On Sun, 21 Nov 2004, Jon Johanning wrote:
> I wouldn't quite say that socialism is essentially dead, but it
> certainly needs a heroic resuscitation effort. If the word means
> anything, it means control of the means of production, or of the
> economy as a whole, by society. It's not very hard to come up with many
> defects in the existing system of private control, but so far I have
> yet to find anyone who has a plausible outline of a system of social
> control that would actually work and would deliver better results than
> the present one. To me, it's basically pointless to call oneself a
> "Marxist" or "socialist" without a practical, positive proposal for
> replacing the system.
One important point to keep in mind here is that the existing system of private control is far from universal, even in a supposedly "capitalist" society like the U. S. In fact, we can provide numerous examples of socialist or quasi-socialist production in the U. S. that actually work and efficiently distribute useful goods and services:
1. public libraries 2. public highways 3. national parks 4. open source software 5. food co-ops 6. credit unions 7. public utility boards 8. headstart 9. medicaid (lower administrative cost than any private health insurer) 10. the creation of the internet
Despite the capitalist hype, socialist production is a significant element of the U. S. economy. We don't need to come up with something new; we need to build on our demonstrated success. Given this state of affairs, I don't really understand the hand- wringing about calling yourself a socialist (I agree with Doug's tactical decision on Moyers, however).
--If you think that people should cooperate and pool resources to generate mutually useful goods and services, you're a socialist. The current political problem is not that this is naive or unworkable in our society; numerous examples demonstrate that actually existing socialist production is effective. Rather, the capitalists have us on a tight ideological leash: even people sympathetic to socialism reluctantly assert that socialism isn't practical or workable, ignoring all the obvious data I listed above. This is ideology par excellence!
It's a propaganda war, and the capitalists are kicking our asses. Granted, they control the huge multinational mass media outlets, but we need to challenge their definition of the political situation. We've got classrooms, dinner tables, and mail lists; we need to use them to argue that socialism is useful and effective.
Miles