To Pay or Not to Pay

Planka.nu is a site and network with the intention to form opinions about public transport in Sweden. The group behind it is a syndicalist movement who believe that people should not have to pay for the use of public transport. The website offers a form of 'insurance' for people who skip paying. The 'insurance' consists of paying 100 SEK (compare with the prices in Gothenburg: a monthly fee of 375 SEK for people under 26 years and 500 for people above) and then, if you get caught not paying, having the organization pay your fine.

So is this civil disobedience aiming to change something about society, or a way for people to save money without a 'higher cause'? Planka.nu argues that if enough people stop paying for public transport, there will be no choice but for politicians to make it free and financed by taxes. This argument can be seen as some form of welfare utilitarianism; the members of planka.nu have decided not pay their fees to, in the end, make public transport available to everyone regardless of their ability to pay for the service. Critics of the network argue that this is not what will be achieved, that the fees for the people who actually do pay will increase instead.

I think that the reasons why people join Planka.nu are not always a will to change the future of public transport. The people who do this for their own benefit I cannot view as ethical. I can, in a way, understand those who use this form of civil disobedience to change the rules, and I applaud their ingenuity – it is a very clever idea.

However, there are two reasons why I don’t like their reasoning. First, I don’t think they will succeed and this pretty much means that the only thing this network has achieved is higher fees for the people who do pay, just as the critics say. If this is true, the welfare utilitarianism argument will be reversed: instead of a large number of people benefiting from the actions, a small group of people ride the busses and trams for free while the larger group has to pay for them.

The other reason is that I think there is a value in following the democratic process. Civil disobedience is acceptable in certain extreme cases. But generally speaking: if you want to be part of a democratic society, you have to accept that a certain number of things about it won’t be to your liking. If you want to change them, you should use democratic tools to do that. If you join Planka.nu, you have decided to not play by the rules and every time that happens the democratic process is weakened a bit. In this case, I don’t think that it’s worth it.