I agree that state or rather some type of collective ownership is a
necessary but not a sufficient condition for socialism. Among the positive
features of state ownership not mentioned are:
i) profits are not distributed to private capital but to the state for
collective use.
ii) state owned enterprises may operate on the basis of need or social
policy rather than profit. Sask. Power brought gas and electricity to rural
areas. Production can be subsidized for social and national purposes.
Privatization plus global trade agreements ensuresthat every possible
enterprise and service becomes an outlet for private capital and a source of
private profit and that production based upon need or social policy rather
than
private profit becomes a larger and larger part of production all in the
name of progress and market efficiency of course.
CHeers, Ken Hanly
----- Original Message -----
From: Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 11:11 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:2998] Re: Re: Re: Re: Memory & History: Herman Melville's
_Benito Cereno_ (was Re: Yugoslavia to fSU and Chile)
> 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
>
