Louis wrote:
>The ratio of state ownership is deeply relevant. It helps to provide a
>job. Jobs are necessary for life. With privatization, you get
>unemployment. With unemployment you get begging, starvation, prostitution
>and despair. Very important questions to the working class, which is the
>only class that can build socialism.
Do you believe that state ownership automatically creates a job? It's not
true in Algeria, for example, where the state ownership of the oil industry
coexists with high unemployment (one factor that has encouraged the Islamic
movement against the government there). Also, even in the old USSR, where
low unemployment was the rule, political deviants found that they had a
hard time getting a job. Please correct me if I am wrong about this.
Though the open kind of unemployment that is the norm under capitalism is
clearly of concern to working people, we should also be concerned with the
hidden kind of unemployment that prevailed in the old USSR, since it was a
sign of wasted resources that could have been used to promote environmental
health, rising private consumption, or whatever.
In many cases, as Kornai argues, Soviet workers had jobs (and so weren't
openly unemployed) but didn't do much work, since there was little
incentive to do so (because there were not enough consumer goods available
to make one's money salary worth much and the workers didn't have control
over the state hierarchy they worked for). Because people didn't work much
(except sometimes in the periodic government "work for Mother Russia"
campaigns), that limited the supply of consumer goods, making money
salaries somewhat worthless. (In the old USSR, people usually had big
hoards of cash since there wasn't much that could be bought with it.) This
"we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" was a vicious circle -- a
sort of supply-side mirror image of the kind of demand-side vicious circle
that normally prevails under capitalism, in which inadequate demand for
workers implies inadequate demand for products, which implies inadequate
demand for workers...
To repeat myself (as I do too often), state ownership is necessary to
attaining socialist goals but is not sufficient. The Pharaoh owned the
means of production, but that didn't promote socialist goals. Crucial is
that people have democratic control over the state. Not only does that help
deal with the informational problems of planning (as Trotsky pointed out,
countering one of the points that Hayek later made) but it promises to
increase the incentive to work. Obviously I don't have time to elaborate...
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
