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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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