GLOBAL KEYNESIANISM

Hi, everyone:
Since I hope that there are some objective listeners int his group, I
should like to comment on some of the statements made by Andrew Austin and
Dr. Barenda, even though I feel, that it is useless to try convincing
cofirmed socialists, with logical arguments.

1. Defining Capitalism as genocide, slavery, racism and state oppression:
Such atrocities have happened long before capitalism came into being and
have certainly also happened in countries professing to be Marxist;
remember the Gulags or the killing of a quarter of their fellow citizens by
the Khmer Rouge! 
They happen when the wrong people come into power and cannot be easily
removed, which unfortunately can happen with present day elections, where
wealth is often a defining element, but it is much more probable in systems
lacking orderly procedures for choosing their leaders and checks and
balances for their later performance.

2. Keynesianism is equivalent to the total state control of the economy
during war:
Wrong: Keynesianism implies only partial government intervention; more
during recessions and very little in boom times.

3: Keynesian economic promotions must be used to produce armaments:
Wrong; there is no reason why they cannot be used to build needed
infrastructure, affordable housing for the poor or to clean up polluted
beaches.

4. Keynesinism is counterproductive, since it is only propping up
Capitalism momentarily and postponing the final, necessarily Socialist
solutions. This leads us to the problem of judging, how true Socialism
could be realized and what it could do for humanity. Since no clear answer
have been forthcoming on these problems durung this discussion, we can only
try to observe to  what happened in the Soviet sphere or in other,
nominally Marxist countries. Now many contributors of this group
immediately might answer, that these countries practiced State capitalism
or any other "ism" but not true Socialism. But is it not strange, that NONE
of the many attempt to put the ideas of Karl Marx into practice did achieve
success?
Here is my explanation of this apparent mystery
In order to eliminate what they conceive as the sequestering of surplus
values, Socialist must take the following measures
1.moving the control of the means of production out of the hands of
individual owners or multilateral corporations into some body representing
the workers and
2. replace the market with centralized planning of the economy.
Such measures imply giving an enormous power over the lives of the whole
population to a very small group of people or to an all-powerful dictator.
This is a much higher concentration of power than anything attained by the
mightiest of corporations, with none of the checks and balances still
existing in our neoliberal democracies.

Now power corrupts and absolute poser corrupts absolutely, but nevertheless
by luck such a dictator might sometimes turn out to be a relatively
well-meaning and incorruptible person and Fidel Castro might fit this
description; but what happens if you get Pol Pot instead?

My final conclusion: The success of any systems depends on the quality of
the men or women who make the decisions and the biggest problem is how to
choose them.
Any ideas?

Regards Paul