Re: socialism historical?

2003-06-18 Thread Fred Foldvary
 So what label would you use?
 Fabio 

I would avoid using the labels capitalism and socialism.

Substitutes for capitalism:

1) private enterprise
2) free market; free enterprise; pure market
3) market economy
4) interventionism
5) mixed economy

Substitutes for socialism:

1) forced redistribution
2) command economy
3) government ownership
4) worker cooperatives; worker ownership of capital
5) forced collectivism

Fred Foldvary

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Re: socialism historical?

2003-06-18 Thread Kevin Carson
Socialism is a historical term whose use has evolved over time.  I believe 
it first appeared in an Owenite periodical, the London Cooperative Journal, 
in 1829 or 1830.

The beginning of the classical socialist movement was the Ricardian 
socialist movement.  They were inspired by two arguments of Ricardo's:  1) 
that the equilibrium value of commodities approximated producer prices when 
those commodities were in elastic supply, and that these producer prices 
corresponded to the embodied labor (including past labor embodied in 
capital);  and 2) that profit, interest and rent were deductions from this 
exchange-value.

From these doctrines, the Ricardian socialists deduced that profit, interest 
and rent derived from the exploitation of labor.  The term Ricardian 
socialist applied most directly to English writers like Hodgskin, Thompson, 
Grey and Bray; but the same deductions from Ricardo occured to Proudhon, 
Rodbertus, Marx, and Warren before the middle of the century.

Socialism is not by any means necessarily statist.  The market-oriented 
Ricardian socialist Thomas Hodgskin, and the American individualist 
anarchist Tucker (who resembled each other closely in many ways), believed 
that the free market was the best route to socialism.  They both viewed 
profit, interest and rent, not as natural outgrowths of a free market, but 
as the products of state-enforced privilege IN VIOLATION OF the free market.

The central defining features of socialism, as Tucker defined them in State 
Socialism and Anarchism, are:
1)  The belief that all exchange value is created by labor; and
2)  that labor is entitled to all it creates.

Tucker believed that this latter end could be best achieved by removing 
statist privileges like banking market entry barriers, legal tender laws, 
and enforcement of land ownership not based on occupancy and use.  The 
resulting free market in land and credit would reduce the return on these 
factors to the labor value of providing credit and the labor value of 
improvements on land (plus economic rent, of course).

I recently found a relevant statement on the issue by the Marxist Maurice 
Dobb, in his introduction to Marx's Toward a Critique of Political 
Economy.

As Dobb rightly pointed out, the orthodox Marxist doctrine is that surplus
value was a necessary outgrowth of wage labor, even in the freest of free
markets. Even in such a laissez-faire environment, the difference between
the value of labor-power and the value of labor's product would result from
the inherent nature of wage labor. Profits would result, Marx said, even if
all products were sold at exactly their values (i.e., the LTV describes how
the market works now, not the ideal for a future utopia). His whole
doctrine depended on the assumption that exploitation would result even in a
free market, where all commodities were sold at value. As Marx said: If
you cannot explain profit on this assumption [without bringing in state
coercion], you cannot explain it at all.
Dobb continues:

The point of this can the better be appreciated if it is remembered that
the school of writers to whom the name of Ricardian Socialists has been
given (such as Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson and John Bray), who can be
said to have held a 'primitive' theory of exploitation, explained profit on
capital as the product of superior bargaining power, lack of competition and
'unequal exchanges between Capital and Labour' (this bearing analogy with
Eugen Duhring's 'force theory' which was castigated by Engels). This was
the kind of explanation that Marx was avoiding rather than seeking. It did
*not* make exploitation *consistent* with the law of value and market
competition, but explained it by departures from, or imperfections in, the
latter. To it there was an easy answer from the liberal economists and free
traders: namely, 'join with us in demanding *really* free trade and then
there can be no unequal exchanges and exploitation.'
In fact, what Warren, Tucker, and market-oriented Ricardian Socialists like
Hodgskin did was PRECISELY to take up this last challenge. But the way in
which they did so did not please most liberal economists. Benjamin Tucker
accepted Most's charge that he was merely a consistent Manchesterian, and
adopted that label as a badge of honor.


From: Fred Foldvary [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: socialism historical?
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 11:40:43 -0700 (PDT)
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  government money, as it predates socialism, probably doesn't rightly
fall under the category of socialism. 
Does the meaning of socialism include a time frame, so that a policy that
is socialist after that time is not socialist before that time?
What is socialism, what year does it take effect, and why is the time
element involved?
Fred Foldvary

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Re: socialism historical?

2003-06-18 Thread Fred Foldvary
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 You seem to confuse the concept of subordinating the individual to
 a greater human collective to subordinating the individual to the will of
 the tyrant.

But does not the practice of the subordination of the individual to the
collective go back to ancient times, indeed to pre-historical tribal
practice and belief?
Fred Foldvary

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Re: socialism historical?

2003-06-18 Thread AdmrlLocke

In a message dated 6/18/03 2:03:39 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

But does not the practice of the subordination of the individual to the
collective go back to ancient times, indeed to pre-historical tribal
practice and belief?
Fred Foldvar
 

in the ancient world we clearly have a good deal of subordination of the 
individual to the strongest individual or to the priest-king (the strongest 
individual?) but I'm not so clear about subordination of the individual to the 
collective.  It became an article of faith in the 19th-century that pre-historic 
humans practiced primitive communism, but I'm not sure there's much evidence to 
support that faith.  We do know that when Americans came to some of the 
pacific islands that theory said should be practicing primitive communism that they 
actually had a complex system of private property, and that Americans imposed 
primitive communism on them to force them into the right stage of history.

David



Re: socialism historical?

2003-06-17 Thread fabio guillermo rojas

Political labels are notoriously contextual. The passage of a few years
renders many labels unintelligible. However, there is something more
interesting to say. Political parties frequently co-op  specific policies,
which distorts our association of a label with a policy. Example:
the two politial parties in the US have played football with balanced
budget. Perot also made a big deal about. So what label would you use?

Fabio 

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Fred Foldvary wrote:

 --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
   government money, as it predates socialism, probably doesn't rightly
 fall under the category of socialism. 
 
 Does the meaning of socialism include a time frame, so that a policy that
 is socialist after that time is not socialist before that time?
 
 What is socialism, what year does it take effect, and why is the time
 element involved?
 
 Fred Foldvary
 
 
 =
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 




Re: socialism historical?

2003-06-17 Thread Francois-Rene Rideau
On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 07:41:45PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Socialism developed in the early and mid-19th century as a rejection of
 classical liberalism,
Wrong. You seem to confuse the concept of socialism with the word socialism.
Just like classical liberalism can be traced back to chinese taoists or
to greek stoicists, socialism can be traced back to chinese legists or greek
platonists. Plato's much praised The Republic is your typical
national-socialist utopia.

So yes, the word socialism appeared and became popular in the early
nineteenth century, some time after the word liberalism,
to denote the opposite trend in ideology. But both concepts or traditions
seem to be as old as society itself.

 What they all have in common, rather, is the subordination of the individual 
 to some sort of higher collective, whether, as in the case of communism, the 
 international working class, or, as in the case of national socialism, the 
 nation (the people of a particular ethnicity), or, as in the case of liberal 
 socialism, democracy or the People (a vague notion not necessarily 
 incorporating a particular notion of ethnicity).  In practice many of these types of 
 socialism (of which I've listed only a few) overlapped, and we see, as I mentioned 
 in an earlier email, when the German Marxists allied themselves with the 
 monarchists to pass government-mandated pensions over the opposition of German 
 liberals.  
 
 While most forms of socialism have been statist, not all statism has been 
 socialistic.  The primary statist ideology prior to classical liberalism, 
 classical conservatism, took as its justification not the subordination of the 
 individual to some higher collective, but the divine right of kings to rule (one 
 might say subordination of the individual to God through God's alleged 
 representative on earth, the king).
 
 The post-modern left, for that matter, has to some degree moved beyond 
 socialism anyway.  The environmentalist movement in particular has shifted from 
 conservation for the sake of future generations of humans to protecting the 
 environment for its own sake.  Even more than socialism, environmentalism harks 
 back to medieval calls for subordination of the individual to a non-human higher 
 good.
 
 David

-- 
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