In a message dated 8/5/99 7:42:44 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

> One can debate the meaning of the term "socialism," but if it means
>  anything, it means control of production by the workers themselves, not
>  owners and managers who rule them and control all decisions, whether in
>  capitalist enterprises or an absolutist state.

This is a rather narrow definition.  What socialism means in practice is the
leveling of income through a severe taxation system that also regulates the
economy strictly according to state determined needs.  Nowhere in the notion
of socialism is it true that there is any control by workers.  The notion of
control by the people has always been a democratic notion that began with the
French and American revolutions.
It is true that the tension between individual freedom and the freedom of the
people as a group is severely exacerbated in democratic constitutional
governments, but this occurs only because of the original difficulty of
demarcating a collective subject
that actually goes into action under certain historical conditions.
Nation-states have always been able to act under the leadership of a king or
state government, but to
have developed the understanding that the collective subject is acting in
tension with
dominant individual actors and a state governmental system leads to the sense
that
the system is legitimate only when the collective subject abides by its own
norms
because of the developed opinions of the people and not because of coercive
laws and policies.  Socialism has been unable to develop this understanding:
that the people constitute an agency in contradistinction to the state.
Political theories of democracy posit an autonomous collective subject
capable of action through
solidarity; political theories of socialism have always clung to a steering
system
whether by the party or the state administration.

Fred Welfare