Chapter 1

 

On Cooperation and Sharing

 

 

Part One: Introduction

 

Convinced as we are that cooperation and sharing are feasible, we regard the greater part of the suffering we observe as avoidable.  This simple and appealing idea is today so distant from the concerns of academic social science that it will take a whole book to make it possible to hope that it might be put on the agenda for serious consideration.  Through methods known as "nonviolence" and "cultural action," society could be transformed.  We are endlessly frustrated to see that while these methods are misunderstood, rejected, or simply not known, unnecessary suffering continues.  We are aghast and amazed that the human family has failed its simplest test, that of assuring that every sister and brother has enough food.  From the points of view of agronomy and biochemistry, the test is a no-brainer.  Still, humanity flunks it.  It also fails to exercise the elementary self-control needed to keep its population within the carrying capacity of the environment.  We are aghast and amazed that people do the stupidest things, such as killing other people and destroying habitats. 

We do not believe our amazement is due to lack of knowledge of the causes of dysfunctional behavior.[i]  Rather we believe that our amazement is due to our having elaborated an especially intense vision of an alternative--a global mosaic of cultures practicing local variations on an ethics of love and responsibility; and to our conceiving an especially clear methodology for putting the alternative into practice.  Although the present world crisis may be regarded as a crisis of globalization, or of neoliberalism, or as a security crisis, we think it more accurate to regard it as a continuing crisis of social democracy.  The decline of social democracy in the second half of the twentieth century was simultaneously the rise of neoliberalism.  It seems more accurate to us to regard humanity’s continuing inability to build just societies as the disease, and poverty and war as the consequences of the disease.

Above, in the Preface, we declared true by definition our premise, "that life would be much easier and happier if individuals and institutions were guided by principles of cooperation and sharing."  It is to be understood as a tautology: "If people did what needs to be done, then what needs to be done would be done."  This is known in Spanish as "a parrot's truth" (una verdad de perogrullo).  Otherwise viewed, it is a proposed conceptual framework.  Readers of Howard Richards’ Letters from Quebec will recognize the philosophical method we are employing, which may be called a method of metaphysical construction (itself a form of cultural action).  There also, Howard Richards laboriously staked out positions that respond to some philosophical objections to this method, such as the objection that the method improperly derives “ought” from "is," or facts from definitions. 

The topic of the present book is social democracy, and its purpose is to move forward the construction of social democracy.  Our proposal for forms of cultural action toward social democracy rests on our belief that, as Roy Bhaskar writes, “society is at once the ever-present condition and the continually reproduced outcome of human agency” (1986: 123).[ii]  There is no natural reason why people cannot cooperate and share; the only barrier to achieving the greater happiness that can arise from increased cooperation and sharing is the way we humans have organized our societies.  We believe--and we believe many others believe--that the West European social democracies were, in their heyday from about 1955 to about 1975, humanity's greatest achievement so far in harnessing human energy and mobilizing natural resources and capital in the service of meeting everybody's needs.  Therefore, this book analyzes social democracy in principle and worldwide, paying special attention to the historical experience of Western Europe, and within Western Europe, to the experience of Sweden.  From studies of their successes and failures, we will draw some conclusions about social democracy's philosophical limitations.  We will make some recommendations to activists, particularly to those who are striving to realize the promise of social democracy, while painting it green.

However, before beginning a case-by-case analysis of social democracy, we will give ourselves a running start by mentioning briefly some main ideas of a few of the many thinkers who have advocated cooperation and sharing, namely (in chronological order): Plato, Jesus, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Mohandas Gandhi, Robert Axelrod, and Mother Teresa.  We must mention a few of the great contributions to the concepts of cooperation and sharing, of which we take social democracy to be the main modern political approximation, in order to give these two concepts more content.  Since "cooperation and sharing" will function as a baseline for our study of social democracy, we begin by drawing attention to some of the dimensions that have been contributed to these rich concepts by a few of their main exponents.

Also, we mention some precedents because we do not want to be alone.  In our accounts of social democracy we will find ourselves attacking some ideas commonly found in mainstream social science, especially economics and political science.  We will be attacking limited historical and evolutionary visions, widely employed root metaphors, and research methodologies that pass as academically respectable.  We will also be attacking what passes for common sense in modern western societies.  We do not want to appear to be a lone voice in the wilderness denying everything everybody else asserts to be true.  In establishing our baseline concept, therefore, we seek to establish also that the idea of cooperating to meet needs has been taken seriously by intelligent people, who really lived, who really meant what they said, and who took important concrete steps to put cooperation into practice.

After getting a running start by citing some of the wisdom of Plato, Jesus, Smith, Marx, Gandhi, Axelrod, and Teresa, we will return periodically to the discussion of alternatives to social scientific orthodoxy—alternatives that take ethics and cooperation seriously.  We will be discussing alternative thinkers like, for example, Daniel Quinn (1999), who says "we need not new programs but new minds," as well as radical critics within the social sciences like Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis who provide valuable critical insights from within a worldview too close to that of mainstream social science to fully appreciate modernity's (and social democracy's) limitations.[iii]  We do not mean to say that we will always be fighting mainstream notions of what social science is all about.  We find a great deal of truth, for example, in studies such as Bo Rothstein's (1998) study of Swedish social democracy's relative success when it was implemented by "cadres" instead of "bureaucrats," even though the studies rely on methodologies we regard as both typical of contemporary social science and as profoundly mistaken.

 

 

 

 

 

On Cooperation and Sharing: A Perspective from Plato

 

"Is the physician, taken in that strict sense of which you are speaking, a healer of the sick or a maker of money?  And remember that I am now speaking of the true physician.                  "A healer of the sick, he replied."  --Plato[iv]

 

Starting with his earliest dialogues, Plato relies on the fact that the specialized knowledge (the characteristic episteme) of each profession or art aims at something.  The physician aims at health.  The pilot aims to guide a ship safely.  The farmer aims to produce food.   The cobbler produces shoes. 

We echo Plato when we teach our children that the postal worker delivers mail, the baker bakes bread, the firefighter puts out fires, the bus driver drives the bus.  Howard Richards’ four-year-old granddaughter often asks, "What does he (or she) do?"  The answer to her question invariably describes a way of serving society. 

The specific aim of each techne (profession or art) is categorized by Plato in at least four interchangeable ways: it is its good, it is the need it satisfies, it is the interest it serves, it is its use.  A recurrent theme in Plato's writings is that although we can state the use of the special knowledge of the carpenter, the potter, the blacksmith, the dentist, and so on, we fall into confusion when we try to state the use of the special knowledge claimed by those who profess to teach virtue, politics, or rhetoric. 

Plato's longest dialogue, The Republic, begins as an inquiry into virtue, specifically that aspect of virtue known as justice.  Plato accepts the idea—a traditional idea at the time he was writing--that virtue has four parts, or aspects: wisdom, temperance (or moderation), courage, and justice.  Justice is the topic of The Republic, but the other three virtues are also discussed and defined there. 

In the first of the ten books of The Republic, Socrates, Plato's hero and spokesperson, is frustrated by the superficiality and inconsistency of common notions of justice (i.e., of dikaiosyne, also translated as "fairness" or "righteousness").  As is the case with the other virtues, most people think they know what justice is, how to acquire knowledge of it, and what good it does, until they are led into contradictions by a questioner like Socrates who simply asks them to answer simple questions and to state their ideas clearly. 

Reading between the lines a bit, one can also discern in Book I of The Republic that it is not only most people's confusion that upsets Plato.  Plato is also upset by base tendencies toward cynicism and skepticism found in commonsense notions of justice.  Reading between the lines a bit one can detect Plato's desire to uplift his readers with his philosophical writings, in order to lead them to ideas of justice that are not only clear and true, but also noble.

Frustrated by an inconclusive, and somewhat degrading, review of common ideas about dikaiosyne, Socrates proposes that a better way to approach the topic would be to design an ideal state.  What kind of state would we want to live in?  What would a good state be like?  There, in the image of a utopian vision of a society practicing the good life, it will perhaps be possible to see the true nature of justice, writ large and therefore legible, as a word written in large letters is legible for weak eyes unable to read small letters.

Turning then to the task of designing a state, Plato finds that the true architect of a state (i.e. of a polis, a Greek city-state) is the needs of its people.  We quote the words Plato ascribes to Socrates at length:

"A State, I said, arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self sufficing, but all of us have many wants.  Can any other origin of a State be imagined?

"There can be no other. [Adeimantus answers]

 

"Then, as we have many wants, and many persons are needed to supply them, one takes a helper for one purpose, and another for another; and when these partners and helpers are gathered together in one habitation the body of inhabitants is termed a State.

"True, he said.

"And they exchange with one another, and one gives, and another receives, under the idea that the exchange will be for their good.

"Very true.

"Then, I said, let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.

"Of course, he replied.

"Now the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition of life and existence.

"Certainly.

"The second is a dwelling, and the third clothing and the like.

"True.

"And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand.  We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder, someone else a weaver -- shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps some other purveyor to our bodily wants?

"Quite right.

"The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.

"Clearly.

"And how will they proceed?  Will each bring the result of his labours into a common stock? --the individual husbandman, for example, producing for four, and labouring four times as long and as much as he need for the provision of food with which he supplies others as well as himself; or will he have nothing to do with others and not be at the trouble of producing for them but provide for himself alone a fourth of the food in a fourth of the time, and in the remaining three fourths of the time be employed in making a house or a coat or a pair of shoes, having no partnership with others, but supplying himself all his own wants?

"Adeimantus thought he should aim at producing food only and not at producing everything. . . " (1941: 59-62).[v]

            Plato thus contributed to civilization two important ideas that support our premise that the lives of human beings would be easier and happier if individuals and institutions were guided by principles of cooperation and sharing:

1. The purpose of each of the various professions and callings followed by the various members of society is to meet people's needs; and

2. The overall design of a good society is a design that will result in the meeting of the needs of its inhabitants.

 

On Cooperation and Sharing: A Perspective from Jesus

 

What we wish to demonstrate, or at least briefly illustrate, is that the meanings of "cooperation" and "sharing" (and of similar terms such as "love" and "solidarity") have been indelibly marked by the words of Jesus.  When we later argue that social democracy has been an effort to implement solidarity under modern industrial conditions, we will attribute part of the notoriety of some of the images socialism has invoked to Jesus.  It is not our aim here to make a case either for Jesus or against Jesus; nor is it our aim to reckon a balance sheet weighing pros against cons to arrive at a sober appreciation of the good and bad aspects of his influence.  Our aim is a dream, the dream that Adrienne Rich (1978) called "the dream of a common language."[vi]

            To hear echoes of the words of Jesus in the achievements of West European social democracy does not imply attributing to Jesus any originality.  The Old Testament, Greek philosophy and religion, oriental sages, contemporary movements and sects in Israel, and the shamans of hunting and gathering peoples can all be cited to prove that many people had the same ideas earlier.  A recent and plausible theory about the source of the popularity of the ideas Jesus expressed has been proposed by Riane Eisler (1987).

According to Eisler, cooperation and sharing prevailed in prehistoric times in various cultures at various times and places, and in particular shortly before the dawn of history in Southeast Europe and Asia Minor.[vii]  The cooperating and sharing "partnership societies," as Eisler calls them, were conquered some time around 2000 B.C. by warlike patriarchal tribes from the north.  The results of the conquests were what Eisler, and, following her, Walter Wink, call "dominator societies."  The principles of a dominator society include separation, exclusion, force, fear, mutual indifference, and exploitation.[viii]  Nevertheless, Eisler speculates, the older, gentler values were not extinguished.  They were preserved as collective memories, and as alternative practices.  People never forgot the old folkways, and people never ceased to respond to the natural tendencies that the old folkways developed.  For this reason, Eisler believes, there was an audience ready to listen to the teachings of Jesus.  His message was a revival of principles that had been defeated but not lost (Eisler 1987: xvii-xx, 94, 102-03; Wink 1998: 37-111). 

Eisler's theory is, of course, speculative, as is any attempt to reconstruct what the historical Jesus really said.  What is not speculative are the words people find on the page when they open a Bible and read it.  Whatever the process was through which the words attributed to Jesus have been remembered, written down in Greek in four gospels and in some other books (some of which did and some of which did not make it into the canon), and then translated into English and virtually every other language, the result has been that the Bible is far and away the world's most widely read book.  The words of Jesus are the best known of all the words ever written in a book and read by a reader.  There is nobody who is a close second.  Here are a few of Jesus' best known words, rendered into English by King James's translators:

 

"When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory.

"And before him shall be gathered all nations, and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats.

"And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

"Then shall the King say unto them on the right hand.  Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

"For I was an hungered and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in.

"Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

"Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee ?  Or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

"When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in?  or naked, and clothed thee?

"Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?"

"And the King shall answer, and say unto them.   Verily, I say unto you.  Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

"Then he shall say also unto them on the left hand.  Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.

"For I was an hungered and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink.

"I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

"Then shall they also answer him saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

"Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you. Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

"And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal" (Matthew 25:  31-46).[ix]

From a different gospel, we read the following well-known words of Jesus:

 

"Abide in me, and I in you.  As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in me.

"I am the vine, ye are the branches.  He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit, for without me ye can do nothing.

"If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch and is withered, and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.

"If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you.

"Herein is my father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples.

"As the father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love.

"If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love: even as I have kept my father's commandments, and abide in his love.

"These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.

"This is my commandment.  That ye love one another, as I have loved you.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

"Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.

"Henceforth, I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends: for all things that I have heard of my father I have made known unto you" (John 15: 4-15 ).

 

In these two passages, as in many others, Jesus speaks of "father" (patros).   As in patriarchy, here patros is a principle of authority, but these passages also show some movement away from the coercion associated with patriarchy and toward participation.  The believers are like branches of a vine, who are unified by a source of love that comes to all of them through the vine.  The principle of authority "abides," dwells, lives, within the soul.   The disciples are "friends," not "servants," because they also possess the principle of authority, which is the same thing as the principle of love, within themselves.

            The word translated as "love" is agape.  Outside the New Testament this word is rarely found in ancient Greek texts.  To offer an interpretation of the meaning of agape it is necessary to rely mainly on the instances where it is used in the New Testament itself.  Our interpretation is that agape is, besides being Jesus' characteristic qualification of the father principle, an abundant, overflowing, unconditional love that flows from union with the divine.  It names the joy of the life of the saved.  In one of the rare occurrences of agape in Greek literature outside the New Testament, Homer employs the term to name the joy and hospitality with which his family and friends welcomed Odysseus on his return to Ithaca.  This suggests that a meaning of agape is "welcoming."

Among the many other Biblical passages that could be used to illustrate Jesus' contributions to principles of cooperation and sharing, some of the most significant are the ones where his followers practice sharing.  Here is one:

And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together: and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness.

And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things he possessed was his own; but they had all things common."And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all (Acts of the Apostles 4: 32-34).

 

            Although there are many examples of communities that cooperate and share, the example set by the communities of early Christians plays a unique role.[x]  Simply because it is recorded in the Bible, the world's all-time bestseller, their example is a guarantee that the possibility of living in joyful and mutually supportive communities cannot be erased from human memory.

            Let us suggest that three succinct beliefs about cooperation and sharing can be deduced from the words of Jesus and from the practices of his early followers:

1. The duty to contribute to meeting the needs of others is a peremptory divine command.

2. The transformed individual internalizes the principle of agape.  Decisions to act from love become, simultaneously, the individual's own free choices and the result of identification with a higher power.

3. Communities practicing cooperation and sharing have existed.

Of these, it seems it is the first that provokes the most bitter opposition.  People, on the whole, do not like taking orders, and they especially do not like taking orders, from a God or from humans who claim to be acting in the name of a God, which instruct them to share their property, their time, and their energy.  Further, what Jesus commands is so distant from the way most people actually behave that his words seem calculated to make people feel guilty.  Because few people pass muster according to Jesus' standards, he can be accused of promoting what Hegel called "the unhappy consciousness." A peremptory divine command that nobody obeys can be called emotional terrorism.   There is terror too, in a literal interpretation of images like throwing into eternal hell fire the goats-who-did-not-give-food-to the-hungry-beggars and the withered-branches-cut-off-from-the-vine.  

Being controversial, however, does not appear to do anything to silence the voice of Jesus.  We suggest that in spite of the harsh judgments that can be made against him, Jesus retains the status of a landmark, or beacon light, with respect to which people take their bearings, regardless of which direction they are traveling.   His words are central to language and to culture not just because the Gideons keep putting a copy of the Bible in every hotel room, but also because of the eloquence of the words themselves.  Jesus made certain points so clearly and powerfully that, whether or not you agree, it is impossible to misunderstand.  "For I was sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not," is not subtle.  It is possible to say that such words violate your freedom, that they inhibit your pleasure, or that they attack your self-esteem.  Yet it is not possible to say that you did not get the point.

On Cooperation and Sharing: A Perspective from Adam Smith

 

The Adam Smith problem is the problem of reconciling Smith’s ethics with his economics.[xi]   His ethics appears to be in substantial conformity with the teachings of the world’s great religions, according to which humans are obliged to love and serve one another.   His economics, meanwhile, appears to be in substantial conformity with the teachings of egoistic materialist philosophies, according to which humans naturally act from self-interest, and cannot be expected to act otherwise. 

            One possible solution to the Adam Smith problem is to say that Smith made no substantial departure from the religious and ethical traditions of his part of the world—i.e., the Hebrew-Greek synthesis that defined the ideology of Christendom, and therefore initially that of Europe.  On this view, Smith agreed with Plato, Jesus, and others who taught that humans should cooperate and share in order to meet one another’s needs.   On this view, Smith’s discoveries and inventions were simply new means to old ends.  We call this the “have your cake and eat it too” interpretation of Smith--and not just of Smith, but of a whole constellation of philosophers who in the 17^th and 18^th centuries invented discourses that restructured traditional ethics to fit the needs of the nascent global capitalist economy.

            On this have your cake and eat it too interpretation, Smith was the advocate of cooperation who had discovered the best way to do it.   Certainly Smith was enormously impressed by how weak and helpless a single human being alone is, and by how much each of us depends upon the cooperation of others.  In a famous example, Smith shows how even to obtain such a simple thing as a pin to hold up the hem of a garment, a person relies upon the combined efforts of thousands of people, from the one who digs the ore, to the one who smelts it to iron, to the one who draws the metal into wire, down to the one who cuts it, the one who shapes the head of the pin, and the one who transports it to a retail store, and many more besides.

Still developing this have your cake and eat it too reading of Smith, we can point to texts where Smith portrays the division of labor as the key to stunningly successful cooperation.  If each person does one job and does it well, and learns how to do it faster and with less waste, and thinks about how to improve the process, and acquires equipment with which to do it, the result is that the job is done substantially better.  The gains from the division of labor, when compared to an individual trying to be a jack of all trades, allow, on Smith’s calculations, a tenfold increase, or a hundred-fold increase, or even a thousand-fold increase in production.   The gains from the division of labor are so great that entrepreneurs can afford to pay high wages and still make large profits—a Smithian concept that is still with us today in the form of the idea that wage increases should track productivity increases.   Moreover, the expansion of the division of labor to an international level through free trade augments the purchasing power of labor by lowering food prices.    Smith observes that even the poorest worker in Scotland or England is incomparably better off than the savage, and he attributes the relative opulence of the British working class to the benefits of the division of labor (1937: 3-12, 81, 125).[xii] 

The market economy Smith envisaged allowed, as Smith himself noted, the existence of a small class of wealthy individuals who did not work but lived off the labor of others.   Smith acknowledged that their unearned wealth not a moral merit of the society that bred them, but he considered their existence to be a small price to pay for a system that brought so much welfare to so many.  In this respect, on a have your cake and eat it too reading, Smith can be regarded as being in substantial conformity with Judeo-Christian ethics, even if not in perfect conformity.

As the division of labor can be viewed as an efficient way to cooperate, similarly exchange can be viewed as an efficient way to share.  Following what Smith called the natural human propensity to truck or barter, when a person go to a market to buy or sell, s/he gives something s/he does not need and gets something s/he does need.   Exchange is the best way to share.  What sharing accomplishes is moving one person’s surplus to another person’s dinner table.  Free exchange in a market could be called the best way to accomplish the purpose of sharing because it is the way that taps the strongest and most reliable motives, the self-interest of the buyer and the self-interest of the seller.

On this have your cake and eat it too interpretation, Smith has no quarrel with Jesus or Plato about objectives.  Smith is merely the advocate of more effective ways to achieve the same objectives that everyone agrees on.   Lines from Smith could be quoted to show that Smith himself says in so many words that the whole purpose of exchange is use, and that if it were not for the value of the uses to which the merchandise exchanged is put, there would be no value in exchange.  Smith also says that the whole purpose of agriculture and of manufactures is to supply the wants and conveniences of life (1937: 6, 650-51).

The have your cake and eat it too reading has an important corollary.  The merits of the free market are not matters of moral principle.  They are empirical findings.  The principle is to meet everyone’s needs.   It is a contingent fact, of which Smith takes large and detailed notice, that markets as he envisaged them work to meet everyone’s needs, and work better than any alternative.  Yet there is no guarantee that facts Smith described will always be true, and it could well turn out to be the case that at some times and places and to some extent or degree, they might turn out to be false.   The corollary is, therefore, that free markets and associated institutions are right to the extent that they in fact turn out to work, and they are wrong to the extent that they do not work. 

What we have called a corollary to a have your cake and eat it too interpretation of Smith, was stated in different terms, but with essentially the same meaning, by the 20^th century Dutch social democratic economist Jan Tinbergen (1962).   According to Tinbergen, writing in post-World War II Holland some 200 years after the publication of The Wealth of Nations, there is no significant disagreement between the advocates of capitalism and the advocates of socialism.  Capitalists and socialists agree on objectives.  They also agree that whatever achieves the objectives most efficiently should be done. Furthermore, they agree on the methodologies to be employed in monitoring economic institutions and measuring their performance.   There is therefore nothing left on which to disagree.    All that remains is to determine by empirical research whether in any given case it is private enterprise or some form of social enterprise, a free market or some form of regulated market, that performs most effectively to meet any given set of needs (1962: 19-39, 101-02).[xiii]   Health care systems, for example, can be studied empirically, using known social science methodologies.   The results of studies will show what health care systems produce the best outcomes, i.e., the most health. Capitalists and socialists alike--assuming of course that they consistently accept the consequences of premises they have already endorsed in principle--will agree that in health care the practices that produce the best results define the best ways for humans to cooperate and share to meet each other’s needs.  And so on in every other field.

We have presented first the simplest solution to the Adam Smith problem, which is to say there is no conflict between his economics and his ethics, and no conflict between his ethics and the ethics of Jesus.  We have also mentioned an equally simple corollary, which says that there is in principle no conflict between capitalism and socialism.  In reality, the situation is more complex and less harmonious.   We move now to an opening discussion of some of the complexities and conflicts. 

Although some of Smith’s works permit a “have your cake and eat it too” reading, others do not (or at least not on the face of it).  Consider the following two passages.  The first is taken from Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, first published in 1759:

And hence it is, that to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and alone can produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety.   As to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us (1976: 25).

The second is a famous passage from The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.  We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.   Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly on the benevolence of his fellow-citizens (1937: 14).

            The first passage says that solidarity motives are strong, and suggests that we as a human family should rely on them to assure that everyone is taken care of.    The second passage seems to mock solidarity motives, and to suggest that they cannot be relied on.    Such apparent inconsistencies led Witold von Skarzynski (1878) to propose the ingenious hypothesis that during his 1764-66 sojourn in Paris, Smith had come under the influence of French materialist philosophers, and had changed his mind.  Therefore, The Wealth of Nations of 1776 reflects materialistic egoism, while the earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759 reflects idealistic altruism.

Unfortunately for the change of mind (or Umschwung) hypothesis, subsequently discovered notes from the lectures Smith gave as Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow in the school years 1762-63 and 1763-64 brought to light that the main ideas of The Wealth of Nations had already been worked out prior to Smith’s trip to Paris.  Partly in the light of the demise of the Umschwung hypothesis, the editors of a critical edition of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976) wrote in the introduction:

There is nothing surprising in Smith’s well known statement, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests.”  Who would suppose this to imply that Adam Smith had come to disbelieve in the very existence or the moral value of benevolence?   Nobody with any sense (1976: 20).[xiv]

At the risk of appearing to fall into the category of those who do not have any sense, we wish to express the opinion that there is still an Adam Smith problem, even granted that Smith never ceased to believe in the importance, or even necessity, of benevolence.   The problem is that Smith gets more credit than he deserves. 

Our formulation of the Adam Smith problem can be made a bit more precise by borrowing a metaphor from Noam Chomsky, in order to distinguish between the surface grammar of Smith’s texts and their depth grammar (1966: 32-33).   On the surface, the drama of Smith’s texts is a patient struggle of thoughtful goodness to overcome the several constraints that retard human progress.   The author is invariably on the side of the generically good: knowledge, sympathy and fellow-feeling, peace, security, prosperity, enlightenment.

We adopt the notion of “depth grammar” to designate the words and provisions that lawyers sometimes call “operative.”  These are the rules that determine the judge’s decision in a case or controversy, or what the parties must do to comply with the terms of a contract, or who gets what property under a will or trust, or who must pay what tax.[xv]  As we descend from the dramatic surface to the operative level, we begin to see divisions in the ranks of the angels.   Smith’s market parts company with Plato’s dikaioysne (justice), and with Jesus’ agape (love).  Justice and love, as they were understood in the mainstream medieval syntheses of Greek and Hebrew culture, are, in Smith and other philosophers of the early modern epoch, riddled with exceptions, limited, and redefined.  We will list some things that happen in Smith’s writings at an operative level, which, taken together, substantially undermine cooperation: 

1. Property assumes priority.  The Wealth of Nations is an expanded version of the last part of Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence, the part concerning the duty of “police” to promote prosperity.  But the first duty of police is to establish peace.   Peace is established by guaranteeing to every person security in the possession of property.  In this and in other ways, the priority of property is presupposed and guaranteed before political economy even begins.

2. Benevolence becomes voluntary.  Moderns like Smith discard caritas as a name for the human duty to cooperate and share with others, and write instead about “benevolence.”    Benevolence is classified as an “imperfect duty.”   This means that the beneficiary has no right to enforce performance of the duty; rather, the giver is free to choose whether to comply with the duty of benevolence or not.

3. Sympathy backs 18^th century British common sense.  Sympathy plays a major role in Smith’s thought, serving as a touchstone to resolve precise issues in the law of contracts and the law of property rights.  Exactly which expectations of the parties are legitimate is determined by reference to the sympathies of a bystander who is not a party.  Thus “sympathy,” which on the surface appears to be a principle of morals akin to a love ethic, functions on an operative level as an appeal to the common sense norms of a commercial society.

4. Justice is redefined.  Smith’s source for justice is neither Greek nor Hebrew.  It is Roman Law.  “Justice” means suum cuique—“to each his own.”   And it means pacta sunt servandum—“contracts are to be performed.”

5.  Love moves to the periphery.  From being, as caritas, the main actor, love is demoted to playing bit parts, some of them comic.  For example, “Of all the passions, however, which are so extravagantly disproportioned to the value of their objects, love is the only one that appears, even to the weakest minds, to have any thing in it that is either graceful or agreeable” (Smith 1976: 33).

6.  The natural replaces the divine.   A traditional discourse, such as, for example, that of the prophet Mohammed, would identify that which is good and ought to be with “God’s will.”  Smith helps found modernity by employing “natural” as a buzzword that identifies what ought to be.   Conversely, “artificial” becomes a key pejorative label.

7. Prudence replaces wisdom as the first virtue.  Wisdom (sofia) was the first of the classic four Greek virtues.   It was also the first of the seven cardinal virtues of Christendom.   It meant the government of life by reason, where the very idea of reason, as reason was in those times conceived, carried overtones of divinity and solidarity.   Smith utilizes ideas from Roman stoic philosophy to name the first virtue as “prudence” instead.   “Prudence,” as Smith and the stoics he cites use the term, carries forward the idea of governing life by reason, but it modifies it in such a way that the first virtue comes to mean, first and foremost, taking care of one’s self.

8. A myth about the history of law shapes civil religion.  The generic struggle of enlightenment against darkness, which we have identified as the dramatic surface of Smith’s texts, becomes specific and operational as a creation story about how the legal and ethical framework, which Smith’s economics presupposes, came into existence.  While eschewing John Locke’s myth of the social contract, Smith himself proposes a myth of progress, according to which all societies pass through the same stages of improvement.   Private property, as the Scots and English knew it, was not universal.  In the 18^th century it was not yet established among the Arabs, the Tatars, or the Chinese, as Smith recounted in detail in his lectures on the history of law.   The legal and ethical framework of the free market was “natural” not because all peoples lived within such a framework, but because the invariant direction of progress in history was such that all peoples were on their way toward it.

            Thus, in the end, we propose, there is an Adam Smith problem.  Yet it is not just an Adam Smith problem.  It is also a David Hume problem, a Frances Hutcheson problem, a Hugo Grotius problem, a Denis Diderot problem, an Immanuel Kant problem.  On the surface, the early modern texts are edifying discourses, striving to save society from moral decay by demonstrating a sound basis for ethics, carrying forward the same ages-old good fight for cooperation and sharing that the prophets and philosophers carried on in Biblical times and in ancient Greece.  On the operative level, however, a transmutation occurs.  Ethics is rewritten to facilitate capitalism.  The Adam Smith problem is not what Skarzynski thought it was; it is not that Smith changed his mind after he wrote about sympathy and benevolence and before he wrote about economics.  The ethics texts and the economics texts are indeed consistent with each other, but the reason why they are consistent is that the ethics texts do not mean what they seem to mean.   The generous emotions they evoke are not the operative rules that decide cases and establish rights. 

Seeing the Adam Smith problem as we propose suggests an interpretation of what the Chilean social protest singer Victor Jara called the “tremendous decency” of the bourgeoisie.  Jara made fun of the comfortable citizen, who, not content with owning property, having a good education, fine clothes, and fine manners, was also distinguished by a disarming personal charm, and even more than by charm by a fine moral character that Jara called “tu tremenda decencia.”[xvi]    Tremendous decency.  A polish that shines on the surface.

The view we are proposing also serves to show that the market was not anything anybody discovered or invented.  A society whose operative rules are those reflected in  Roman Law is already a market-oriented society.  In such a society one can ask, as an empirical question, what the prices of A B or C goods are in a market, but one cannot ask whether there are markets, because the basic social structure, the law, the courts, the very language, the very expectations concerning what it means to be a “person,” presuppose that there are markets.  Property, contracts, money, markets are not separate stand-alone institutions, each separately invented, but complementary aspects of the same worldview and framework, an interrelated social structure that evolves over time.

A third consequence of the solution we propose to the Adam Smith problem is that Tinbergen’s idea of doing empirical studies to find out what social arrangements work becomes problematic.  Our surface/depth metaphor calls attention to powerful but ordinarily unseen (because taken for granted) variables at work in the operative depths of society.  One wonders how an empirical study could keep track of the results of social experiments that would run operational concepts of justice through many variations.    Yet if one takes seriously the idea of finding out what works by trying out alternatives,  then one must be ready to change basic rules.  One wonders whether Tinbergen had in mind doing studies that would evaluate 21^st century shifts in the meanings of key terms,  similar in scope to the conceptual  sea change Smith articulated in the 18^th century, and, if  so, what such studies would look like.

 

On Cooperation and Sharing: A Perspective from Karl Marx

 

Although social democracy has many roots and precedents, the classical starting point for most social democratic thinking, in Europe and around the world, is the philosophy of Karl Marx.  This is not least true when social democracy defines itself by contrasting its tenets with those of Marxism.

Although Marx had many seminal ideas, one of the central ones, which can be taken as a key to what he thought about cooperation and sharing, is the idea that under capitalism there is private appropriation of the products of social cooperation.  Collaborative work by many produces the world’s goods and services.  Yet after the product is produced, the few own the product, and the proceeds from its sale are credited to their account.  The few who reap the profits are, of course, the very same few who allowed the production process to start by advancing funds, with the “sly intention” as Marx puts it, of getting back more funds than they advanced.  They control the labor process because they start it.   If they do not expect it to be profitable, they do not start it, and it does not start.   Ownership.   Power.   What the few accumulate, due to their power, is the surplus created by the labor process.   Collective labor causes the outputs to be worth more than the inputs, but the principal benefits of the collective labor go not to the collectivity or to the laborers, but to the owners.

Marx’s solution to the problems posed by a cooperative social process skewed by private appropriation of its fruits, is to eliminate the private appropriation.  Then there would be real cooperation.  There would be social production for social use, establishing a material base for the free and full development of each individual, not just that of the privileged few.  On the question of how social cooperation for mutual benefit would be organized after “the expropriators are expropriated,” Marx was deliberately vague.  At one point he invokes the image of society as one giant collective laborer, who carefully divides up labor time among the various necessary tasks, in order to produce everything the one giant collective laborer needs.   At another point Marx contrasts capitalism with the organization of a peasant family, where all the farm tasks are divided among the members of the family, and the family shares the harvest.   For the most part, though, Marx thought it best to leave the design of the society of the future to the citizens of the future.

On one occasion, however, Marx had to give some detail about how to organize socialist production in order to reign in some of his over-eager followers.   In May of 1875, convened at Gotha as a union of two previously existing organizations, the German Social Democratic Party proposed a program calling for “ the cooperative regulation of the total labour with equitable distribution of the proceeds of labour”  (quoted in Tucker 1978: 528).[xvii]  Marx apparently feared that this language might be taken to mean that instead of dividing the revenue of industry between wages and profit, there would be only wages, no profit, with the share that under capitalism went to the owners being devoted to increase wages.   Against any such hare-brained scheme, Marx pointed out that under modern industrial conditions any plan for cooperative working and equitable distribution would have to take into account certain complications, as follows:

Let us take first of all the words “proceeds of labour” in the sense of the product of labour, then the cooperative proceeds of labour are the total social product.

From this must now be deducted:

First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up.

Secondly, additional portion for expansion of production.

Thirdly, reserve or insurance fund to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc.

These deductions from the “undiminished proceeds of labour” are an economic necessity and their magnitude is to be determined according to available means and forces, and partly by computation of probabilities, but they are in no way calculable by equity.

There remains the other part of the total product, intended to serve as means of consumption.

Before this is divided among the individuals, there has to be deducted again, from it:

First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production.

This part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society and it diminishes in proportion as the new society develops.

Secondly, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc.

From the outset this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society and it grows in proportion as the new society develops.

Thirdly, funds for those unable to work, etc., in short, for what is included under so-called official poor relief today.

Only now do we come to the “distribution” which the programme, under Lassallean influence, alone has in view in its narrow fashion, namely, to that part of the means of consumption which is divided among the individual producers of the co-operative society.

The “undiminished proceeds of labour” have already unnoticeably become converted into the “diminished” proceeds, although what the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a member of society (Marx, reprinted in Tucker 1978: 528-29, italics in original).

 

Marx took such exception to the ideas of Lassalle and his followers because plans such as theirs only fueled the argument that the high-minded ideals of socialism such as those we are calling cooperation and sharing were a utopian scheme, doomed to failure.  Marx wanted to demonstrate that with careful consideration, cooperation and sharing could indeed be feasible.

 

On Cooperation and Sharing: A Perspective from Gandhi

 

In the western world in the past few centuries ideals of cooperation and sharing have sometimes been in conflict with, and have sometimes coexisted in an uneasy truce with, ideals of property rights and individual freedom.  Karl Marx considered the property rights of the owners of the means of production to be a power to exploit workers, and thus to be in conflict with the ideal of cooperation.  Adam Smith and others brokered a truce between love and freedom by dropping caritas and adopting “benevolence.”    Benevolence was defined in such a way that it could not conflict with the freedom of the individual because it was, although admirable, purely voluntary.

Mohandas K. Gandhi approached these issues from a non-western and deeply religious perspective.  In place of the ideal of property rights, Gandhi proposed an ideal of trusteeship, extending the meaning of a term borrowed from English common law.  He wrote, for example, in 1934:

Those who own money now are asked to behave like the trustees holding their riches on behalf of the poor.   You may say that trusteeship is a legal fiction.  But, if people meditate over it constantly and try to act up to it, then life on earth would be governed far more by love than it is at present.   Absolute trusteeship is an abstraction like Euclid’s definition of a point, and is equally unattainable.  But if we strive for it, we shall be able to go further in realizing a state of equality on earth than by any other method (1990: 125).

With respect to freedom, we follow the Gandhi scholar Raghavan Iyer in suggesting that although Gandhi advocated freedom as earnestly as any Westerner, the significance of the word “freedom” in Gandhi’s context tilts it away from conflict with cooperation and sharing, not just because (as in Smith) sharing is voluntary, but also because showing love in action is the natural tendency of the free soul.

About freedom Gandhi wrote: “No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom.  It is contrary to the very nature of man.  Just as a man will not grow horns or a tail, so will he not exist as a man if he has no mind of his own.  In reality, even those who do not believe in the liberty of the individual believe in their own” (Gandhi quoted in Iyer 1973: 115).  Thus Gandhi identifies being a free individual with having “a mind of [one’s] own.”   Iyer sheds further light on the significance of freedom for Gandhi, and on how he saw the relationship between “freedom and “mind.”  Iyer writes, “Individual freedom alone, he [Gandhi] argued, can make a man voluntarily surrender himself to the service of society; if freedom is wrested from him, man becomes an automaton and society is ruined”  (1973: 114). 

Here Gandhi is not advocating the kind of individualism that is commonly held up as a Western ideal.  Iyer writes, “Whereas Western individualism emerged in modern urban society and is bound up with the doctrine of natural rights, Gandhi’s individualism derived from the concept of dharma or natural obligations which held together the traditional rural communities of ancient Indian civilization” (1973: 115).  Iyer further expounds upon this distinction:

Those who, like Hegel, hold that society and the State are prior to the individual use the word `individual’ in a special sense –to mean a self-conscious moral person.  They argue that men become self-conscious and moral only in society, where they can acquire the concepts which enable them to be objects of thought and criticism to themselves.  To Gandhi, on the other hand, the human soul is autonomous in society because it is an integral part of the rational and moral order of nature.   Traditionally, Vedic thought bequeathed the belief that man lives in a wider society that embraces all the creatures and deities of the universe, and consequently a strong individualism developed in the context of Indian society.  There has been a repeated exhortation in the Indian tradition that man should rise above society, and while social virtues are necessary in social life, they must be ultimately transcended by the individual (1973: 117).[xviii]

The dilemmas of the West thus appear in a considerably different light when seen by Gandhian eyes.  Trusteeship and service (sharing and cooperation) come to be seen as the very aims, the manifestations, the results and the essences, of the freedom of the liberated soul.

On Cooperation and Sharing: A Perspective from Robert Axelrod

 

Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation is one of many works that start from the premise that people are self-interested egoists, who seek to find and use the strategies that will most benefit themselves.  Axelrod states, “From an individual’s point of view, the object is to score as well as possible over a series of interactions with another player who is also trying to score well”  (1984:109).[xix]  Axelrod argues that cooperation among egoists can come about, can become a stable practice, and can resist invasion by non-cooperating “meanies” who might seek to move in and take advantage of the cooperators.  If it turns out that in reality people are not complete egoists, then so much the better.  Then there will be even more cooperation.  But Axelrod is among those who think it important to make a case for cooperation developing even among purely self-interested actors, whose decisions are wholly unaffected by the welfare or the suffering of others.

His argument can be thought of as having two stages, each of which is elaborate.  The first stage is a series of computer simulations, in which strategies are tested to see which yields the highest payoff to the player using that strategy.   A set of formal assumptions defines the mathematical game being played.   The second stage is a series of reports from the real world, with which Axelrod seeks to show that the mathematical results of the computer simulations are consistent with what actually happens in practice.

The formal assumptions that define the mathematical game are, in brief, the following:

1. The game is played round-robin in pairs, with each actor (i.e., each strategy, because the actors are defined by the strategies they employ) facing one opposing party in a match consisting of a series of encounters, or moves.

 

2. At each encounter, each actor can either cooperate with the other, or defect.

 

3. At each encounter, each actor decides what to do without knowing what the other will do.

 

4. However, after the first encounter, each actor knows what his opponent just did, and what the opponent did in all the previous moves of the same match.

 

5. If you choose to cooperate, and the other defects, then you are a sucker and you get 0 points.

 

6. If you defect, and the other cooperates, then you win big and get 5 points.

 

7. If you cooperate, and the other cooperates, then you both win, and each gets 3 points.

 

8. If you defect, and the other defects, then each gets 1 point.

 

Within the framework of the formal model some of whose main features we have briefly summarized, experts on game theory were invited to submit strategies, i.e., computer programs defining decision rules that would designate what move an actor would make, never knowing the opponent’s current intentions, always knowing the history of the opponent’s prior moves in the match.  Axelrod then ran a series of computer simulations, in which each strategy took a turn being pitted against each other strategy.  The winner was the strategy that garnered the highest number of points overall, i.e., the sum of all the points scored when paired with each of the others. 

The winner of the tournament, and also the winner of nearly all of a series of follow up tournaments, was a strategy called Tit For Tat, submitted by Professor Anatol Rapoport (1974a) of the University of Toronto.   The Tit For Tat strategy has the following characteristics:

1. It always cooperates at the first encounter of a match.

2. It is nice.  It is never the first to defect.

3. It can be provoked.  If the opposing player defects, then it retaliates by defecting on the next move.

4. It is forgiving.  If the other player cooperates, then Tit For Tat cooperates on the next move, regardless of what the other player’s prior history of defections may have been.

5. It is not envious.  It does not seek to best the other player, but rather seeks to maximize its own score.

6.  It is simple.   It is easy to predict its actions, because it always does whatever the other player did on the immediately preceding move.

Tit For Tat's success as a strategy was amazingly robust.  It succeeded in eliciting cooperation from the other party on a regular basis, regardless of what strategy the other party was using.  Consequently, it and its opponent each scored 3 points for cooperation on nearly every move.  This did not mean that Tit For Tat bested its immediate opponent, but it did mean that when the tournament scores were added up, Tit For Tat had the highest total score.

The second stage of Axelrod’s argument is to bring together empirical evidence from many fields in an attempt to show that the superiority of the Tit For Tat strategy is echoed, if not exactly repeated, in the real world.  One of Axelrod’s most striking examples is that of Allied soldiers facing German soldiers in the front line trenches in France during World War I.   Sociological studies have established that where the same military units faced each other for a long time, they developed a cooperative relationship such that neither shelled the other.   He quotes a British soldier, “Mr. Bosche ain’t a bad fellow.  You leave ‘im alone; he’ll leave you alone” (1984: 81).[xx]

Axelrod finds, both in theory and in practice, that a cooperative strategy like Tit For Tat will become generally adopted whenever actors can anticipate frequent future encounters with the same other parties.  He states, “The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship”  (1984:182).  It is therefore desirable, whenever cooperation is desirable, to arrange institutions so that people regularly encounter the same other people.  It is also desirable for people to know Axelrod’s theory of cooperation, so that by consciously following a strategy like Tit For Tat (with a few amendments for special circumstances) they can accelerate cooperation’s evolution.

As a footnote to The Evolution of Cooperation, it is worth noting that Professor Anatol Rapoport, who submitted the winning tournament entry, came to believe that world peace and justice could not be achieved solely by strategic thinking of any kind, not even by the relatively benign kind represented by Tit For Tat.  Rapoport, who was for many years the world’s leading authority on game theory, came to believe that strategic thinking ought to be complemented by thinking more closely identified with dialogue and with normative ideology, which he called “debate.”[xxi]

 

 

On Cooperation and Sharing: A Perspective from Mother Teresa

 

 

We feel very close to Mother Teresa.   Her God is our God.  We speak of her in the present tense because she is alive, because Jesus is alive. We quarrel with her constantly.

Our quarrel with Mother Teresa has nothing to do with any disapproval of her work.  We have nothing but praise for her.  What upsets us is our fear that she has a low opinion of us.  She writes, “If there are people who feel that God wants them to change the structure of society, that is something between them and their God”  (Mother Teresa 1985: 97).  We quarrel especially with the phrase “their God.”   It makes it sound as though social change activists and philosophers have a different God, “their God.”   We want it to be the same God, “our God.”  We resist the third person plural and insist on the first person plural. 

We quarrel with Mother when she writes, “I was at a meeting of the Superiors General in Europe.  They talked only of changing the structures of society, organizing things in a different way.  It all came to nothing.   It did not do something for the poor, or preach Christ to those without religion, to those totally ignorant of God”  (Ibid.: 31).

If it were true that nothing has ever come of efforts to achieve structural change, then we would say that we must redouble our efforts.  If the principle causes of the misery that the Missionaries of Charity relieve have so far proven to be unmovable, then it is time now to move them.  We want to throw in the face of Mother Teresa the words of Hjalmar Branting, the first socialist prime minister of Sweden, who said that if Christians were honest, they would be socialists.[xxii]  But Mother Teresa’s remark is not true.  It is not true that efforts to remedy the deep structural defects of modern society have always come to nothing.  Howard Richards is reminded of the words of a client of his law office who had to undergo expensive spinal surgery, which was paid for out of her deceased husband’s pension as a General Motors retiree.  She said to him from her hospital bed, “Thank God for the AF of L CIO.”

We want to disregard the occasional words found in Mother Teresa’s writings that appear to disparage people who work for social change.   Perhaps it was a slip of the pen when she wrote “their” and meant “our.”  Perhaps she was unconsciously defensive, feeling that she needed to defend herself against people who disparage her vocation.  We want to say that she was more truly herself when she wrote, “It is so beautiful that we complete each other!  What we are doing in the slums, maybe you cannot do.  What you are doing in the level where you are called--in your family life, in your college life, in your work--we cannot do.  But you and we together are doing something beautiful for God” (1985: 41).  

Our quarrels with Mother Teresa turn on the phrase “the structure of society.”   The idea of “sharing,” on the other hand, is common ground.   About sharing she says:

 

Share, as the mother of a starving Hindu family did, who, when we took her some food, immediately took half of it to the hungry Muslims next door (Ibid.: 33-34).

I did not bring more rice that night because I wanted them to enjoy the joy of giving, the joy of sharing.  You should have seen the faces of those little ones!  They just understood what their mother did.  Their faces were brightened up with smiles.  When I came in, they looked hungry, they looked so miserable, but the act of their mother taught them what true love was (Ibid.: 78).

A gentleman asked me: “What should we do to remove poverty from India?”  I answered, “When you and I learn to share with them. . .” (Ibid.: 54).

People are beginning to get more concerned and more anxious to share their help.  In Calcutta, for example, we have many more people ...who come on a regular basis just to do the humble work: to wash, to wash clothes, to cook meals, to feed the people (Ibid.: 88).

Mother Teresa writes few words and speaks mainly with actions.  We think it is legitimate to accept some articulations of the principles that guide her actions, found not in Mother’s own words, but in the words of Eileen Egan, one of her biographers.  Egan is a person who, as a representative of Catholic Relief Services, brought much of the food which the Missionaries of Charity distributed, a person who spent a great deal of time with Mother.  Egan writes, “Mother Teresa seemed to follow an old maxim that the good that is possible is obligatory.  She and her Sisters were obliged to do everything possible for the poorest and weakest; they were not paralyzed by the thought of what they could not do” (1985: 49).  She also writes, “For Mother Teresa, there was no break between the apprehension of a need and an action to meet that need, however small that action might be”  (Ibid.: 61). 

Back to our quarrel, what is a social structure?   It is a rule, otherwise known as a principle, or a norm.  The word “structure” is most likely to be used when the rule is a fundamental principle that organizes the life of a society.  Mother Teresa does not live according to the rules, the structures, of modern commercial society.  She lives according to the principle of love, the rules of cooperation and sharing.  Far from being an opponent of structural change, she is structural change.

However, as conservative social philosophers like Ludwig von Mises (1951) and Friedrich Hayek (1935; 1976) have emphasized, in the course of making arguments that capital accumulation and therefore capitalism are inevitable and indispensable, and as Marx acknowledged in his Critique of the Gotha Program, very often the most efficient way to meet needs is to go the long way around.[xxiii]  Under modern industrial conditions, the break between the apprehension of the need and the completion of action to meet that need may be years, or even decades.  For example, to supply a large city with clean water, or with electricity, it is often necessary to make plans many years in advance, and to carefully calculate the resources required to carry out the project at each stage of its development.  Capital investments are often made long before there is any product or payback.

Finding ways to put into practice norms of cooperation and sharing under modern industrial conditions is the challenge of social democracy.