[was: Re: [PEN-L:3001] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Memory History:
Herman Melville's _Benito Cereno_ (was Re: Yugoslavia to fSU and Chile)]
I wrote: Do you believe that state ownership automatically creates [full
employment]? It's not true in Algeria, for example, where the state
ownership of the oil industry coexists with high unemployment... 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.
Louis writes: I am talking about state ownership in countries that have
had socialist revolutions. Algeria did not. The right to a job was one of
the central features of the Soviet economy, as it was in China until
recently (Iron Rice Bowl).
I would credit the "iron rice bowl" and "the right to a job" not to state
ownership of property but to the fact that the peasants and/or workers were
actively involved in the revolution and thus kept a lot of power in society
for a long time (though this power decayed). State property is a necessary
condition to allow these rules, but is not sufficient.
In the case of the USSR, the "right to a job" eventually reflected not
working-class power as much the dynamics that Kornai and others pointed to:
the planning system created an incentive to hoard all inputs, including
labor-power. Factory managers had to have enough labor-power available to
try to live up to the unreasonable demands of the central plan. This in
turn allowed the working class to escape the kind of powerlessness that
arises from the normality of unemployment (seen under capitalism) but not
enough power to control the state.
BTW, did the right to a job apply to Jehovah's Witnesses? or did they have
to stay "in the closet" to keep a job? That is, am I right to say that
"even in the old USSR, where low unemployment was the rule, political
deviants found that they had a hard time getting a job"?
If you want to know how important it was and how antithetical it was to
an "efficient" economy, I would refer you to Alec Nove's "Toward a Feasible
Socialism". Workers are not "productive" unless you have the lash of
unemployment threatening them.
Capitalism's "solution" (using the reserve army of the unemployed to
motivate workers) is quite inefficient, while the official standards of
"efficiency" applied in the media and by many economists basically refer to
profit maximization, not true efficiency. (Capitalism sacrifices efficiency
to preserve profits, just as the Soviet-type planned economy sacrificed
efficiency to preserve bureaucratic rule.)
As you should know from reading my messages to pen-l, I don't agree with
Nove, even though I've never singled him out by name.
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...
Efficiency is a different topic altogether. I am much more concerned
about beggary, prostitution, hunger and disease than I am about efficiency ...
You should know that if an economy is wasting less of its resources, it has
more resources available to deal with beggary, prostitution, hunger, and
disease. The fact that it does not do so reflects _class power_: the
capitalists don't want to solve these problems unless (1) they start
spreading to their number, as when diseases from the slums start hitting
the "good side of town" (cf. Engels on Manchester) and/or (2) people start
organizing to push those in power to care about these problems.
In a separate thread (on privatization), I wrote that the ruling strata in
countries with state-owned means of production fight like hell to preserve
that power. Second, there's the specific kind of corruption I was talking
about, the use of collectively-owned assets for private gain. Now, I don't
know the facts of the matter, but Milosevic's colleagues have been accused
regularly of exactly that.
Louis writes: Of course there was corruption. Milosevic's resignation
speech openly admits that. "Time spent in opposition helps a party rid
itself of those who joined it for personal gain while it was in power."
If even Milosevic admits the existence of corruption, then it _must_ exist!
So you think that this corruption was one factor that encouraged his recent
expulsion from the presidency of the FRY? Or was the corruption itself the
result of US/NATO's efforts?
However, corruption in a postcapitalist society is a lesser evil to
unemployment in a capitalist society. People did not die of corruption
under Brezhnev, they die now for lack of food or medicine in Putin's free
economy.
I find it very hard to make comparisons like this. Some bozo might say "but
what if 1917 had never happened? then we should compare a country that was
capitalist all along to what really happened under the commies." Another
might say "Putin's simply trying to clean up the mess that Brezhnev and his
