[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I'm not sure I understand the transposition of my comments from private > progressive organizations to a public sphere. I think the characteristics of > the two sectors are quite different. The public sphere is highly unionized, > and monitored by a phalanx of civil service rules. These help control > exploitation in the work place. I think the problem with private > 'progressive' organizations, as well as unions, is that they see exploitation > outside their organization as an issue to fight over while they turn a blind > eye to the exploitation of their own labor force. I think progressives and > unions should be brought to task and made to provide the same protections > against over exploitation, and the same respect, for their own employees as > they demand for union members they represent or issues they work on. My point is that it is very difficult to conceive of how an organizational form can promote good (disinterested, humane, fair, competent, etc.) behavior among those in authority. Your distinctions between public sector and progressive org are well-taken, though the difference may have more to do with small and large than public and prog-org; in other words, employees will win more protection when there are more of them in one place, and progressive organizations tend to be small. In any case, the personnel regs you cite are a small part of the mission of public organizations. Here in D.C. we have the spectacle of fairly strong personnel regulations and grossly inferior performance by the city government. The inevitability of human nature is too strong to be overcome by mere changes in political party or organizational change that is not ingenious (and hence rare and difficult). Tom Walker wrote: Perhaps the long losing streak of the left and labour comes from the widespread abandonment of a politics of free time in favour of the politics of the welfare state. My own quirky reading of history (along with a few books I've read) tells me that the welfare state began as a conservative institution to defend the state against revolutionary threats and succeeded in recruiting to its defense the bulk of the radicals whose original argument was for the abolition of the state. Me: You could characterize this as said radicals coming around to the realization that the welfare state in some form or other was the best that could be hoped for. TW: This is not to say that there are no 'proper limits' to a politics of free time, either. On the contrary, proper limits are what may make free time a *politics* rather than an beguiling, empty slogan. Me: I guess I should explore your web site more because I'm not clear on what the politics of free time is about. If it's 'thirty for forty,' then a raft of economic doubts, or issues, at least, come into play. Work sharing is a different, more plausible matter, though I'm not persuaded that it is of such great importance as to be a 'politics' all by itself. Re: Naiman All the issues he raises are well-taken, but the irreducible fact is that people get screwed in progressive organizations. If it could be documented -- which I doubt, on feasibility grounds -- that such things happen much less frequently than in non-prog orgs, that would be nice to report, but the contrast between rhetoric and untoward events is so stark that it will always be a political problem -- and the bigger prog orgs get the more we will hear about this stuff. J. Devine: > While I agree that there should be limits on the size of the > "public sector" (i.e., the central government), it's important to > remember that there are other ways of attaining socialist goals > (and, more generally, of attaining collective goals) than just > government. In fact, the overemphasis on the central government > has been a major flaw in both social-democratic and > Marxist-Leninist thought. I've been convinced of the last point since I started working near the Federal government -- liberals and the left are too absorbed in the central government, as if the US was like France. > Besides central government, ways of attaining collective goals > include tradition and decentralized, grassroots, democracy. (For But to me that's still government and collective decision-making. There's a long-standing debate about whether the potential for corruption is greater at the local level than elsewhere. > ideological reasons, the last is left out of Econ. textbooks, > including, surprisingly, that of Bowles and Edwards.) Clearly, > tradition won't serve socialist goals (and anyway, capitalism > abhors, undermines, and destroys tradition). But decentralized > democracy (worker co-ops, community co-ops, etc.) have been > central to alternatives to social-democratic and Marxist-Leninist > statism. The old US Socialist Labor Party (is it still around?) The SLP will never die. These are fine things as far as they go, which has never been very. You must be aware that coops and labor-managed firms can have incentives to behave in unpleasant ways to non-members or to provisional members, even when their internal democratic process is exemplary. > used to be good on this issue (though sometimes they were > dogmatic or utopian). Some of the non-social-democratic and > non-Marxist-Leninist thinkers implied that no central government > was needed at all, but we don't need to go to that absurd extreme > (at least not right away). > > The point is that we can have a very large non-capitalist sector > without it being a central-government sector. It can work with, > be complementary to, a democratically-controlled central > government. Sure but from an efficiency standpoint, quite a few things need to be Federal. I've written about this a bit. Even tasks which local governments are best suited for require finaicial leveraging from higher bodies because of different financing capacity locally, and with such leveraging inevitably comes as well some control. > BTW, I wonder: should we really favor an expansion of the size of > a central government like the one in the US, which is so > insulated from democratic control? As noted above, whether states or localities are more democratic is problematic. What we tend to gloss over is the power of public opinion at all levels which doesn't buy progressive answers to problems right now. > (Speaking of such, the US central government does an excellent > job of spending on war, preserving capitalism, and subsidizing > business profits. That is, it serves its masters well. That > suggests that maybe, in theory, it might do a good job of serving > socialist goals, too. Of course, as Max notes, we have to be > afraid of it getting too much power.) I'm not so concerned with power as with wasting resources. In other words, the prospect of the US Congress managing, say, the Intel Corporation, is not repellant so much because they would use power in an oppressive manner so much as that they would run the company into the ground. That's why, in my view, if you don't want the Feds running Intel, then you ought not to call yourself a socialist, and I don't, even though I would like to see about forty-five percent of the economy devoted to producing public goods. Blair Sandler: > . . . > the public sector. [Technically speaking, non-profits are neither more nor > less public than capitalist enterprises: a board of directors runs the > organization.] A quibble -- Less public in terms of freedom from public accountability, in comparison to a government enterprise run indirectly by public officials. > On the contrary, it seems to me to indicate the necessity of *greater* > collective political action, specifically of communal or communist class > processes, wherein workers collectively appropriate their own surplus labor > and decide what to do with it (and thus how to organize their work, etc.). The question is how you realize "greater" action that is more effective in defining and pursuing the public interest. S. Tell wrote: > Since the time of Plato, the elitist and defeatist view that the people > are too ignorant, stupid, uneducated, uncultivated, incapable, etc. to > rule and move society forward has held sway in many sections of society, > especially academe. The issue isn't capacity to rule, but the conditions that promote good self-government. The capacity to rule is also the capacity to misrule. > . . . Robert Dahl and other products of elite U.S. universities have been > dictating for years that democracy is extremely difficult, even > impossible, to have when large numbers of people are involved. . . . Anyone who has actually participated in a process of group decision- making knows that the larger the group, the harder to get anything done by means of "direct democracy." D-D is just a slogan to evade the hard question of how to reconcile the costs of D-D with the need for rapid, coordinated action. Or even worse, it's a facade for a process of decision-making that is the antithesis of democracy, such as so-called "democratic centralism." I say this because this idea that "the people should rule" is heard so often on the left, and it is a MEANINGLESS statement. > . . .order of the day. By advancing the spurious notion of "reasonable > limits," the financial oligarchy hopes to postpone their > inevitable demise by keeping the people enslaved. My mother-in-law will be pleased and not a little surprized to learn that I'm in the "financial oligarchy." Wasn't it you who said that personal insults ought not be be responded to? > It will never accept > the reality that people have rights by dint of being human, nor will it > accept direct democracy. Coming from you, that's odd. Sounds like some kind of deism. I thought people had rights because they fought for them. > Political power must arise out of the fact that it is the people of a > country who are sovereign and it is they who must have political power by > dint of their being. This is the right, by virtue of being, to establish > the political system of their choice. The present state is the state of Including fascism? > the financial oligarchy with a worked out arrangement among big business, > big government and big labor. They have devised a political process > that elects their agents to govern in their interests. I'm calling my agent this afternoon and will put in a good word for you. Doug Henwood: > . . . The deeper issue is that the leadership of many nonprofits (and unions) are > elitist themselves, and take patronizing attitudes towards their > clienteles/members as well as their workers. Deeper than that is why leadership is or becomes elitist. To paraphrase S. Tell, I think it's by dint of their being human. The proper limits to government stem from the limits of people. Attaining perfection is slow and takes a long time, and in the long run etc. etc. MS ==================================================== Max B. Sawicky 202-775-8810 (voice) Economic Policy Institute 202-775-0819 (fax) 1660 L Street, NW [EMAIL PROTECTED] Suite 1200 Washington, DC 20036
