David Schweickart

Justin Schwartz recommends the market socialism of David Schweickart to the list. I went to the library and took out the only book of Schweickart's available: "Capitalism or Worker Control?, an Ethical and Economic Appraisal", written in 1980.

Schweickart describes what comes closest to his model of "worker- control socialism" on page 48:

"In the early 1950's a small Eastern European country, a country with 'two alphabets, three religions, four languages, five nations, six federal states called republics, seven neighbors and eight national banks,' embarked on a remarkable experiment. In 1948 Stalin accused Yugoslavia of antisovietism. By 1949 all trade between Yugoslavia and other Communist countries had been halted, and an economic boycott imposed. Pressed by events, Yugoslavia began a highly original construction -- a decentralized socialist economy featuring worker self-management of factories. The system has undergone many modifications during the three succeeding decades, but the basic structure of worker self-management has persisted and has been combined with ever greater reliance on the market. The experiment has encountered difficulties, but it has been by no means unsuccessful. Between 1952 and 1960, Yugoslavia recorded the highest growth rate of any country in the world. And though the pendulum has swung back and forth between liberalization and repression, Yugoslavia has been without doubt the freest (by Western standards) of any Communist country."

What Schweickart leaves out entirely is any discussion of Yugoslavia's connection to Western imperialism during this period. This reflects an astonishing degree of naivete. There is no sense in discussing Yugoslavia's growth rate without discussing the willingness of Western banks to extend credits or corporations to buy her exports. Yugoslavia had a special relationship with the West during this period. By omitting the global context in which Yugoslavia's "success" takes place, Schweickart displays intellectual shallowness that beggars description.

Of course, it took less than a decade since the book was written for Yugoslavia to descend into economic collapse and civil war. Therefore, it seems rather foolish to hold the country up as any kind of model. Schweikartites like Justin Schwartz might argue, "Well, we can't expect him to be a fortune-teller, can we?" Actually, you didn't have to be a fortune-teller to know which way things were going. Anybody with a firm Marxist grasp of the class relationships between the Yugoslav bureaucracy and Western imperialism might have been much less eager to hold that country up as a model. The warning signs were there for all to see.

Branka Magas wrote the following in "Wrong Turn in Kosovo", an article originally written in 1981, that is contained in her very fine "The Destruction of Yugoslavia" (Verso, 1993):

"Albanian nationalism becomes quite understandable when one surveys the ecomomic position of Kosovo, and the size of the gap which separates it from other republics and SAP Vojvodina. Kosovo is lagging far behind the others and this gap is increasing. Its birthrate, among the highest in Europe, is one cause of its falling behind, but it is not the only or fundamental one. Deeper reasons are to be found in postwar history (Kosovo was included in the category of the underdeveloped and therefore given additonal grants only after a significant delay): some in the nature of the Yugoslav economy (market socialism has increased regional inequalities), others in the international context within which it has to operate (the high price of industrialization exacted by imperialism)."

Now this type of information was available to political scientists and economists at the time. However, you had to have a particular type of orientation that Schweickart lacked. You needed to see national economies within a global context. This is how Lenin and Trotsky evaluated the prospects of the USSR in the early 1920's for example. This is a habit that is engrained in Marxist thought. Since Schweickart's connections to Marxism were tenuous at best, it is not surprising that he paid no attention to the global context. He was too busy in his study constructing an elaborate theoretical model based on a country that was like a house of cards waiting to collapse.