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[ox-en] Re: Weighting labor



Hi Stefan, hi list,

Stefan Merten wrote:
what do you do if demand for unpopular, repetetive, boring tasks (like
cleaning or most of the typical manufacturing tasks) exceeds supply of
people willing to do the task on a reliable, lasting basis? dropping all
"excessive" projects until demand meets supply for the specific task
doesnt seem like a reasonable solution.
they are "weighted higher", i.e. if you decide to perform an unpopular task,
you have to do less of it than when you perform a popular task.
Read the book.

This is indeed one point in the book which I simply do not understand:
In which way this is any different from a simply labor market? You are
paid higher wages for tasks for which there are less people available.

The most important difference is, of course, that there is no *market*. On
the labor market, you need to find a buyer for your labor capacity. You than
have to utilize your labor capacity as the buyer (who is usually a
capitalist) seems fit -- which, among other things, means that you have to
work longer than you would have to work if you were simple working for
yourself. By doing so you produce _surplus value_, which is of course the
reason why the capitalist hired you in the first place, and which is the
very basis of the capitalist economy, as you well know.

But in the peerconomy, there is no labor market and no buying and selling of
labor capacity -- instead, people simply _divide up_ among themselves the
work that they want to have done. Therefore, there is no surplus -- you
merely have to do your share of the work, but no more; and there is nobody
who is a privileged position due to his/her being able to buy other people's
labor capacity.

However, the labor market is true to reality in that not everyone is
able to do any job and so the supply side is part of the weight. But I
see no way to prevent that in a system based on abstract labor like
you are proposing.

Well, in the case that there is high social demand for people with a special
talent and there are fewer people with this special talent than necessary to
satisfy all demand, that's indeed what happens, and that's the intended
effect. But I think this case is rare -- usually many people can learn and
acquire skills, and whenever there is high demand (and therefore high
weighting) for a certain skill, more people will start to learn it until
this temporary effect has leveled out.

Whenever something is regulated by supply and demand, the interesting
question is, of course: where to they tend to reach balance? Which function
controls where supply and demand tend to meet?

In capitalism, as Marx tells us, the decisive factor is the _complexity of
labor_ -- the more complex some task is, the more is pays (while all simple
labor is paid roughly the same). That's probably due to the fact that
workers have to invest time and money in order to get the specialized
education necessary to do such complex work.

But for the peerconomy, I assume that education and training are usually
free (which means not only that you don't have to pay/contribute anything in
order to learn something, but also that society cares for your needs while
you're a learner), and therefore (provided that's indeed the case), I don't
think that the complexity of a task will have a high influence on its weight.

On the other hand, the _pleasantness_ of a task (more exactly, its
_popularity_: do or don't people like to do it?) will probably play a large
role. In capitalism, it doesn't, since people _have_ to sell their labor
capacity, and therefore can't be choosy -- if you refuse an unpleasant job,
there are usually sufficent other candidates willing to take over. That's
different in the peerconomy, where tasks are merely divided up: if many
people want to do a popular task, and nobody another unpopular one, they
have to find a solution (in order to actually divide all tasks up). The
solution, according to my proposal, is that those who switched over to the
unpopular task, need to do less, while those who stick with the popular one
have to do more (in order to make up for it -- the overall work to divide
up, remains, after all, the same).

This difference -- task pleasantness/popularity matters, while it doesn't in
capitalism --also means that labor in the peerconomy is not quite as
"abstract" as in capitalism. In capitalism, there is a double abstraction:
(1) abstraction from the results of the work (what is is that is produced?)
and (2) abstraction from the process of the work (what is is that workers
are doing -- do or don't do they like it?). In the weighted labor model,
abstraction (1) is also present, but abstraction (2) isn't. Therefore, we
could maybe talk about "semi-abstract labor" when discussing this model.

CU
	Christian

-- 
|-------- Dr. Christian Siefkes --------- christian siefkes.net ---------
|   Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/   |   Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
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