Socialism; Market Socialism
By: Mary Anne Winslow
From the economical angle this article studies socialism as the regulated market system, not as political system or ideology. The enterprises are represented as workers’ and are democratically controlled by all who work for them, and among the issues to be decided are the distribution of income within the cooperative. Let us look a little more closely at what the ground rules of such an economy might be. Enterprises borrow capital from an investment agency at a fixed rate of interest and subject to certain restrictions. They have rights of use in the capital they borrow but not full rights of ownership.
This means that the value of their fixed assets must be maintained: Capital cannot be treated as income nor loaned to other enterprises. There must also be bankruptcy rules: Enterprises that cannot provide their members with at least subsistence income must eventually be wound up, with the workers transferring to other cooperatives. Each enterprise must maintain its democratic form. If it wishes to expand, it must take in additional workers as full members with equal voting rights. Subject to that condition, however, it can adopt whatever internal management structure it chooses.
Small cooperatives might want to decide most issues by general meeting, larger ones might want to have a more elaborate system of decision making, with executive committees, and so on. Perhaps more important still, the tension between central direction and democracy that I hinted at earlier has been confirmed in practice. This conflict can occur at two levels. At the national level, it is impossible to envisage effective planning without a bureaucratic machine staffed by experts with access to technical information and therefore always liable to break free from democratic control. Embracing market socialism also means qualifying, in certain respects, the socialist commitment to community. I do not mean that the commitment should be abandoned–indeed I have argued elsewhere that what continues to distinguish socialists from radical or egalitarian liberals is their recognition of the importance of communal ties in underpinning collective provision and the redistribution of material resources. What needs to be given up is the vision of an all-embracing monolithic community that leaves no room for social relationships of other kinds.
Instead, the market socialist picture is one of a complex society in which elements of community exist at different levels–in neighborhoods, in workplaces, and, above all, in the arenas of politics, where people can act to express their common identity as citizens–but also alongside competitive and other relations. My second claim is that market socialism embodies a substantial degree of equality, substantial enough, I should argue, to meet the aspirations of most socialists. There is not, of course, complete material equality. The market relies on giving producers material incentives to respond to demand, and although the size of these incentives depends on tax schedules, which are politically determined, I don’t want to suggest that they can be reduced to zero. Nor would this be desirable. Pure equality conflicts with the justice of rewarding people according to their productive contribution.
The point is that in market socialism all income in the market sector is earned income, received as a result of decisions within each cooperative as to how its combined labor is to be deployed. There are no returns to capital as such. Moreover, this income is spread throughout the membership of each enterprise in accordance with whatever schedule has been agreed upon. Particular cooperatives may, of course, strike it lucky, in the sense of finding that their products sell unexpectedly well. But there is no incentive to convert such short-term gains to a long-term position of advantage under the system outlined, since cooperative members will be reluctant to reinvest their profits in what is from each member’s point of view a collective asset on which he or she has no individual claim. If what matters in assessing equality is lifetime income, rather than income over some shorter period, it is reasonable to hope that windfall gains will even themselves out. Bear in mind, too, that the guaranteed income proposal provides a secure baseline beneath which no one is allowed to fall. In short, market socialism embodies three forms of equality: an equal minimum income, equal access to the capital allocated by the investment agencies, and a limit to marketgenerated inequalities by virtue of the cooperative system and social ownership of productive resources.
Finally, market socialism provides substantial and fairly distributed freedom. It provides, in particular, freedoms in the choice of work and in consumption, freedoms that contemporary experience shows to be highly valued. Markets allow people to plan their lives within the limits of the resources available to them, rather than waiting for the decisions of an authority. Existing capitalist markets can rightly be accused of negating this freedom, in the case of most people, by severely limiting the resources to which they have access. The arrangements I have sketched for market socialism aim to avoid this accusation. Access to capital remains crucial, and it is vital that the investment agencies not be able to exercise their powers in a discriminatory way. This is a major reason for wanting to have a plurality of such agencies-for instance, a central coordinating body and a number of regional agencies in charge of investment in their own areas-as I shall argue later. The aim is to dissolve personal power by providing people with a range of partners with whom to deal, so that they are not dependent on the grace and favor of any one official. The market achieves this for consumers, but under market socialism there is no capital market in the conventional sense, and so whatever system of capital allocation is chosen must aim to achieve the same end for producers. With this proviso, freedom under market socialism is secure.
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