[p2p-research] 21st Century Socialism: Eleven Talking Points

[Kevin Carson]

On 5/2/09, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
> My worries about socialism:
>
> 1. It seems to have failed too many times.
>
> 2. It seems to often bring out authoritarianism -- and I cannot agree to any version of that.  Cuba, North Korea, even China to me are social abominations despite some successes and admirable traits.  It is vital to state upfront what is and what isn't compulsory.
>
> 3. It is too often statist (see point 2).
>
> 4. It doesn't allocate goods efficiently.
>
> 5. It tends to rely too much on centralized planning and controls.
>
> 6. The word itself doesn't connote anything in particular any longer.  Who is and who isn't socialist?  Is Sweden socialist?  Cuba?  Why or why not?
>
> 7. Who sets socialism's priorities?  How is socialism governed optimally?  Does it remove the local?
>
> 8. People seem to not be spontaneously socialist.  Earlier this year there was a set of discussions on "cul-de-sac communes."  I didn't see a rush to start them.  Why not?  Sure, I'd love to borrow some tools from my neighbor, but what are the costs and commitments?  How do I dissolve my bonds if I want to?
>
> 9. Can't we be as socialist as we want through civil society organizations already?

What I thought interesting about the article was its identification of
such things as cooperatives, increased worker skill, and many-to-many
networks as building blocks of socialism.

This is refreshing IMO, because it seems to reflect a partial return
to the understanding of the term "socialism" as it existed before it
became equated to state ownership/control or to collectivism.

For the first few decades of the classical socialist movement, it was
a broad fabric of sub-movements that ranged from statism and
collectivism, to people like Benjamin Tucker who understood it as the
kind of society that would be produced by the free market if it
weren't for government-enforced artificial scarcity restricting the
issue of interest-free mutual credit and free homesteading of vacant
land.

It's nice to see at least a partial return to what the editors of
Radical Technology called "the recessive, decentralist strain of the
Left that reemerges when the dominant strain of Lenin and Harold
Wilson is engaged elsewhere."

-- 
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