Understanding Class Solidarity: The Role of Conditional Altruism in Collective Action, Study notes of Introduction to Sociology

Download Understanding Class Solidarity: The Role of Conditional Altruism in Collective Action and more Study notes Introduction to Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Sociology RATIONALITY, SOLIDARITY AND CLASS STRUGGLE Solidarity as an Element in Class Formation Solidarity is one of the pivotal aspects of class formation, particularly for subordinate classes. I will define solidarity this way: Class solidarity refers to the willingness of individual members of a class to support the collective struggles of the class by bearing various kinds of individual costs or sacrifices. This includes both active participation -- such as joining a strike -- and what could be termed passive support -- such as not crossing a picket line. In both cases, solidarity implies a willingness on the part of individuals to bear certain kinds of individual costs in order to achieve some kind of collectively desirable goal. The capacity for workers to struggle for their class interests against capitalists hinges centrally on their ability to maintain solidarity. As Claus Offe argues, the central resource of working class organizations engaged in struggle is people, especially (but not only) their willingness to act: their time, their energy, their ability to labor and withhold labor. While financial resources of working class parties and unions may also be important, the fundamental basis of working class power is the ability to mobilize people for collective action, and this depends to a significant degree on solidarity. Understanding more systematically exactly what solidarity is and what conditions sustain or undermine it, therefore, is one of the central problems in the study of class formation. I. Solidarity and the free-rider problem Jon Elster argues that solidarity should be understood as a particular solution to what is generally called the “free rider problem.” Collective action is problematic whenever for each potential participant, there is a cost in participating in the collective action while the result of the collective action, if successful, is a “public good” which can be enjoyed by participants and non- participants alike. In these circumstances, every rational agent is tempted to be a free rider. Thus workers in a firm may have an acknowledged interest in the successful outcome of a strike, but, in view of the costs of participation, none may have an interest in personally contributing to a successful outcome, particularly since no one person’s participation will make a difference in the outcome. If all individuals reason in this way, then all will free ride and the public good will not be produced. In these circumstances, individual “utility maximizing” – to use the economists’ language -- will have produced an outcome worse (in terms of each agent’s interests) than could have come about had individuals not individually maximized utility. This kind of situation is a specific example, applied to the problem of collective action, of the “prisoner’s dilemma” game we discussed in the last lecture. Docsity.com 2 Examples of these sorts of dilemmas occur constantly in history. The “tragedy of the commons”, where each individual abuses a commonly held resource in pursuit of individual advantage with the result that everyone’s ability to benefit from the resource is reduced, is not just a theoretical story told to illustrate a point, but a pervasive historical experience as well. Social movements are constantly faced with difficulties in getting potential participants to accept the sacrifices of struggle, given that each individual’s participation is unlikely to make a decisive difference in the outcome and, if the movement succeeds, the benefits will accrue to nonparticipants as well. Yet, class struggles and other popular social movements involving considerable sacrifice on the part of participants occur throughout history. People do not universally choose to free ride on other people’s efforts. Understanding how this occurs, Elster argues, is the heart of understanding solidarity. 1 The formal structure of the free-rider problem To see how Elster develops this analysis of solidarity, it will be helpful to lay out the structure of the free rider problem somewhat more formally. I assume that this is familiar to most of you (and it is explained in the reading), so I will only quickly run through this idea. Imagine a strategic game involving two actors, “me” and “everyone else”. Each of these actors faces a simple strategic choice: whether to participate in a collective action or to abstain. For any pair of choices, there is a specific pay-off to each of the actors. The pay-offs faced by “me” are represented in the matrix below: EVERYONE ELSE Cooperates Defects Cooperates A C “ME” Defects B D 2. Three quantities defined by this table are particularly important in Elster’s analysis: A-D: the gain from cooperation, i.e. the difference between what the individual gets if everyone (including the single individual) cooperates versus everyone abstains. B-A: the gain from free-riding, i.e. the difference between what the individual gets by abstaining while everyone else cooperates versus what that individuals gets if he/she participates along with everyone else. Note: if my individual participation significantly affects the probability of success B-A could be negative. D-C: the loss from unilateralism, i.e. the loss the individual experiences by being the only person to participate in the struggle (sometimes also called the “sucker penalty”). Docsity.com 5 of this situation as one in which one gets positive utility out of cooperating along with everyone else because of ones Kantian values.] This change of preference ordering, however, does not reduce the loss from unilateralism, the costs an individual faces by “being a sucker” and engaging in struggle when “everyone else” abstains. Even without the free-rider gains, therefore, individuals will not individually choose to engage in collective action (because of the losses from unilateralism) unless they are confident that others will cooperate as well (i.e. they prefer D, universal abstention, to C, being a sucker and suffering the loss of unilateralism). This implies: Even where people hold genuinely altruistic values, collective action requires significant information about what other people will do. Nonselfish, rational behavior, will therefore generally take the form of conditional altruism rather than unconditional altruism: each individual prefers to cooperate if and only if the others can be expected to do likewise. (This is called an “Assurance Game”: you cooperate if you have assurance that others will do so as well). Elster’s Punchline: Conditional altruism constitutes the essential content of class solidarity. Class solidarity will be high when two conditions are met: (a) The preference ordering of conditional altruism is deeply held by most workers, and (b) The information conditions are present such that each worker has reasonable confidence that other workers will participate in the struggle. 3. Collective Action with Irrational Agents. There are many ways in which “irrationality” may enter into an explanation of collective action. Individuals may decide to participate in collective actions because of the irrational belief that their personal participation will actually make an important difference in the probability of success. Or they may participate out of rage, in which they make no calculations at all of the consequences or the effectiveness of their action. Or they may participate because of “wishful thinking” about the likely personal costs of participation (eg. subjectively underestimating the probability of being killed or wounded in a battle). Whether these kinds of irrational beliefs and motivations play a large or small role in explaining actual class formation and class struggle is an empirical question. They are not needed, however, to define solidarity itself. Solidarity is not a willingness to make personal sacrifices for the common good based on irrational beliefs or motivations, but rather a rational strategy for realizing certain values given rational expectations of the behavior of others. Docsity.com 6 III. Social Conditions for Solidarity The reason for elaborating the concept of solidarity as a particular kind of solution to the free rider problem is not simply for the sake of a more rigorous definition. Rather, this characterization of the strategic action problem of class solidarity is important because it helps to focus our attention on the likely factors that could explain the variability across time and place in solidarity. The claim that conditional altruism is the essential content of solidarity implies that the determinants of solidarity can be broken down into two primary categories: (1) those determinants which directly shape the preference orderings of workers, and (2) those which affect the information conditions necessary for conditional altruistic preferences to be translated into collective action. The various social factors commonly treated as important determinants of solidarity can be analyzed in these terms. Let us look briefly at three of these: the concentration and interdependence of workers in production, the stability of working class communities, and the role of leadership and organization. 1. Concentration and Interdependence of Workers. Marx emphasized the importance of the increasing concentration of workers in large factories and their growing interdependence within the labor process for increasing the likelihood of solidaristic struggles. How do these social structural changes work through the mechanisms discussed above? Increasing interdependence, it can be argued, is likely to have a particularly important effect on the preference orderings of workers, increasing the extent to which workers care about each other. Interdependence acts as a counterforce to the competitive pressures of the labor market, pressures which underwrite selfish preference orderings. Marx certainly felt that competition undermined solidarity of workers. In a passage from the German Ideology quoted by Elster, Marx writes, “Competition separated individuals from one another, not only the bourgeoisie but still more the workers, in spite of the fact that it brings them together” (quoted on p.355 in Making Sense of Marx). The division of labor within production and the accompanying interdependence of workers in what Marx sometimes calls the “Collective Worker”, would tend to produce preferences in which the welfare of coworkers became important. Increasing concentration in large factories, on the other hand, is an important determinant of solidarity not simply because it may change workers’ preferences, but also because of its impact on the information conditions for struggle. In contrast to small holding peasants dispersed throughout the countryside or workers in small shops, the concentration of workers in large factories facilitates communication among them and increases each worker’s ability to predict the behavior of others. Since conditional altruism will lead to active solidarity only when workers are reasonably confident that other workers will join the struggle, concentration facilitates solidarity by increasing the knowledge workers have of each other. Docsity.com 7 2. Community The stability of working class communities bears strongly on both conditions for solidarity. Conditional altruistic preferences do not fall from heaven; they are created and reproduced through the lived experience of reciprocities of helping and sharing in times of distress and need. Such experiences are likely to be more pervasive in communities which are basically class homogeneous than communities which have deep cleavages within them. They are also likely to be more pervasive when there is a long time horizon in which people experience such reciprocities, particularly where individual experiences are extended intergenerationally and become part of “historical memory”. Suburbanization, fragmentation of communities, high residence turnover and geographical mobility, are likely to atomize preferences and reinforce egoism by breaking this historical memory of past reciprocities and reducing the individual experiences of helping and sharing. Community structures also affect the information conditions of struggle. It takes time for people to get to know their neighbors, to be able to predict their responses to particular conditions. Newcomers to communities are often hesitant to be active participants in struggles, not just because they may care less for their neighbors, but because they have less reason to trust them (and be trusted). If there is high levels of mobility in communities, therefore, it will be harder for people to have the necessary confidence in the good faith of others to decide to participate in collective struggles. 3. Leadership, activists and organization. Marxists, particularly since Lenin, have always argued for the importance of formal organization and leadership in class struggle. The spontaneous collective actions of workers can never, by themselves, achieve sufficient coherence and capacity to transform capitalism; leadership and organization must be added to those struggles to make them effective. In addition to the obvious importance of leadership for sheer coordination of struggle, Elster emphasizes two other roles for leadership which bear directly on our analysis of solidarity: first, the effects of leadership and organization on the information conditions for collective struggle; and second, the potential importance of a core of unconditional altruists within a social movement for the movement to reach the necessary threshhold for wider participation. Leadership and organization play a particularly vital role in facilitating predictability and knowledge among potential participants in collective struggle. Elster writes: If one individual knows and is trusted by one hundred people, he can create the information conditions by two hundred transactions -- first asking each of them about their willingness to join the collective action and then telling each about the willingness of everyone else. By contrast, bilateral communication between the hundred will require about five thousand acts of communication. The information gains from leadership can be quite substantial. (Making Sense of Marx, p.366-367.) Docsity.com