LETTERS
Editors: Bernard Rosenberg's diatribe against us [Summer 1985 issue] is unworthy of Dissent, both in its cavalier misrepresentation of the facts and its insufferably selfrighteousness tone. Our...
...And no well-planned city should expand beyond its stipulated size...
...Each of our lives has been immeasurably enhanced by the great music, art, architecture, literature, techno128 logical development, and social struggles of the past...
...Surely Mr...
...q Editors: Let me add a briefer note to Irving Howe's brief note to David Bromwich's trenchant article on Reagan and Bitburg...
...Kohak fails to tell us why he believes the Soviets would sacrifice the benefits they derive from the creation of a separate East German state, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and from their successful insistence that the Polish opposition movement of 1980-81 be put down...
...And true, some of the nastiest stuff in Ramparts, such as the piece by Paul Jacobs "exonerating" Dissent from "being CIA-connected," appeared "under a previous regime...
...Since he was a man of the "left," he was not altogether happy with the implications of his own position...
...One example he gives is, in theory, extremely easy to remedy...
...q Editors: Brian Morton's "Death of a Veteran" (Dissent, Summer 1985) struck me as an unusual choice for Dissent, because it seemed such a personal reaction to his father's death...
...Jimmy Carter showed, at times, a pinched vindictiveness...
...The Yugoslav experience is sadly relevant here...
...This and the change in property status might cause some small entrepreneurs to refrain from growing—which is the consequence of imposing any limit...
...It can also be more or less useful and more, or less, scarce...
...Kota would recognize, I feel sure, that the last thing those intrepid people want is the withdrawal of U.S...
...That impasse, however, is just the problem...
...Nove does accept the proven Marxist thesis that only labor produces value, but mistakenly assumes that scarcity and time—both important considerations in production—are also productive...
...A full reply would require another book...
...Obviously, the more free goods there are, the smaller is the sum available for each family to spend as personal income...
...Morton accuses the socialist tradition of "a lack of sobriety about death...
...His "teflon" surface was scratched...
...Would we tell the coal miners that they are free to organize their mine as a cooperative and divide up the profits...
...But what matters here is what they try to slide past in their concluding paragraph: these red-hot radicals of yesterday supported the most reactionary presidential candidate—Ronald Reagan—of the past half-century...
...Why then should we mourn inconsolably when any one of us goes where all the creators of our social heritage have gone before...
...The weakest point in Nove's argument is the discussion of investment policy—that is, of the control of capital...
...Suppose that, for good geographical-locational reasons, the steel works, oil industry, and coal mines of a given country are located in its north-east corner...
...Apparently, capital needs that cannot be met out of a firm's own resources would be supplied by the state banking system, since private banks and stock markets would not exist...
...no, it was those caucuses at the Democratic National Convention that enshrined, apparently, the old foolishness of Collier and Horowitz...
...December 1970, an encomium to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro by K. S. Karol: "Fidel invariably monopolizes conversations, not because he refuses to listen, but 123 simply because he thinks aloud and likes to answer his own questions...
...I began my adult life with a very favorable attitude toward co-ops and have belonged to several, but in 60 years of observation I have seen very little evidence that they offer much hope for the future...
...An alternative is to allow free and unfettered competition between the socialized and private sectors, with no limits at all, so that (to take Goertzel's example) if Apple Computer is a brilliant success and becomes a giant company, this should not call for any change in its status...
...Rather, I think it's more that the socialist tradition takes seriously its emphasis on society's contribution to each of us as an individual and, connected with that, the judgment that our individual worth is directly related to our contribution to society...
...Presumably the goals are a society where inequality is limited to the minimum necessary to provide incentives, where the welfare of the least advantaged is assured, and a comfortable standard of living is provided for all...
...Who would get the secure jobs in stateowned enterprises and what workers would be left to their own initiative to form a cooperative or private enterprise...
...Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear...
...One could envisage laws turning the brilliant entrepreneur who outgrows "private" status into the managing director of an enterprise that now has an elected workers' council, which would doubtless be happy to support, and share in, success...
...The signatories of the Charter-77 document to which Mr...
...Given the paralyzing failure of the present policy, it is surely worthwhile to explore the possibility of extending the Austrian solution to all of central Europe...
...Competition between small, unstable firms producing the same goods, recommended by Nove, is incompatible with such urban planning and life...
...The main thesis of the book is that confrontational politics on a small scale is the path to real social change, that individual acts of courage are the proper and necessary response to a political system that is no longer representative of people's needs...
...The national government should control ony the rate of national savings and the allocation of capital funds...
...He holds that I am "too drably practical," and at the same time not practical enough...
...and Richard Nixon projected—well, Richard Nixon...
...If the U.S.S.R...
...In the Washington Post piece Rosenberg criticizes, Collier and Horowitz acknowledge they were guilty of admiration for, of all people, the Korean ComradeMonarch Kim Il Sung...
...One Hungarian critic actually argued that either one should ban private enterprise altogether or, if it were to be allowed, subject it to no limits at all...
...The article in Ramparts by Paul Jacobs attacking Howe appeared under a previous regime, not in the days when we edited the magazine...
...Nove offers none...
...A related confusion is manifest in Nove's comment about the "metaphysical" point in determining whether a gift of nature has value...
...Co-ops cannot compete successfully with large corporations under capitalism, and they have fared badly in communist countries...
...At some point I realized that independent variables were quite likely to outweigh my personal efforts...
...Dissent, Summer 1985), Alex Nove offers a vision of socialism that is too drably practical to excite those who seek dramatic change, yet is not detailed enough to answer the more difficult questions of responsible reformers...
...Plainly, the concern will no longer be to ascertain the degree of exploitation but to ensure a humanistic relation between the production of goods and of services...
...troops would then be able to regain a foothold in Europe...
...Even when Reagan does get upset, he has the air of a grandfather starting to splutter at junior...
...Bitburg fell far short of catastrophe...
...For an elaboration of these points, see my book, Liberal Socialism Applied (1978), pp...
...The valiant never taste of death but once...
...Unfortunately, there is no explanation that very similar schemes of liberal or market socialism were presented with more sophistication and greater detail by several socialists in the 1930s and 1940s...
...Stories are welcome on other social issues as well, and can also describe the efforts of someone other than yourself whose story you feel should be told...
...And what caused them to embrace everything they had previously rejected...
...Children were born who got no bad vibes when we hear the name 'Stalin.' " • May 1970, the cover features a picture of the burning of the Bank of America in Santa Barbara, with this caption: "The students who burned the Bank of America may have done more toward saving the environment than all the Teach-Ins put together...
...Without the Soviet Group of Forces in Eastern Germany, Germany would speedily be reunited...
...Paradoxically, the term then will no longer be relevant...
...43-105...
...But here are a few snippets from Ramparts during the Collier–Horowitz days: • December 1969, Jerry Rubin (whom they now claim to have always regarded as "a political clown") wrote: "But then a Wonderful Thing Happened...
...VENERABLE EDITOR" Adds Writing at home, and with the research help of Brian Morton, I add a few words about Ramparts during the time Collier and Horowitz were among its editors— from 1969 to 1973...
...0 Editors: With breathtaking glibness, Erazim Kohak, in his "A Letter from Europe" (Fall 1985), brushes aside the painful lessons of the history of that subcontinent in this century and advocates a return to isolationism...
...On the whole, his proposed system of liberal socialism is plausible, sound, and satisfying...
...Adam Smith made the valid distinction, accepted and amplified by Marx, between use-value and value (or its manifestation as exchange value...
...Quite the opposite...
...How effective would we be in keeping a small-scale privately owned restaurant from hiring too many dishwashers...
...but not as much as by our Chief Magistrate's alliance with fanatical fundamentalists who demand a "Christian America...
...December 1970, a piece on businessmen against the Vietnam War, concluding that "Many young people, black and white, have found that the system doesn't work for them, and that violence does...
...A cooperative or socialized enterprise would be less likely to close down a plant in California in order to have the work done in the Third World...
...It strikes me that perhaps people who grow up in radical or atheist homes find it possible to postpone their philosophical-psychological reconciliation with death until they are bowled over by a personal experience...
...Where full political and human rights are protected, all social groups are treated equally, the environment is protected, and peaceful relations are maintained with other nations...
...If we can't make these more modest mechanisms operative, what makes us think we can make Nove's more ambitious proposals work...
...Reagan, almost alone among major politicians, projects to onlookers no signs of deviousness, or even of meanness...
...Of course, in any society labor is used for a variety of different purposes: to provide cabbages, shoes, ships, computers, chess boards, drugstores, the services of repairs, hairdressing, teaching, bookkeeping, post offices, orchestras...
...The reader who turns to Nove's book (The Economics of Feasible Socialism, Winchester, Mass.: Allen & Unwin, Inc., 1983) for elaboration of the ideas discussed in the Dissent excerpt will be disappointed...
...Where death is concerned, I early on found a comforting litany in the Great Bard's words in Julius Caesar, and I have never been able to improve on them: Cowards die many times before their deaths...
...And where would cooperative and small-scale private enterprises get their initial capitalization, if not from the same state bureaucracy...
...By the way, in capitalist society many use-values that have no value are treated as if they are possessed of that economic reality...
...True, Horowitz did write sharp criticisms of the New Left's (or part of the New Left's) infatuation with leftauthoritarian regimes...
...Perhaps the socially desirable goals could be accomplished by less restrictive measures, such as plant-closing legislation, tax penalties for undesirable corporate behavior, progressive taxation to redistribute income...
...Anyhow, if even major issues of investment strategy are not within the purview of the central planners, they would have no function whatever...
...Socialist politics, even in this country, can include solid achievements along with frustrations and disappointments...
...But even if our correspondents could not bring themselves to vote for Mondale, that hardly justifies voting for Reagan—the darling of the union-busters, of the military machine, and of all who wish to roll back whatever progress has been made in this country these past few decades...
...For central Europe, it holds out the prospect of an indefinite foreign occupation, for the divided Europe at large a prospect of a chronic confrontation ever threatening to erupt into the unthinkable...
...Kohak can hardly imagine that, in the age of nuclear warfare, U.S...
...It should not plan the local physical investment of such funds...
...People differ...
...To vote for Mondale was to vote for the Democratic party, and therefore for the "political detritus" of the '60s...
...I encourage anyone who is personally involved in a struggle for social change to write and tell me about your experiences...
...What a relief...
...There clearly, however, must be some control over the general level of borrowing, or inflation and imbalances would surely become dangerous...
...President Reagan possesses a quality—doubtless, one he has always had—that ensured his success as a secondary lead in Hollywood films playing male ingenu roles, just as the same quality resulted in his lack of success playing villains...
...An article in the New York Times (April 19, 1985) suggested that it was Reagan's past life in the insular world of Hollywood that accounted for his illadvised remarks...
...Preferences vary...
...Foolish things could no doubt also be found in the youthful writings of some Dissent editors...
...All this tends to shift the society/individual equation toward the individual...
...Is Goertzel in favor of unfettered private enterprise...
...A small group of computer enthusiasts starts a small business...
...Inside, an unsigned editorial: "Burning a bank is not the same as putting the banks and their system out of business...
...Criticism is indeed called for...
...Gerald Ford occasionally resembled the slow student who becomes darkly sullen when he is made aware he doesn't know something...
...He argues that the distinction between productive and nonproductive labor "would plainly be inappropriate for a socialist economy...
...To do that, millions of people in this country will first have to wake up to the real source of their misery...
...But Martin Luther King—him they declared to be an Uncle Tom...
...Its success almost immediately forces it to reorganize as a cooperative and, when it becomes too large to be cooperatively managed, as a socialized enterprise...
...Most of what Rosenberg says about the new left is fair enough and we wouldn't disagree with it...
...even the number of sleeping Marines killed in Beirut fell far short...
...But there could also be an inhibition of the flexibility and creativity that is possible when an enterprise is controlled by entrepreneurs who don't have to spend their time in committee meetings...
...Which is why Jews voted in larger numbers than in 1980—Collier and Horowitz notwithstanding—for the Democratic candidate...
...To me that means to society at large, or to society as our family, neighborhood, church, school, and so on...
...Land (not the landlord, the land) is, however, for all practical purposes productive, scarce, and has value...
...Is it really sensible to envisage their development as being under the full control of "their" region...
...Goertzel speaks of "new lines of inequality...
...Yes, in my "model" those who wish to borrow for financing capital investment would have to apply for credit to the state banking system...
...The action in Santa Barbara . . . might spark that awakening...
...Use-value, a necessary component of anything produced for sale or for use, bears no relation to economic value...
...It is a defensible position, but it is a nonsocialist (if not an antisocialist) one...
...I disagree...
...And what was so terrible about the Democratic party...
...I doubt if Swedish socialists would go so far, much though I admire the Scandinavian achievements...
...I asked them, as I now ask Goertzel: Should there not be some limits, if one is seeking to define a feasible socialism...
...It would, however, give the dishwashers (and the rest of the work force) in a very large restaurant (employing, for instance, 100 or so persons) some rights to participate, elect a council, and so on...
...We wrote and published harsh attacks on the new left's Marxist-Leninist-Maoists and their irresponsible and dangerous contempt for history and ideas (a tradition still kept alive by Abbie Hoffman and others...
...I regret the impression of glibness, produced by compression, and hope to return to the topic at length in a future issue...
...These criticisms do not alter my overview of Nove's superb contribution to the ongoing discussion about what a socialist economy might be, or ought to be...
...Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come...
...troops from Europe...
...Even if a peace treaty provided for the withdrawal of Soviet troops behind the borders of the U.S.S.R., they would still be poised only 500 land miles from Berlin, while U.S...
...Except, in President Reagan's case, it is a reversal of the logic: he is found not guilty by the public because no one can demonstrate—or even perceive— that he utters anything, anything at all, maliciously...
...It was the liberals...
...We all need psychic crutches to bolster our rational convictions...
...Kohak refers of course called for the withdrawal of all foreign armies from Europe...
...A. P. Lerner clarified these issues in five journal articles, in the years 1934-37, and in his book, The Economics of Control (1944...
...Not Mondale's cautious retreat from social liberalism...
...All sorts of mechanisms would be used to evade them...
...It should merely change its prices and/or its product mix...
...On the contrary, the distinction would definitely be in order, for an entirely different reason of social import, in a planned, socialist society, one in which "all socially useful labor" would be honored...
...To provide a host of significant social services (such as health delivery, research in the arts and sciences, education, cultural activities), the production of material goods—producers' as well as consumers' goods—will have to be most carefully planned...
...As editors of Ramparts from 1969 to 1973 we did not purvey "snippets of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought...
...Children were born...
...But President Reagan reveals, at least publicly, not a glimmer of malevolence...
...The limits I suggested would not require the police to prevent a restaurant from "hiring too many dishwashers...
...The best we can do is to contribute our mite, while getting some fun out of it while we're here...
...It is not evading the issue to insist that this is a matter for genuine democratic discussion and decision...
...If he could put himself in their shoes, Mr...
...His face seems, rather, to be hiding nothing, absolutely nothing, behind an affable mask: no deceit, no troubles, no doubts...
...process vs...
...As the product of two generations of Congregational missionaries, that was one of the issues I had to deal with, at least in a preliminary way, when I decided as a freshman in college that there is no God, ergo no hereafter...
...But, if nothing else, we have tried to learn that it's really foolish to defend past foolishness...
...Albert Prago argues that "use-value . . . bears no relation to economic value...
...I agree that this is a controversial area...
...Yugoslavia, the land of producers' co-ops, has long suffered from mass unemployment and emigration of workers because its co-ops could not provide enough jobs...
...On investment and the role of central control, my fear is that (for reasons discussed in my book) local authorities would disrupt interregional links and obstruct desirable forms of specialization, precisely because of their commitment to local needs...
...Finally, he believes that such countries as Sweden come closest to realizing a democratic socialist program in the actual world of today...
...Leaving Europe "to work out its own salvation" in those circumstances could lead to only one outcome: not finlandization, but subjugation...
...Those nationalizations that did take place were often unsuccessful, for reasons Nove recognizes, and they are exemplified in the problems of England's nationalized coal mines...
...Price theory is the heart of economic theory...
...In lieu of the unattainable peace treaty, they have the Helsinki Final Act, in which all the states of Europe, West and East (excepting only Albania), together with the United States and Canada, agreed to recognize the de facto post-1945 boundaries of Europe...
...For an annotated bibliography, see my treatise, Liberal Socialism (1974...
...On productive and unproductive labor there is a huge literature, stretching back to the 18th century or possibly even to Aristotle...
...were "provoked" by a real or alleged German revanchism to reoccupy Central Europe, Mr...
...377...
...With no way open within the system [before, that is, you could vote for Reagan], violence has become the issue of the '70s...
...result orientation in social and political activity...
...I also question Nove's stress on the need for central government planning "of major investments of structural significance" (p...
...Obviously, some "gifts of nature" have 125 extraordinary use-value, but have no material value: the beauty of a sunset, unpolluted air, resources in situ, rainfall, ad infinitum...
...So, credit where it's due...
...Members of producers' co-ops have strong incentives to reduce output, raise prices, increase wage rates, and exclude new members...
...Our book on the Kennedys is not an encomium to Camelot, as Rosenberg claims, but was universally reviewed as a critical portrait of the Kennedy family and as a damning account of the Kennedy administration...
...Fighting the good fight, with good comrades and plenty of laughs along the way— that is its own reward...
...Let us continue with the Apple Computer example...
...Yet even classic capitalist countries made a legal distinction between private and public companies, and had antitrust laws...
...Finally, any theory of feasible socialism should include at least the basic principles of ideal socialist city planning...
...Editors: I am putting together a book of personal stories by people who are acting alone or in small nonstructured groups to effect social change, and I would like to hear from anyone who is taking an active stand in the areas of nuclear weapons, hunger, environmental issues (ecosaboteurs especially), or women's, minorities', gays', and workers' rights...
...Do not his arguments for the merits of the market system—flexibility, decentralization, democratization—apply to the investment process...
...Finally, what should be distributed free in any model of socialism depends on what the bulk of the population want...
...Private banks...
...troops would be more than 5,000 miles away by air or sea...
...What is democratic socialism intended to accomplish...
...Can we be assured 124 that innovative entrepreneurs, like those who founded the Apple Computer company, would find support in this system as readily as they might in a system where private-venture capitalists are permitted to operate...
...All I can do is try briefly to justify, where possible, my position...
...Kohik cannot believe that the Soviets will voluntarily withdraw their forces from 127 Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary...
...In this, they are at one with their fellow oppositionists in Poland and the rest of East-Central and Eastern Europe, for whom such a withdrawal would spell the beginning of a new and even blacker night of the soul than that through which they now so painfully grope their way...
...All capitalist cities must be completely rebuilt to enable people to live in small, stable, self-sufficient urban communities where people can become well-acquainted and can easily walk or cycle to jobs, offices, shops, clinics, and so on...
...If he thinks Marx was mistaken he should say so...
...Women pleading for equal rights and a candidate of their own gender...
...It is not good enough to say that something must be useful if it is to have value...
...But days after I had read it I found my mind coming back to it...
...In a rational society value may disappear, ultimately, but use-value will remain...
...The advocates of a "Central European solution"— interposing a genuinely neutral central Europe between the power blocs—are not calling on the U.S...
...What alternative does he suggest that would qualify as "socialist...
...Simple...
...Perhaps I should modify and extend borrowing possibilities by enabling firms to borrow from each other, and in today's Hungary firms can issue bonds, purchasable by other enterprises and even individuals, which bear an interest rate but give no right of control over the borrowing institutions...
...Why then carp over a vote for Reagan when a vote for Mondale was a vote for the Democratic party and thus for all the political detritus of the '60s enshrined and legitimized in its whiny Jew- and America-baiting caucuses...
...No firm should ever fail and discharge its workers...
...I estimate that 30 to 50 percent of all goods should be free goods in a liberal socialist economy...
...In your segments of Feasible Socialism, Nove merely explains that socialist prices should "balance supply and demand, [and] reflect cost and use-value" (p...
...Of course, there could be several competing state-owned banks (as in France), so the 126 borrower need not be faced with a "centralized bureaucracy...
...Yes, even some Hungarian colleagues criticized me for laying down limits too narrow for private enterprise...
...They do so with mixed economies balanced by strong labor movements and democratic political institutions...
...Ambassador Davies restates forcefully and cogently the reasoning that led American (and Soviet) policy in Europe into its current impasse...
...And so did the blacks...
...otherwise a quite undeserved degree of income differentiation would obtain...
...To draw a line somewhere between "productive" and "unproductive" seems, to me, a rather unproductive activity, so long as we are speaking of "socially useful labor...
...But it is not his past life in Hollywood that is responsible for the lack of effect—it is his past work there...
...If we look around the world, there is no question that the social democratic nations such as Sweden, Norway, Austria, and Finland come the closest to achieving the democratic socialist utopia...
...majority decision-making...
...Nove virtually ignores the problem of which goods should be sold for a price and which should be free...
...to retreat into isolation but to explore imaginative new alternatives...
...but the Chinese and Soviet practice of providing housing as a virtually free good is very uneconomic...
...III Editors: Dissent deserves praise for devoting 24 pages to major segments of Alec Nove's lucid and stimulating book, The Economics of Feasible Socialism...
...Certainly, social benefits could accrue through these organizational rearrangements...
...This opportunity would be attractive to those in rich mining areas, disastrous to those whose coal seams are less profitable (but perhaps still need to be worked in order to maintain adequate energy reserves...
...Some prefer to take civil-service jobs, some even join the Grenadier Guards, others join kibbutzim, still others try to run a small car-repair firm or teach children to play the violin...
...Far from being yippies then or yuppies now, as Rosenberg describes us, we have always regarded Abbie and Jerry as political clowns...
...How much time and effort would be wasted in dealing with government regulators, ever-growing stakeholder groups, and so on...
...Mario Cuomo's speech reasserting New Deal liberalism...
...Let our readers decide whether such items (there were others) justify Collier and Horowitz's description of their days at Ramparts...
...But is Sweden the realization of socialism, or even of a "socialist utopia" [sic...
...At about the same time I also was convinced by Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith that the scientific method was the most likely way to sort out reality from its alternatives and, by all that I had read and observed, that socialism was the best hope for humanity...
...To do so would risk the loss of the whole northern tier of the cordon Stalinaire...
...Kohak proposes that Soviet forces be withdrawn from Eastern Germany and United States forces from Western Germany...
...His vision of a "dual society" surprises me...
...To implement Nove's system in an advanced capitalist country would involve nationalization of key industries, and socialization and collectivization of smaller businesses...
...It is not a "dual" but a multiple society that is surely wanted...
...True, Jews were scared by Jesse Jackson's deplorable utterances...
...That heritage makes our lives other than brutish...
...First, to Ted Goertzel...
...Our efforts to prohibit alcohol, prostitution, narcotics, gambling, and other profitable enterprises have never been altogether successful...
...I could cite several other cases in which basic problems of liberal socialist economic theory were treated more fully and more competently by these pioneers than by Nove...
...This ignores such vital issues as whether prices should measure average or marginal costs, which usually differ widely, and how either average or marginal cost should be determined...
...One of the tensions between some older socialists and our comrades who grew up in the New Left tradition of the '60s is the latter's emphasis on the individual's perceived needs and feelings as a major concern of the political collective...
...As for the central Europeans themselves, be they Poles, Germans, Czechs, or Austrians, though they would clearly prefer an American occupation to a Soviet one, I believe, as a central European myself, that most of them would prefer self-determination to either...
...And as long as the public remains enchanted by Reagan's image, this eerie quality of absence, this utter lack of malice, they will continue to tolerate a successful grandfather-figure who makes hundreds of blunders and gaffes, as long as he makes them without any detectable wickedness, and as long as no catastrophes result...
...Does anyone really expect that the left can revive the Democratic or the Labour party with these ideas...
...Far from denigrating the venerable editor of Dissent, we respected him even in the '60s as the author of Politics and the Novel, and as a courageous anti-Stalinist on the left...
...These goals, not the specific institutional patterns used to achieve them, must be the foundation of any socialist utopia...
...representative democracy...
...The police forces required to impose such a system would be overwhelming...
...The legal restraints Nove proposes would inhibit the efficient functioning of the market process...
...Obviously, those working a "rich mine," or exceptionally fertile land, would be subject to a rental payment...
...367...
...Not the campaign, not the issues, not the candidates— not Reagan's chipping away at the welfare state, or his military bluster, or his policy toward Nicaragua...
...Socialists need a sound and detailed theory of free or communist distribution, but Nove offers no such theory...
...Wages might be more equitably distributed...
...No, it was those "Jew- and America-baiting caucuses...
...These ideas were new and exciting 50 years ago, but today they seem outdated...
...I agree...
...Nove's system contains the potential for new lines of inequality...
...Some like security and routine, others prefer risk and adventure...
...Since there appeared to be scant scientific evidence for reincarnation, I did not turn to it or other notions that are consoling when we are faced with death...
...My feeling is that thousands of these acts of courage occur every day...
...participatory vs...
...I refer to the books and articles published by Eduard Heimann, E. E M. Durbin, Carl Landauer, Oskar Lange, A. P Lerner, R. L. Hall, H. D. Dickinson, B. E. Lippincott, J. A. Schumpeter, and others...
...But Mr...
...It worked in Austria, where the Soviets recognized the advantages of a neutral buffer over an occupied one...
...But now, some months later, it appears that Reagan's image wasn't marred, nor was his teflon armor chipped...
...Perhaps the chief novelty of Feasible Socialism is its treatment of producers' cooperatives as essential forms of socialist organization...
...What Americabaiting are Collier and Horowitz talking about...
...The legal prohibitions proposed by Nove would inevitably be viewed as illegitimate, cumbersome, and unjust by a large segment of the population...
...At the height of the uproar, and in the weeks that followed, a number of newspapers and magazines pointed out that—for the first time—Reagan's image, how he is perceived by the public, was slightly dented by the Bitburg blunders...
...What would be Goertzel's way out...
...I think investments should be planned by local units of socialist firms and state agencies because these are closer to the local scene and more familiar with the prices and costs of individual goods...
...Nove offers a brief critique of capitalism, but nowhere does he specify the values that socialism is intended to achieve, let alone offer an argument that the social arrangements he proposes are the best way to attain those objectives...
...Can we really trust the political system to make a fair allocation of resources between the centralized state corporations, state-owned enterprises, cooperative enterprises, and private enterprises...
...If Beckwith had read my book, he would have seen an analysis of the ideas of Oskar Lange, and also of the more recent ones of Ota But I could and should have devoted more space to, for example, Lerner and Dickinson...
...Since 1945, however, we have had one demonstration after another of Soviet determination to maintain that buffer zone at nearly any cost...
...The difficulties of achieving such a system in racially and ethnically heterogeneous societies such as the United States are well known, but they pale into insignificance compared with the problems of implementing a model such as II Editors: Two (related) comments in Alec Nove's stimulating discussion on "feasible socialism" (Dissent, Summer 1985) have elicited this response...
...The reasoning employed oddly reflects the logic of the libel laws, which—in the past—used to prohibit a public official from recovering damages unless he could prove that any falsehood published was printed with actual malice...
...This partly explains their preference for consensus vs...
...I Editors: In "Feasible Socialism...
...And, therefore, Reagan might well be, ironically, the first American president who will look no older when he leaves office than when he began...
...Since they are Czechoslovak citizens under constant secret-police surveillance, it would have been impolitic if, in this document addressed to a West European audience, they had only demanded what I do not doubt is foremost in their desires: the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia...
...If Morton's reaction appeared so personal—why should I be worrying about it...
...even love...
...Only labor produces value, in the sense that shareholders and landlords do not: ownership as such—that is, allowing someone else to work—is not productive, for a socialist...
...Or would we see a dual society emerging, where the well-educated and well-connected found jobs in the well-funded public sectors, subsidized by the taxes paid by those in the cooperative and private enterprises...
...But does this not involve a concentration of power in precisely the sort of centralized bureaucracy Nove finds unsatisfactory in almost every other economic sector...
...Writing from abroad, I am unable to check the assertions of Collier and Horowitz regarding their role on Ramparts...
...It's true, I had to give up the idea that my life would only be worthwhile if I left the world a better place than I had found it...
Vol. 33 • January 1986 • No. 1
