[p2p-research] People happier under Soviet-styled socialism?

[Kevin Carson]

On 6/9/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think the article is misleading as it uses democracy as a yardstick,but
> that's not the issue, capitalism is, especially the brand that replaced the
> system, i.e. neoliberal shock therapy.
>
> Let's not forget Russia lost 15 years a life expectancy in a decade, a
> dramatic decline in living standards, with a wholesale abandonment of the
> safety net well below European welfare standards ... At the same time, there
> was a straight looting of state property, while on a local level, mafia
> organizations took over ...

The sheer scale of theft was absolutely astounding.  The entire
state-owned economy, which should have been "privatized" as worker
cooperatives (and was going to be under Gorbachev's plan), was instead
looted by the kleptocrats.  It makes the Enclosures look positively
picayune in comparison.

It's interesting that the more principled right-wing libertarians,
like Murray Rothbard, argued that state property in former state
socialist regimes should be treated as unowned and "homesteaded" by
those in actual occupancy (either the workers or consumers).  That
would mean "privatizing" state industry by handing it over to workers'
councils, and privatizing state services like utilities by
transforming them into consumer co-ops.

Similar in kind, if not degree, has been the bait-and-switch involving
the American Social Security system over the past 25 years.  The U.S.
government passed a "reform" to "solve" the system's shortfall in the
'80s by increasing the payroll tax.  Unfortunately, most people
weren't aware that there wasn't a big stack of surplus money being put
away.  Rather, the surplus was used to buy U.S. savings bonds.  In
other words, the SS surplus was used to conceal and understate the
deficit over a twenty year period caused by cuts to the top marginal
tax rate.  American workers paid a higher SS payroll tax, which they
had been promised would keep the system solvent for their lifetimes,
and the money was instead given back to the rich while the SS trust
fund was filled up with government IOUs.  And now, after twenty years
of higher payroll tax and absolutely nothing to show for it, we're
being told the only way to fix it is to increase the retirement age or
some other bit of skullduggery.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html