moral incentives

[Lisa Rogers <eqwq.lrogers@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The stuff that Peter likes about some anti-market-socialists is
exactly what I _don't_ get about some leftish thought.

I don't get why some people seem to think that effectiveness /
susceptibility to 'material incentives' in human behavior is due
_only_ to 'capitalism' (however you define it.)

I don't know why abolition of 'markets' or whatever is imagined to
disappear all greed and self-interest.  The idea that any society has
ever been composed of people who (mostly at least) were 'selfless' is
unsupportable, and I know of no basis to expect that it will change
in the future.

That's why we have to change material circumstances in order to
change the way that people act, we can't change the world by
appealing only to 'moral incentives', to the greater social good.
Under the present _material/legal/social/state_ system of capitalism,
that does little good.

I've always thought that some claims of how much different people
will be and how they will no longer require any material incentive
for anything to be, dare I say it, utopian.

I can imagine already some of the objections, I've heard some before,
_of course_ I know that personality is socially constructed, etc,
etc.  This is one of the reasons that I'm interested in foraging
societies, which are commonly thought to be some kind of perfectly
harmonious "original communism".  In an apparently very different set
of material/social circumstances, just how differently do people act?

My report to you all is that it is both different AND the same.  Just
like Diaz, Cortez and Pizarro invading C/S/America, those 'alien'
'independent' cultures looked quite familiar.  Foragers do a lot of
things differently, but they are the same people.  What they do makes
a lot of sense within their context, usually in terms of some
self-interest.

This is my non-technical presentation of a kind of rationality that I
see operating in all lifeforms.

So, of course people respond to their circumstances, so we have to
change the circumstances.

One of the reasons that I'm interested in learning more about Cuba is
that they talk about material vs. moral incentives, have tried some
of each, and some people claim various success and other effects from
the uses of each.  This is one of the reasons that _I_ was the first
one ever to bring up the subject of Cuba on this list, since I joined
it in March 1995.

The only reason I haven't yet started chewing on it very seriously is
that my plate is already overflowing.

Lisa


Peter Burns wrote:
Subject: What I like about antiMS types
They have a belief in the moral perfectability of human beings that
would put most Christians I know to shame.
The degree of virtue and responsiveness to moral as against material
incentives which they expect the working class to be capable of after
the revolution is heartwarming.
These folks really do think that practical sanctity is a real
possibility for the majority of humankind.



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