Zizek's Lenin

[Brad De Long]

>Brad De Long wrote:
>
>>But what I was curious about was not the negative critique of 
>>capitalism but the positive critique: what is to replace it? What 
>>is the superior social calculating mechanism for planning 
>>production and distributing consumption? How to rearrange work so 
>>as to greatly shrink the realm of necessity and greatly enlarge the 
>>realm of freedom?
>
>These are the $64,000 questions (in decommodified, nonalienated 
>dollars, of course). My own strategy would be to be embarrassingly 
>gradualist - to remove life, bit by bit, from the compulsions of 
>money: guaranteed minimum incomes, decommodified provision of health 
>and education, free child care, confiscatory taxation at the high 
>end, greater worker control over the workplace, constriction of 
>financial markets, forced opening of corporate books, etc.
>
>Doug

Danger! Danger, Will Robinson! You're sounding like a Keynesian--or 
at least like John Maynard Keynes in "Economic Possibilities for Our 
Grandchildren"...


:-)

Laura Tyson will tell you that greater worker control over the 
workplace in Yugoslavia did give workers in successful firms a strong 
incentive not to replace their comrades who quit--because then the 
rents from market position were shared out among fewer people. Thus 
the more successful a factory was, the slower its labor force tended 
to grow. (To be fair, the fight over whether this was just a 
"tendency" or an empirical fact was never resolved.)

Practically everyone will tell you that every bureaucracy that isn't 
under strong market discipline--and some bureaucracies that are under 
strong market discipline--tend to develop pathetic and extreme 
amounts of "slack." How do you empower the clients of an organization 
that provides "decommodified" goods and services?

Market failure in financial markets I understand. How to improve them 
seems to me to be much harder (although there do seem to me to be a 
bunch of things worth trying)...

Thus I tend toward liking large guaranteed minimum incomes, lots of 
vouchers for people to spend, and substantial tax penalties for all 
short-term financial investments...

But this strikes me as rather thin gruel compared to our common 
utopian dreams...

Brad DeLong