> From: "William S. Lear" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: [PEN-L:8634] Re: market socialism, planned socialism, ut > On Sat, February 15, 1997 at 18:48:27 (PST) Max B. Sawicky writes: > >The idea was that the public is inclined to > >respond to fewer of the factors that make for > >inequality than is the left. For instance, I > >would speculate that inheritance taxation > >is looked upon more favorably than, say, > >taxing lottery winnings. > > Forgive me, perhaps I'm missing something: are you saying the left is > for taxing lottery winnings ahead of inheritance taxation? I would Not ahead of, but on the same plane as. My point is that we (the left) tend to map our own prescriptions for equality onto the public and possibly gloss over contrary views held by a non-trivial number of people. In particular, I speculate without benefit of current data that the public would be disinclined to reduce inequality stemming from some factors whereas the left would not discriminate in the same way, to the same extent, or would reduce inequality to a greater extent. I do have one source for my statement, beyond the simple personal experience of talking to hundreds of working people, individually, about socialism; it's an old paper by Aaron Wildavsky called "The Political Feasibility of Income by Right" which is anthologized in his book, Revolt Against The Masses. > think the left would either be for getting rid of lotteries > altogether, or for leaving the winnings largely untouched (most Well that's not a very coherent position, is it? > winnings are small lotto payoffs anyway, are they not?), given the > demographics of the participants. Would this not be basically in line > with what you identify as the opinion of the public? Clearly part of the public loves lotteries and gambling, and I don't think it's because of advertising or individual economic distress. There is also of course a popular opposition to gambling which is partly religious in origin and partly wine-and-cheese liberal or radical chic. > >The Right Turn and 'leftish' policy encompass > >quite a few more things than our own rarified > >notions of equality. > > Of course it does, that's why we should should define what we mean by > left policy, and compare those notions with what Ferguson and Rogers > (inter alia) touch upon in their book (for those interested: Thomas > Ferguson and Joel Rogers, _Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats > and the Future of American Politics_, Hill and Wang, 1986). They > cover more than "rarified notions of equality"---they look at many > different dimensions of public opinion, and most of them are well to > the left of what currently passes for "left", at least. My point was NOT that the public will not be interested in left policies or politics. That would make everything I do pretty ridiculous, if it isn't already. It was that a particular component of the left agenda -- income equality -- may be misconstrued in terms of scope and content, insofar as it hopes to speak to a popular sentiment in the working class. > This only gets us so far, however. The next thing to ask is how much > people have been fooled by the massive amount of propaganda to which > they are subjected on a daily basis, both in schools and in the media. Now we're back to the brainwashed masses. I've ventilated on this before on PEN-L so I won't rehash here. > Noam Chomsky once mentioned that he felt many of people's "anti-left" > leanings were quite superficial and obscured a core of essential > support for progressive politics. This is very similar to what Rafael I agree with this. > Ezekiel reports in his book _The Racist Mind: Portraits of American > Neo-Nazis and Klansmen_, Viking, 1995, on the beliefs of many KKK > members, for example. This too, since in my younger days I used to have civil discussions with Klan members about socialism. > . . . > I guess I see it as a core of solid support, with superficial > objections. Does this seem reasonable, at all? I think we're in about 75% agreement. > To get back on topic, I think that what we should be looking into, > instead of jumping right in to market socialism vs. planned socialism, > is at the way democracy could participate in economic policy. There > needn't be a strict dichotomy between "the market" and "centralized > planning". Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel have done some interesting > work in this regard, and I think it needs to be taken much further. At the risk of starting another thread and enflaming Robin and others, I would put the emphasis on determining what policies would really be effective and how to sell them to the public. I've been in too many meetings to want to participate in many more devoted to planning the economy from the ground up. This should not be taken as an aspersion on the Albert/Hahnel canon, which I should probably become more familiar with before venturing further opinions on the subject. MBS
