> >How do you propose to get to a nonmarket socialism? Seems to me the
> >only hope is to bend, push, modify, transform what exists now, which
> >means, in Diane Elson's phrase, socializing markets. It seems
> >abstract and adventurist to talk about any postmarket socialism as if
> >you could just pull it down from the shelf.
> >
> >Doug
>
>What does it mean to "socialize markets"? This sounds like Chris Burford's
>idea. It can't work, needless to say. Reforms like the Tobin Tax, etc. are
>all well and good, but socialism has a completely different agenda. It
>involves dissolving the old state apparatus, nationalizing the means of
>production, a monopoly on foreign trade and extensive use of planning.
>Furthermore it is not pulled down from a shelf, but created through struggle.
>
>Louis Proyect
Actually, trying to "bend, push, modify, transform what exists now"
has always been what socialists and other leftists tried to do in
non-revolutionary times. Even "revolution" (despite its connotation
of turning everything upside down) can only "transform what exists
now." No one in the world has ever tried to pull a new world from
the shelf, because it is not possible to do so (except in science
fiction like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's _Herland_).
The problem is that it is all well and good to say we should be
"socializing markets," but the real world has been moving exactly in
the opposite direction of privatizing the public domain (DNA, water,
information, social programs, state-owned enterprises -- you name it,
they have or are trying to privatize it).
Yoshie
