Is John Sweeney a Socialist?

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 11:36 AM 1/28/00 -0500, Nathan Newman wrote:
>State control of an enterprise with arbitrary workplace authority is a hell
>of lot less socialism for the the workers involved than a decent union
>contract in a capitalist enterprise.  Not recognizing this is the basic
>intellectual failure of those socialists favorable to authoritarian state
>regimes that called themselves socialist or communist.

Don't be so quick in condemning x-socialist countries, Nathan.  True, their
unions were "company unions" and did not have the right to collective
bargaining or to strike, but:

1. The state guaranteed the right to work - which mean that I could go to a
state employment office and they had a legal obligation to find me a job; and

2. Once employed, I could not be fired without a labor court hearing -
those hearings were usually a nighmare for supervisors because they had to
actually prove their case rather than merely claim some bullshit excuses
that bosses usually give to get rid of workers.

So the bourgeois concepts of formal freedom and contract may not be the
best solution in situiation of grossly unequal power, is it exists between
workers and bosses - the strong state is a better guarantor of workers'
rights than collective bargaining.  That is the fundamental principle of
socialist and social democractic systems of government.  

wojtek