From: Alexander Sheppard (alexandersheppard@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Nov 06 2002 - 10:46:12 MST
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.
_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:57:58 MST