Sorry to be a skunk at the picnic but I fear that being enamored of these tools of centralized managerial control are actually going in the WRONG direction --- I am perhaps too much influenced by the anarchist critique of "actually existing socialism" but I think that all centralization is almost GUARANTEED to be undemocratic. I do not know where Trotsky and his supporters ended up, but long before Trotsky was "defeated" by Stalin, the trade unions who initially played such an important role in the Bolshevik organizing and seizure of power (led by Tomsky) had been totally sidelined --- an advance warning of what the Stalinist Soviet state would look like --- The only way to guarantee a DEMOCRATIC socialism is with the kind of decentralization that has been studied by GAR ALPEROVITZ for decades.
In my next e-mail, I;ll give links to Gar's work (unless Louis beats me to it). NOW -- that doesn't mean that the INFORMATION generated by these techniques cannot be very valuable for the decentralized decision-making units that would make up what Gar called a PLuralist Socialist Commonwealth (he first published that in the REVIEW OF RADICAL POLITICAL ECONOMISTS in 1972!!) --- but POWER must be from the bottom up not the top down. HOWEVER -- I don't want to be a total skunk -- sharing that information and history is quite valuable and I join in welcoming that intervention. Solidarity, Mike > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5366): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5366 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79555899/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
