[PEN-L:1725] Re: Re: Re: Re: Social Democracy and Utopia

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Brad,
>     OK, for the umpteenth time I am going to point
>something out to you to which you have never responded.
>     What about Slovenia and worker-managed market
>socialism?  Taking a look at where it started from in 1945,
>the record is pretty good and although not as liberal of a
>democracy as the Scandinavian social democracies, it was
>pretty free and easy, more so than other states ruled by a
>Communist Party (actually the League of Yugoslav Workers,
>to be technically precise).
>     I must grant that Slovenia's virtues are only clearer
>since the collapse of Yugoslavia, and that the overall
>record there on a lot of grounds has been not as good,
>although your constant inclusion of Tito in your list of
>awful leaders looks pretty thin.  Things only went bad in
>Yugoslavia after old "last of the Hapsburgs" kicked the
>bucket.
>Barkley Rosser

Milovan Djilas has... interesting views of Tito. A believer in political
democracy Tito was not.

There is the problem that successful worker-managed firms tend to want to
not hire new workers (because it dilutes the value of their ownership
share), so you have higher demand for a factory's products leading to a
contraction in the factory's production. But I would love it if ESOPs
became the chief means by which corporations raised capital. And I have
always been profoundly depressed that both co-determination and
worker-managed firms have not managed to expand faster...


Brad DeLong