This essay is a rejoinder to the essay Deconstructing Balanced Job Complexes by Mark Evans.

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The following is a brief (not a book) but a long (not a tweet) reply to Mark Evans regarding his critique of balancing jobs for empowerment. I assume he sent his piece to RU hoping to prod discussion and since I always support that intent, but I have not yet seen any ensuing discussion, I am following up. I will try, however, to make this stand-alone readable. The issues are important, however, so please forgive me for trying to cover all aspects of Mark’s concerns which I could not do in a brief note. 

Evans notes that Hahnel and Albert a) Pay very close attention to a particular criterion, the empowerment effects of jobs, as a means to assess the impact of jobs on class relations. b) Claim that if jobs overwhelmingly allot to some employees empowering tasks and overwhelmingly allot to other employees disempowering tasks, then among other inequities the employees with the empowering jobs will determine outcomes and the employees with the disempowering jobs will be left to follow instructions. And c) Argue that “b” holds not only in capitalism but also in what has been called twentieth century centrally planned and market socialism so that a revolution can remove capitalists but maintain a ruling coordinator (empowered) class above a subordinate working (disempowered) class. And I agree with Mark that indeed Hahnel and I do all that.

Evans says he has three criticisms of our views. First, Hahnel and Albert use “black and white” thinking. That is, we say society has only two choices when it comes to the division of labour. Society can 1) choose the corporate division of labor and accompanying class division or can 2) choose balanced job complexes and accompanying classlessness. 

Evan’s didn’t quote either Hahnel or I saying that those were the only options which is not surprising since other possibilities include, among others, that society could have every job include a little of everything. Or could apportion tasks to jobs randomly or even alphabetically. Or could apportion tasks to jobs to minimize time required to do each job. Evans also doesn’t quote us saying that no other institutions affect class division, presumably since we say the opposite with diverse examples. But he is correct that we do say having a corporate division of labor produces class division whereas having balanced jobs promotes classlessness.

Insofar as I am aware, however, our actual “way of thinking” about attaining classlessness and particularly the divsion of labor was to 1) look for what attributes of workplace (or other) economic arrangements cause class division; 2) see that having some people own means of production and others own only their ability to do work causes class division; and 3) see that having some employees do overwhelmingly empowering tasks while others do overwhelmingly disempowering tasks also causes class division. 

Regarding ownership, Hahnel and I indicated why the rejected ownership relations yield capitalists who take profits on the one hand and employees who sell their ability to work for wages on the other hand and we described, as have os many others, the relations that develop between them. Regarding division of labor, which is more germane here, we built on old anarchist insights but also more recent insights from Barbara and John Ehrenreich, and added some observations of our own to show why what we call a corporate division of labor yields coordinators who issue instructions on the one hand and workers who carry out instructions on the other hand and we tried to discern and explore the relations that develop between the two. Beyond how jobs are defined, we also saw and sought to show how existing modes of remuneration, decision making, allocation by markets or central planning, corporatized schooling, class imposed upbringing, and corporate culture abet or even themselves generate a coordinator/worker class division and we sought visionary replacements for each. Was that “Black and white thinking”?

With those clarifications out of the way, I quite agree with Evans that sometimes to look at a situation and see only black and white and no gradations in between, or to see only good and bad and no gradations in between—or more generally to see that all possibilities worth addressing are only “type one” or “type two” and rule out as impossible or inconsequential all other types, say types three or four, can be seriously damaging when the ruled out types three and four have important effects. In any event, I think Evans is saying that by strenuously focusing on empowering and disempowering tasks Hahnel and I likely ignored some other important factors whose absence then led us to wrong conclusions. That is certainly a possibility, but did it happen?

Did we use “dichotomous, divisive and unrealistic thinking” that failed to take into account an important other source or sources of class division? If so, Evans would be right to look further to see if our doing that led us to propose balanced jobs despite that they would fail to avoid class division. Or, for that matter, led us to miss some other innovation that would better avoid class division? So was our thinking “an example of what is commonly understood to be a cognitive distortion that can often lead to emotional disturbances”? I guess this was worth Evans asking because if it was the case, perhaps potential readers shouldn’t investigate our conclusions, but instead run for the hills. 

At any rate, thus far in his critique, Evans didn’t yet show, nor did he even try to show that balanced jobs aren’t needed for classlessness or that there is some better step to take to attain classlessness in place of seeking balanced jobs. Rather, so far, he only suggested one or the other such failing might exist because, contrary to my experience of it, our thinking was severely “black and white.” But Evans has two more criticism sections so perhaps that is where he will show what we actually left out and, as a result of leaving it out, what we got wrong.

Next Evans says Hahnel and I make an “unjustified simplifying assumption.” This claim matters, he says, because, “If we get our simplifying assumptions wrong then our vision will be distorted.” I almost agree but for stickler-level accuracy his sentence should have ended “may be distorted,” and, yes, in such cases that is certainly possible, though not inevitable. 

For example, suppose you assumes the sun, moon, and earth are points in space, not huge balls of Hydrogen and Helium plus relatively little other stuff. If so, you assume something that is false and you could on that account get some subsequent deductions wrong. On the other hand, your gross simplification could be very helpful, and even essential, for various other purposes. So Evans is right that we should be careful to not ignore things that greatly matter to what we want to understand.

Consider a second, far more relevant example. Suppose a movement assumes that only differences in ownership can yield class divisions. The movement might then fail to see—because it has conceptually a priori ruled it out—any other cause of class division. As a result, while that movement’s vision for a better economy might smartly address the class-creating problem of ownership, having restricted its own awareness by its initial assumption, it might not even notice the class-creating problem of a skewed allocation of empowering tasks. The movement might even settle on an economic vision that mistakenly retains a never-discussed horribly skewed distribution of empowering tasks (and central planning or markets) and a derivative class division even against the desires of most of the movement’s own members. 

Neither example is hypothetical. Astronomers often assume stars and planets are point masses and twentieth century socialism has repeatedly claimed that only ownership relations produce class division and has in turn repeatedly ignored a horribly skewed allocation of empowering tasks as a source of class division. In other words, twentieth century socialism displayed exactly the kind of failing that Evans has in mind and as a result wound up entrenching a coordinator class over a working class. It would certainly be ironic if after so emphasizing that failing, as we repeatedly have done, Hahnel and I had fallen into an even partially analogous failing. But did we? 

Evans says that despite that he knows how bothered by 20th century socialism Hahnel and I have been, nonetheless, we made the same type of mistake. We didn’t address pre-work education’s role in creating class division and for that reason we missed that to renovate education could obviate the need to balance jobs for empowerment. Additionally, Evans says, we didn’t take into account that technological innovations could reduce the volume of disempowering tasks in a future economy. And finally, Evans says we didn’t consider that people might have different attitudes toward more rote and repetitive activities or toward more empowering ones—for example, they might have in the future more respect for the former than people now have. 

Well, Evans is right that in the eight lines that he quoted to set out our views we didn’t address those matters. But he was wrong to conclude (assume?, assert?) that beyond those eight lines we didn’t address those matters. 

In reverse order, regarding his third instance of our simplifying away an important factor—attitudes toward work—instead we noted that in what we call coordinator economies slogans and assertions that “the farmer feeds us all” and the assembler is “the salt of the earth” and formulations like those were proposed to change people’s attitudes. This was done, however, without addressing and seeking to change the underlying division of labor, much less naming and explicitly seeking to end the coordinator class versus working class hierarchy. We noted that predictably the slogans didn’t alter that those with disempowering circumstances steadily became increasingly subordinate to those with empowering circumstances who in turn became increasingly domineering. And we have also noted that the same can be seen in isolated experiments of worker-controlled co-ops or occupied factories which, however, mistakenly retain the old division of labor. 

The point is that to urge the oppressed to admire the oppressor and even to urge the oppressor to respect the oppressed, supposing that we leave the oppressive conditions between them unchanged, changes little. Thus, while I would agree with Evans that it is good to seek new attitudes consistent with new jobs, I would disagree that doing so can substitute for explicitly seeking those new jobs.

Regarding Evans’ second point, which is that we ignore technological innovation, again if we look beyond the eight quoted lines it turns out that we show how balanced jobs plus equitable remuneration, and participatory planning in fact yield incentives to technologically replace disempowering with empowering and also painful with pleasant tasks whenever doing so would yield overall preferred outcomes. We also contrast this to how economic institutions in capitalism and in coordinatorism yield opposite incentives. But unless changes in technology optimistically leave only empowering tasks, or sadly leave only disempowering tasks, so that in each case the technical changes eliminate a corporate division of labor, referring to technology doesn’t identify something we have ignored, nor would changed technology obviate our need to balance jobs. Instead, the reverse is true, if we balance jobs and get rid of the associated class division so as to have classless institutions, then technological innovation on behalf of populations and not elites will flourish.

Maybe Evans is saying even without parallel or prior social change, technology may so diminish the number of disempowering or of empowering tasks left for humans as to impact the needed scale of effort to attain job balance so that we won’t need to overly emphasize the social need to actively seek balanced jobs. To my ears, this is rather like the not so long ago formulations that social media would yield participatory democracy. But, in any case, Evans still hasn’t suggested that a corporate division of labor doesn’t create a coordinator/worker class division. And he hasn’t suggested that balancing jobs wouldn’t help remove that cause of class division. For these reasons, at this point in reading his criticisms I found myself wondering if Evans mainly thinks it would be desirable to go at the question of class without referring to the corporate division of labor, the coordinator/worker class distinction, and job balancing—as well as the associated need to elevate workers in activist planing, activity, and organization, and thereby simultaneously guard against elevating coordinators too often and too aggressively. Perhaps, I wondered, he very strongly feels those desires and they have led to some shortcuts in trying to argue against seeking balanced jobs.

Be that as it may, Evans continued to suggest that we will make mistakes due to our faulty thinking, this time the fault being that we make what he deems unjustified assumptions. But what assumptions? We say the empowerment effects of jobs can and have generated class division and class rule, but this claim was not for us, or for early anarchists, or for the Ehrenreich’s, ever an assumption. It was and it remains something to very carefully demonstrate. So I wonder if Evans will clarify why our claim is false and what consequential mistake we have made due to the claim being false, and, for that matter, even in what sense any of our claims were ever simply assumed. 

But I have to say that while I think (and I hope) that while all the above is worthwhile for clarifying certain issues, I think it is all secondary to Evans’ main argument because I think Evans mainly sees education as the key factor that we ignore. And that would be fair enough, except that again, we don’t ignore education at all. Not even a little. 

We argue, for example, that if society, or in particular an economy, needs people to have certain attributes its educational institutions will tend to produce in people those attributes. So, with a corporate division of labor, schools will need to graduate prospective employees who are either prepared to rule or resigned to obey. Indeed, in general, if their pre-work lives give people skills, inclinations, and desires contrary to those their society’s roles will require of them, there will be ineffective participation in those roles or there will be resistance and conflict that seeks to change either the schooling or the roles. And indeed, this type observation holds for economic and for other entrenched social roles and the people who must carry them out. 

On the other hand, we also emphasize that when thinking about a transformed economy with balanced jobs and classlessness, it’s schools would need to graduate prospective employees with diverse proclivities, skills, and knowledge but all of whom expect to and are prepared to have influence, exert their abilities, and participate in decisions. And for that, they would need to have the type of participatory, liberating education we and to my knowledge all advocates of participatory economics and balanced jobs have sought to envision and advocate. So I am not sure why Evans thinks we ignored education.

But I admit and even emphasize that even with that corrective, Evans raises a fair and revealing question. What if a movement wins liberating education for all but foregoes specifically seeking balanced jobs to replace corporate defined jobs? I think that Evans is suggesting that in that case, even without directly advocating and winning balanced jobs, all will be well. Winning better education for all will produce and sustain classlessness. And if that is true, he argues, then we would not need to talk about and try to win balanced jobs.

But if Evans does think that, then I am not sure in which of two ways he thinks all will be well, or, if he thinks in neither of those ways, but thinks there is some third way, what that might be. In the first way, Evans might be saying that universally participatory educated employees will on entering workplaces easily and successfully redefine jobs so that all incoming employees are able to utilize and maintain their capacities, remain confident, have sufficient knowledge of their workplaces to contribute wisely to decision making, and have access to means and have time to be self managing, all without settling for having some who command and others who obey. In short, they will create balanced jobs for themselves without having to struggle to overcome old ways. Or two, even with say twenty percent of jobs still including all the empowering tasks and eighty percent including only disempowering tasks, with fully liberatory education for all there won’t be any class hierarchy, nor will one emerge, because, well—here I honestly don’t know why. Perhaps Evans has in mind that everyone will know they are themselves knowledgeable, confident, and so on, and eighty percent won’t mind doing work that doesn’t utilize their capacities and in fact subverts them, while others do jobs that not only utilize such capacities but also decide, design, and define what the eighty percent do.

In any event, knowing I will disagree, I think to find a contradiction Evans quotes us as saying that “the parts which compose whole [societies] interrelate to help define one another, even though each often appears to have an independent and even contrary existence.” And so, quoting us again, “we should expect interdependence and only introduce simplifying assumptions that deny the importance of interconnections when such assumptions are carefully justified.”

Okay, I take for granted that I did write those words, though sadly I am too old to remember doing so. On the other hand, I do agree with their point. And indeed, I think they urge the kind of thinking evidenced in the bi-directional connection that we describe between pre-work education and the requirements and consequences of work roles, as well as in our approach to the multi-way causal intersection of key spheres of social life each with the rest, including, of course, each with the economy and vice versa.

Still, Evans wisely and now very explicitly says, “The question that I would like to consider now is, are there any unjustified simplifying assumptions in the above scenarios that Albert and Hahnel present as part of their argument for BJCs?” And I agree this is a good question to ask in order to perhaps find some mistake made in the argument for balancing jobs except that the “two scenarios” he is talking about are Evans’, not ours. 

But nit-picking aside, Evans rightly adds, “One way of testing for possible unjustified simplifying assumptions is to (re)introduce a factor that has been abstracted out of the picture… For example, we might consider the effect a participatory education system might have on the scenarios used by Albert and Hahnel as a starting point for their argument for BJCs.” 

So, okay, I will ignore that our actual starting point for thinking about balanced jobs was the world that people live in and its history of class division and class struggle, as well as 20th century socialism, as well as co-ops, etc., and not two four line quotations, because I think Evans has in mind, as anticipated above, that if we have a population that enters an economy’s workplaces that has undergone upbringing and schooling that prepares them all for exercising self management, then to explicitly balance jobs as a separate much less a defining and highly focussed task would not be necessary because its sought effect would already be attained. As Evans puts it, “What we would see, as a result of a participatory education system, is a workplace full of confident, competent and civilized workers able to engage in both the work of their chosen area of expertise and self-management.” 

To address this, but not give even a momentary appearance of assuming that we can have full fledged participatory education for all in capitalism (or in coordinatorism) without at least having developed movements attuned to the need to balance jobs and to end corporate divisions of labor and that fight for and defend such gains, I will instead imagine that a workforce with such training and resultant qualities is magically transported from Ursula Le Guin’s envisioned Moon in her great novel The Disposed, to our current earth. Suppose we consider day one, when this set of people arrives at various current workplaces. Then what? 

Well, they would encounter jobs about a fifth of which would be overwhelmingly empowering and four fifths of which would be overwhelmingly disempowering, not to mention encountering people who think that is the way work has to be organized and who want it to stay that way. I would suggest, and I would guess that Evans would likely agree, that the Le Guin transplants would reject the jobs as offered to them, and in fact be horrified at their barbarity, and would then fight to redefine them to be balanced. On the other hand, if the Le Guin transplants entered a particular workplace where there were already balanced jobs, they’d be all set, which is why balanced jobs call for just the kind of education Evan’s and I both favor.

Okay, but what does that show? Evans favors and we describe in a great many places and also indicate the necessity of what we tend to call participatory education. We favor it partly on its own merits but also not least to avoid having balanced jobs but a workforce that is ill prepared do those jobs. So yes, if incoming employees are ready for and expect to do work consistent with their liberatory training and expectations and to meet their human desires, but instead encounter workplaces where a relative few have space to do empowering tasks, make decisions, set agendas, etc., but most have space only to obey and carry out instructions—that is, if they encounter an unchallenged, unaddressed, unchanged corporate division of labor—then they will want to redefine the jobs they encounter because, well, who is going to choose to set aside their preparedness and accept subordination? 

And indeed, this hypothetical picture is not entirely fanciful. Rather it was true of quite a number of people in the Sixties, including myself, who partly due to some better education and more so due to some sadly temporary cultural changes, upon encountering capitalist options, went more or less ballistic at their barbarity.

So does that mean Evans is correct? To win classlessness we don’t need to overturn the corporate division of labor? We don’t need to propose and fight for balanced jobs? We don’t need to identify the class division arising from a horribly skewed distribution of empowering tasks? We don’t need to build our movements to consciously seek to avoid arriving at coordinatorism so as to instead arrive at classlessness? Can we skip all that and just revolutionize schooling?

If Evans is saying that fighting for worthy education is part of fighting to balance jobs and to win a better economy and better society, I of course agree. But if he wants to assume that the education battle is won and the graduates enter a world of work that still has a corporate division of labor and that the entering employees would leave it in place, I have two problems. 1) In this assumed hypothetical I claim they would instead fight to dismantle the old division of labor and put in its place balanced jobs. But if we take the claim seriously, 2) it includes, ironically, a faulty simplifying assumption. It leaves out the economy-impacts-education side of the relation between the economy and education to address only, in part, the education-impacts-economy side. That is, there is no chance a movement will reconstruct education as Evans and I would celebrate but not have run into and had to address the class division between coordinators and workers and in particular the belief of defenders of existing education that it should not be changed because it is just what it should be to provide existing economy what existing economy needs—a workforce four fifths of whom have been mainly taught to endure boredom and take orders, and one fifth of whom have been taught to dominate workplace decision making.

So I agree with Evans that revolutionizing education is incredibly important, of course, but I also urge that the idea that movements will do that to completion while there is no movement to revolutionize work to welcome a self management-ready new workforce is unreal. Instead education innovation and for that matter activist organizing more broadly will be sought in light of largely parallel desires for classlessness and other liberatory aims as well, just as classlessness and other liberatory aims will be sought on behalf of benefiting enlightened emerging students. But there will be a struggle over every key key aspect of all such changes, including over skewed distribution of empowering tasks just as over skewed distribution of productive property, and also skewed definition of familial, cultural, and political roles to eliminate all of it as well as all other sources of class and also race, gender, and power hierarchies. 

Evans has more. He says we ignore polity, though in fact we carefully reject current polity and more to the point we carefully favor what we call participatory polity and we extensively discuss its interface with economy and vice versa. Also, Evans says we ignore the possibility of legislation bearing upon economy, though here too we certainly do the opposite, including not only for vision but for short-term strategy.

So we come to a question that I wondered about as I read and now while I am reacting to Evans’ concerns. I don’t think Evans is trying to defend or protect unbalanced jobs and coordinator dominance of workers but I do get the feeling that he wants so much to avoid activists who seek a new classless economy having to directly name, think through, and especially address coordinator class dynamics, and in particular that he wants to avoid such activists having to advocate balancing jobs, that those desires fueled his critique of balancing jobs. I don’t have a lot of Evans literature to consult to check this hypothesis but I would like to suggest why, in any event, even if not him then some people may feel those concerns so strongly as to produce and cling to claims like those put forward in Evans’ essay and why I think, even if only perhaps too briefly here, that that it is a mistaken path but one that arises from a wise and fair concern that does need attention.

So what is the wise and fair concern that I think Evans and many others who want to attain classlessness have? I think Evans wants to make it, as he actually says, more difficult for anyone to claim “that balanced job complexes are an essential component of the participatory economic model” so we can fight for participatory economy and society without having to bring up, much less advocate, much less organizing in part in light of and around balancing jobs.

Consider: Roughly twenty percent of the working population is coordinator class. Suppose movements explicitly say that they want to achieve classlessness, including that they want to redefine jobs so all jobs have comparable empowerment effects. That would mean that people now doing coordinator class jobs would wind up with classlessness but also with jobs that include some disempowering tasks. The “wise and fair fear” of seeking balanced jobs and addressing the involved class relations head on is that the prospect of having to do a share of disempowering tasks may polarize twenty percent of the population against anti-capitalist change. 

Advocating and seeking balanced jobs, and taking explicit account of coordinator/worker relations in making anti-capitalist demands and in developing activist organization might be viewed by some people as, to use Evans’ phrase, “unnecessarily divisive.” “Divisive” because of the potential effect on those empowered actors in the current economy who might join an anti-capitalist movement but not one that wants to balance jobs. “Unnecessarily” because like Evans they think one can attain classlessness without risking incurring such divisive effects.

So, what is my reply to this understandable desire that I think Evans shares and that I know many others have? 

First, I agree that seeking to balance jobs and talking about harmful coordinator class inclinations and the need to remove their institutional sources can aggravate class divisions. It can cause, and in fact I think it is fair to say that it will cause some coordinators to oppose such activist efforts. 

But second, since I seek classlessness and because I believe if movements assume away these class differences thinking that they can be successfully side-stepped by one means or another, those movements will typically wind up controlled by and reflecting the styles, culture, and desires of the coordinator class. Those movements will then either fail to replace capitalism due to alienating too many workers by their coordinator inclinations  (a far bigger cost than alienating some coordinators due to seeking real worker self management) or they will garner enough support to succeed in replacing capitalism but will attain coordinatorism and not classlessness. They will anoint a new boss in place of the old boss. I prefer no bosses.

Believing all that that, I can’t ratify the understandable hope to end-run this class issue by making believe that to balance jobs isn’t critical. What I can do, is try to help find ways for seekers of classlessness to uncompromisingly pursue their rightful goal while they also seek to minimize their polarizing impact on coordinators. 

Some ways of talking, demanding, organizing, etc. are indeed unnecessarily divisive and therefore can actually impede rather than advance our winning classlessness. But the solution isn’t to not seek balanced jobs. It isn’t to avoid directly addressing coordinator/working class issues. The solution is to pursue both, but very carefully.

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