Vaclav Havel -- playwright, activist, last president of Czechoslovakia, first president of the Czech Republic -- published an interview book in 1986 (published in English in 1990) called Disturbing the Peace. Here is part of his answer to So you do have a more concrete notion of a better social system after all?
"I've already admitted to having one. The traditional political debate between the right and the left revolves around the ownership of the means of production, to put it in Marxist terms: that is, around the question of whether business enterprises should be privately run or made public property. Frankly, I don't see that that is the main problem. I would put it this way: The most important thing is that man should be the measure of all structures, including economic structures, and not that man be made to measure for those structures. The most important thing is not to lose sight of personal relationships--i.e., the relationships between man and his co-workers, between subordinates and their superiors, between man and his work, between this work and its consequences, and so on.
"An economy that is totally nationalized and centralized (i.e., run by the command system), such as we're familiar with in our country [Czechoslovakia], has a catastrophic effect on all such relationships. An ever-deepening chasm opens up between man and the economic system, which is why this type of economy works so badly. Having lost his personal relationship to his work, his company, to the many decisions about the substance and the purpose of his work and its consequences, he loses interest in the work itself. The company allegedly belongs to everyone, but in reality it belongs to no one ...
"... At the same time, I don't believe that we can wave a magic wand and dispose of these problems by a change of ownership, or that all we need do to remedy the situation is bring back capitalism. The point is that capitalism, albeit on another level and not in such trivial forms, is struggling with the same problems (alienation, after all, was first described under capitalism): it is well known, for instance, that enormous private multinational corporations are curiously like socialist states; with industrialization, centralization, specialization, monopolization, and finally with automation and computerization, the elements of depersonalization and the loss of meaning in work become more and more profound everywhere. Along with that goes the general manipulation of people's lives by the system (no matter how inconspicuous such manipulation may be, compared with that of the totalitarian state). IBM certainly works better than the Skoda plant, but that doesn't alter the fact that both companies have long since lost their human dimension and have turned man into a little cog in their machinery, utterly separated from what, and for whom, that machinery is working, and what the impact of its product is on the world. I would even say that, from a certain point of view, IBM is worse than Skoda. Whereas Skoda merely grinds out the occasional obsolete nuclear reactor to meet the needs of backward COMECON members, IBM is flooding the world with ever more advanced computers, while its employees have no influence over what their product does to the human soul and to human society ... the fact that IBM is capitalist, profit-oriented, and efficient while Skoda is socialist, money-losing, and inefficient, seems secondary to me.
"Perhaps it is clearer now what kind of "systemic notions" I favor. The most important thing today is for economic units to maintain--or, rather, renew--their relationship with individuals, so that the work those people perform has human substance and meaning, so that people can see into how the enterprise they work for works, have a say in that, and assume responsibility for it. Such enterprises must have--I repeat--a human dimension: people must be able to work in them as people, as beings with a soul and a sense of responsibility, not as robots, regardless of how primitive or highly intelligent they may be. It isn't easy to find an economic expression of this indicator, but I think it's more important than all the other economic indicators we've managed to isolate so far."
* Two small notes while reading this: the comparison between large firms and socialist states reminds me of Galbraith's arguments, and I think the point about a high-producing company being potentially worse than a low-producing company is especially strong given that distribution, not production or scarcity, is the constraint in meeting basic needs today.
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