Supply and demand for primary goods: justice and productive freedom
Some goods are associated with human rights and therefore need to be accessible to the general public. Once they are rights, the responsibility for providing such goods is shared between States and society.
In an ideal situation, where all UN objectives are met, no one would be excluded from accessing such goods. But it is well-known that there are currently billions of people who are excluded from accessing those goods. Millions of millions of these people are Brazilian.
Putting it in numbers of necessary goods vs. the capacity of production of those goods, we can clearly observe that the technical conditions to change this situation and guarantee access to basic rights for all human beings already exist.
Such a situation reveals that the nature of the problem is normative. In other words, it is necessary that some of the ideas that guide global production be reformed or abandoned.
Among the various causes that we can point to the phenomenon of exclusion, the most common is to refer to distributive justice (more specifically the lack of it). However, we want to access a moment before the distribution.
A moment we believe contributes to building the (unfair) premises of the current value logistics.
What should be the origin of primary goods?
If the State has a duty to make the primary goods available (either directly or indirectly), it must have the means to determine the production of such goods. This is the question faced by Professor Lucas Stanczky, from Harvard, in the text Productive Justice.
Stanczyk suggests that the State has the means to justifiably determine the production of primary goods, for example through compulsory labor.
The justice criteria to evaluate the fairness of compulsory labor is about the distribution of the burden of production among society, and, of course, the tension between the burden and the freedom of each citizen.
The source of the author's argument is that, if the State can violate the basic liberties of its citizens in cases of an external threat without acting unfairly (war, for example), the same can also be said about internal threats like misery, hunger, etc.
Even if it immediately seems an extreme measure, compulsory work already exists in the form of restrictions on the emigration of recent graduates in strategic areas, for example.
It seems more radical than it is.
However, such an argument cannot be said to end the problem since the exclusion of primary goods continues to be a current reality. Stanczyk's text warns us that before discussing the fair allocation of primary goods, it is important to define the criterion of productive justice.
One of the most recent advances in the discussion around productive justice concerns the emergence of ReFi, DeFi, and DAOs.
It can be said that such new tools give us the opportunity to experiment with new logistic forms to produce, transport, and allocate value.
In the absence of a criterion of justice that helps us to evaluate the process of production of primary goods when discussing the distribution of them, we'll end up hostage to premises such as scarcity.
Such a premise may even be useful in the discussion on the allocation of luxury goods (or NFTs), for example, but when it comes to the allocation of primary goods, such a premise cannot receive a kind of “license” against the fact that humanity already produces more than the necessary to fully supply its need.
Take Brazil, for example, While we’re one of the largest food producers in the world, we are also home to millions of families whose children faint from hunger in schools due to lack of nutrients.
Do the poor in Brazil not contribute enough to the surplus product that makes our country a big farm that feeds the whole world?
In concrete terms, discussing productive justice means reviewing the ethical-normative aspect of how the burden of compulsory labor and the incentives to production are distributed within a society.
If we do not discuss the issues around productive justice, it can be too late and too expensive to discuss the same issues in distributive justice, because they’ll come in the form of urgent matters concerning the life of families. In that scenario, the best we will be able to provide will be palliative measures of credit or government-funded grants.
If the average Brazilian is not benefiting from the current structure of production, it is necessary that he (or she) be given the freedom to choose or build his own structure.
What the State cannot do, whether from a libertarian, classical liberal, or even Marxist perspective, is to impose on the producer/worker a structure of production that limits his potential and excludes him from enjoying the value of his own work.
The burden of the production of primary goods cannot continue to be carried mostly by the poor. It must be equally divided among all parts of society.
So everyone will be a stakeholder of the primary goods.
Productive Justice
If productive justice concerns the conditions in which the social good is constituted, it also affects the range of choices available to individuals and communities to define the form and conditions of their contribution to the social product.
As Frank Cunningham reminds us in the text Market Economies and Market Societies, while the market economy is efficient in allocating goods, a market society can be predatory in relation to any activity that is not industrial or financial.
The limit of the freedom available to producers/workers to define the value of their product is found in the organic demand for the product among the rest of society. In this way, this kind of freedom is never absolute, since its limits are constituted in economic interactions.
The arbitrary violation of such freedom can arise from two main sources: State abuse and abuse of private entities. One of the concerns of the discussion about productive freedom is how to distinguish the typical action of the State and the natural dispute of the private entities in the market from the abuses of both.
If productive justice concerns the origin of primary goods and productive freedom concerns the level of decision that each subject and community has over its production, the meeting between the two occurs in the hypothetical ideal situation.
In it, the conditions of supply of a primary good are constituted by discarding both the exclusion of access to some part of the population and the violent imposition of predatory productive structures.
In concrete terms, the normative suggestion we offer is that the Brazilian State and Market have a responsibility to ensure that experimentalism in relation to models of production and the logistics of value is not a luxury of financial elites.
Simply put: we must first consolidate a form of productive justice that prioritizes the discretion of producers, and then a form of freedom that allows producers to experiment with alternative productive structures so they can escape the currently predatory ones.
Thus, we believe that the Brazilian State will reduce the cost of managing the poverty that arises from the current structure of production. Needless to say, the current structure does not guarantee productive freedom for most producers, neither it is efficient in making primary goods available to the entire population.
I think we will be able to overcome it, not by imposing a new one that seems suitable right now, but by giving the producers the freedom to experiment with building new institutional forms to store value.
Once they have such freedom they'll not be submitted to traditional institutions from the financial market.
Instead of remedying mediocrity, we'll finally release the potential for innovation repressed by productive structures that currently alienate the producer from the value of his products.