'Marginal Group'?

Well, the other day, Kurt, I found a cool web site where you entered your income and it showed where you stood in the world. I plunked in $25K for me and, lo and behold, I'm in the top nine percent of the world!

Seems we're the 'marginal group' here.

My approach to abolish the market in labor is opposite the Soviet model. If mine, factories are mostly publically owned, but leased to the workers to do with what they will, sink or swim, by satisfifying their customers in the marketplace. No 'Gosplan,' please!

You could look at it as a local capitalist collective, if you like, one worker, one vote, and they divide the profits among themselves as they see fit. That's why labor is not a cost or commodity here. For their lease, they make a fixed payment to a capital fund, a good part of which is decentralized to comunity banks to disperse and loans and grants, as they see fit locally. Naturally, some infrastructure is national and global in scope.

The conumer goods and services market remains, subject to the usual regulation--no polluting, etc. And a worker run coop of firm can thrive if they do well in the market, satisfying their customers, or sink if they're a bunch of slackers.

The main thing is that they don't have to 'grow or die,' just maintain market share.

Read David Schweickart's 'After Capitalism' for the full account. Or even google to find my review of it. His main point is 'There is an alternative', a critique of the 'TINA' crowd.

As for 'Wolverine,' yes, Marx talked about the 'tendency of the rate of profit to fall,' but as a tendency where there are also coutervailing factors. Some doctrinaire folks read this as predicting there's alway a collapse just around the next bend, but Marx himself never went that far.

Marx was also, understandably, somewhat hampered by the degree of progress of the science of his day, which tended to think in closed systems, more than the open systems of complexity and chaos we know now.

But I still see the market as an advance. I had the Norwegian Reds take me once to the museums in Oslo with the Viking ships, which as a kid always fascinated me. Exchange then was primarily through plunder, theft and pillage when they could, and barter when they were constrained militarily. Of course, some of this still goes on today, but gradually the market as we know it gained ascendency, and brought forth the revolution in the productive forces Marx describes so eloquently in the Manifesto.

You may want to take another look at it, from the perspective of globalization. Many of the capitalist busineess mags have, and found it still insightful today, even more so in some ways.