[PEN-L:32914] RE: Re: Re: United Airlines and market socialism

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:32909] Re: Re: United Airlines and market socialism

Michael Perelman writes: > United Airlines does not seem to be a clean test of market socialism. Workers got nominal ownership and three seats on the board.<

it's more of a clean test of the idea of worker-financed bail-outs of capitalist corporations in a system that militates against democratic workers' control.

>  Even so, the article that Lou posted was correct in asserting that that the worker owned firms would have to follow market laws and therefore not really get a chance for socialism.  Marx suggested that huge capitalist   forms would  create a shell from which socialist organizations could emerge.  I don't buy that idea either.<

Marx actually suggested both (1) that huge capitalist firms represented an abolition of capitalism within capitalism (see chapter 27 of volume III of CAPITAL, p. 438 of the International Publishers' edition) and (2) that workers' cooperatives were a precursor of socialism ("within the old form the first sprouts of the new," especially by showing that the capitalist was "redundant" (chs. 27 & 23, pp. 440 & 387).  (In ch. 27, he writes that "although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organization all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. ... the antithesis between capital and labor is overcome within them, if only by making the associated workers their own capitalist... They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one." (p. 440).)

To my mind, this does not say that Marx emphasized planning (the basic rule of the huge firms' internal organization) over workers' cooperatives, as the apologists for the old Soviet Union said. Nor does it say that he emphasized cooperatives over planning (as some "market socialists" do). Rather, it says that Marx wanted _both_ society-level planning _and_ workers' control (overcoming the antithesis between capital and labor) as complementary parts of the same socialist package. 

Of course, this simply puts a major task on the agenda of socialists: how can we merge and reconcile central planning and decentralized democratic cooperatives? Marx looked at precursor forms, but it seems like we have to go further, talking about various possible schemes. I don't want pen-l to do this at this point (unless others prevail), since SCIENCE & SOCIETY had a good issue on this subject recently.

Jim