Date: Mon, 12 Feb 1996 05:36:37 -0600
From: rahul-AT-hagar.ph.utexas.edu (Rahul Mahajan)
Subject: Brian C's question


Brian C:

>Please explain how democracy and socialism can coexist??  Since socialism
>involves planning outcomes to better meet certain needs, explain how this
>can be done democratically.

Please explain how socialism can exist without democracy or democracy can
exist without socialism. Since socialism involves the emancipation of
people from the need to sell their labor or starve and concomitantly
turning people from the objects of forces beyond their power to subjects
responsible for their own fate, explain how this can be done
undemocratically.

Since democracy entails (at the least) equal representation in the societal
processes of decisionmaking, explain how this can be done when some people
have control of huge amounts of wealth and concomitantly of huge numbers of
people who must sell their labor or starve, and can buy and influence
politicians so that the laws cement their privilege and so that they can
remain above any inconvenient laws.

To answer your question, planning can be done by a decentralized network of
representatives who make their decisions on the basis of the perceived good
of their constituents and who are fully accountable to same (subject to
recall, etc.)

Rahul




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