On being the right size (1928)

Re:On being the right size (1928) by yaakov34 on Monday October 14, 2013 @06:57AM (#6546509)

You're describing syndicalism; it's not true that it was never implemented by the communists. The Soviet Union had a very serious go at it, allowing the artel as an economic unit (essentially a kind of co-op), and allowing people to freely sell products of their own labor. Within months, this led to a renewed stratification of society, the emergence of a nouveau rich class, and something approaching a return to capitalism (some people's labor is more profitable than others'). In the case of the Soviet Union, this led to a crackdown on the labor market. They also made attempts to organize along trade union lines instead - which reduces the stratification problem somewhat since a trade is not a single economic unit - but having the electricians and the mechanics within a factory report to different management was not practicable. The USSR came to its system of government-run conglomerates because it was the only way they found to combine socialism with getting at least something done; it was not their initial intention to have everything run by the government, if only because the didn't really want the management burden.

In other cases, the evolution towards capitalism just ran its course. Israel stumbled into syndicalism by default - its labor unions and cooperatives predate the state. In virtually all cases, the cooperatives did not grant new members the same rights as the founding members. E.g. the bus cooperative - which started out as a free association of owner-drivers - now relies on hired labor for most of the actual driving, with wages the same as any other driving job in the capitalist free market. The final stop for this kind of developments is in the unionized ports, where they have full union members making tens of thousands of dollars a month for sinecure jobs, with a lot of the gruntwork being done by minimum-wage hired labor with no rights. It's nice to talk about how "the workers" will not vote for this or that, but when it comes to voting members - of anything - voting themselves more rights than the people asking to join, they have, they did, and they will vote for that.

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Re:On being the right size (1928) by vidarh on Monday October 14, 2013 @07:07AM (#6546540)

It is worth noting that the USSR came into that system for many reasons, but not least because they tried something that Marx had explicitly warned against: Attempting revolution somewhere that was so poor that redistribution would make want for basic necessities universal.

Marx pointed out already in The German Ideology (1845) that this would just cause a return to class struggle, as it creates an immense incentive for people to find ways to accumulate, no matter how much you try to crack down on it.

This was one of many objections to the Bolshevik rush to try to develop socialism, but by the time of the Bolshevik power grab, Lenin had spent 25 years inventing excuses for how Russia could somehow avoid that trap, starting by his fantasy that the Bolshevik would somehow get the support of poor farmers (didn't happen)... Didn't save him from it.

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Re:On being the right size (1928) by pron on Monday October 14, 2013 @10:13AM (#6547357)

Israel has had several interesting attempts with socialist economic units, most notably the Kibbutzim, whose decline will give economists and social psychologists enough fodder for years. Most of these attempts indeed failed (some more so than others), but they worked quite well for a few decades.

One could argue that an economic structure – any economic structure, including capitalism – cannot survive without a supporting value system. In Israel, all of these attempts took place in a capitalistic environment, both inside Israel and in international markets. It is worth mentioning Max Weber's observations that it took many years for society's value to change enough to support free-market capitalism. For example, he describes how workers traditionally worked less hours when offered a higher wage.

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