From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rms2g@virginia.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 06 2002 - 15:42:57 MST
Alexander Sheppard wrote:
> Well, first of all, someone seems to have commented that socialism is
> agnostic on matters of authoritarianism. This isn't true at all.
> Socialism is actually fairly anti-authoritarian. There are some
> members of the socialist tradition who do favor some degree of
> authoritarianism, but I would say no legitimate idea of socialism
> favors Stalinism, and the ones which do favor even some limited
> authoritarianism--for example, an elected council deciding everything
> (this would still be a very monstrous system in my opinion) are very
> inconsistent and mistaken about what would be the result of such a
> system. Actually, it seems to me that what might well happen in such
> a system is that the elected representatives would ultimately take
> more and more power for themselves until the situation became rather
> like in the USSR--because such a system would just be conductive to
> that, because there's absolutely no legitimate reason why any sort of
> council, including an elected one, should have that much power.
>
> Libertarian socialism is different. Essentially, libertarian
> socialism turns this idea of some huge bureaucracy controlled by
> elected congress on its head: rather, it eliminates the congress, and
> transfers descision making power (I'm speaking roughly here...this
> isn't necessarily exactly how it would work) to the workers
> themselves. Now NASA doesn't have to be ordered around by
> Congress--it has its own councils, which effectively empower the
> normal engineers, the people who actually know what the hell is going
> on, to make descisions in a fairly democratic way. If that were the
> case, then nonsense like the International Space Station would likely
> never have been proposed (and if it was, it would do something to
> justify its exorbitant price tag), and we'd almost certainly have
> humans on Mars today. NASA is a special type of government
> organization where its role in the new system is very clear, because
> unlike many other organizations, NASA has a purpose which is
> comparatively independent of "the masses".
>
> Instead of having workers in a corporation coerced every minute by a
> petit dictator, the workers would seize control and discuss what
> activities the organization ought to be doing--producing wheat,
> perhaps, or computers--on their own, in an intelligent sort of
> council system. There would be no profits, no money--if you were
> producing wheat, you'd produce wheat because you thought producing
> wheat mattered, not because you were randomly hired to some job which
> was fairly meaningless to you after you got out of college because
> society didn't give you any other real options. People wouldn't do
> things because the CEO instructed them that they had to do it or he
> would fire them, with horrible consequences for them--they'd do it
> because it mattered, because it benefited human society or achieved
> some other goal that people thought mattered <i>themselves</i>. It is
> <i>they</i> who have the right to choose what they want to do, not a
> petit tyrant. If people could do that, then society would be a lot
> more focused on actually doing meaningful things, as opposed to
> following the whims of the masters.
### One question - what would you do to those who would produce things that
matter, like bread, but wouldn't like to share them with those who decided
to make things that don't matter, like an ISS? Would you take the bread away
from bakers, and give it to the those who wanted to (quote)"achieve some
other goal that people thought mattered <i>themselves</i>"?
Now, if you leave the bakers in peace, I have no problem with your idea -
there is a lot of totally harmless ideas out there, without the slightest
impact on reality. But if you want to take from the baker against his wish,
for any reason, I'd buy a gun and join them in defense. After all, today
it's the baker, tomorrow it might be the me. Petty dictators get bigger if
you don't smack them.
You might Google on the "invisible hand". There is a lot of meaning in the
worker/CEO relationship that seems to be escaping your attention.
Rafal
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