Here is the Comment I have posted on OutsideLeft’s site:

I have lived for most of my life in countries grappling with different forms of socialism (communist Yugoslavia, apartheid S Africa) or trying to escape from it (post-communist Russia, post-war Bosnia, post-Milosevic Serbia, post-communist Poland). So I feel qualified to say that your arguments are, er, scrawny.

As Tim Worstall points out, markets can not do everything, so there is a case for some sort of collective agreement to set some better rules. But then what?

The deep problem with socialist thinking in the way it invariably translates into practice is that it leads to state-dominated oppression on a massive scale.

Socialists like to try to wriggle out of the Stalin/Mao/N Korea examples as if they were ‘aberrations’. But on the contrary, they exemplify what happens when the idea of the state as opposed to the individual is taken to its logical conclusion.

Yugoslavia tried ‘workers control’ for many years and what a farce that was (I was there – were you?). It failed because it dared not allow ‘workers’ to break up a failing enterprise and use the pieces to set up new private businesses on a scale that was actually successful. It limited market entry. It suppressed competition. assumed that wage labour was pernicious exploitation, thereby instituting state control as a new form of exploitation. It had no flexibility. It ran up huge debts borrowed from the West, and could not pay them back.

Result? Ethnic War.

The other point is that all market-socialistic states (such as Sweden and others in Europe) benefit from the innovation and energy coming from countries with freer market economies. Take that away and their ‘success’ would look much less impressive?

Ultimately it’s all about information management. The more the state or the workers or any one category of people/organisation try to limit options, the harder it is for new ideas and innovation to circulate. Human potential shrivels.

You might say that some sort of lumpen Equity is the uber-value, and that lower human potential is a price worth paying.

The question then is Lenin’s Kto Kogo? Who decides that balance?

All evidence suggests (including the thousands of new offences created by New Labour) that beyond a fairly limited level, state-socialist control becomes a dysfunctional moral and political calamity.

Maybe I should write a bit more about why Yugoslav Socialist Self-Management failed. It’s quite interesting, insofar as the Tito Yugs really tried hard to create something between Soviet-style control and the Market, to the point where Tony Benn and others were lauding their genius.

Here is one analysis which meanders around but eventually gets there:

In retrospect, those who still favor a self-management system that is in theory, correct, seem somehow unable to recognize the truth of one Yugoslav economist’s comment that self-management was a system « for angels and not for men »

The façade of self-management, as Zagorka Golubovi