socialism

During the night two delegates of the railwaymen were arrested. The strikers immediately demanded their release, and as this was not conceded, they decided not to allow trains leave the town. At the station all the strikers with their wives and families sat down on the railway track-a sea of human beings. They were threatened with rifles salvoes. The workers bared their breast and cried, "Shoot!" A salvo was fired into the defenceless seated crowd, and 30 to 40 corpses, among them women and children, remained on the ground. On this becoming known the whole town of Kiev went to strike on the same day. The corpses of the murdered workers were raised on high by the crowd and carried round in mass demonstration.

The difference between communism and socialism is that under socialism central planning ends with a gun in your face, whereas under communism central planning begins with a gun in your face.

You Need To Gauge, To Engage.

Give with a free hand, but give only of your own.

The free worker receives a wage; the slave an education, food, care, clothing; the money that the master spends to keep the slave is drained little by little and in detail; one hardly perceives it.1

Getting through life without a lot of money, possessions, and/or friends is admirable, especially if it is by choice.

Many millions of pregnancies__any if not most of which have each led to the birth of at least one child__ere each used as nothing but a conspicuous means to a secret end called the evasion of abortion.

The world economy would collapse if a significant number of people were to realize and then act on the realization that it is possible to enjoy many if not most of the things that they enjoy without first having to own them.

He had the tendency, unfortunate for a new member of the committee, to like if not the rich themselves, at least their activities and surroundings, and to dislike the poor; a woman in rags toting a baby, barefoot children, made him feel sadistic rather than compassionate.His socialism, then, had the impatience and unfriendliness of a fashionable doctor forced to attend a tramp run over in the street.

I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours.

As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would have been no technical development or social culture.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.

Rivera__ admiration for Stalin was equaled only by his admiration for Henry Ford. By the 1920s and _30s, nearly every industrial country in Europe and Latin America, as well as the Soviet Union, had adopted Ford__ engineering and manufacturing methods: his highly efficient assembly line to increase production and reduce the cost of automobiles, so that the working class could at least afford to own a car; his total control over all the manufacturing and production processes by concentrating them all in one place, from the gathering of raw materials to orchestrating the final assembly; and his integration, training, and absolute control of the workforce. Kahn, the architect of Ford__ factories, subsequently constructed hundreds of factories on the model of the Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, which was the epicenter of Ford__ industrial acumen as well as a world-wide symbol of future technology. Such achievements led Rivera to regard Detroit__ industry as the means of transforming the proletariat to take the reins of economic production.

So what__ your alternative?_ people say, as if that__ logic. We don__ have to have an alternative, that__ not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you__e welcome, but if we don__ that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labor.

Here__ the solution. We need a CO2 tax, revenue-neutral, to replace taxation on employment, which was invented by Bismarck _ and some things have changed since the 19th Century.

We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy__ot maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.

Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.