File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-02-17.213, message 42


Date: Sat, 15 Feb 1997 19:53:16 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: M-I: Re: Value theory /Was LTV



David Schweickart, author of Against Capitalism, Cambridge UP 1993,
Westview 1996, is the leading defender of market socialism today. He's a
friend of mine and we sometimes do a Punch and Judy show at conference, or
did before I went to law school. He Judy, me Punch: I criticize the
weaknesses of his model, the outlines of which I mainly accept. He
develops it further in his next paper or book.

Sorry if we are talking past each other. Now I am mystified. Apparently in
your socialist society we do not have collective ownership either. I am
puzzled. Are we back with no ownership? 

Ownership or property rights are bundles of legal claims. They involve the
rights of particular persons to do such things as use, manage, receive
income from, transfer, alienate, destroy, and prevent others from using
what is owned. These rights can be distributed among different groups or
individuals for the same thing. Now who has what rights in your system,
and how is this set of rights enforced?

 --jks

On Sat, 15 Feb 1997, Mark Jones wrote:

> Justin :
> 
> >I have pressed them against Schweickart myself.
> 
> Mark: 
> Who he?
> 
> Justin:
> >I think that there are analogous problems with planned
> > socialism. 
> 
> Mark:
> Tthis is strange -- I said the same thing myself clearly enough, I
> thought.
> 
> Justin:
> > I don't agree that the only alternatives are a pseudo-collective
> > bureaucractically controlled state ownership without real autonomy or flat
> > out capitalism. 
> 
> Mark:
> I do not argue that they are.
> 
> Justin:
> > even the Yugoslav experience [snip]
> > Mondragon's worker council 
> 
> Mark:
> Not Mondragon again! Not Yugoslavia! No, No! We have to move on.
> 
> Justin: 
> > I don't make fetish of the state or remove it from the sphere of social
> > conflict. 
> 
> Mark:
> But you do, you do!
> 
> Justin:
> >But the point remains: social ownership requires an
> > institutional form. 
> 
> Mark:
> The point is how to transcend societies based on private property, of
> which social ownership can only ever be a sub-category.
> 
> Justin:
> >If the state will not own the productive assets in a
> > planned society, who will? 
> 
> Mark:
> Aaaagh! This is like one of those films where the zombie plods after a
> nubile preppie and no matter how fast she runs the damn thing is always
> behind the next tree. No matter how often we recycle this damn argument
> we always come back to the same point and it's like Groundhog Day --
> everything we discussed the day before never happened. This morning we
> mostly agreed about everything. This evening we mostly disagree.What can
> I say? We have already dealt with all this.You are arguing with the
> Justin of this morning, not with me any longer.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> Mark Jones
> http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~majones/index.htm





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