File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-25.033, message 46


From: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb-AT-jmu.edu>
Subject: M-I: market socialism
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 18:03:11 -0500 ()


     This will probably be my last posting for now to this 
list on this topic as we seem be approaching burnout in the 
discussion of it.  After all, Louis P. is off Leninizing, 
albeit occasionally still throwing a jab at the 
"anti-communist" market socialists; Louis G. has followed 
Louis P. to this newer topic and appears to be attempting 
to refrain from further pokes at the hapless academic 
elitist labor aristocrats, and the "most important 
intellectual writing on the Left today" (hi, Adolfo) has 
been shrugging his shoulders for so long and so vigorously 
that they are on the verge of flying off his body into 
cyberspace, :-).  Anyway, a few more points:
     1)  As Doug Henwood noted, the important issue is 
really control of investment.  I note that at least 
the Schweickart version of MS has that under the 
control of central planning.  I also note that over 
on M-Th Justin S. has agreed that social services 
should be centrally planned under MS.  In the early 
days of the Yugoslav model control of investment was 
centralized and only devolved later. This later 
devolution may well have been a major factor in the 
worsening of the regional inequalities and the 
subsequent breakup of the Yugoslav state with its 
associated tragic consequences.
     2)  The issue is really not market versus plan, 
it is market versus command.  I have already noted the 
possibility of indicative planning with market 
socialism.  This distinction really goes back to the 
Bukharin-Preobrazhensky (geneticist-teleologist) 
debate in the USSR in the 1920s, there being 
indicative planning by the Vesenkha during the NEP 
that later became command planning.
     This shows up in the contrast between the views 
of Lange and Dobb in the English language lit.  
Lange's position was not a pure market socialist 
position, but it was in some sense not that far from a 
simplistic version of the Cockshott-Cottrell model.  
There would be central planning, but it would be based 
on a market equilibrium.  It would be informed by 
market information.  C and C's planning algorithms 
actually incorporate reactions to market forces in a 
very Langean way.  This is more centrally 
controlled than purer MS models.  The 
Dobb-Preobrazhensky view was that the market was/is 
irrelevant and that the planners will simply direct 
the economy where they want it to go.  In Dobb's 
formulation, there may be a loss of micro efficiency, 
but that this is more than compensated for by the 
overall higher rate of growth brought about by a 
higher rate of capital accumulation (based on surplus 
extracted out of the hides of the peasants).
     3)  Which brings us back to what really is the 
central problem again, who gives the commmands in a 
command planned economy?  I note that it was the 
command nature of the Nazi economy that led Hayek to 
call it "socialist," a categorization I reject.  We 
have heard that what happened in the USSR was a 
distortion, a bizarre seizure of power by a 
bureaurcratic elite.  But, we have seen many nations 
where command planning has been attempted.  Are there 
any where there has not been such a seizure?  How is 
there to be democratic control by the workers of this 
process?  Those who prattle on about thaxis (the unity 
of theory and practise) as rendering this 
discussion irrelevant strike me yet again as dealing 
here in advanced utopianism of the rankest sort.
     I conclude with a quote from a book by a 
notorious petit bourgeois pair of scholars who after 
discussing and dismissing the Hayek-Friedman arguments 
about democracy and socialism state:
     "Thus every generalization seems subject to 
exceptions rendering it almost unusable.  But, 
although liberal democracies have adopted the command 
mode of allocative decisionmaking on a temporary basis 
during wartime, none has done so on a permanent basis 
during peacetime. Here is a more definitive 
hypothesis: Permanent command control of an economy 
implies unequivocal loss of personal freedom because 
none can be allowed to challenge the system of such 
control.  Thus it is permanent command that is 
incompatible with liberal democracy, not economic 
socialism."
Barkley Rosser

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
rosserjb-AT-jmu.edu




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