James Devine wrote:
> 1) on "private" property's abolition: I think that the point of socialism
> is to replace "private" property with _responsibility_. "Private" property
> isn't really private: owning it gives one the right to impose a lot of
> costs on other people and on nature, power without proportional
> responsibility; owning enough of it gives one the ability to appropriate
> surplus-value. With socialism, the point is to get responsibility in line
> with power. Responsibility would be to the democratic assemblage of all of
> society or to society's delegates. Responsibility -- unlike property -- is
> temporary (and one can't pass it down to one's children). The
> responsibility held by society's delegates is similarly temporary.
I couldn't agree more with this. The issue is decision making authority
rather than ownership which is a red herring.
> 2) on the free-rider problem: as far as I can tell, there are only three
> ways to deal with the free-rider problem. One is state enforcement,
> familiar from econ. textbooks. Another is tradition, custom, combined with
> a less-than-individualistic attitude on the part of people, a sense of
> social responsibility. The third, usually or always ignored in textbooks,
> is also combined with people having a sense of social responsibility:
> grass-roots (extrastatal) democracy. Socialism would emphasize the last,
> though it's going to be hard to get rid of the first. Custom seems on its
> way out (slowly) as capitalism abhors tradition.
It is true that the spread of markes obliterates traditional solutions
-- which is one thing wrong with markets. But there are "modern"
solutions to free rider problems. As a matter of fact, the feature of
participatory planning that has federations of consumers "bidding" at
the same time and under the same conditions for public goods as
individuals "bid" for private goods eliminates the free rider problem
for public good provision. Solving free rider problems in private
property market contexts IS difficult. Solving the problem in other
contexts is not necessarily such an insuperable obstacle.
> 3) I don't think we can leave important issues of socialism to
> criminologists and legal theorists. The lines between social-science
> disciplines are largely artificial.
Doesn't anyone know and good radical criminologists. We have a group of
lawyers -- gasp -- in the AU law school who are radical law theorists.
They have a code word for themselves, like we have "political economist"
which I can't remember. Jamin Raskin, Mark Hagar, et. al. I just wanted
to defer to these guys who are so much more familiar with the criminal
mind than I.
