JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
>
>
> The workers are the mangerial class in MS: they arrange their enterprises
> along democratic lines as they see fit.
Sure its defined that way, but there will be managers and even if they are elected, class conflict will ensue. Unions? Strikes? One of Mao's points was that class struggle continues under socialism.
Who said anything about labor
> markets?
Schweickert in *Against Capitalism* (an excellent book) explicitly says he wants labor markets. I don't have a copy so can't quote. The trouble is, if you don't have labor markets you can't get the hard budget constraint and if you can't get the hard budget constraint, market socialism is pointless. Without unemployment and a labor market there is no incentive to work hard unless there are other incentives i.e. democratic planning. There have to be incentives other than unemployment and poverty to get people to work hard at shitty jobs (garbage collection, sewer cleaner, university professor, etc.) I was more impressed with the macroeconomic ideas (i.e.planning) in the Schweickert model.
There's also the question of imperialism and inequalities between nations and regions which I brought up with him on the SPSM list. I don't think these problems can be solved within a world market economy.
>In Schweickart's model, a right to a place in a coop or >a government
> job is a constitutional entitlement.
Who is going to enforce it? Again, if you assign jobs to people for which there is no market demand, you lose the hard budget constraint and markets are pointless. If you are going to have 7 people on a garbage truck anyway, what is the point of having a market to allocate jobs? You lose what competition is supposed to provide. Market socialists try to have their cake and eat it too.
>If the objection is to non-uathorutative
> assignment of work, try and ask some workers what they think about a system
> tahtw ould tell them where they had to work and what to do.
Better than unemployment. That's also pretty much how it works now in a market based society. The market tells you where you have to work and what you have to do. If you are working class, you have to find out what the market demand is, you have to train yourself to do the job and then you must go where the job is.
>With the
> statement "all markets are evil and need to be abolished," it is impossible
> to argue. That is not materialist analysis but fundamentalist faith.
Maybe. I just joined an org called Planned Socialism Salvation Front. Wish us luck.
>
> For what it is worth I have been a market socialist almost my entire life on
> the left, going back 20 years now. I was wooed by Alec Nove and won by the
> Yugoslavs, people like Branko Horvat and Jaroslav Vanek;
Nove was a decent economic historian but his critique of marx in *Feasible Socialism* is a joke. Ralph Miliband ended up endorsing something like Nove's scheme in his last book. Vanek was a neo-classical economist interested in questions like proving that market socialism could reach general equilibrium. Perhaps interesting as an academic exercise but I don't see what anybody canlearn from it. A lot of the others; Horvat, Sik, Brus, Kornai are great because they know you cannot study economics in isolation from politics, history and culture. These are economists one can learn from.
> In any case it was not "defeats" that made me see the logic of the position,
> but successes, notably in the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain and the former
> Yugoslavia.
I've heard that Mondragon is little different than a capitalist firm these days, giving credence to our argument that market socialism will slide back into capitalism especially when undertaken as an oasis in the capitalist desert. Yugoslavia had its problems too, mostly macroeconomic I think. It wasn't a full market society either, lacking a hard budget constraint though some libertarian ourfit once called it the "most laissez faire society on earth". What did role did laissez faire markets play in the subsequent senseless brutality that took place there?
>Of course the economic failure of the old USSR--evident to
> everyone by the mid-1970s--was a factor, but I do not consider thata defeat
> for socialism, since the USSR was socialist only in name. The defeat of
> socialism in the FSU took place long before--sometime between 1918 and 1929,
> it was a process.
It may have not been socialism but it was a hell of a lot better than what they have now. It was a gigantic defeat for the people of the fSU and the left worldwide. At a factory where I worked for many years, we used to refer the fSU as our "armed wing". We knew that it was no coincidence that the speed ups and union concessions began in the early 90's. FWIW, my father, a lifelong shift worker in a factory spent some time in the USSR during the early 60's. He thought it was a great place (cheap booze, beautiful women and well educated people) despite all the corny propaganda and art work which noone believed anyway.He always said "give me the USSR any day."
A lot of the problems in the fSU and Yugoslavia were cultural too e.g. Great Russian Chauvinismm, various ethnic nationalisms and trying to impose modernity (or "modernity") on nomadic herdspeople who had been living the same way for a thousand years. Islam looms large too. There are 50 million Muslims in Russia alone.
> The best time for socialism in the FSU was during the NEP,
> wihen there were relatively free markets.
Maybe the best time for market socialism but it wasn't the best time for the people over there, that was during the 60's and 70's. The USSR also tried introducing markets a la Yugoslavia in the late 60's. It was a failure. Of course there were always (black) markets in these societies and the degree to which they contributed to or detracted from the stability and overall functioning of those societies is hard to tell.
The planning/markets debate is interesting and very important though I think at this stage, what works and how it works will be decided through practice. The debate is becoming a little like arguments for and against the existence of God. An impasse that can only be solved through empirical evidence. Maybe I'm just bored with it.
Sam Pawlett