Socialist Scholars Archive
Notes on the Socialist Scholars Conference (from R L Norman) Bogdan Denitch:
Unless a better way can be worked out on the technical matters after this conference, I will cease to have any role in the structural work after April 20. On that day or the following Monday, I will close out the Amalgamated account and not deal with the money. Either the IDS [DSA’s ‘legal tax-free’] bank account or the BMCC account [ a less ‘legal account at the college ] will be responsible for completing payments on the hotels, travel and what I assume will be a couple of thousand owed on the printing. I can then become a 'political' member of DSA and simply talk at meetings or write. I've tried to be responsible for holding the structure of this thing together since 1984. The only competent person brought into the organization by yourself was Kim Adams, who sadly is no longer with us. The Political Economy of Incompetence: Bogdan Denitch
difficult to get orgainzational people- you attract 'political people'- incompetents and thieves 2. Yugo model failed politically because it failed economically- not as a model within one country, but for the same reason that it failed in the former Soviet Union- accumulation cannot be successfully stifled in one country when it can continue in other countries. whether or not it is desirable for accumulation to be stifled is another question. 3. You have a particularly corrosive personality as far as organizations go. Your combination of arrogance and technical incompetence to makes it difficult even for persons who basically aggree not only with your position, but with your interpretation of that position- to work with you in furthering that position. 4.You
have seriously confused and conflated your role with that of the organization.
You are not Louis XIV nor Napoleon Bonaparte, who could legitimately
assert 'the state is me'. As the political chair of the largest Socialist
conference in the western hemisphere, you are not some Asiatic despot,
despensing favors at whatever whim you may have or on the basis of whatever
lie you have been told by Kott or whomever else. You don't have the
right to put the very existence of this conference at risk, simply to
assert some prerogative that you think has been denied you. You are
not the ruler of Great Britain, for whom technical competence in running
the throne is basically an irrelevancy. This conference is very poor.
Why the SSC Failed to Grow after 1987 I believe that the primary reason for this lack of growth in the conference since about 1987 is your attitude towards accumulation in general, which itself is a personal extension of accumulation model which developed in former Yugoslavia after World War 11. Obviously the model of economic growth in which you were acculturated helped determine your attitude, as did mine or anyone elses for that matter. I believe that in that model, a high degree of political control did exist, to the point where real accumulation ,the primitive accumulation kind, never existed within post war Yugoslavia. The managers of the factories were in some sense of the word responsible for maintaining enough efficiency within their factory ( or service center such as a hospital), sufficient to allow for a moderate rate of growth, but not so much growth that a large surplus was created. Such a large surplus would have created more problems within this model than it would have solved. Too much money would have caused a fight over who was responsible for creating the new wealth and hence who should receive the main benefits. The managers would have surely attempted to make the case that their skills were the main factor, while the workers would have asserted that their continuing, unflagging efforts had been the reason. If certain factories got too efficient, then cross factory envy might result. If a single ethnic region got too efficient, then ethnic animosity might increase. None of these outcomes was favorable to political stability within Yugoslavia. Given that rapid economic growth always produces escalating inequality and political instability, the primary role of any central government in a capitalist state is both to maintain economic growth, but to recycle the resulting surplus (itself due to exploition) down the class ladder; to try to keep too much of the surplus from accumulating with the very top of the bourgeoise thereby threatening the existence of the whole system. Given the general level of economic devastation and the extreme ethnic violence of World War 11, this was even trickier for the Yugoslav model to do. For while no capitalist class existed there to steal the benefits of labor, there also was limited capital accumulation as well to provide for investment and rapid future growth. That this model worked far better than any other socialist system, which had not under gone a period of rapid accumulation, did not prepare it for the 1980s. The Titoist model held down the ethnic rivalries, sufficient to promote a wide degree of ethnic intermarriage, according to yourself up to twenty five percent in many areas- no small fete, considering World War 11. Apparently, it was also successful enough economically to provide a $500 a month per capita income (again your numbers) by the late 1970s, again no mean fete considering the effect of the war. But as with other attempts to have socialism within one country, irrespective of the state of international accumulation, this model outlived the conditions under which it was created. The loss of Tito himself hurt, but did not necessarily invalidate the model. The death of a monarch does not necessarily lead to the destruction of the monarchy. What I believe doomed the model was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the resulting accumulation of capital in the advanced industrial world and especially the U.S. itself. This flight of capital damn near sunk Mitterand in France in 1983 and almost certainly finished driving the creaking Soviet into the dirt. What could have been a slower transition to capitalism in former Soviet Union and what might have saved the former Soviet Union as a union could not happen under the economic onslaught unleashed by Ronald Reagan. The more developed areas of the Soviet empire saw a chance to dump the lesser developed areas and compete for more growth and hopefully a better way of life than was possible under the old regime. The accuracy of this possibility varied from state to state and was deeply flawed by tribal hatreds of hundreds of years standing, especially in the case of the Baltic states, who suddenly realized that they were about 95 percent dependent upon Soviet, i.e. Russian energy and even as their need for foreign investment was great, their need for cheap Russian oil was greater. Thus as their western 'friends' pushed Gorbachev to 'release' the poor captive nations, a garot was slowly encircling their economic throats. This was not lost upon the Russians either. While the world price of energy was down considerably during the 1980s, it was a damn sight higher than the old Soviet 'friendship oil' rates of the 1950s through the 1970s. More importantly, Soviet energy sales did not require hard currency. For the Russians, the loss of empire may have been a problem of pride, and while it may have created manufacturing production problems and certainly some security problems, it is a flat fact that the problems could be dealt with better without most of the old empire being subsidized by cheap Russian oil and natural gas. I was niave when I started working as the conference organizer in many respects. Perhaps my greatest miscalculation was about you and your leadership ability. It never occurred to me that a serious political leader would not only ignore acts of serious incompetence but would scream at anyone for bringing them up privately, as if hearing about the problem was the problem. It never occurred to me that even an incompetent leader would overlook gross acts of negligence, then reward those assholes with greater responsibility.
RLN Model of Conference (R L Norman Jr) If your view of the structure of the conference is framed by your own model of economic growth, so is mine. I was raised on a small dirt farm. My mother and father were essentially tenant farmers with a small holding of their own, not enough land to support a family, but enough land to mortgage for equipment and seed and rent money for a slightly larger operation. After the children got old enough to work, we worked. We worked like Hell. For us it was root hog or die. My dad had to scramble to survive. Truthfully, my mother and us kids worked much harder than he ever did. And as he so often reminds me even now, he doesn't let things worry him. Perhaps its for the best, he probably has the best health of his siblings even though he is near the oldest and he drank heavily during much his early years and smokes to this day. Yet even he worked damn near like a slave under his father and was capable of work when he had to. I learned very early how to work. By the time I was sixteen, I helped organize much of the farm work and I was responsible for significant chunks of the summer work. The SSC would be bigger today, perhaps fifty percent bigger, but your insistence on day to day control over the technical matters, for which you have great disdain, and you apparently have as much disdain for the few persons willing to try to do those technical matters. It is a serious distortion of the term 'political' to apply it to many of your decisions relating both to the makeup of the main conference speakers and to the staffing of the conference itself. In general it could be reasonably argued you apply your version of the 'personal as political' to the main speakers. Social Democratic Thought in America: an Oxymoron ? What I guess it comes down to, is that I’m beginning to have serious doubts about the ability of social democratic thought, as it is expressed in America, to have a positive political influence, either in the economy or in the race mess. Ethnically it is a failure both personally and politically. Jesse Jackson repaid Michael Harrington's overtures and advice by financially holding up DSA when he spoke for us once in D.C. He treated one of our major union people as if she were no more than a street whore. Jackson's own ethnic and feminist sensibilities certainly could stand improvement. The one major black member national speaker does as best he can (Cornel West), but fights a damned lonely fight pushing social democracy. It would surprise me to find out that DSA had a five percent black membership.
1993 DSA Winter Youth Conference
A small
but crucial error. I've been to such conferences at Columbia, where
even during rain storms, enough students turn out to keep the thing
from being an embarrassment. Perhaps when the youth section ‘central
committee’ met after the conference, they felt it to be a success.
When middle and working class higher education gets tougher each day
and public colleges are being cut right and left, and the major social
democratic youth group cannot tap into the rising anger of these students,
its time to question the politics and or the competence of that group
and its parent organization
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