonderful, good, it's all about freedom and individuality, and socialism
is the opposite: bad of all of those things.' That was a game to be played in a Cold War.
But it's not serious. Socialism has always been defended by it's most important
champions, its most important writers and leaders, as something designed to improve
the lives of individuals. You don't have to agree with that, but the notion that it's the rejection
of individuality or individual is an absurd hyper-overstatement in the middle of a Cold War,
but not to be taken seriously in any other context, if even in that one.
So the easiest way to answer it is that in a socialist society, one in which everybody is
equally powerful in terms of making decisions - one person, one vote -whether or not there
would be a place for individuals to work alone would be subject to democratic decision making.
And I would expect that respect for people who want to work alone will make it likely, if not
certain, that that will be one of the ways you can participate in an economy and in a society.
The caveat, the qualification I might put is that you will want to establish rules and regulations
for self-employment that do not harm or undermine the collective effort (the people
who want to work together in a community rather than working in an isolated way.)
And, assuming that that can be worked out, which it can be, and which many societies have done,
then there should be no problem for those individuals who want to work alone.
I might remind everyone that in our capitalist system where the typical arrangement
is an employer and employees room has been made for people to work as individuals; store keepers,
craftspersons, we have names for people, individual farmer. And so not everybody
has to work in an employer/employee situation. There are even communes here in the United
States and in most capitalist countries where you have a community, a collective
way of organizing. And that coexists with other capitalist arrangements. And I would
expect there would be periods where there is coexistence of all different kinds of
work arrangements in a socialist society where the main form, or the prevailing form, would be
a worker co-op, a democratic collective community organization of the workplace.
The key thing to keep in mind is that what socialism means is one thing is
no longer acceptable. And that is the capitalist relationship; the relationship in which one person
is an employer, or a small group, and a large group is employees. Where all the decisions about
the workplace are made by the small group, which isn't accountable to the large group, that has
to live with the results of the decisions made by the small group. That's the opposite of democracy.
That's excluding the majority of people from having a direct say on the conditions of their
work and their jobs, and therefore that part of their lives. That's out, and you know that's out
in the same way that in the United States the 13th Amendment of the Constitution says
you can organize a commune, you can organize self-employment, you can organize a capitalist
enterprise, but here's one thing you can't do: nobody can be the slave of somebody else.
Ha, here's a thought then. In a socialist society nobody can be the employee
of somebody else in the typical capitalist way. You can work on your own and you can work as part
of a democratic community, but you can't violate the basic premise of democracy because that's
the commitment of the society as a whole. So I don't expect there'll
be a problem for individuals who wish to work alone. That just has to be worked out.
Alongside coexisting in a way of mutual toleration and acceptance and respect between the individuals
who work alone and those who want to work in a democratic community at the workplace.
If this kind of conversation, if this kind of question and answer strikes you as an important
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