Parasites And Property Rights

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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: The information in this episode comes from Red Flags Press. Their main web site is very useful for research purposes, and I recommend it!

We follow the idea of the “social parasite” through socialist writing and show how it shifts from moral accusation to an enforceable legal category once society claims ownership over individual labor. We argue that the transaction costs of monitoring effort and assigning “socially useful” work push real-world socialism toward surveillance, coercion, and punishment.
• socialist critique of wage labor as work or starve
• transaction costs as defining, monitoring, and enforcing property rights
• the property rights switch from self-ownership to society owning labor
• “from each according to their ability” as an obligation backed by force
• socialist writers labeling middlemen and many professions as parasites
• the party as the decision-maker when prices are suppressed
• Joseph Brodsky’s trial as a real anti-parasite enforcement example
• why the parasite problem expands and becomes politically arbitrary
• how similar labor-claim logic shows up in authoritarian socialism and fascism
• why Scandinavian social democracy is capitalism, not classical socialism
The book of the week is Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Moment, and I strongly recommend it.

Links:

Red Flags, "Why Socialism Says Slacking is Theft."

Moments in Soviet History: The Trial of Joseph Brodsky

Leo Huberman, The ABCs of Socialism.

"Soviet Era 'Parasites'" https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2016/05/20/soviet-era-parasites-return-to-todays-russian-a52934

If you have questions or comments, or want to suggest a future topic, email the show at [email protected] !

You can follow Mike Munger on Twitter at @mungowitz