File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-22.073, message 5


From: Rahul Mahajan <zeynept-AT-turk.net>
Subject: M-I: Game theory 3
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 22:35:01 +0200


Giving the devil his due:

As I stated earlier, the problem which is represented by the Prisoner's
Dilemma is one of the most fundamental, if not the most fundamental,
problems facing those who are trying to build a better world. This fact is,
I think, known to anyone with even the most marginal experience in trying to
win people over politically. As I also attempted to establish, the analysis
of the game does not give us any results that are really concrete and
unambiguous. Anything that you can get out of the analysis you can get as
well out of common sense.  A similar example from political science involves
utility-based models of why people vote: you weigh the utility cost to a
person of voting versus the probability that her vote will change the result
of the election (multiplied by the utility benefit to her of the changed
result), but the chance of a single vote's changing the result is so small,
that in order to get a positive utility for voting (which you need, because
the fact is that some people, at least, vote), you have to posit a utility
benefit merely for the act of voting. In other words, people vote because
they like to vote. An archetypical example of the stunning profundity of
bourgeois social science. The models they set up to explain behavior either
give the wrong result or have to be modified by ad hoc introduction of
mechanisms that, at best, crudely recapitulate the results of common sense,
and, at worst, like in the voting model above, trivialize the analysis to a
degree almost unamiginable to anyone not in possession of an advanced degree.

Even so, the problem, as stated above, remains, and cannot be circumvented
merely by an invocation of solidarity, selflessness, revolutionary ardor, or
whatever else. The fact is that people who are willing to fight are, in
almost all situations, in a small minority, and we see little sign of that
changing. Even under a future socialist order, this fact will have to be
taken into account. I have great hope for, if not necessarily faith in, the
possibility of the creation of the new human (pace Che) under socialism, but
it is throughly untenable to claim that everyone will be a cooperator in any
case. I think we have progressed well beyond the determinist fantasies of
the early 20th century, when people ranging from revolutionary communists to
conservative bourgeois social scientists thought that human behavior could
be molded into any form desired by creation of the proper environment. We
know now that the interaction between individual and environment is much
more complicated and cannot be reduced to either a biological or a cultural
determinism or even to a crude 80% of this, 20% of that sum.

One of the reasons for the rise of repressive mechanisms in all socialist
countries to date, in addition to imperialism, internal power plays, what
have you, is the fact that the socialism that was conceived was vulnerable
to the defection, to put it in Prisoners' Dilemma terms, of even a small
number of members of society. This seemed at the time to necessitate some
combination of state repression and reintroduction of capitalist relations
in order to deal with it -- thus, we get phenomena like the NEP or the
institution of piece-rates in many industries in the Soviet Union around
1930. Of course, part of the solution of "free-rider" problems is
ideological, but a society that is to be non-repressive, physically and
ideologically, must be stable under the defection of a substantial minority
of people -- reducing the number of defectors to zero will always require
more repression than it's worth. I have little faith in any attempts to work
out how to do this in abstract models unconnected with real practice, but
it's a consideration that anyone who works toward socialism should always
have somewhere in the back of her mind. 

Rahul



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