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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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