Socialism One Sector at a Time

[marmar]

via CommonDreams:



Published on Thursday, May 28, 2009 by Z Net
Socialism One Sector at a Time

by Peter Marcuse

The closest we've come to a serious movement that adopted socialism as a goal was in 1968, and Rudi Dutschke - "Red Rudi" - was a charismatic leader in that movement in Berlin. The approach he advocated was to "March through the Institutions of capitalism." In the militant context of the times, that might well have started in the universities and the factories: democratic government led by students and faculty on the campus, democratic government of and by workers, autogestion, in the work-places. The approach, recognizing that revolution in its classic form was unlikely to take place all at once but its goals might be approached strategically piece by piece, is worth taking up again today.

The mortgage component of the economic crisis today suggests the approach. While liberals bemoan the greed of bankers and the fraudulent practices of brokers, the roots of the crisis go much deeper. They begin with the selling of the myth of home ownership, sold as the only way to have security of tenure, but increasingly exposed as a fragile reed. The alternatives: cooperatives, land trusts, public ownership, mutual housing associations, become increasingly obvious alternatives. They suggest social housing, non-speculative forms of ownership in which the possibility of a financial profit is not the driving force behind "owning" a home. At a personal level, that opens the door to thought about the relationship between use values and exchange values, an important lesson in itself. But going further, it raises the question of whether the for-profit market is really the best way to allocate housing, one of the necessities of life. Left advocates of rent control have long argued that housing should be provided "for people, not for profit;" that slogan seems more appropriate than ever today.

And what does it mean if not a socialist housing sector - not necessarily covering all housing, and allowing for a non-speculative market to operate, but advancing along very anti-capitalist lines.

The idea that certain sectors of the economy are logically public is hardly a new one. Fire protection was originally undertaken by private fire companies, education was originally privately provided, most railroads were privately built and operated, so were toll roads. Worker management has a much slimmer history, but is hardly unimaginable; experience in some countries with worker take-overs of individual factories or the formation of cooperatives is quite wide-spread, if limited. But the experience in broad sectors that we now largely take for granted is as germane.

That education should be not only free but publicly-provided is generally acknowledged. The fight over charter schools in the United States illustrates that there is an attack on its public provision, but there is at the same time a strong defensive movement, and the conflict raises the question of the private role sharply. The form of control is interesting-not teachers themselves, but democratically elected school boards. It might provoke thinking as to how democratic control over other sectors could be established, by some institutionalized relationship between users and workers. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/28-12

[phantom power]

1. This whole notion of private home ownership for "profit" is pretty recent.

The idea of building equity was always a selling point, but it was more of a side benefit than the raison d'etre. And making a huge return on investment was never assumed. More like retaining value over time, relative to inflation.