If you learn one thing as you go through this short time we call life, it is that people do not think. Situations, conversations, ideas go into our heads and some piece of the mind connects with another piece and instead of thinking about the topic it pulls the answer out immediately. If we wait we come back with the same answer, only now we think we thought about it. Have you ever wondered why you dream such nonsense or why certain things will create some feeling of dread or happiness or whatever? It is because much of what we are is simply our mind's evolutionary process at work. But maybe, sometimes, we can take those synapses and move them around so that next time something different comes out. Possible?
Anyway that is my intro to an interesting interview in the 'Boston Review.' Quote below for my wingnut friends who often tell me how much they appreciate my quotes and book links.
"Most interactions with people that you trust, people that you love, or people that just need to cooperate with on an immediate basis, take the form of “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” It doesn’t matter if you’re working for the government, working for a corporation, or working in your family; if you need to fix the toilet because it’s leaking and you say “Hand me the wrench,” the other guy doesn’t say “What do I get for that?” It’s not an exchange; people act according to their abilities to chip in. Ironically communism is applied because it’s the only thing that works; it’s the most efficient way to allocate resources.
Thus I like to say that you could argue that capitalism is just a bad way of organizing communism." David Graeber
Boston Review — David V. Johnson: What We Owe to Each Other (David Graeber, Debt)
The guy's analysis of his own pass me the wrench analogy is overly simplistic and, unfortunately, incorrect. There are actually several exchanges of equity taking place simultaneously. First, on a literal level, the other guy in your family is exchanging his assistance (handing you the wrench) for the benefit of being able to share in a working toilet. If he responded to your request with, "No, get it yourself", there's a good chance that you'd be inclined to give him the finger and tell him to find another place to p*ss and sh*t.
There's probably several opponents to this line of thought who are currently thinking that the exchange is still communism in that, if you're the only one who can fix the toilet and are thus undertaking a greater portion of the work but receiving the same communal reward (being able to share in a working toilet), then you're still participating in a "from each according to his abilities to each according to his need" situation. If only the material equity is taken into account, this seems to be the case. However, the reason that such a seemingly imbalanced exchange is occurring isn't necessarily due to any genetic predisposition to universal altruism and self sacrifice. In this case, the two people in the analogy are family. i.e. They care about each other. If it was the toilet of some random person unknown to the repair-man, it's highly debatable whether or not he'd wish to fix that toilet for the low cost of "pass me the wrench".
The deeper exchange of equity taking place might be harder for some of you to relate to, and I'll preface by saying that I'm sure many will consider comparing emotional exchange to material exchange a cheapening of the concept of love. I don't, however, subscribe to the philosophy that there's anything inherently evil or contemptible about the concept of voluntary trade, and so I'll go on. In the case of people who care about each other, the equity in trade is, in a word, joy. Emotional positivity. The people that you love bring joy into your life, and in exchange for that joy you show them gestures of love. Again, many of you will probably reject this concept instinctively, but a desire not to see love described in these terms does not change the fact that these exchanges occur. When your brother passes you the wrench and does what little he can to contribute to the greater cause of fixing the sh*tter, you have no qualms about the obvious difference in the size of your contribution because of the emotional positivity he brings to your life.
Another invisible currency that must be taken into account is moral equity (which is still basically a type of emotional equity). Let's say you can't stand the family member passing you the wrench, but you allow him to live in your house, say, out of a sense of duty. As a matter of principal, you allow this person, who overall brings to your life emotional negativity, to live in your house and share in this toilet you're about to fix because your personal code of ethics doesn't condone abandoning a family member. The exchange taking place here is you giving access to your home, complete with a working toilet that's mostly your doing, in return for the maintenance of the integrity of your principals. The cost, if you were to leave him having to p*ss and sh*t in the corner of his living space, would be the compromise of those principals and the emotional negativity that accompanies compromising your beliefs. Not to mention the obvious inconveniences perpetuated by a situation devoid of a suitable dumping space.
Next we come to social currency. Suppose you don't like this family member passing the wrench and your personal principals, for whatever reason, don't exclude the possibility of leaving him toiletless, yet you grudgingly put in the majority of the work for the same benefit of a working toilet. When you don't demand physical payment then and there you, in all likelihood, avoid social fallout in the form of mutual family, friends, and acquaintances thinking less of you and perhaps confronting you for callous treatment of a family member. For a lot of you (us), the next time something communal (bathroom, kitchen, common area furniture) needed to be fixed that he -was- capable of fixing, you'd probably want him to fix it because you did the toilet, and if he disagreed with having to fix it, you'd probably use the fact that you fixed the toilet as leverage (leverage=means=currency) to get him to do it anyway. Many people probably choose not to exercise social equity in this manner, as it is common via current mainstream philosophy to consider it petty to "tit for tat" someone, even if you don't care about them (see moral equity, one paragraph up). This doesn't negate the leverage's existence.
The broader point the author of that quote was trying to make is that people often voluntarily undertake a greater portion of random, day to day tasks due to a greater capacity to accomplish, even though their material rewards aren't necessarily any greater than others benefiting from the task but putting in less, and that this proves that communism is simply the natural order of things. Clearly there are other facets at play that he chooses to ignore, and thus his argument is far from definitive.
