> On Thursday, January 8, 2004, at 03:32 AM, dredmond at efn.org wrote:
>
> > Historically, Mitsubishi has
> > acted less like a private capitalist and more like a set of public
> > networks.
>
> Still, this kind of "socialism" certainly doesn't include popular
> control over the economy, which I consider a sine qua non of socialism
> in the true sense.
Exactly. Apart from the matter of _predominant_ private control/accumulation in such cases, it is over-reductionist to simply divide institutions into "socialist" or "capitalist", especially when almost anything, other than the classic private corporation of the anglosphere, meets one's defition of "socialist". I mean that this is stretching "socialism" way beyond breaking point in terms of meaningful and consistent usage ( IMO ). Especially when alternative concepts like dirigisme and "state capitalism' are available. State capitalism _may_ be little different to state socialism in practice, but it is different.
And in any case "social capital" fits snugly with private property and accumulation --- there is nothing new in this:
"In Volume 3 of Capital, based on his thinking from the 1870s, Marx argued that the development of capitalism had undergone a mutation. Instead of the direct personal association between the individual person of the capitalist and its effective control over capital in a private enterprise, a trust relation between individuals had enabled the impersonal corporation to be established. The joint stock company had been incorporated to both free the modern corporation from the personal interest of shareholder funds and the personality of the capitalist who controlled the use made of money-capital through its transformation into industrial capital. While the corporation may have come to regarded as a source of personality, to be as regarded as if it were a legal person, the social capital which was embodied in it was devoid of _personal_ownership_ [my emphasis].
Capital, as such, came to be socially associated. The development of social capital represented 'the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself'. While capital had increasingly become social, according to Marx, in that its ownership extended beyond the body of any individual person, capital has no social purpose and no purpose other than what is constituted by and for corporate profit and interest divided between industrial enterprises and financial institutions. As such, there were a series of trust relations pivoted on the trustees who held funds in trust for those who deposited money in banks and financial funds and, thereby, also held finance for investment by those who managed industrial enterprises. Trusteeship, residing in the bank, was highly complex since the trustees worked through norms which both had to justify that the industrial corporation had the capacity to create profitable productive assets at the same time that they were meant to ensure that money entrusted to them was secure. For example, when Marx wrote that it was the bank which distributes 'available social capital in a money form', he was conscious of how this source of trusteeship gave rise to a 'new financial aristocracy' whose propensities for speculation were now 'unchecked by private property'.18 Marx's point was reinforced by his contention that social capital also represented nineteenth century de-nationalisation of state-owned property.19 [Michael Cowen, 1998, "Trust in Development", IDS Working Paper 10/98, University of Helsinki, http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/kmi/Julkais/WPt/1998/WP1198.HTM ]
> Of course, state ownership of the economy doesn't guarantee popular
> power either, considering the non-democratic nature of the states that
> have claimed to be "socialist" up to now.
And this was the reason why the term "state socialism" was invented in the late 19th C., in distinction to utopian socialism, anarchism and communism, which were all anti-state (in varying ways).
regards,
Grant.