Jim Devine wrote: > > But I do get you point (I hope): if a mode of production -- such as > the one that used to prevail in the old Soviet Union -- cannot get the > job done of producing and distributing goods and services with a > reasonable degree of efficiency compared to other existing modes of > production, it's bound to fail eventually if it doesn't solve the > problem.
This does not prove that the "less efficient" mode of production is the inferior mode of production. To paraphrase Dickens's Cissie Jupe, "Who has got the goods and services?" in that wealthier nation? A mode of production which (a) provided good preventive medicine for its entire population (b) minimally decent care for all the disabled and (c) equal medical care for all would be superior (and fuck efficiency) to any mode of production, however more efficient overall in the provision of goods and services, that was inferior in these three measures. No socialist system is going to produce a mass of goods to match an advanced capitalist society -- and that will be an advantage, not a disadvantage. Total production has to fall (from US/EU/Japan levels) or the human species won't survive. Carrol
