[번역] 자코뱅 기사 "적과 흑 The Red and the Black" ②

이전 글

[번역] 자코뱅 기사 "적과 흑 The Red and the Black" ①

"The Red and the Black" by Seth Ackerman, <Jacobin> 

"적과 흑", 세스 애커만 

---

Radicals responded to the end of “really existing socialism” mainly in two ways. Most stopped talking about a world after capitalism at all, retreating to a modest politics of piecemeal reform, or localism, or personal growth.

급진주의자들은 "현실사회주의"의 종말에 크게 두 가지 방식으로 반응했다. 대다수는 자본주의를 넘어선 사회에 대한 상상 자체를 멈추고, 단편적 개혁, 또는 지역주의적 편향, 또는 자기계발의 온건한 정치로 물러섰다.

The other response was exactly the opposite — an escape forward into the purest and most uncompromising visions of social reconstruction. In certain radical circles, this impulse has lately heightened the appeal of a leap toward a world with no states or markets, and thus no money, wages, or prices: a system in which goods would be freely produced and freely taken, where the economy would be governed entirely by the maxim “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

다른 반응은 정반대로 가장 순수하고도 비타협적인 사회 재건의 전망에 투신하는 방식으로 나타났다. 일부 급진적 운동권 사이에선 국가와 시장이 사라진, 따라서 화폐도, 임금도, 가격도 존재하지 않는 세계에 대한 환상이 자리잡았다. 이들이 그리는 세상은 모든 재화가 자유롭게 생산되고 자유롭게 소비되는, 따라서 말그대로 "각자는 능력에 따라, 각자에게는 필요에 따라"의 격언이 현실화된 체제다.

Whenever such ideas are considered, debate seems to focus immediately on big philosophical questions about human nature. Skeptics scoff that people are too selfish for such a system to work. Optimists argue that humans are a naturally cooperative species. Evidence is adduced for both sides of the argument. But it’s best to leave that debate to the side. It’s safe to assume that humans display a mixture of cooperation and selfishness, in proportions that change according to circumstances.

이런 이야기가 나올 때마다 논쟁은 대부분 인간 본성에 대한 거창한 철학적 사변으로 빠져든다. 회의주의자들은 그런 체제가 작동하기에 인간은 너무 이기적이라며 비웃는다. 낙관주의자들은 인간이 본래적으로 협동-지향적인 종(種)이라고 주장한다. 각자의 입장을 뒷받침하는 논거들이 제시된다. 그러나 이 토론은 나중으로 미뤄두는 편이 낫다. 인간은 협력과 이기심이 어느 정도 섞여 있는 존재라고 보는 것이 타당하다. 상황과 조건에 따라 혼합의 비율만 바뀔 따름이다.

The lofty vision of a stateless, marketless world faces obstacles that are not moral but technical, and it’s important to grasp exactly what they are.

국가와 시장이 사라진 세계를 향한 고귀한 이상이 맞닥뜨리는 걸림돌은 윤리적인 문제들이 아니라 현실적이며 기술적인 문제들이고, 우리는 그 문제가 무엇인지를 이해할 필요가 있다.

We have to assume that we would not want to regress to some sharply lower stage of economic development in the future; we would want to experience at least the same material comforts that we have under capitalism. On a qualitative level, of course, all sorts of things ought to change so that production better satisfies real human and ecological needs. But we would not want to see an overall decline in our productive powers.

먼저 우리는 급격한 경제적 후퇴는 원치 않음을 가정해야 한다. 미래에도 적어도 우리가 자본주의 내에서 누리는 물질적 풍요 정도는 유지하고 싶을 것이다. 물론 생산이 실제 인간 및 생태계의 필요를 더 잘 충족시키도록 하려면 질적으로 많은 변화가 필요하다. 다만 전반적인 생산력의 저하는 바람직하지 못하다.

But the kind of production of which we are now capable requires a vast and complex division of labor. This presents a tricky problem. To get a concrete sense of what it means, think of the way Americans lived at the time of the American Revolution, when the typical citizen worked on a small, relatively isolated family farm. Such households largely produced what they consumed and consumed what they produced. If they found themselves with a modest surplus of farm produce, they might sell it to others nearby, and with the money they earned they could buy a few luxuries. For the most part, though, they did not rely on other people to provide them with the things they needed to live.

그런데 현재 우리가 감당할 수 있는 생산은 방대하고 복잡한 노동 분업을 필요로 한다. 이는 까다로운 문제다. 문제의 심각성을 구체적으로 이해하려면, 미국 혁명 당시 일반적인 미국인들이 생활했던 방식을 떠올려보라. 그들은 작고 비교적 고립된 가족 농장에서 일했으며, 그런 가구들은 주로 그들이 소비할 것을 생산하고 생산한 것을 소비했다. 잉여 농산물을 조금이라도 갖게 되면 근처의 다른 사람들에게 그것을 팔고, 그 돈으로 조금의 사치품을 구매했다. 허나 대부분의 경우, 그들은 살 필요가 있는 것들을 제공받기 위해 다른 사람들에게 의존하지 않았다.

Compare that situation with our own. Not only do we rely on others for our goods, but the sheer number of people we rely on has increased to staggering proportions.

그 당시의 상황과 지금을 비교해보라. 재화 생산을 다른 이들에게 기대는 것을 넘어, 우리가 기대는 이들의 수가 엄청나게 늘어나버렸다.

Look around the room you’re sitting in and think of your possessions. Now try to think of how many people were directly involved in their production. The laptop I’m typing on, for example, has a monitor, a case, a DVD player, and a microprocessor. Each was likely made in a separate factory, possibly in different countries, by various companies employing hundreds or thousands of workers. Then think of the raw plastic, metal, and rubber that went into those component parts, and all the people involved in producing them. Add the makers of the fuel that fired the factories and the ship crews and trucking fleets that got the computer to its destination.  It’s not hard to imagine millions of people participating in the production of just those items now sitting on my desk. And out of the millions of tasks involved, each individual performed only a tiny set of discrete steps.

당신이 있는 방을 둘러보라. 그리고 당신의 소유물들의 생산에 얼마나 많은 사람들이 연관되어있을지를 생각해보라. (중략) 

How did they each know what to do? Of course, most of these people were employees, and their bosses told them what to do. But how did their bosses know how much plastic to produce? And how did they know to send the weaker, softer kind of plastic to the computer company, even though it would have been happy to take the sturdier, high-quality plastic reserved for the hospital equipment makers? And how did these manufacturers judge whether it was worth the extra resources to make laptops with nice LCD monitors, rather than being frugal and making  old, simpler cathode ray models?

The total number of such dilemmas is practically infinite for a modern economy with millions of different products and billions of workers and consumers. And they must all be resolved in a way that is globally consistent, because at any given moment there are only so many workers and machines to go around, so making more of one thing means making less of another. Resources can be combined in an almost infinite number of possible permutations; some might satisfy society’s material needs and desires fairly well, while others would be disastrous, involving huge quantities of unwanted production and lots of desirable things going unmade. In theory, any degree of success is possible.

This is the problem of economic calculation. In a market economy, prices perform this function. And the reason prices can work is that they convey systematic information concerning how much of one thing people are willing to give up to get another thing, under a given set of circumstances. Only by requiring people to give up one thing to get another, in some ratio, can quantitative information be generated about how much, in relative terms, people value those things. And only by knowing how much relative value people place on millions of different things can producers embedded in this vast network make rational decisions about what their minute contribution to the overall system ought to be.

None of this means that calculation can be accomplished through prices alone, or that the prices generated in a market are somehow ideal or optimal. But there is no way a decentralized system could continually generate and broadcast so much quantitative information without the use of prices in some form. Of course, we don’t have to have a decentralized system. We could have a centrally planned economy, in which all or most of society’s production decisions are delegated to professional planners with computers. Their task would be extremely complex and their performance uncertain. But at least such a system would provide some method for economic calculation: the planners would try to gather all the necessary information into their central department and then figure out what everyone needs to do.

So something needs to perform the economic calculation function that prices do for a market system and planners do for a centrally planned system. As it happens, an attempt has been made to spell out exactly what would be required for economic calculation in a world with no states or markets. The anarchist activist Michael Albert and the economist Robin Hahnel have devised a system they call Participatory Economics in which every individual’s freely made decisions about production and consumption would be coordinated by means of a vast society-wide plan formulated through a “participatory” process with no central bureaucracy.

Parecon, as it’s called, is an interesting exercise for our purposes, because it rigorously works out exactly what would be needed to run such an “anarchist” economy. And the answer is roughly as follows: At the beginning of each year, everyone must write out a list of every item he or she plans to consume over the course of the year, along with the quantity of each item. In writing these lists, everyone consults a tentative list of prices for every product in the economy (keep in mind there are more than two million products in Amazon.com’s “kitchen and dining” category alone), and the total value of a person’s requests may not exceed his or her personal “budget,” which is determined by how much he or she promises to work that year.

Since the initial prices are only tentative estimates, a network of direct-democratic councils must feed everyone’s consumption lists and work pledges into computers, in order to generate an improved set of prices that will bring planned levels of production and consumption (supply and demand) closer to balance. This improved price list is then published, which kicks off a second “iteration” of the process: now everyone has to rewrite their consumption requests and work pledges all over again, according to the new prices. The whole procedure is repeated several times until supply and demand are finally balanced. Eventually, everyone votes to choose between several possible plans.

In their speaking and writing, Albert and Hahnel narrate this remarkable process to show how attractive and feasible their system would be. But for many people — I would include myself in this group — the effect is exactly the opposite. It comes off instead as a precise demonstration of why economic calculation in the absence of markets or state planning would be, if perhaps not impossible in theory, at least impossible to imagine working in a way that most people could live with in practice. And Parecon is itself a compromise from the purist’s point of view, since it violates the principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need” — individuals’ consumption requests are not allowed to exceed their work pledges. But of course without that stipulation, the plans wouldn’t add up at all.

The point is not that a large-scale stateless, marketless economy “wouldn’t work.” It’s that, in the absence of some coordinating mechanism like Albert and Hahnel’s, it simply wouldn’t exist in the first place. The problem of economic calculation, therefore, is something we have to take seriously if we want to contemplate something better than the status quo.

---

이어지는 번역은 다음 글에서.