Barkley: > But, given that arguably >Slovenia is _still_ an actually existing market socialist >economy, albeit trending to a market capitalism with heavy >worker-owned, worker-managed elements, one can hardly lay >the "utopian" label on the advocates of worker-managed >market socialism. Louis: I will have *much* more to say about this in my next post, but let me make a brief point here. Yugoslavia was an attempt to create a society based on the Soviet model. The Marxist economists who were part of Tito's original planning team had given a lot of thought to the question of how they would develop socialism geared to what they saw as the particular characteristics of capitalist Yugoslavia. This included ideas about the need to combine self-management with export manufacturing, etc. The key thing is that socialist Yugoslavia grew out of the relationship of class forces following WWII, not utopian schemes. What has happened, however, is that a segment of the market socialist current has abstracted out the main features of socialist Yugoslavia in the "good old days" and turned it into a blueprint for socialism. In one of Schweickart's early books, he tips his hat to Yugoslavia as a model of what he is talking about. Isn't it besides the point for socialists in the United States to be holding up Yugoslavia as a model? We are American Marxists, not Yugoslavian Marxists. When we talk about the socialism that is feasible for the United States, we should be doing the sort of study that our counterparts were doing in the mountains when they were fighting with the Partisans. But we have no revolutionary mass movement. All we have are left economists with very little ties to any mass movement --revolutionary or reformist-- who dream up "feasible socialisms" with zero connection to current American politics or even a politics that can grow out of the contradictions of society today.
