Ken pushed his anti-USSR mondragonic speech once more:
>I find it revealing that no one on this
>list chose to respond to this challenge ...
Don't understand the challenge. Don't know of what it is revealing, apart from
high volume. Anyway, you seem to be begging for reactions, so here you are.
>Soviet-style socialism has been shown unworkable
What do you mean by "unworkable"? It worked quite a while, isn't it?
>, yet when a viable model of
>transcending capitalist relations such as Mondragon is presented
Cooperatives are cool. There's no question. However, I don't know much
about this case. Have they completely transcended capitalist relations
internally? And, as to the presence of exploiters, they surely pay taxes and
probably pay interests on the money they needed to buy land and other stuff.
Besides, one can say that they are exploited when they sell at a lower than fair
price due to market conditions, dumping, etc.
>a practical program that will enaable
>us to overcome the flaws of capitalism in a way that suffers no loss of
>efficiency such as that attained by the market principle of determining
>demand.
I think that this efficiency of the market remains to be seen. I guess it depends
on what kind of efficiency (efficency of what?) you wants. Could you expand on
what you mean by "determining demand"? Markets do equilibrate supply and
demand by excluding the poorest and/or less eager demanders. In a free
market functioning as in theory, it is generally demand which adapts to supply
short-term and not the reverse. Anyway, it's clear that markets are very bad at
some things and rather good at others. One thing they are good at IMO is
distributing production and dynamically signaling the most demanded things
through price. However, if there's inequality it means that the poorest won't be
able to get the most demanded things. A partial solution that is already
applied now in many countries is restricting the markets in the essential
products like some foodstuffs. A more comprehensive and complementry
solution would be a direct attack on inequality. Markets also obviously fails
where there's not much elasticity in demand and supply. There's another
problem: speculation. It's especially severe in the case of the things that don't
deteriorate quickly like real estate. Anti-speculative laws have existed in
some critical situations but I think that the only good answer is weaking
property rights and creating a counter-speculative institution who does
something like the Fed does with the dollar rates (trying to stabilize the rates
by buying low and selling high).
Julien
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