>Elson makes point about demands for state activity absent self-activity
>(of various kinds, seems like she refers to citizens more than workers)
>being non-starter. She calls for using state resources to facilitate
>networks (worker-consumer-activist) to educate folks to develop what
>she calls 'social audit' for assessing economic accountability/
>responsibility, and to formulate ideas for new technologies & economic
>restructuring. Such networks would become part of regulatory process
>and that process could be used to require private property owners and
>private firms to be more socially responsible. At some point critical
>mass could be reached in which social accountability would supersede
>private profitability. DE's premise rests upon emergence of participatory
>rather than 'parasitic' state (as Marx called it _Civil War in France_)
>with socialism being conceptualized in terms democratic accountability of
>resource use. There is 'pulling down from shelf' quality to Elson's
>pragmatism given likelihood of increasing tensions associated with
>possibility of any kind of socialism. Michael Hoover
Interesting. I think that an element of much of the market socialist
current has to do with building up what amounts to counter-institutions in
capitalist society--like cooperatives. Although Justin tried to
disassociate himself from the Mondragon cooperatives, it is a fact that
some of the key MS ideologues like Betsy Bowman stress that Mondragon type
cooperatives are key to the transition to socialism. They see the spread of
cooperatives until reaching critical mass as a precondition to a new
society. Once that critical mass has been reached, a new government will be
declared to defend the class interests of the cooperative producers. Bowman
and a fellow philosophy professor defended these ideas at a Brecht Forum
about 7 years ago when MS and postmodernism were all the rage. Her
co-thinker started his talk by calling attention to the widespread
existence of ESOP's and employee-owned firms like Avis or United Airlines.
It all seemed rather surrealistic to me.
In point of fact if there is to a socialist transformation in the US, I am
positive that it will involve nothing like this at all. A review of
American history will back that up. During the 1930s you had pitched
battles between workers and bosses over the right to form unions and to win
a living wage. If the idea of socialism came into play, it was the result
of many workers reaching the conclusion that an alternative to the current
system was necessary. They didn't think about how they could run Ford Motor
themselves within the context of the capitalist system, but how to get rid
of the system itself. Most workers have about much interest in becoming
joint entrepreneurs as they do in starting their own business. One of the
interesting observations made in Andrew Hacker's "Money" is that immigrants
tend to be over-represented in small business startups because American
workers lack the desire to take risks or compete in that fashion,
especially African-American workers.
Louis Proyect
The Marxism mailing-list: http://www.marxmail.org
