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.
Apparently we have different definitions of class. Mine turns on differential ownership of productive assets. Elected bosses won't have more productive assets, just managerial authority. will there be conflict between workers and bosses? You bet. Unions? I hope so. Strikes? Maybe,a lthough more likely the workers will vote out the bosses they don't like. But in principle, sure. Do you see things as operating differently under planned socialism? Are you with Charles B on this, no unions, nos trikes, one party, which is the Communist Party that represents the worker's interests by definition?
Who said anything about labor
> markets?
> Schweickert in *Against Capitalism* (an excellent book) explicitly says
he wants labor markets.
Not exactly. He wants people to be able to join the coops that will have them. But they are paid profit shares, not wages, so the "labor markets" are not like capitalist labor markets. thew orkers do not sell their labor power. It is not a commodity. They join a coop and get an equity share. They are paid a piece of the profits.
> 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.
I agree about the hard budger constrint, but that has nothing to do with labor markets. The HBC means that if a firm is failing, it doesn't get bailed out. It means real bankruptcy.
> Without unemployment and a labor market there is
no incentive to work hard unless there are other incentives i.e.
democratic planning.
Democratic planning is not an incentive. It is an alternative economic system which may have incentives in it. The incentive in MS to work hard is increased profit shares. Here the fact that workers are not wages is very important. It is a common criticism of capitalism that it is socialsim for the bosses, who get profits as their incentive, but capitalism for the workers, who are driven by fear of unemployment. Here, everyone gets a share of the profits, and the law guarantees full employment.
> 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.)
How about higher profit shares?
> here'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.
I think this is more problematic. Schweickart argues that MS would be less likely to be imperialist because worker self-managed firms are not expansionist. That is true, but it does not explain how existing inequalities are to be corrected. Perhaps that is a problem in any system where national sovereignty is respected.
>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?
Who enforces any legal rights? You either give the job to a governmnent agency or give peoplea private right of action. That is not hard.
> Again, if you assign jobs to people for which there is no market demand, you lose the hard budget constraint and markets are pointless.
You misunderstand what is the HBC. It is true that there is a tension between efficiency and equity, but it is a tradeoff and not absolute. the market will not collapse if the government has to hire some people who cannot be picked up by coops for whatever raeson. Besides, there are lots of public goods that we market will not provide for those people to work on. Many of these are necessary for markets to operate, like roads.
> Market socialists try to have their cake and eat it too.
Quite right, as opposedto planned socialists, who tell us that we are to have cake, but no receipes, please, or capitalists who tell us we can have cake, but can't eat it.
>If the objection is to non-authorutative
> assignment of work, try and ask some workers what they think about a system
> that would tell them where they had to work and what to do.
> Better than unemployment.
Right, but MS is a full employment economy.
> 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.
And you don't see the difference between this and being told, you will be a housepainter in Vancouver; we have enough economists, thank you. Try it on some workers, see if they can explain it to you.
> Nove was a decent economic historian but his critique of marx in
*Feasible Socialism* is a joke.
But his critique of Soviet planning is good and right.
> Ralph Miliband ended up endorsing
something like Nove's scheme in his last book.
I always liked Ralph.
> 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.
And I have. What about you?
--jks
> 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
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