Michael asks whether "workers [were] even partially in CONTROL?" in the former Soviet Union and in early socialist China. Since workers are imbued with capitalist ways of thinking when socialism begins, the answer cannot be a system of bourgeois democratic procedures among workers at the points of production.
Maybe these excerpts from A Critique of Soviet Economics , attributed to Mao Zedong, suggest an approach that is both realistic and determined to keep moving on the communist path. ( http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/CSE58.html ): In our experience, if cadres do not set aside their pretensions and identify with the workers, the workers will never look on the factory as their own but as the cadres'. "Master-of-the-house" attitudes make the workers reluctant to observe labor discipline in a self-conscious way. The year-end "leap forward" bonuses of the last two years are an example. With the exception of governmental and educational workers, all staff and workers have had year-end leap forward bonuses in varying amounts determined by the staff and workers themselves in the particular units. With respect to administration of enterprises owned by the whole people, we have adopted a set of approaches: a combination of concentrated leadership and mass movement; combinations of party leaders, working masses, and technical personnel; cadres participating in production; workers participating in administration; steadily changing unreasonable regulations and institutional practices. Chinese cadres participate in production; workers participate in management. Sending cadres down to lower levels to be tempered, discarding old rules and regulations -- all these pertain to the superstructure... -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#29483): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/29483 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/104961025/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
