Well written mini phreek. However, your answer does leave a few holes that Horten was able to attack upon. So I will provide the necessary information to cover the two major topics in this forum: “Greed” and “Laziness”
But communism motivates the people to become lazy and motivates the productive to seek their fortunes elsewhere!
As for ‘lazy,’ it is a contention that everybody is somewhat of a procrastinator. When we are born, we usually want to do our own thing whenever we want to. But, as an essential part of indoctrination (condition was phreek said), that we begin to love work. Yes but work without any rewards?
"It’s an article of faith for most of us that rewards promote better performance.
But a growing body of research suggests that this law is not nearly as ironclad as was once thought. Psychologists have been finding that rewards can lower performance levels, especially when the performance involves creativity. A related series of studies shows that intrinsic interest in a task - the sense that something is worth doing for its own sake - typically declines when someone is rewarded for doing it.
If a reward - money, awards, or winning a contest - comes to be seen as the reason one is engaging in an activity, that activity will be viewed as less enjoyable in its own right.
With the exception of some behaviorists who doubt the very existence of intrinsic motivation, these conclusions are now widely accepted among psychologists. Taken together, they suggest we may unwittingly be squelching interest and discouraging innovation among workers, students and artists.
The recognition that rewards can have counter-productive effects is based on a variety of studies, which have come up with such findings as these: Young children who are rewarded for drawing are less likely to draw on their own that are children who draw just for the fun of it. Teenagers offered rewards for playing word games enjoy the games less and do not do as well as those who play with no rewards. Employees who are praised for meeting a manager’s expectations suffer a drop in motivation." - Boston Globe
It’s not that socialism and communism offer no motivation to be productive; it’s a combination of two factors – we still need a lot of stuff done by people, that virtually nobody would want to do (i.e. toilet cleaning), and our society is configured to discourage human self-actualization in Maslowian sense. However, if you look at one large subculture – Free Software – you will see an example of culture that works on just those principles. Such a structure cannot be universalized yet, but it may very well be a glimpse of things to come in a communist society.
Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much
[ This Message was edited by: TG Moses VI on 2002-04-11 00:16 ]
