Wolff, co-ops and socialism
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Was the author of the above article the same Steele who later underwent a conversion to libertarianism?
There were also factories and small business taken over by workers and when they started to produce profits the government took them. In New York City workers took over apartment buildings, fixed them and they also lost them, and they had to run them as any other real estate business. There were coops run by workers unions and they also became capitalists enterprises and many of them were taken over by banks
https://www.iar-gwu.org/blog/uu8eyrdai9tolcuutx9d3eae6ehrgb
In Bolivia there are more 1,140 coops with more than 30,000 employees and all of them are run as capitalist enterprises, otherwise they will go in bankruptcy and some of them have vanished because as capitalist enterprises they are competing each other to produce more and cheaper. That is what the MAS movement wrongly calls socialism, but the MAS government advocates for state capitalism
A Decade after the Take: Inside Argentina’s Worker Owned Factories
All operated as capitalists enterprises
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2018/09/argentinas-economic-emergency.html
Rightwing or leftwing governments have not been able to resolve the problems of the workers, therefore, the main problem is not management, it is the mode of production
Define conversion from socialism to libertarian.
The reason I ask is related to how people and their positions shift, and perhaps are fluid.
I, myself shift and apply technical understanding of the most fair mode, and keeps coming back to the central anchor of socialism… yet… when I enter the centre space and argue for socialism I interact with broad views. These views and dialogue with otherness help me appreciate divergence; and yet I share the views of SPGB in the mode. Libertarian views still have owning and accumulation of wealth and consumer capture for the benefit of a self.
Self and social has been axiomatic: knowing the self means knowing the other…
So the question conversion: it is what kind of conversion occurred? I am curious about why you raise this, and why liberal libitarianism would even be considered. Anarcho-capitalism would be buyer beware and likely increase human suffering on any model think tank from social or pro social thought.Steele was responsible for that frenzied toe-tapper ‘Little White Bull’ unleashed onto an unsuspecting public in 1957. It topped the charts at number 6. He abandoned Socialism and embraced Propertarianism after reading Ludwig Von Mises between ‘takes’ during the filming of the 1967 Hollywood blockbuster ‘Arthur Sixpence’.
He abandoned Socialism and embraced Propertarianism after reading Ludwig Von Mises…
Thanks for the clarification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ramsay_Steele
Not to be confused with Tommy! 🙂
The real libertarians are the real communists anarchists, they do support a world society without state and freedom, as well Marx was one of the theoretician of Anarchism. The Anarco capitalists are not libertarians because capitalism can not exist without a state, and the state has always intervened in the operation of capitalism, and it has also intervened in the society since the time of Classical slavery. The AC were debunked by several members of the SPGB including Robbo
https://www.marxists.org/archive/rubel/1973/marx-anarchism.htm
More getting-it-wrong from Wolff.
Harriet Fraad, Richard D. Wolff – Twenty-First Century Socialism: What It Will Become and Why
The first part, about the history and evolution of mass parties calling themselves “socialist” or “communist” is not bad once you get over your annoyance at them being referred to as socialists or communists. It’s his proposed alternative of a market economy composed of democratically controlled workers’ cooperatives producing for sale that’s wrong (and isn’t socialism either).
Here’s a couple of extracts:
“Inside enterprises, each worker will have one vote to decide the major issues facing enterprises. Such issues include what, how, and where to produce as well as how to use the resulting products or, if products are marketed, what to do with the revenues. The difference between employers and employees disappears; the workers become collectively their own boss. Profits cease being the enterprise’s top priority or “bottom line” because that maximization rule prioritizes employers’ gains over employees’ gains and capital’s interests over those of labor. In democratized enterprises, profits instead become one among many democratically determined enterprise goals.”
“Democratic worker cooperatives become a key institutional foundation of whatever state apparatus survives. Worker co-ops, democratized households, and individuals will be the state’s three revenue sources and thus key sources of its power. They will democratically decide how to divide the provision of such revenue among themselves.”
Not quite sure what this should be called. Unrealistic worker control of a market economy? Wolffism perhaps? If the state can’t control how the market economy operates how can workers coops be expected to?
At the end on section 10, it shows that it does not understand socialism
Wasn’t sure if this merits a new thread but thought would post here this good YouTube explanation of why co-ops are still subject to imperatives of the market. It’s a follow-up to an early video book review he did about a book from Wolff.
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