Re: Communist Failure and Markets (fwd)

toshio wrote:

> Dear Friends,

 >I have made the World Party without relation to you. I am working to
>establish the
>World Government. Some people wrote about Marxism and dependency theory.
>These are
>mentioned in the paper
>"World Government: The Best Economic Theory."
>http://www3.justnet.ne.jp/~toshio-suzuki/best-policy.htm
>This paper insists that the best economic policy is to establish the
>World
>Government. Marx's theory and dependency theory are mentioned. The paper
>says that
>these two theory do not contradict each other. They are still alive. But
>World Party
>supports the liberal economic system. This is because communism is not
>practical. We
>need socialistic policy. But the basic system should be liberalism or
>capitalism.

 >                                              Yours sincerely
  >                                              Toshio Suzuki

toshio, although i strongly disagree with your argument, you are at least
"specific" in stating what you want. some people on the list pronounce
"socialism" while they "vaguely" refute the liberal economic order,
implicitly hinting the idea of having socialism with capitalism. the
justification is very similar to yours, though it is not explicitly stated
in order not to attract the opposition of marxists in the list. thus, it
is nice to see you having come up with straight-forward proposals. you are
clear to begin with.

as you know, i refute the liberal economic order and capitalism from the
begining to the end. i do this on scientific grounds that economic
liberalism is inpractical and unsustainable. it fails the test of
equality. thus, i refute that socialism, as an economic order, is a
failure or inpractical. what is the criteria of measuring "failure" here?
i have seen no satisfactory study so far explaining why capitalism
(private enterprise system) is more efficient and practical then
socialism. so, let me explain in details. 

some people would suggest that state enterprise system is a failure
because it can not compete with private enterprise system and global
market pressures. since the countries in the periphery already lack the
technological expertise and labor force to compete, their public
enterprises can not run efficiently. socialist societies are largely
dependent on world systemic forces. the failure of socialism is a sytemic
outcome of being part of the world system, not a consequence of this or
that developmental strategy. it also suggested that global capitalism is
much stronger than socialism established in few countires; furthermore,
global capitalism subjugates socialism to the imperatives of the world
economy in a way that it is hard to resist sytemic imperatives. that is
how the inpraticality of socialism is explained. free trade people,
economic liberals and reformist socialists generally subscribe to this 
argument.

i generally agree with this approach. what i disagree is its inherent
determinism, which sometimes resonates the critiques of the  
neo-conservative economists. nowadays, the neo-conservative right
governments, taking the support of the IMF and World Bank policy
proposals, aim at dismantling the public enterprises in the Third World.
they do this on the grounds that those enterprises are inefficient,
monopolistic and non-competitive. they beleive in the principles of global
capitalism, free trade and unregulated economy that is, while they do
their best to implement these ideals to get rid of the welfare state.

first of all, there is no specific evidence that a state enterprise is
less efficient that a private enterprise. as i said before, every
enterprise system has inefficiencies and is subject market forces, not
only public enterprises. the socialist states in the periphery pay the
price more because they are more vulnarable to systemic imperatives. that
is true? so what? this does not refute the fact that workers of those
enterprises benefitted more than the workers of the private
enterprises in the west (i am not talking about the degenerated socialism
of china here. china is no longer socialist. it is a capitalist economy).
they had job security,welfare benefits and less fear of unemployment. yes,
there was Kremlin bureaucracy! yes, there was central planning! yes, there
were some insincere socialists! yes, it was a bureaucratic socialist
state! what makes the difference essentially? the degree yes, but there is
bureaucracy everywhere, there is state everywhere? does not the state
intervene in economy in capitalism or set the prices when necassary? white
house capitalists and federal reserve bureaucrats stay on top of us.
nowhere does free market exist in an ideal form to begin with. to think
about socialism without some form of "implementing agency", state, or
whetever is idealism par excellence. i reiterate this point. idealizing
socialism makes it impossible to materialize socialism. it rather ends in
nihilism, scepticism and acceptance of the status-quo. it turns
socialism into never-reaching ideal. 

let's not idealize "political forms" here (lack of political freedoms,
speech.liberal west versus the brutal communists rhetoric), let's talk
about specific economic proposals. socialism is not a political form in
the abstract, it is a material organization of society with specific
economic agendas (public enterprise system, fair distribution of wealth,
working class ownership of property, control of the economy by the
labouring classes (males and females), elimination of the capitalist
class, at least in the long run, if not in the short run).socialism
without these basics is just a rhetorical game and a romantic exercise. 

in turkey (semi-peripheral capitalist country), the neo-liberal
structuring proposed by the world-technocratic apparatuses, aimed at
getting rid of the public enterprises (telecommunications, mining, some
hotels, transportation). the conservative/liberal government of Ozal said
we have to open ourselves to the new world; turkey can not wait. the fact
of the matter is that you can not privatize your economy radically. who
gives you the right to do that?  the workers resisted and they were
right. nobody has the right to leave the labor force without jobs and job
security. if a state enterprise system has some problems,this does not
ipso facto mean that we should let ourselves to the wind of world systemic
forces just because capitalists want us to privatize our economies. the
countries in the periphery pay the price more than the countries in the
core. they have a large proportion of exploited labor force, great
disparities of wealth, high levels of poverty and unemployment.
privatization will make the situation worse, galvanizing the class
inequalities and objective contradictions already existing.   

in argentina, menem radically privatized the economy to ward off high
inflation (1989). what happened? corruption, unemployed labor force,
tax exemptions, elimination of unions, social rights and liberties at the
expense of workers. only those private enterprises enjoying government
priviliges were able to survive. the privatization of ENTEL (teleco) did
not end up monopoly in the market; it rather gave opportunity to rent
seeking capitalists (private monopolies), who made extensive use of state
protection and geographical monopolization of the market.

in egypt, workers' federation resist market pressures to the extent that
they can. they are *not* passive agents. they are defeated but they
struggle. despite the accomplishments since the Egyptian government was
forced to implement market liberalization reforms, only four big
transactions were executed in public firms. global capitalism is putting
the governments of these countires in a very weird situation:poor folks 
trying to balance between popular demands and expectations of foreign
bourgeoisie. it leads to identity and  _legitimation_ crisis (to use a
habermasian expression) 

second, there is no specific evidence that private sector is more
competitive than public sector (or state enterprise). as we know, state
enterprises also achieved high levels of growth in many third world
countries, which cannot be underestimated. neither private ownership
gurantees competition per se nor lack of competition is a sufficient
reason for privatization (Yarrow, Privatization: An Economic Analysis, Mit
Press, 1988). privatization does not also terminate monopoly and
regulation in the market. even with respect to great britain, some people
have suggested that capitalists soughts ways to retain their monopoly
positions and priviliges even after the privatization took place. (Kay and
Thompson, Privatization: A Policy in Search of a RAtional, _Economic
Journal_, vol 96, march 1986).


the bottom line is that there is no evidence that shows that capitalism is
practical, socialism is inpractical (past or present); or capitalism is
succesfull and socialism is a failure or doomed to death. capitalism
has far more problems than socialism. capitalism has never achieved the
level of equality, however problematic it was, that socialism has
achieved. the simple evidence is free education and access to basic
necessities of life. that is that simple (yet not sufficient). economic
equality conditions political equality. you can not seek political
freedoms if you are hungary. once, russia achieved these goals,
or at least tried to approximate, given the pressures coming from the
world sytemic forces. how can we discuss about socialism without an
historical example? whatever happened in russia was not a joke or an elite
game. it was a significant social transformation that affected each
individual's live, from working classes to peasents, from children to men
and women. once, i was  reading the memoirs and narratives of russsian
citizens experiencing the revolution. it was a great document talking
about how it made an important difference to have access to education
without necessarily belonging to an upper or proportied class. now, we are
privitizing education. if you have money, you go!! the communist
turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet, having had political assylum in Russia, has
also great observations on this topic.


best,

Mine Doyran
PHD, Politics
SUNY/Albany