Re: Re: Milosevic out?

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wrote:
> Whether one calls the relatively egalitarian statist economic development
> efforts "socialist" or not is the kind of sterile academic debate I try to
> avoid.

Charles ripostes:
> Yet, I was responding to a post in which you seem to be telling Lou that
> Yugoslavia is not "socialist"
>
> --------
> To Lou you said:
> (1) state ownership of enterprises only shows the _potential_ for
> socialism, not the actuality of socialism. (It's necessary, but not
> sufficient.) It's not just a matter of the state owning the means of
> production. We must also ask: who owns the state? After all, the Egyptian
> Pharaoh owned the land and other major means of production. Do you think
> that the workers and peasants of Serbia had significant democratic control
> over the Serbian state? (Louis, do you think that Algerian state-owned oil
> wells are "socialist"? How about the Tennessee Valley Authority?)
>
> BTW, Marx and Engels didn't equate state control with socialism. To
> Engels, ".... -clip-  "
> ----------
> CB: So, as you say second, no sterile debate over whether  or not
> Yugoslavia is or was socialist. Rather, is Yugoslavia part of the world
> historic process in which imperfect, potential socialisms are developing
> toward actual socialism.

Sorry about that. It's a common problem, the conflation of the socialism
that I'm in favor of (i.e., socialism that involves workers being in power
democratically) and the socialism as a generic category, which includes
such "bad socialism" as Pol Pot's "Democratic" Kampuchea.

That admission made, I don't see any point in debating it.

BTW, both "relatively egalitarian statist economic development efforts" and
capitalism can help set the stage for the kind of socialism I favor (though
in different ways).

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine