Firstly, just to be totally clear, by the profit motive we mean money profit. As anarchists consider co-operation to be in our self-interest — i.e. we will "profit" from it in the widest sense possible — we are not dismissing the fact people usually act to improve their situation. However, money profit is a very narrow form of "self-interest," indeed so narrow as to be positively harmful to the individual in many ways (in terms of personal development, interpersonal relationships, economic and social well-being, and so on). In other words, do not take our discussion in this section of the FAQ on the "profit motive" to imply a denial of self-interest, quite the reverse. Anarchists simply reject the "narrow concept of life which consist[s] in thinking that profits are the only leading motive of human society." [Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, p. 25]
Secondly, we cannot hope to deal fully with the harmful effects of competition and the profit motive. For more information, we recommend Aflie Kohn's No Contest: The Case Against Competition and Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes. He documents the extensive evidence accumulated that disproves the "common sense" of capitalism that competition and profits are the best way to organise a society.
According to Alfie Kohn, a growing body of psychological research suggests that rewards can lower performance levels, especially when the performance involves creativity. ["Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator," Boston Globe, Monday 19 January 1987] Kohn notes that "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."
Much of the research on creativity and motivation has been performed by Theresa Amabile, associate professor of psychology at Brandeis University. One of her recent experiments involved asking elementary school and college students to make "silly" collages. The young children were also asked to invent stories. Teachers who rated the projects found that those students who had contracted for rewards did the least creative work. "It may be that commissioned work will, in general, be less creative than work that is done out of pure interest," Amabile says. In 1985, she asked 72 creative writers at Brandeis and at Boston University to write poetry.
"Some students then were given a list of extrinsic (external) reasons for writing, such as impressing teachers, making money and getting into graduate school, and were asked to think about their own writing with respect to these reasons. Others were given a list of intrinsic reasons: the enjoyment of playing with words, satisfaction from self-expression, and so forth. A third group was not given any list. All were then asked to do more writing.
"The results were clear. Students given the extrinsic reasons not only wrote less creatively than the others, as judged by 12 independent poets, but the quality of their work dropped significantly. Rewards, Amabile says, have this destructive effect primarily with creative tasks, including higher-level problem-solving. 'The more complex the activity, the more it's hurt by extrinsic reward, she said.'" [Ibid.]
In another study, by James Gabarino of Chicago's Erikson Institute for Advanced Studies in Child Development, it was found that girls in the fifth and sixth grades tutored younger children much less effectively if they were promised free movie tickets for teaching well. "The study, showed that tutors working for the reward took longer to communicate ideas, got frustrated more easily, and did a poorer job in the end than those who were not rewarded" [Ibid.]
Such studies cast doubt on the claim that financial reward is the only effective way — or even the best way — to motivate people. As Kohn notes, "[t]hey also challenge the behaviourist assumption that any activity is more likely to occur if it is rewarded." Amabile concludes that her research "definitely refutes the notion that creativity can be operantly conditioned."
These findings re-enforce the findings of other scientific fields. Biology, social psychology, ethnology and anthropology all present evidence that support co-operation as the natural basis for human interaction. For example, ethnological studies indicate that virtually all indigenous cultures operate on the basis of highly co-operative relationships and anthropologists have presented evidence to show that the predominant force driving early human evolution was co-operative social interaction, leading to the capacity of hominids to develop culture. This is even sinking into capitalism, with industrial psychology now promoting "worker participation" and team functioning because it is decisively more productive than hierarchical management. More importantly, the evidence shows that co-operative workplaces are more productive than those organised on other principles. All other things equal, producers' co-operatives will be more efficient than capitalist or state enterprises, on average. Co-operatives can often achieve higher productivity even when their equipment and conditions are worse. Furthermore, the better the organisation approximates the co-operative ideal, the better the productivity.
All this is unsurprising to social anarchists (and it should make individualist anarchists reconsider their position). Peter Kropotkin argued that, "[i]f we . . . ask Nature: 'Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?' we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organisation." [Mutual Aid, p. 24] From his observation that mutual aid gives evolutionary advantage to those who practice it, he derived his political philosophy — a philosophy which stressed community and co-operative endeavour.
Modern research has reinforced his argument. For example, as noted, Alfie Kohn is also the author of No Contest: The Case Against Competition and he spent seven years reviewing more than 400 research studies dealing with competition and co-operation. Prior to his investigation, he believed that "competition can be natural and appropriate and healthy." After reviewing research findings, he radically revised this opinion, concluding that, the "ideal amount of competition . . . in any environment, the classroom, the workplace, the family, the playing field, is none . . . [Competition] is always destructive." [Noetic Sciences Review, Spring 1990]
Here we present a very short summary of his findings. According to Kohn, there are three principle consequences of competition:
Firstly, it has a negative effect on productivity and excellence. This is due to increased anxiety, inefficiency (as compared to co-operative sharing of resources and knowledge), and the undermining of inner motivation. Competition shifts the focus to victory over others, and away from intrinsic motivators such as curiosity, interest, excellence, and social interaction. Studies show that co-operative behaviour, by contrast, consistently predicts good performance—a finding which holds true under a wide range of subject variables. Interestingly, the positive benefits of co-operation become more significant as tasks become more complex, or where greater creativity and problem-solving ability is required (as indicated above).
Secondly, competition lowers self-esteem and hampers the development of sound, self-directed individuals. A strong sense of self is difficult to attain when self-evaluation is dependent on seeing how we measure up to others. On the other hand, those whose identity is formed in relation to how they contribute to group efforts generally possess greater self-confidence and higher self-esteem.
Finally, competition undermines human relationships. Humans are social beings; we best express our humanness in interaction with others. By creating winners and losers, competition is destructive to human unity and prevents close social feeling.
Social Anarchists have long argued these points. In the competitive mode, people work at cross purposes, or purely for (material) personal gain. This leads to an impoverishment of society and hierarchy, with a lack of communal relations that result in an impoverishment of all the individuals involved (mentally, spiritually, ethically and, ultimately, materially). This not only leads to a weakening of individuality and social disruption, but also to economic inefficiency as energy is wasted in class conflict and invested in building bigger and better cages to protect the haves from the have-nots. Instead of creating useful things, human activity is spent in useless toil reproducing an injustice and authoritarian system.
All in all, the results of competition (as documented by a host of scientific disciplines) shows its poverty as well as indicating that co-operation is the means by which the fittest survive.
Moreover, as Kohn discusses in Punished by Rewards, the notion that material rewards result in better work is simply not true. Basing itself on simple behavourist psychology, such arguments fail to meet the test of long-term success (and, indeed, can be counter-productive). Indeed, it means treating human beings as little better that pets or other animals (he argues that it is "not an accident that the theory behind 'Do this and you'll get that' derives from work with other species, or that behaviour management is frequently described in words better suited to animals.") In other words, it "is by its very nature dehumanising." [Punished by Rewards, p. 24 and p. 25]
Rather than simply being motivated by outside stimuli like mindless robots, people are not passive. We are "beings who possess natural curiosity about ourselves and our environment, who search for and overcome challenges, who try and master skills and attain competence, and who seek new levels of complexity in what we learn and do . . . in general we act on the environment as much as we are acted on by it, and we do not do so simply in order to receive a reward." [Op. Cit., p. 25]
Kohn presents extensive evidence to back upon his case that rewards harm activity and individuals. We cannot do justice to it here. We will present a few examples. One study with college students showed that those paid to work on a puzzle "spent less time on it than those who hadn't been paid" when they were given a choice of whether to work on it or not. "It appeared that working for a reward made people less interested in the task." Another study with children showed that "extrinsic rewards reduce intrinsic motivation." Scores of other studies confirmed this. This is because a reward is effectively saying that a given activity is not worth doing for its own sake — and why would anyone wish to do something they have to be bribed to do? [Op. Cit., p. 70 and p. 71]
In the workplace, a similar process goes on. Kohn presents extensive evidence to show that extrinsic motivation also does not work in the workplace. Indeed, he argues that "economists have it wrong if they think of work as a 'disutility' — something unpleasant we must do in order to be able to buy what we need, merely a means to an end." Kohn stresses that "to assume that money is what drives people is to adopt an impoverished understanding of human motivation. Moreover, "the risk of any incentive or pay-for-performance system is that it will make people less interested in their work and therefore less likely to approach it with enthusiasm and a commitment to excellence. Furthermore, the more closely we tie compensation (or other rewards) to performance, the most damage we do." [Op. Cit., p. 131, p. 134 and p. 140]
Kohn argues that the idea that human's will only work for profit or rewards "can be fairly described as dehumanising" if "the capacity for responsible action, the natural love of learning, and the desire to do good work are already part of who we are." Also, it is "a way of trying to control people" and so to "anyone who is troubled by a model of human relationships founded principally on the idea of one person controlling another must ponder whether rewards are as innocuous as they are sometimes made out to be." He uses the example of a workplace, where "there is no getting around the fact that 'the basic purpose of merit pay is manipulative.' One observer more bluntly characterises incentives as 'demeaning' since the message they really convey is, 'Please big daddy boss and you will receive the rewards that the boss deems appropriate.'" [Op. Cit., p. 26]
Given that much work is controlled by others and can be a hateful experience under capitalism does not mean that it has to be that way. Clearly, even under wage slavery most workers can and do find work interesting and seek to do it well — not because of possible rewards or punishment but because we seek meaning in our activities and try and do them well. Given that research shows that reward orientated work structures harm productivity and excellence, social anarchists have more than just hope to base their ideas. Such research confirms Kropotkin's comments:
"Wage-work is serf-work; it cannot, it must not, produce all it could produce. And it is high time to disbelieve the legend which presents wagedom as the best incentive to productive work. If industry nowadays brings in a hundred times more than it did in the days of our grandfathers, it is due to the sudden awakening of physical and chemical sciences towards the end of the [18th] century; not to the capitalist organisation of wagedom, but in spite of that organisation." [The Conquest of Bread, p. 150]
For these reasons, social anarchists are confident that the elimination of the profit motive within the context of self-management will not harm productivity and creativity, but rather enhance them (within an authoritarian system in which workers enhance the power and income of bureaucrats, we can expect different results). With the control of their own work and workplaces ensured, all working people can express their abilities to the full. This will see an explosion of creativity and initiative, not a reduction.