Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

204 What To Make of Ityou may never see, let alone admire. Although your supervisormay repeatedly remind you to speed output and keepcosts down, you will not be invited to reflect on the joys anddignity of work.Points well taken. But they need to be laundered andshrunk. They derive from memories of a society of self-subsistingfamilies, their implements designed and fabricatedby members of the family. The complaints point to consequencesof large-scale social cooperation, not consequencesof a market system. Compare again communist systems.Supervisors and managers? Of course. Setting standards ofquality and cost, whether low or high, to which workersmust accede? Of course. Not seeing and claiming the finishedproduct? The same as in a market system. Opportunityfor and encouragement of reflection on the meaning ofwork and life? Perhaps in utopia, but not in any recent orcontemporary nonmarket system that we know.The most conclusive refutation of the degradation-ofworkthesis puts all these considerations aside and simplypoints to attitudes toward work in premarket societies. ToAristotle, labor was degrading, a judgment dominant intothe nineteenth century, as illustrated in English upper-classcontempt for both work and trade. It is only with the rise ofthe market system that the contempt begins to die away.Market EthicsAs they move toward market systems, China and Russiaare laying down a record of corruption, elite greed, and businesspractices not easily distinguished from gangsterism.Since the abuses seem to exceed those of established marketsystems, one may consider dismissing them as transitory.And one may find some of their sources in the inade-