Adam Przeworski, II

(Note: I’m informed by one of my readers that it’s pronounced “Shaworski.”) Part I of this series is here.

Socialism has meant nationalizing the “means of production.” This never meant your toothbrush, car, or doggie. It meant plant and equipment, starting with the biggest corporations. In “Capitalism and Social Democracy,” Przeworski (‘AP’) distinguishes between nationalization and socialization. The former means the government owns the means of production. The latter means workers own the enterprises in which they work. Nationalization in this sense has been derided as “state socialism” by partisans of more direct approaches.

A problem with factory ownership is it fails to eliminate commodity production, the wellspring of ills according to Marx and Engels. I would not dispute that it could bring a better world, but workers need not operate their enterprises according to any interest but their own. Would oil workers, for instance, agree to shut down their livelihoods for the sake of combating climate change? I would guess not. We’ve heard they would rather be doing other things like building solar panels, but switching jobs is no trivial thing for most people, assuming there is something to switch to.

If we reject the expectations of inevitable, cataclysmic breakdown, as I do, then continuing commodity production under socializaion has fewer disadvantages. There remains, however, the fundamental question of what is to be produced in the economy as a whole, and how it would be distributed. Decentralization of ownership to individual enterprises fails to address that question. We would still need a State to handle those questions.

State socialism, more to my liking, is not without its own problems. You can have bureaucrats with their own interests, not necessarily congruent with the public interest. A public enterprise is motivated to make money, for the sake of its own employees. Management is not necessarily solicitous of their own workers. Just ask a postal worker. A public enterprise is vulnerable to demagogic appeals made by politicians that may sound good to the lay person, but are not necessarily good for anyone.

An example of such demagogy that I wrote about here is the mistaken notion that the post office should be self-funded. This canard has been used to cripple the USPS.

AP writes that for social-democratic governments and nationalization, they were like the dog that caught the firetruck. When the opportunities arose, they were unprepared and dithered. They were not well-situated to know how to do it, notwithstanding Marx’s premise that workers in advanced capitalist economies were prepared to run those economies, if they seized the opportunity. Of course, the government leaders in question were not workers, but their representatives, as would be the case in any large-scale institution “subject to democratic control.”

These days the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) don’t have much to say about’ nationalization. Bernie Sanders is pointedly uninterested. What should be nationalized?

You could say a single-payer health care system is nationalization. It replaces private health insurance companies with a single public one. Medicare For All is certainly a priority in the DSA pantheon. Beyond that, however, things get murky. We could say M4A is as much a welfare state expansion as it is nationalization. To get into more classic socialist territory we’d have to look at fields such as transportation and banking.

There has been talk of postal banking, including by yours truly. Otherwise, however, not much is brought forward. The “Green New Deal” could be anything. There is plenty of support for welfare state public spending and redistributive taxation. In other words, social-democracy.

Given the urgency of action against climate change, nationalization becomes a likely tool. Power companies are often a combination of public and private. The regulation of these renders them formally public, but the regulation is often thought to have been captured by private capital. That tells you something about the prospects for nationalization.

The Gov could use its buying power to cram down the cost of prescription drugs, nationalization in all but name. Other categories of public investment beg for expansion. Utilities — water, gas, sewers — are obvious candidates. All of it requires tax revenue. Social-democracy, a.k.a. “gas and water socialism.” Otherwise I don’t hear much. Do you?

For certain categories of nationalization, a special factor for the U.S. is our federal system. The bias is that nationalization has to run through the filter of state government control. This is not much of an issue in the unitary states of Europe. I like to remind people the U.S. has the most decentralized public sector in the world, possibly excepting Switzerland.

At the very least, it seems like a question of priorities. Would you rather have the government take over IBM or fill out the welfare state (health care, family allowances, housing, etc.)? Once we get there, which still looks to be a long hard slog, we can think about further steps. It’s just as well that DSA and Senator Sanders have more pressing short-term objectives.