LETTERS
Editors: Anyone au courant with the New York literary scene, or familiar with debates and discussions on capital punishment, knows that the target of Alfred Kazin's attempted character...
...Within limits, we would be less concerned about the free operation of market forces determining pay at the top end of the scale, provided that high salaries reflected the intelligent use of real skills, rather than the exploitation of monopoly power in the labor market...
...But wherever the dividing line is finally drawn, our concern about the reemergence of capitalist ownership arrangements implies an additional labor market rule precluding voluntary employment contracts between workers and a private owner in organizations above a certain size...
...The developers have agreed to build Tibbett Gardens without profit...
...Of the 252,000 units planned, more than 85 percent will go to families with incomes of $25,000 or less, and 50 percent will be affordable to families earning $15,000 or less...
...This remarkable man deserves a better place in our memory...
...With cheap rapid transit, the changed location would not produce any hardships for workers living, say, in the South Bronx...
...oncq that no longer existed, sooner or later it was bound to perish...
...Moreover, his lurch to revolutionary maximalism actually commenced in the summer of 1933...
...New York City isn't even the capital of its state, let alone the nation...
...Fall 1987) is Dr...
...Why Should We Favor It...
...We therefore sought to explain and defend market socialism in a broad way, rather than to peddle a particular vision...
...These drawbacks, typical in all metropolitan areas, include, for this region, the additional complexity of location in three separate states, with the economic cannibalism inherent in our federal system...
...For example, it's about time notions about the economic health of the so-called Sun Belt were put to rest...
...Editors: Anyone au courant with the New York literary scene, or familiar with debates and discussions on capital punishment, knows that the target of Alfred Kazin's attempted character assassination ("They Made It...
...I am confident that, in subsequent years, had he remained a Leninist of sorts or a Marxisant sociologist, he would have acquired a position in some sociology department that his talents so richly deserved...
...BENJAMIN MARTIN Replies: Ernest Erber's gross distortion of Largo Caballero's role might very well have been extracted from a 1939 time capsule...
...Miller and Estrin express a preference for "a free market in products, and either no market at all, or a well-regulated market in labor or capital...
...It was during this confusing period that Caballero was influenced by Alvarez del Vayo, a leading left-wing Socialist who later turned out to be an undercover CP operative, to agree to the merger of the Socialist party's youth organization with that of the Communists...
...When, some months prior to the Civil War, the Communist party had demanded that the POUM be excluded from the People's Front election coalition, Caballero had bluntly told them "no" and the Communists had simply caved in...
...Then there is the failure to appreciate the fact that the city is part of a large metropolitan area, the majority of whose residents do not live in the five boroughs...
...It is obvious that Kazin was counting on the ease with which a large number of your readers would identify the person whom he lacked the courage openly to name...
...In what ways, then, would labor and capital markets be differently organized under market socialism...
...Some attention to the different pattern in Canada, for instance, might conceivably spur serious consideration of such a possibility...
...But this inference is mistaken...
...In my opinion, the anticommunism of Socialists in Spain today is very much in the Caballero tradition...
...He became a brilliant writer and teacher of adult education courses...
...In Martin's article, he quotes Julian Bestiero, who stood at the extreme right wing of the Socialist party and refused to participate in the Civil War, as denouncing Caballero's "bolshevization," which Martin calls "inane...
...When other places were mentioned, the tone often implied that they were somehow better off, even that they represented enemy territory...
...and nowhere did I suggest that the project is "the mayor's only effort to provide affordable housing...
...Public corporations should be restricted to the utility sector and other natural monopolies...
...Francisco Largo Caballero was a man who had selflessly devoted his life to the workers' cause and to their betterment...
...Nor does Americans' ingrained free market-and-frontier ambivalence toward cities exactly sustain a consensus that great cities need and deserve great national investments...
...Take labor first...
...Suffice it to say that, by 1975, neither the leadership nor the coalitions were in place...
...For all that, a more farseeing, adroit leader than Koch could at least have curbed the symbolic and real excesses— the open contempt for losers, the brutal overbuilding and low-income housing abandonment, the complete abdication of city planning—that have given greed and a vicious momentum all their own in the life of New York...
...Who, like Hook, have turned their backs on the suffering that goes on in our society and that cannot be blamed on Hook's primary interest and everlasting obsession—the Soviet Union...
...And for the right reasons: greater economic efficiency and individual freedom of choice...
...The most committed free marketeer would not permit the invisible hand always to reign supreme in these areas, nor would we...
...Fine...
...It should be noted that, upon inauguration in 1978, Koch could only follow the guidelines of municipal salvation already hammered out by Felix Rohatyn, Victor Gotbaum, Albert Shanker, Hugh Carey, Walter Wriston, and others (often over Mayor Beame's sputtering protests) three years earlier...
...He states it as a prediction to be considered with the prediction that a far greater number of innocent persons will lose their lives if capital punishment is absolutely abolished...
...Ernest van den Haag was a young anti-Fascist who was imprisoned under Mussolini's Fascist regime...
...Its collapse created considerable disarray and a profound identity crisis...
...ERNEST ERBER Columbia, Md...
...Nor do they seem to grasp the fact that consumer goods markets are tied, through the production process, to capital markets and labor markets and that to do away with the markets in the latter categories effectively cripples the markets in consumer goods...
...They are my heartfelt, damned lonely protest against the times...
...Ever since World War I, UGT trade union action had been based on such a gradualist, collective-bargaining outlook...
...My point—and that of Professor George Sternlieb of Rutgers and two New York Times real estate reporters, all of whom I cited—is that, as a demonstration that private developers can build even moderate-and middle-income housing without extensive public subsidy, the project is a dramatic, instructive failure...
...RICHARD BLUESTONE New York, N.Y...
...But that in turn raises questions that go back to labor-capital truces of the 1940s and 1950s...
...There are other points at which their arguments for market socialism seem vulnerable...
...Experiences with the Communists made Caballero and his followers increasingly embittered anticommunist, especially Luis Araquistain, who served Caballero as editor and publicist, both before and after the Civil War...
...q .1=11.1nn•n• SPRING • 1988 • 251 A Better Place in Memory Editors: Largo Caballero's role in Spanish politics is, regrettably, misunderstood by Benjamin Martin in an otherwise excellent article ("The Spanish Civil War Revisited," Dissent, Summer 1987) that states the case for socialist and liberal support of Republican Spain in the Civil War...
...No doubt, some of those concessions were excessive: a necessity turned into a luxury...
...Given the virtues that Miller and Estrin attribute to the market process, I can see why it might in fact be the preferred approach...
...He infers that we favor nonmarket allocative procedures for labor and capital...
...Was there any way of bringing the city back from the edge of bankruptcy other than the concessions and inducements that the Koch administration gave to the real estate developers...
...His particularly unattractive features, such as the veiled and not-so-veiled race baiting, were perhaps signs of an inner guilt or irritation that an ex-liberal feels when he has to do unpleasant things—and soon learns to find them pleasant...
...The Tibbett Gardens proposal is not aimed at providing only low-income housing, nor is this joint program with the Real Estate Board the mayor's only effort to provide affordable housing...
...Editors: The essay by David Miller and Saul Estrin, "A Case for Market Socialism: What Does It Mean...
...Would the likely alternatives to capital and labor markets (presumably various forms of central planning) lead to a curtailment of these market-based benefits...
...On many matters I have been and still am in strong disagreement with Professor van den Haag...
...It is a perfect representation of what, alas, so many of us in those days erroneously believed to be true...
...While pointing out the special circumstances that they see in capital markets and labor markets, Miller and Estrin neglect the other half of the equation: Do the problems cited fully or only partially offset the benefits (efficiency, information, freedom, and power) of markets...
...WILLIAM SPINRAD Glen Cove, N.Y...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...SUSAN D. WAGNER Director of Housing Coordination The City of New York Office of the Mayor Would Anyone Else Have Done Better...
...On the plus side, Miller and Estrin are headed in the right direction: away from dogmatic demands for comprehensive state planning...
...But basically, given the sad state of the city before Koch took over, was there any realistic alternative to Koch...
...Moreover, the government must intervene to prevent the emergence of the unemployment that would otherwise result...
...There are three main requirements: (1) It should operate efficiently, in the sense that capital is allocated to the enterprises where it will be used most productively...
...Of particular importance here are the benefits of workers' self-management and a distribution of income that is closely aligned with productive contribution...
...Though the Communists played upon his vanity and used him to penetrate into governmental positions, there is no evidence that he yielded more to them under the desperate need to secure Soviet arms than did his successor, Juan Negrin, a moderate Socialist, or than did Prieto as minister of war...
...Our predilection is for decentralized solutions wherever possible, and our aim is to find ways of combining these with longstanding socialist commitments to distributive justice and aspects of welfare that conventional markets tend not to accommodate...
...Ernest van den Haag, currently professor of jurisprudence and public policy at Fordham University...
...It is only a small part of the mayor's ten-year, $10.2 billion plan to restore, construct, and preserve 252,000 units of low-, moderate-, and middle-income housing units...
...He possessed a rudimentary political understanding...
...He eventually became the head of the Socialist-led trade unions (UGT) and bitter personal rival of Indalecio Prieto, journalist and intellectual, for leadership of the Socialist party...
...Some movement toward regional government is also in order but, unfortunately, much less likely...
...SPRING • 1988 • 249 I have never met Ernest van den Haag and have so little interest in him except as a symptom that I saw no need to mention his name...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...They are not written in "character assassination" (that leftist catchword) of anybody...
...About the only people with a genuine regional perspective are the radio helicopter pilots reporting traffic jams...
...Granted, the theme is implicit in several articles...
...Essentially, it comes down to an indictment of the Koch administration as a half-willing, then quite willing auxiliary of Reaganism...
...It is our view that for most productive activities co-ops should be the predominant form...
...The small "elite" of investment "experts" will remain with us...
...I held this view for many years against van den Haag...
...Everything about capital punishment revolts me...
...They had not become genuine revolutionaries, they simply were converted, to quote a leading Spanish socialist historian, into "radicalized reformists...
...ROBERT BLAIR Wheaton, Md...
...If anything, Koch's situation in 1978 (and Abe Beame's in 1975, when the crisis hit) was worse than those of European social democratic governments, which can at least fiddle with monetary, trade, and business-labor policies in a manner solicitous of the premiere cities where those governments, after all, are lodged...
...Caballero and his paper called for the "dictatorship of the proletariat" during the period (1935) when the Communist party, to Caballero's dismay, was abandoning its revolutionary jargon in favor of the Popular Front...
...His personal tragedy was that he viewed politics and theories simply as means to advance the interests of the UGT...
...Thenceforward, Largo and his supporters became the prisoners of a political dynamic, finding it necessary to translate radical talk into action, thus leading to the insurrectionary folly of October 1934...
...JIM SLEEPER Replies: Susan Wagner's letter consists almost entirely of bureaucratic obfuscation and betrays (or perpetrates...
...I wonder if one of you would try to answer these questions...
...Texas, of all places, is currently confronting its own fiscal crisis...
...These efforts deserve accolades, not criticism...
...After reading his remarkable book Punishing Criminals, I changed my mind in the light of the tremendous increase in violent crime and now believe that the class of cases in which capital punishment should be discretionary should be expanded...
...This indicative planning framework would not, in itself, ensure public intervention in the accumulation process...
...When the Communists sought the liquidation of the POUM as "Trotskyist-fascist agents of Franco," Caballero blocked them, saying that, despite political differences, he knew the POUM leaders for many years as devoted to the cause of the working class and that, as a worker, he would never dissolve another working-class organization...
...Its discussion of workers' self-management is excellent, and its review of the role of the market process is intelligent and—as far as it goes—fairly convincing...
...It then becomes hard to balance the market elements of allocation against the necessity for some sort of political regulation...
...It probably does not make sense to state an absolute preference between them regardless of the historical circumstances of particular countries...
...The second condition means that the decisions of that "elite" give them a "power" over the majority of citizens whose lives are affected by private investment decisions...
...He is very formidable in debate...
...When he reached this country in 1940, he was still an ardent leftist, but during the course of intense discussion with social democrats and other anti-Stalinists he gradually relinquished his beliefs first in Leninism and then in Marxism...
...A second constraint on the labor market derives from our concern with enterprise structure...
...q SPRING • 1988 • 255...
...It is clear that Miller and Estrin are not offering any formula for making investment decisions less complex...
...3) It should not generate very large inequalities of wealth among those responsible for the investment decisions...
...Jim Sleeper, lumping together the movement of printers and garment manufacturers to "Hackensack or Taiwan," reflects the metropolitan view we-they...
...Martin leaves his readers with the impression that Caballero was simply a tool of the Communists...
...But what you don't quite come to grips with is the question any attentive reader must ask: Was there any realistic alternative to Koch in the given society...
...To avert the loss of supporters to the CNT, to mollify radicalizing militants, and to restrain a resurgent political right, revolutionary rhetoric was first employed as a defensive resort...
...q On Housing Editors: The article by Jim Sleeper, "Boom and Bust with Ed Koch" (Dissent, Fall 1987), was misleading and factually incorrect...
...Actually, they were less resistant to Communist demands than was Caballero, who developed a strong dislike for Rosenberg, the Soviet ambassador, for his interference in Spanish internal affairs...
...I deplore the fact that Dissent has opened its pages to this mode of controversy...
...ALFRED KAZIN Replies: Whenever Sidney Hook sees my name in print he loses his temper and some sense of what the occasion demands...
...Caballero left his peasant village in his youth to become a construction worker in Madrid, where he taught himself to read and write in order to be a more effective union leader and Socialist politician...
...Not that European cities are fully spared the vicissitudes of international capital and job migrations...
...Could a municipal default and court-ordered restructuring of the city's and state's priorities in 1975 have done better...
...Her Tibbett Gardens numbers reflect the Board of Estimate's salvaging operation that occurred after the article was published, a salvaging operation that proved, again, the importance of direct public subsidy to moderate-income housing...
...But by asserting that the market process when applied to consumer goods leads to (1) efficient production and distribution, (2) the best use of socially decentralized information, (3) increased personal freedom of choice, and (4) decreased bureaucratic power, the authors have necessarily, if indirectly, raised the question of whether these benefits would not also apply to capital markets and labor markets...
...Editors: I read your special issue on New York City with much interest and pleasure...
...But I have found his critical and often astringent dissent from my views intellectually challenging...
...3. When I referred to the "inane bolshevizers" I did not say that the leaders of the socialist left were witting procommunists...
...it is a municipal corporation utterly hostage to other hostile governments and private lenders...
...The most difficult issue is choosing between the options that remain for running a market-socialist capital market...
...My paragraphs in Dissent were taken from private journals that are my way of surviving everyday life in New York and the horrors of twentieth-century extremism...
...In addition, 10,000 square feet of community space will be provided, at least one hundred units will be reserved for senior citizens, open space for recreational use by both the community and the residents will be provided, and a recreation area of over 13,000 square feet will be available for the elementary school...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...I have been reading or hearing Sidney Hook's lectures all my life, and for some reason his self-confidence has never diminished, though the substance certainly has...
...There is nothing resembling labor direction in this model of socialism...
...More expansive than the special New York issue of twenty-five years ago, the articles were imaginative, probing, informative...
...milnmo SPRING • 1988 • 253 SAUL ESTRIN AND DAVID MILLER Reply: Robert Blair attributes to our essay "A Case for Market Socialism" more definite intentions than its authors had...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...The plan approved by the Board of Estimate for Tibbett Gardens calls for 750 units of middle-income housing and the construction of a 600-seat elementary school to alleviate overcrowded conditions in the area...
...Blair focuses on our claim that labor and capital markets have special features that set them apart from ordinary commodity markets...
...The intention was to persuade those on the left committed to a vision of socialism built on centralization, bureaucracy, and planning that a decentralized solution through markets was not merely feasible but attractive...
...but at least they have countervailing political and cultural strengths to help cushion and anticipate such fluctuations...
...The retentionist view for which van den Haag argues and which, according to Kazin, makes him a monster, is an old and conventional view staunchly held by many honorable scholars, including some of the great liberal Justices of our Supreme Court...
...For the most part, we envisage that the labor market would operate freely...
...I see no reason to assume that a free market in labor— supplemented with adequately designed and funded education and job-training programs—would be unacceptable to intelligent socialists...
...Both poverty and unemployment rates are highest there, however much they bribe business to locate...
...Some articles articulate the kind of provincialism outlanders frequently ascribe to New Yorkers—their image of the nation, perhaps the world, as simply divided between our town and out of town...
...I do not expect Sidney Hook to understand this, but I was remembering something very disturbing and oppressive to me—the defense, even the espousal, of capital punishment...
...On the other hand, the investment banks might be constituted as private companies, with their shares owned (for instance) by the enterprises to which they lent their capital and raising their money from private as well as public sources...
...The first condition means that investment decisions tend "to gravitate in practice into the hands of experts who are able to spend time acquiring the necessary information . . . a small elite...
...Under the most obvious alternative— state planning of capital investments—the "experts" will be constrained by the need to please their political and bureaucratic superiors...
...Although you suggest a minimum income of $44,000 will be required, with $52,000 more likely, to afford these units, the reality is that a two-bedroom unit will be affordable to a family earning approximately $42,000...
...Moore, and John Stuart Mill...
...I will endeavor to respond only to the more important ones: 1. The old saw that Largo suddenly saw the light in 1935 upon reading the works of Marx and Lenin while in prison and then veered sharply to the left is nonsense...
...Once he lost his trade union bearings and had to make political decisions of much greater import, his use of revolutionary verbiage became an entrapment that led to the destruction of the Spanish socialist movement...
...Changes in national policies are imperative and possible...
...Van den Haag nowhere accepts with "a smile" that in the nature of the case there is always a risk when capital punishment obtains that an innocent person may be executed...
...But it ensures that investment takes place after the maximum feasible exchange of information, with government intervention triggered by predetermined criteria...
...Our aim was not to provide a blueprint for a society organized on market socialist lines but to present some underlying principles and canvass some practical options— chiefly on the question of the preferred structure of economic enterprises...
...May I then be permitted some criticism...
...Under the circumstances, Ed Koch did a brilliant huckstering job for New York, to former congressional colleagues and corporate decision makers, on precisely the terms an ambivalently urban America demands...
...2) It should preserve the autonomy of the enterprises that receive the capital...
...In summary, the problems discussed in many articles cannot be solved, by and large, within the city itself...
...I challenge Kazin to defend his absolutist position against capital punishment by reasoned argument rather than by insult...
...Workers would choose which skills to cultivate and which enterprises to apply to join...
...q New York as Metropolis Editors: I enthusiastically join those who have praised your Fall 1987 issue, "In Search of New York...
...I'm afraid the only idea Hook has of literature is polemic...
...Under the influence of his good friend Abba Lerner, he shifted to economics...
...But despite his immense abilities, the doors of the academy were closed to him...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...1) and (2) together strongly suggest that there should be market competition between the investment agencies, so that the agencies bear the gains and losses of their decisions and so that cooperatives and other enterprises can use the option of switching from one agency to another to protect themselves from unwarranted interference...
...Mixed Economy, Yes...
...An examination of recent performances by Congress and the president in preparing the federal budget suggests that nonmarket approaches have significant limitations of their own...
...0 Market Socialism, No...
...From his previous role as a somewhat conventional labor union official and Socialist municipal councillor, Caballero emerged from prison to lead and energize the Socialist party's left wing, which published its own mass circulation paper in opposition to the party's daily...
...While much of this commitment is for low- and moderate-income housing, the retention of middle-income New Yorkers—the job and tax base of the city—is critical to maintaining the economic vitality of New York...
...After New York it's really not all Bridgeport...
...They are not so much questions of principle: we can set out the desiderata for an investment system without great difficulty...
...250 • DISSENT To reply to Richard Bluestone...
...It might have been that, but it should not be confused with "Stalinization," as Martin does when he expresses his gratitude that in today's Spanish Socialist party there are no pro-Communists "like the Caballerists of the 1930s...
...I would have liked to see some examination of how the city's problems are exacerbated by the nature of our megalopolis: countless autonomous governments that limit regional planning, financial strains on the city intensified by costly programs for which we suburbanites contribute so few tax dollars, the narrow parochialism of our small local communities, etc...
...Many of the articles did not sufficiently emphasize how city problems are intrinsically connected with national issues...
...My differences with the editors of Dissent are great indeed, but I am taken aback that even those among them who still believe in a united front with Leninists of any variety would countenance publication of Kazin's cowardly pursuit of a personal vendetta in the pages of Dissent...
...They seem to have a much less clear picture of the limitations of governmental efficiency, wisdom, and benevolence...
...Our predisposition remains for free-market outcomes whenever possible...
...Hook does not deny the truth of what I wrote—that van den Haag found "acceptable" the execution of twenty-four people proved innocent of the crimes for which they were put to death...
...With the right judge and mobilized coalitions, perhaps...
...He nowhere urges that capital punishment be mandatory but always discretionary...
...And if critics answer that the government never does adequately design and fund such programs, I would have to enquire why such critics would therefore expect the government to do a better job designing and maintaining job-allocation programs...
...In addition, investment choices can have important effects spilling over to individuals other than those responsible for the decisions...
...Further refinements on these options can be devised and are discussed in our forthcoming book on market socialism (see J. Le Grand, ed., Market Socialism, Oxford University Press, 1988...
...Note that in either case it would be possible to assess the investment managers according to the economic success of their decisions, and to work out appropriate reward schedules...
...Kazin's libelous reference to van den Haag's views on capital punishment are characteristic in their emphasis on disparaging epithets rather than argument...
...In the early months of the Civil War, his revolutionary posture having made him the idol of the Spanish working class, Caballero became prime minister virtually by popular acclaim...
...It is clear from the opening of their article that Miller and Estrin have a good grasp of the benefits and limitations of market processes...
...Although we do not wish to rule out private activity on a small scale, we believe it is essential to the survival of market socialism that large-scale privately owned enterprises not be permitted to emerge...
...After all, Hackensack is not off the coast of China but a shorter distance from midtown Manhattan than the daily subway rides many of us grew up on...
...Further, the valuable accounts of the city's cultural scene might have touched on kindred developments elsewhere...
...The difference between a market process and a nonmarket process in this case is simple: Under a market regime the investment "experts" are constrained by the need to earn profits for the investors whose capital they employ and by the competition they face from other investment "experts...
...An obvious example is pollution, but of equal social importance might be the special employment needs of particular areas...
...The Spanish Republic was only able to survive and function so long as it could rely on a united, democratically committed Socialist party...
...Wagner's citywide housing production numbers are fanciful—most of the $10.2 billion has yet to be found, and the city always welches on its low-income numbers in the end...
...They were in fact somewhat wary of a Communist party that until 1934 followed a wildly insurrectionist policy...
...Could the special circumstances be dealt with by supplementing the market process with limited social legislation rather than by abolishing markets...
...There must be a floor to levels of pay for all groups whatever their special situation in the economy...
...This is not the place to discuss the complex points in favor of van den Haag's position, which is less extreme than those of Kant, G.E...
...Capital allocation raises more complex questions...
...Readers unaware of Kazin's target could hardly be interested in a description of an anonymous character by a disappointed rival for the favors of "The Village's most frequented femme fatale...
...But their ultraleftist incoherence, which contributed so much to the ultimate demise of the Republic, their extolling of the Soviet model as the exemplar for Spain, their fulsome praise of Stalin and the USSR, a certain fascination with and inferiority complex vis-a-vis the then inconsequential Spanish Communist 252 • DISSENT party —Araquistain boasted that Left Socialists were more Communist than the Communists—all of this and much more made the Spanish socialist movement extremely susceptible to Communist and Comintern manipulations, making it both a victim of and responsible for the Spanish tragedy...
...New York is naked by comparison...
...I find it terrifying that only a few religious people (mostly in the South) actively oppose it...
...Our preferred solution would be to place the problem in a permanent institutional framework—a forum in which the competing claims of market and social returns could be fought out, case by case...
...Erber commits a host of factual and interpretive errors...
...Since he cannot deny it, he reads me one of his lectures—this time on capital punishment...
...These commitments militate against the private ownership of enterprises and take us beyond the "mixed economy" if it means a system that preserves private ownership of capital in all essential respects but tries to offset its effects by political means...
...So his own visionless "tics" suited the nation's, where cities are concerned...
...254 • DISSENT We would stress in conclusion that we certainly do not have a naive faith in the benevolence or omniscience of civil servants...
...They, in turn, must please the politically significant players in the given political system (the Politbureau, for example, or core constituent groups in a democratic system...
...As between a congressional subcommittee and the strategic planning staff of IBM, I am not as sure as Miller and Estrin that I'd be happier to have my investment dollars looked after by the public sector...
...SAUL ESTRIN London School of Economics DAVID MILLER Nuffield College, Oxford q To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...Simply put, we have to realize that we are all in it together no matter where we live...
...On the one hand, we might envisage an array of public bodies, legally constituted and operating independently of one another— several national investment banks and a plethora of local and regional agencies mandated to foster investment in their particular areas...
...All sorts of excuses were offered for denying him a regular teaching post— excuses that if taken seriously would have applied just as much to the less gifted persons who were hired in his stead and sometimes even to those who offered these rationalizations...
...That the solution has proved to be mean-spirited and destructive—indeed, has done permanent, ugly damage to the civic consensus that a different group of actors hammered out in the 1930s and 1940s under LaGuardia—is now as plain as the racial violence and homelessness in our streets...
...and, yes, part of that bargain meant showing that he could keep rebellious minorities in their place...
...Now the negotiating power given to the Communist party by Soviet arms permitted them to exploit the split in the Socialist leadership and force Caballero out of office...
...Quitting would be equally voluntary...
...he merely translated ironclad constraints into a New York idiom that cowed, chastened even, liberals like himself...
...SIDNEY HOOK Stanford, Calif...
...When the New International denounced me as a Fascist, at least I was openly named...
...In another sense, our solution is a "mixed" one, inasmuch as we try to combine markets with planning in a way that makes best use of both these (fallible) instruments...
...a thorough misunderstanding of Tibbett Gardens...
...Largo and his fellow UGT leaders were merely trade unionists with little political vision or understanding...
...Paris, Amsterdam, and other such cities have thus been spared some of the small-minded hucksterer's panic over competition for investment that precludes even the possibility of intelligent city planning in New York (and suits Koch's own peddler's mentality to a tee...
...Tibbett Gardens seeks to provide critically needed housing for middle-income New Yorkers...
...Letting the state, even a democratic state, control or closely regulate investment is not likely to produce results clearly superior to those achieved by a market process...
...What trade-offs might be faced under each system...
...Contemporary capitalist economies face similar problems and tend to resolve them in an ad hoc way, with nonintervention the norm and sporadic, but dramatic, government involvement in cases where public opinion or interest is strong...
...But market socialists must ensure that when market forces take equilibrium real wages for some groups below the socially defined level of subsistence, for example, because of a serious downturn in world trade, workers' incomes do not actually fall to this level...
...The major problem is that the latter discussion doesn't go very far at all...
...For example, both halves of the first substantive sentence of the letter get my very clear argument precisely backward: I described and evaluated the project as the moderate-and middle-income housing it pretended to be...
...When discussing the "special features" of capital markets, for instance, Miller and Estrin argue that investment decisions (1) are particularly complex and (2) may have substantial social repercussions...
...Not least ex-leftists like Sidney Hook, who have become Ronald Reagan's favorite intellectuals...
...But wasn't Koch's experience something like that of certain social democratic governments in Europe during the past fifty or sixty years which took over a collapsing capitalist economy, neither could nor would undertake radical measures, and therefore had no choice but to introduce austerity measures that did indeed bring some economic health to the society, though at the expense of the poorest segments of the population...
...As late as my debate with the notorious "hanging Judge" Liebowitz before the New York Bar Association, I myself have been an opponent of capital punishment except in three classes of cases where it would be discretionary — tthhoossee involving historical creatures like Hitler, those in which persons sentenced to life voluntarily request it, and those in which the guilty defendants have killed more than once...
...2. The shift to an infantile leftism came in the wake of the breakdown in 1933-1934 of the bureaucraticcorporatist labor relations structure (the mixed juries) that Largo, as labor minister, had instituted in 1931...
...Miller and Estrin need to address such issues...
...That it would affect city revenues is, of course, another "big story...
...3) suggests that privately owned banks of the traditional sort would not be appropriate to market socialism...
...Dissent, Summer 1987), is a valuable contribution to the discussion of alternative economic systems...
...Our point was simply that whereas with most ordinary commodities the case for allowing markets to operate freely as mechanisms of exchange is overwhelmingly strong, with labor and capital other factors—social costs, in a broad sense—enter the equation...
...Above a certain size, all productive companies must therefore become either publicly owned corporations or producer cooperatives...
...While serving a prison term following the failed Socialist-led uprising in 1934, Caballero began reading Marx and Lenin, causing his ideas to veer sharply to the left and, upon the suggestion of an American journalist, thinking of himself as "the Spanish Lenin...
...In that sense, Koch cannot be credited with even a diabolical originality...
Vol. 35 • April 1988 • No. 2
