On A Transition To Socialism

I have just started David Schweickart's After Capitalism. I have yet to get to his exposition of how transition to economic democracy might be achieved.

To my mind, a transition to Schweickart's preferred system could start with a government fund acquiring enough equity in corporates to prescribe certain organization decisions. As I recall, the United States government bailed out General Motors during the 2008 worldwide depression. These were loans; they could have taken equity. The Norwegian government accumulates a Sovereign Wealth Fund from North Sea oil. The Australian government has superanuation funds.

Once a government has enough ownership of some corporations, they are not required to maintain them as hierarchical, authoritarian institutions. They could, say, get rid of the board of directors. An elected workers' council could appoint management.

The government fund can still own the capital. The firm pays a fee for renting the capital. I once worked for a wholl owned subsidiary, a capitalist firm owned by another capitalist firm. We had to pay such a fee to the owning company.

Schweickart has the revenue obtained by such fees used to create an investment fund. Investment will be directed not solely by profitability. He has the investment fund being paid out on a per capita basis, as a first approximation. Some of the investments are national in scope. The remainder goes to regions on a per capita basis, as a first approximation. This works well with a federal system, like Australia, Canada, and the USA. Public needs would have some influence. For example, some investment might be deliberately directed to less developed regions of the country or to update old technology with more green, ecological technology. New worker-directed firms can be created, and current firms can invest in new processes and new products.

I can see how some of these fees might also pay for, say, head start, pension funds, and so on. Not everybody is in the work force. Schweickart recommends a job guarantee program. He imagines current social programs would continue with funding, I guess, by current tax systems. This is in parallel with new investment fund.

The workers, however, would be the residual claimant under economic democracy. They might not even be paid wages. Profit calculations would differ. Maybe profits are broken down and distributed every week, every two weeks, or every month.

Under Schweickart's economic democracy, the means of production are not privately owned but rented from the public. Workers do not sell their labor power for a wage. Products are produced for buying and selling on markets. As now, large islands exist where the maket is replaced by internal planning. Now those are privately owned corporations. Under this new structure, these firms would be governed by the workers themselves.

We could start transitioning to such a system today.

But I do not see where the political will comes from to do this. On the other hand, I have seen changes in my lifetime that I did not think possible: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the fall of fascism in Chile, a genuine democracy created for a while in the Philippines.