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JOHANNES BERGER
Fakultdt fur Soziologie, Universitit Bielefeld
Whereas it was shown that crises neither uniquely determine the course
of development ("final breakdown") nor shape the consciousness of the
working class, and whereas the idea of the proletariat as agent of fun-
damental change became completely implausible, socialism still re-
mained an aim worth fighting for. What makes van der Veen and Van
Parijs's article so stimulating is the resoluteness with which they question
whether socialism is desirable. Of course, the critique of socialism as an
economic order is nearly as old as socialism itself. This critique tried to
show that socialism is not only unworkable but also undesirable: the
"road to serfdom."' What is really new in van der Veen and Van
Parijs's article, however, is that they regard socialism as a totally super-
fluous stage in the evolution of humankind and regardcommunism as the
telos of history. Instead of "socialism" the authors propose an incon-
spicuous change in social policy: to reach a communist society, it is suffi-
cient to introduce an unconditional guaranteed income for everybody.
Such a proposal is not entirely new. As the authors realize, it can be
traced back to Fourier. It also plays a major role in recent discussions
within the Green movement about the reform of social policy. But new
is to treat the universal grant as a lever for the transition from capitalism
vious enough from the point of view of the working class: access to the
means of living is dependent on finding a profit-maximizing employer
interested in one's labor power. Insofar as the capitalist employment rela-
tion is seen as the main obstacle to self-realization of workers, the overall
improvement of the working class will depend on overcoming that rela-
tion. There exist altogether four alternatives for dealing with the central
problems of the employment relation:
To distribute the net product more according to basic needs and less ac-
cording to labor contributions would shift what Habermas calls the
"system/lifeworld-border" outwards, by increasing free time at the ex-
pense of working time. Also, one could expect a universal grant to lead
to an improvement of work (because it makes low-paid work less attrac-
tive) and to a more uniform distribution of a smaller demand for labor
(because full-time employment would no longer be required for subsis-
tence). But at the same time this strategy aims at releasing the labor mar-
ket from obstructing prescriptions, thus allowing firms to select the la-
bor force according to strict performance principles. One should be
honest enough to make this point clear.
To fully judge the policy measure the authors propose as a means to the
ends of communist society, one could start with detailed questions:
Which kinds of public expenditures are replaced by the universal grant?
What kind of taxation does it require? Though the devil usually is "in
nuts and bolts" I leave a discussion of these questions aside. I will focus
on three major points:
First, the main problem is not whether the tax rate should correspond
to a Rawlsian or a Marxian criterion, but whether there is a tax rate that
Second, can one really say that a society is the more communist, the
more its net product is distributed according to needs? I think that the
two components of the communist distribution principle - covering ba-
sic needs and complete independence of individual income from labor
contribution - become contradictory beyond a certain point. Van der
Veen and Van Parijs concede this by stating that "there is, clearly, a
trade-off between the freedom to satisfy one's needs and freedom from
drudgery." A communist society is not only one in which income and
labor contributions are completely decoupled; it involves not only libera-
tion from coercion of the labor market, but the chance to participate in
both parts of the economy, the informal and the formal one, in order
to satisfy one's needs above a basic level. If the decision to participate
in acquisitive activities is not forced by need, one cannot call it anticom-
munist - at least van der Veen and Van Parijs cannnot.
Certainly one problem remains if the economy grows: the possible de-
struction of the natural environment. As freedom from drudgery be-
longs to a better society, so does a definite improvement of ecology and
economy. The expansion of the latter must not be paid for by the de-
struction of the former. If a monetary economy is not incompatible with
communism, it becomes difficult to ascertain how much such an econo-
my can grow before it becomes incompatible with a healthy environ-
ment. But as long as growth does not impair the ecology, why should the
transition to communism exclude further growth? Moreover, a universal
grant alone is clearly insufficient to protect the natural environment. Un-
der ecological hardship a transition to communism requires more than
this simple policy.
Third, van der Veen and Van Parijs focus on the question of how the
economy will evolve once a universal grant has been adopted. They avoid
the question of how the universal grant will be introduced in the first
place. At the end of their article they say "human rationality" will bring
this change about, because material conditions make it feasible. I con-
sider this a weak argument. After saying "good-bye to the proletariat"
one should not rely on any kind of evolutionary mechanism. Whether
there will be a universal grant depends less on human rationality than
on the rational pursuit of interests. Will enough people want it? The in-
terest in a universal grant will change with its level. Quite different coali-
tions of classes will be interested, depending on whether it fosters or im-
pairs growth. So, much as I sympathize with the universal grant, I must
judge its probability as being pretty low.
Notes
1. Cf. L. von Mises, Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen uber den Sozialismus (Jena,
1932), and F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, 1944).
2. Von Mises, Gemeinwirtschaft, 209.
3. Von Mises, Gemeinswirtschaft, 132.