Know Your Enemy, Part V: Dworkin’s Bourgeois Social Democracy
By David Jarrett
In the next installment of “Know Your Enemy,” David Jarrett looks at the bourgeois social democracy of Ronald Dworkin, challenging his thought experiment of sharing out resources on a desert island with a communist approach.
A principle many communists hold is that the benefits and burdens of social production should be divided somewhat equally among citizens. Interestingly, this is also a principle espoused by Ronald Dworkin—one of the most influential bourgeois social democratic philosophers of the last century and former Head of Jurisprudence at Oxford University. Dworkin starts from the premise that for a government or sovereign to be legitimate, it must treat citizens with equal concern. Then, via deductive reasoning, he arrives at the conclusion that for a government to treat citizens with equal concern means promoting equality of resources. For Dworkin, the bundle of resources to be counted when measuring equality includes the work a person does. So, if A and B have the same amount of stuff over a lifetime, but A did more work than B to get the stuff, then A was worse off than B in terms of resources. If A had less than B but did correspondingly less work, then A and B were equal in resources.
The principle is arguably somewhat problematic, but we set those problems aside in this article. Instead, we note that many communists would justifiably see the equality of resources principle as underpinning a possible communist vision. For example, Albert and Hahnel’s participatory economics and Cockshott and Cottrell’s Towards a New Socialism are different visions for planned economies that are somewhat compatible with the principle. Under Albert and Hahnel’s participatory economics, wages correspond to effort ratings from workmates; thus, income should ideally correspond to effort under their system. Therefore, the benefits and burdens of social production should be equal. Cockshott and Cottrell have argued for income corresponding to hours worked, with more arduous jobs potentially receiving higher pay, which amounts to a similar scheme.
It is interesting, therefore, that Dworkin’s vision looks nothing like what communists would favour. Dworkin favours maintaining existing property concentrations but wants to see a bigger welfare state. What explains this difference? This is an interesting question for communists to consider because, if many people who support bourgeois social democracy have a line of thinking that is anything like Dworkin’s, then understanding how they come to their conclusions could be useful if we want to influence them to change their minds.
Dworkin gets from the equality of resources principle to advocacy for bourgeois social democracy via deductive reasoning using a series of thought experiments. To understand what equality of resources looks like, Dworkin asks us to start by imagining that a large number of shipwrecked survivors end up on a desert island, with no foreseeable chance of rescue. These islanders all hold to Dworkin’s equality of resources principle. They also believe—in fact, simply assume—that all resources on the island should be divided equally among them as private property. They achieve this division via an auction, where they somehow find and agree on a worthless currency and auction off all resources on the island. The auction only ends once the “envy test” is met, meaning that nobody would prefer somebody else’s final bundle. Otherwise, the auction has to restart until the envy test is met. The completion of the auction establishes initial equality of resources.
Next, an additional step is needed to maintain equality of resources over time. A problem Dworkin highlights is that brute luck in the form of innate talents will impact incomes. This is a problem for Dworkin because the equality of resources principle requires that income be solely impacted by the effort one puts into labouring. If people with more talent earn more than others due to higher ability, this is unfair according to the equality of resources ethic. Again, using deductive reasoning and thought experiments, Dworkin concludes that progressive taxation would be a suitable solution, although he acknowledges that this would not fully address the problem and that brute luck will still play a role in incomes.
The main problem with Dworkin’s vision from a communist perspective is that his islanders simply assume that private property is the best way to establish initial control over resources. Dworkin (2000: 67) specifically says of his islanders that: “They do not yet realize, let us say, that it might be wise to keep some resources as owned in common by any state they might create.” So we see that Dworkin does not give an explanation for enacting his equality of resources principle with a private property system—he just arbitrarily stipulates it. Despite being an extraordinary philosopher, he cannot escape the bourgeois assumption that private property should be at the foundation of society.
This assumption leads Dworkin into all sorts of problems. His auction proposal is entirely impractical for both the imaginary island and the real world. The main problems for the island auction are (1) how islanders divide all resources on the island into saleable lots, (2) that the auction is potentially never-ending, as it requires that the envy test be met before it is completed, and (3) that Dworkin makes no points about how resources can justly be used until the full auction process is complete, which could take a very long time, if it ends at all. Furthermore, such an auction is unthinkable in the real world. Thus, when discussing enacting his principles in the real world, Dworkin does not mention the auction or even reallocating initial property titles. He just suggests enacting welfare measures while implicitly accepting that existing concentrations of property remain as they are.
A communist approach to resources would be more feasible on Dworkin’s imaginary island and in the real world. Put crudely, for communists, the world should be held in common, and people should have reasonable possession, occupancy, and use rights over their equal share of the world’s resources, while always recognizing that they should be accountable to others for their resource use. This accountability is to ensure that people do not use more than their equal share or take sole possession of resources that could be more reasonably managed collectively.
On an island, this would entail three steps. First, in the absence of any social agreements over resource use, islanders would have the right to use resources in a way that excludes others from resource use as little as possible. For example, islanders would have the right to drink water from a lake but not claim private ownership of the whole lake. Second, they would have a duty, as soon as possible, to set up processes with other islanders to make themselves accountable to each other for their resource use. Put briefly, an ideal accountability process would be a bottom-up commune of communes, whereby people are accountable primarily to their closest neighbours in their local commune for their resource use, and then each local commune is accountable to other communes. Third, to ensure that income corresponds to effort over time, the islanders should then enact Albert and Hahnel’s, Cockshott and Cottrell’s, or some other vision based on income for effort.
In terms of real-world applicability, evidence from historical revolutionary situations (e.g., Paris 1871, Russia in 1917) suggests that setting up something like a bottom-up commune of communes is not technically infeasible. It is not implausible that such communes could be set up in the future and that, through such communes, people could first ensure that nobody is claiming ownership of an unreasonable share of resources and, second, enact schemes that seek to equalise the benefits and burdens of social production. Thus, while Dworkin’s bourgeois social democratic approach cannot help us put the equality of resources principle into practice, a communist approach can. Those who hold to the principle should act accordingly.
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