[Pen-l] Re: Post Office efficiency? [was: Charter schools]

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

me:
> BTW, who was it who said that socialism would be organized like the
> modern post office? I think Lenin quoted someone.

Paul Lafargue [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1882/06/socnat.htm]
Socialism and Nationalisation
(June 1882)

>From Socialist Standard, February/March, 1912.
Transcribed by Adam Buick.

At the present moment a kind of Socialism for the capitalists is being
created. It is very modest. It contents itself with the transformation
of certain industries into public services. Above all, it does not
compromise one. On the contrary it will rally a good number of
capitalists.

They are told: Look at the Post Office, that is a Socialist public
service, functioning admirably to the profit of the community, and
more cheaply than if it were entrusted to a private company as was
formerly the case. The gas supply, the railways and the building of
workmen’s dwellings must also become public services. They will
function to the profit of the community and will chiefly benefit the
capitalist class.

In capitalist society, the transformation of certain industries into
municipal or national services is the last form of capitalist
exploitation. It is because that form presents multiple and
incontestable advantages for the bourgeoisie that in every capitalist
country the same industries are becoming nationalised (Army, Police,
Post Office, Telegraphs, the Mint, etc.).

Certain monopolised industries, indeed, delivered up to the greed of
private companies, become instruments for the exploitation of other
sections of the capitalist class, and so powerful that they disturb
the whole bourgeois system.

Here are a few examples. The electric telegraph, on its introduction
into France, became a state service because the political interests of
the Government required it. In England and the Unites States, where
the same political interest did not exist, the telegraphs were
established by private companies. The English Government was compelled
to buy them out in the interests of all, particularly the speculators,
who in the transformation found means of obtaining scandalous profits.
In the United States the telegraph service is still in private hands.
It is monopolised by a gang of speculators who control the entire
Press of the country. Those speculators communicate telegrams only to
newspapers in vassalage to them, and which must pay such a heavy tax
that many, being unable to bear such a burden, do without telegraphic
news altogether. In America telegrams are the most important part of
the newspapers; to deprive them of these dispatches is to condemn them
to languish and die. In that republican Republic, which individualist
Liberals take as the ideal of their most daring dreams, the liberty of
the Press is at the mercy of a handful of speculators, without
government force and without responsibility, but in control of the
telegraph service.

<snip>

[This fits with Engels' view that under capitalism, there is a
tendency toward more and more explicit socialization of production, as
with the concentration and centralization of production, but
culminating with state aid to capital (as in most Keynesian fiscal
policy). This is not automatically socialism, however, since that
involves democratic control over the state by the working class and
its allies. History has shown, in addition, that this tendency can be
reversed, as from 1979 to 2008.]
-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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