> > unless capitalism's
>> definition has now broadened to include state
>> ownership of natural resources and large industries,
>
>State ownership does stand in contradiction to
>capitalism. State ownership *can* be an aspect of
>socialism, if the state is used as a tool to supress
>the law of value. Socialism is a slippery concept,
>but I would say that you have socialism if there is a
>definite move in the direction of communism, i.e. the
>abolition of value form, the state, and social
>classes.
There is no mystery to the meaning of socialism, my pocket Macquarie dictionary defines it quite clearly:
Socialism: a theory or system of social organisation which advocates public ownership and control of the means of production, capital, land, etc
>The historical workers movement, by not following
>closely enough Marx's mature critique of political
>economy, too often made ownership a defining criterion
>for the question "is it capitalism or socialism?"
>
>But the core defining category of the society of
>generalized commodity production is the value form.
This is all just waffle. If the "public", which means people of a society as a whole, own and control the means of production, then not only will the material basis of capitalism cease to exist, but capitalists will cease to exist as well. As well, it follows that the people will use their control to try to ensure that the means of production operates in their interest, that is the collective interests of society as a whole.
In the end, what you refer to as "communism" is simply another name for socialism.
> > I'm excited about his experiments in workers
>> participation in the allocation of resources will
>> work in the
>> aluminium mills and paper mills where it is being
>> tried out.
>
>This sounds very interesting. Again, I don't think
>workers control is a sufficient criterion for saying
>"socialism." One could also have a worker-owned and
>controlled firm which produces commodities for
>exchange on the market. It may be a "nicer" form of
>capitalism, but it is still capitalism.
Irrelevant.
One could have "a" worker owned and controlled firm which would be capitalist, it has to be because it operates within a capitalist environment. But that is a completely different kettle of fish to a system where the entire means of production is owned and controlled by society as a whole. That is a change of the environment in which individual elements of the means of production operate and so just as a workers collective operating under the rules a capitalist system must play within the rules of capitalism or die, so an unit of production in a socialist system could not survive if it attempted to operate under capitalist rules.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas