From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Thu Jul 29 2004 - 15:58:33 EDT
Short comment: Stalin, at least during the industrialization debate, when he was aligned with Bukharin in the Right Opposition, also accepted the proposition that the continuation of the market was compatible with 'socialism' or what was then referred to as the transitional period. A relevant issue under debate at the time was whether the market in Soviet society would be a short-term concession as it was conceived by Lenin as part of the NEP (he, along with most of the Bolshevik leadership viewed the NEP and the 'return to the market' as a _temporary_ retreat from the goals of War Communism) or whether the market would be extended indefinately into the future within Soviet society as the platform of the Right Opposition, enunciated by Bukharin, seemed to suggest./ In solidartity, Jerry (arrived in Gloucester from Isle of Shoals today.) ---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: Market socialism From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@hetnet.nl> Date: Tue, July 27, 2004 6:05 am -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul wrote: 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. That's not true in the case of Stalin, who declared in the mid-1930s that socialism had been achieved, and therefore that the transition to communism had effectively begun. I think you are correct that the concept of socialism which the Russian revolutionaries had, was based on "second international Marxism" (state ownership of the means of production), but the substantive issue is that in socialist thought the relationship of planning, markets, ownership rights and democracy was not theorised adequately. The most pernicious myths are that there there exists something like "the market", although there are many different types of (possible) markets, and that there exists only one kind of socialism, although there are many different kinds of (possible) socialisms, as Marx himself knew very well (cf. Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution: Vol 4: The Critique of Other Socialisms). In his book Political Economy of Socialism, Makoto Itoh ably discusses this topic, although he more or less ignores the Western socialist literature on democracy and bureaucracy. Jurriaan
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