Thursday, December 9, 2021

Disposable time as a common-pool resource IX -- Disposable time as a model for environmental governance

Not only could disposable time be regarded as a common-pool resource similar to other common-pool resources, but it could stand as the single most far-reaching and democratically vital model of a common-pool resource. Donald Stabile alluded to something in this vein when he noted that, "Human labor is also the primary constituent of the society whose values must be part of any criterion of social evaluation. The appropriate starting point in any policy directed at social costs is with those imposed on labor."

In "Accountants and the Price System: the Problem of Social Costs," Stabile focused on the perspective introduced by John Maurice Clark in his Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs. Clark argued that labor should be considered as an overhead cost of doing business rather than as a variable cost of the employing firm because the cost of maintaining the worker and his or her family in good stead has to be borne by someone, whether or not that worker is employed. "If all industry were integrated and owned by workers…," Clark explained, "it would be clear to worker-owners that the real cost of labor could not be materially reduced by unemployment."

Commenting on the efforts by some accountants during the 1970s to change the way social costs were accounted for on the corporate account books, Stabile concluded that those accountants had not developed useful concepts for examining social costs. To explain why they had failed, Stabile relied on the perspective on social costs set forth by Clark and by K. William Kapp in which analysis of the social costs of labor is central to a process of social evaluation. Such an outlook was missing from the works of social cost accountants, "Market values are a weak thread from which to hang a whole system of value," Stabile argued, "but accountants cling to it doggedly. Without an alteration of this basic tenet of accounting, social cost accounting cannot develop into a criterion of social value." 

Returning to Clark's example of the hypothetical state where all industry is integrated and owned by workers, there is an instance of a non-market process of social evaluation whose results can be worked out with little hesitation, unemployment would be regarded as sheer waste rather than as an unfortunate but necessary measure for accumulating surplus value. Social accounting for unemployment would come to a very different assessment of economic "efficiency" than would a narrowly financial one from capital's perspective.

Simply regarding disposable time as a common-pool resource would not automatically result in managing work as a commons. It is instead an important preliminary step that offers a rich conceptual framework for guiding the development of concrete policy proposals, research agendas, strategies and experiments. Such strategies and proposals can borrow from and combine experience in the governance of resources such as fisheries, forests and watersheds alongside lessons from trade union movements of the past and present and from feminist struggles for recognition and valuing of caregiving work.

Innovations that result from synthesizing such diverse experiences may seem disturbingly unfamiliar from the traditional perspective of viewing labour as a commodity. That is why it is important to not only foster an understanding of disposable time as a common-pool resource but in the process to not lose sight of what the traditional perspective entails and what is the relationship between the two views. In some of the most visionary lines of the Grundrisse, Marx rhapsodized about a future beyond the social contradictions of capital in which wealth is measured by the quantity of alienated labour time that capital is able to accumulate. In contrast to grim scenario, Marx briefly outlined a society in which disposable time become the measure of wealth:

For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual's entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour.

The degradation of individual to "mere worker" has its counterpart in the degradation of the earth to "mere resources," to be extracted, refined, and manufactured as quickly and extensively as possible into commodities. Conceiving of disposable time as a common-pool resource establishes a framework for understanding and resisting both forms of degradations.


8 comments:

Anonymous said...

The degradation of individual to "mere worker" has its counterpart in the degradation of the earth to "mere resources," to be extracted, refined, and manufactured as quickly and extensively as possible into commodities. Conceiving of disposable time as a common-pool resource establishes a framework for understanding and resisting both forms of degradations.

[ Perfect; simply perfect. ]

Anonymous said...

Simply regarding disposable time as a common-pool resource would not automatically result in managing work as a commons. It is instead an important preliminary step that offers a rich conceptual framework for guiding the development of concrete policy proposals, research agendas, strategies and experiments. Such strategies and proposals can borrow from and combine experience in the governance of resources such as fisheries, forests and watersheds alongside lessons from trade union movements of the past and present and from feminist struggles for recognition and valuing of caregiving work....

[ This is wonderful, and just what Chinese development strategy is about. I am even more impressed by these segments. Wonderful work. ]

Anonymous said...

The degradation of individual to "mere worker" has its counterpart in the degradation of the earth to "mere resources," to be extracted, refined, and manufactured as quickly and extensively as possible into commodities. Conceiving of disposable time as a common-pool resource establishes a framework for understanding and resisting both forms of degradations.

[ This is precisely what has been and will continue to be the progression in China. The Chinese poverty program, for instance, worked because though there was central funding programs were community based and individuals were distinctly valued.

This essay series is simply exceptional, exceptional.

You are a gem. ]

Sandwichman said...

Thank you for your appreciate, anne!

kevin quinn said...

Tom: this just by-the-way, but I am happy to see Don Stabile's name. Don is a wonderful person and a fine scholar. I met him in my first full-time teaching job-I was still ABD-as an instructor at St.Mary's College of Maryland. Don was on the faculty--this was 1982--and still is. I had to commute two hours each way from Takoma Park in the suburbs of DC to St Mary's City, a tiny town situated at the confluence of the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay. Don offered to let me stay with him overnight between Monday and Wednesday, so that I would only need to commute once a week. He lived in a trailer on the edge of a cornfield. My first night I slept fitfully. I heard periodically what sounded like snapping noises. When the sun came up, I saw the cause: mouse-traps scattered around with their prey had been triggered in the night. After that, I,..um, made other arrangements--(-;

It was a tough job. The economics staff was just Don and one other TTF and myself, so I think I taught every course in the standard economics major over the two years I spent there. Don was incredibly helpful, and his work is really unique.

kevin quinn said...

Oh I skipped a detail: I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor, not too far from the traps!

Sandwichman said...

Great story, Kevin! Maybe you were the bait? The mice came out to see who this person was who was sleeping on the floor and... -snap!-

kevin quinn said...

I don't want to detract from your interesting and erudite thread, but I can't resist sharing a story from that first semester of teaching. Economics was just a part of a larger department of business or something, and I was hired because one of the faculty members, who taught management, had been elevated to Dean. Much to my surprise, I was assigned to teach Management, his course, in my first semester, along with several econ courses. I looked at the text he had been using and despaired. It was just awful: I couldn't stomach teaching mundanities and banalities dressed up as knowledge--theory x and y which were not theories at all--so I ordered a managerial economics text. Now the course had a well-earned reputation for being an easy way to satisfy upper-level distribution requirements--it was "discussion" and multiple choice exams. Most of the school's athletes seemed to be enrolled. And here I was, asking them to do problem sets and think: they revolted. Some went to the Dean to complain. How could I defend myself? -- your course was BS? The darkest day of my teaching career was the day I taught this course and then went to the lavatory in the building: written on the wall in black I saw "QUINN IS A DICK"!! But Reader, I persevered!