RE: [ox-en] Selbstentfaltung and garbage collection
- From: "Kermit Snelson" <ksnelson subjectivity.com>
- Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2002 14:43:28 -0800
Stefan Merten:
People can enjoy the craziest things - why not coal-mining?
To some extent, that's true. Some children actually do want to collect
garbage for a living when they grow up. They like the big trucks, I guess.
Then there's the story about the guy who loved his job on the roadkill
removal crew [überfahrene Tiere von der Straße klauben] because the side
benefit was "all you can eat!" :)
On a more serious note, one very good reason not to enjoy coal-mining is
black lung [Anthrakose, Kohlenstaublunge]. But I've been reading your posts
carefully, and realize that you will probably answer by arguing that a
society based on Selbstentfaltung will develop technology that makes
dangerous jobs safe and humane, automates them, or eliminates their economic
necessity altogether. Of course, it would take an expert in the field to
verify whether specific assertions like this are tenable.
But more broadly, I now realize that your claim is that Selbstentfaltung is
the source of what Machiavelli might have called "constituent power", namely
a faculty natural to human beings that, if unrestricted, suffices to create
a productive and happy society without resorting to force. It therefore
falls within that large category of what could be called natural law
theories, which the famous jurist Hans Kelsen identified as favoring a
non-coercive, anarchic social order.
Of course, not all natural law theories agree on which human tendency
creates this "constituent power." Adam Smith's "invisible hand" theory says
it's selfishness that does the trick. Antonio Negri in _Empire_ (2000)
proposes that creativity, making and production (he uses the Latin word
"posse" to name this faculty) can, if completely unrestricted, suffice to
create a just society. (This idea is an uncredited borrowing from Georges
Sorel's 1908 syndicalist classic "Reflections on Violence", which calls it
the "ethics of the producers.")
Common to all natural law theories, however, is a heavy preference for
culture over positive law (which Kelsen identifies as a coercive order
identical with the state) as the preferred way to organize a society.
Perhaps the only example of a modern, large economy still based primarily on
such cultural norms is Japan, which has never completely digested its
Meiji-era reception of French and German legal forms. Instead, the society
still very much relies on the traditional (but fading) concepts "giri" and
"ninjo", which translate roughly as "sense of obligation" and "being
humane". It's interesting that the Japanese scholar Sakurai has, following
Durkheim's students Marcel Mauss and Georges Davy, drawn parallels between
giri-ninjo and potlatch culture. The idea of a potlatch or "gift culture"
has come up several times, of course, in theorizing about a possible GPL
society.
In this context, it seems to me that the idea of Selbstentfaltung relies
rather more on the concept of the individual (i.e., the "Selbst" in
Selbstentfaltung) than do many related communitarian theories of natural
law, especially the Japanese. In any case, I believe that placing the
Oekonux "Selbstentfaltung" thesis in the historic and intellectual context
of legal theory might prove more helpful in exploring such questions than
arguing over the meaning of words like "exchange" or "trade". It may also
help us understand that communitarian natural law theories (like Negri's)
and individualist natural law theories (like Adam Smith's) are closely
related, and therefore to understand why doctrinal quarrels such as those
between Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman are arising within the GPL
movement.
Kermit Snelson
_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/