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Notes
Spafford, ‘An Anarchist Interpretation of Marx’s “Ability to Needs” Principle,’ The Journal of Value Inquiry, 54 (2020), pp. 323-343. Unless otherwise stated, all references are to this paper.
The name is due to Spafford’s contention that the AANP articulates part of Marx’s underlying reasons for proposing (in the Critique of the Gotha Program) the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ as the operative distributive principle under the second stage of communism. (326-327)
For example, given the significant ties between quid pro quo exchange and markets, understanding what is wrong about quid pro quo exchange on the communist or anarchist view will most likely help us considerably in understanding what is wrong about markets and commodification on the communist or anarchist view.
There is, I think, another distinct line of thought according to which quid pro quo exchange is bad because it involves comparing the incommensurable, or pricing the priceless, in a way that devalues the goods or services in question. (E.g. Kropotkin’s question: ‘cannot each one of us recall someone who has rendered him [sic] so great a service that we should be indignant if its equivalent in coin were mentioned?’ (331))
Cohen, G.A., Why Not Socialism? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 45.
Where P and Q are individuals, S is some set of states of affairs that will or will not come about depending on what P wills, and T is some set of affairs that will or will not come about depending on what Q wills. (332-333)
In (Chance) we are to imagine that Polly just happens to find a cracker, while Quinn just happens to lose one; while Quinn just happens to find a piece of cheese while Polly just happens to lose one. The distributive outcome is therefore identical to (P↔Q), but nobody has given anything to anyone else or intended that it came about; it just comes about by chance.
And given that (Chance) is not something that they have the power to bring about.
I assume here that Polly and Quinn take themselves to have roughly equally strong desires for cracker and cheese respectively, and they see no morally relevant differences between them that might justify valuing their preference-satisfaction differentially, which explains their shared indifference between (Q→P) and (P→Q).
Perhaps Polly and Quinn have been reading Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?: ‘My commitment to socialist community does not require me to be a sucker who serves you regardless of whether (if you are able to do so) you are going to serve me, but I nevertheless find value in both parts of the conjunction - I serve you and you serve me - and in that conjunction itself: I do not regard the first part - I serve you - as simply a means to my real end, which is that you serve me.’ (Cohen, op. cit., p. 43)
In actual cases of groups who conduct exchange in this sort of spirit of community, it may well be the case that they are willing to give to others without receiving anything in return in the immediate term, so long as there is (rough) reciprocity in their interactions over time. As such, we might think that individual exchanges will often take an apparently unconditional form, so long as they take place in a broader, long-term context that is characterized by the community-based ideal of mutual service. The conditionality would thus only manifest itself in the long run – only if somebody systematically failed to give to others over time would the principle of community recommend not giving to the person in question. This is an important complication to bear in mind. However, it is not this sort of immediate term unconditionality that Spafford has in mind with his interpretation of the AANP, but a stronger version unconstrained by even long-term conditions. Even if the community-based principle of conditional giving is manifest only in the long-run, rather than at the level of individual exchanges, there is still an important respect in which the practice would evince a conditionality that does not appear to be allowed on Spafford’s account. (My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me for clarity on this point.)
We might worry that this is not the case, given Polly’s indifference between (Q→P) and (P→Q). But it’s not clear how we can explain Polly’s preference for (P↔Q) without the claim that Polly would prefer that Quinn gave her a cracker. True, she only wants it in a context of community and reciprocity, and thus would not want to be given it in a non-reciprocal fashion; but she’d nonetheless prefer it that (so long as that caveat is respected) Quinn gives her a cracker. (My thanks to Jesse Spafford for pushing me for clarity on this point.)
Mightn’t the offer still fall afoul of the objection on grounds of incommensurability discussed in fn.4? The answer to this will depend on the details of how one understands that objection. However, the following suggests a negative answer. In cases of quid pro quo exchange, it is the concern for self-interested maximization on the part of each party to the exchange that creates the extreme concern with a close comparison of the value of what changes hands, which is the source of the ‘demeaning account books’ (331) mentality which anarchists and communists object to. But since there is no concern for profit-maximization in cases like Polly’s offer (only a desire to maintain the reciprocity and mutuality necessary for community), there is reason to believe that such offers will not lead to the sort of insidious price-mentality that is the major target of the incommensurability objection.
See 332-333 for definitions of the relevant technical terminology. It is worth emphasising here that Spafford introduces this account of freedom for dialectical purposes, rather than to defend it as a satisfactory all-things-considered account of what freedom is. (See 338-340 for Spafford’s defence of the claim that this definition is appropriate for his dialectical purposes.) I follow Spafford in endorsing this definition for dialectical purposes, rather than as a satisfactory all-things-considered account. (My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me for clarity on this point.)
I leave the difficult question of what sorts of reasons count as the wrong sorts of reasons for another time. The hope would be that an account can be developed that captures problematic cases of quid pro quo exchange – using others to enrich oneself – and excludes non-problematic conditional exchanges such as the sucker-averse anarcho-communists, who do not make conditional offers in order to use others to meet their own ends.
References
Cohen, G.A. 2009. Why Not Socialism? Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Spafford, J. 2020. An Anarchist Interpretation of Marx’s “Ability to Needs” Principle. The Journal of Value Inquiry 54: 323–343.
Acknowledgements
I would like to offer my sincere thanks to Carol Gould, Antonina Maj, and particularly to Jesse Spafford and an anonymous reviewer for extremely helpful comments and discussion.
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MacRae, C.Z. Communists, Anarchists, and Suckers: A Reply to Spafford on ‘Conditional Exchange’. J Value Inquiry 57, 477–485 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09837-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09837-7