> I'm not sure why you think Hardt & Negri are anti-socialist; I'd argue
they're
> calling for an Information Age reinvention of socialism.
To avoid misunderstandings, let me say first that I am a reserved admirer of Hardt & Negri. However, in interviews over the last few years, Hardt has, perhaps rhetorically, said that he prefers "barbarism to socialism", i.e. reversing the old Marxist slogan. In _Empire_ they label the USSR as "Keynesian" (in which case I admire and am amused by their cheek). And so on. If there _is_ more to this than rhetoric, I would argue that this is because their definition of "socialism" is skewed towards negative, statist/authoritarian forms of socialism, and they overlook the more localised/cooperative varieties of socialism. And personally I don't think "socialism" is a word that should be consigned to the garbage heap of pejorative and mediocrity so lightly.
> But socialism isn't the
> same thing as state ownership.
Very true.
> Japan's keiretsu (and to a lesser extent, South
> Korea's chaebol) did indeed practice a covert, sneaky socialism, in the
sense
> that they privileged market share,
That is not "socialist" in any meaningful sense at all. It's is a normal part of all capitalist societies for individual capitalists, companies or whole industries to attempt to gain concessions from governments. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.
> an egalitarian distribution of income
Redistribution and/or wage regulation is not "socialist" either; it is capital forgoing a certain amount of accumulation, in order to stabilise a particular capitalist system.
> and
> industrial skills over short-term profitability.
Even central planning is not "socialist" either, even when it is occurring in matters in which it never or rarely occurs in the Anglosphere.
All of the things you have mentioned above involve _private_ accumulation and that is the key problem here. They are not even "socialist" in anything like the same sense that most of the world's phone companies (N.America excluded) used to be "socialist" institutions.
Regards,
Grant.