From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Mon Jul 26 2004 - 10:40:44 EDT
Jurriaan wrote The dispute among real Marxists has never been about whether there should be a market or no market, but (1) where markets are effective and efficient, and where they are not, or violate social priorities, (2) how these markets should function, and (3) to what extent it is possible to replace markets by superior forms of resource allocation, which is the overall aim. That is how Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin approached it as well. The goal is to abolish a situation where production of output is mainly conditional on accumulation of private capital, rather than conditional on social priorities agreed to by the majority of society. But this does not mean that a private sector would not continue to exist to some extent, in areas where that is useful and productive, for example, entrepreneurship. In large part, the large corporations are internally already functioning as planned economies, and for basic consumer goods the demand is known, predictable and stable, and is supplied by just a few corporations. In that sense, socialisation is objectively already occurring. ----------------------------------- Paul C Well presumably by Juriaans definition I am not a real Marxist as I contend that Marx and Engels considered the abolition of the market and the abolition of money to be one of the main goals of the communist movement. It is clear enough that markets are compatible with socialism, as we have observed socialist societies in which markets exist. The doctrinal point concerns communism. Marx foresaw the abolition of money in 'the first stage of communist society', before it had even shaken off the notion of bourgeois right. It is clear that Soviet authors like Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Stalin all saw some form of continuation of the market as being compatible with socialism. In this they continued the doctrines of their mentor Kautsky. But the effect of this was to project communism to a never-nervier land, a receding mirage of material plenty, obscuring the question of the social relations necessary for communist economic forms to arise.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 28 2004 - 00:00:01 EDT