[OPE] Advice to a postgrad

alejandro_agafonow@yahoo.es

Well, this is an interesting consideration. “The translation of foreign literature”.

Despite my doubts about current Venezuela and Cuba, the Spanish editorial market is the first concerning translations and the second, after the English, concerning the volume of commercialization.

The reason is the large number of the Spanish speaking people.

A. Agafonow

----- Mensaje original ----
De: Martin Kragh <Martin.Kragh@hhs.se>
Para: Outline on Political Economy mailing list <ope@lists.csuchico.edu>
Enviado: domingo, 29 de junio, 2008 23:24:21
Asunto: SV: SV: [OPE] Advice to a postgrad

Yes they have very pluralist universities, what they have had problems with is funding, which has hurt all the sciences, including history and economics. So no, the universities are not that “well supplied”, for example, many libraries can not afford wide selections of foreign and domestic literature (however, this is a problem in Sweden as well), and the scholarly Russian literature runs in infinite small printings sometimes due to this restraint (300-600 copies). Fortunately, they are good at utilizing the internet.   

A good sign of pluralism is the literature being translated and taught, ranging from Böhm-Bahwerk and Knut Wicksell to Oskar Lange, Blaug, Schumpeter and Pierro Straffa. In other fields I’ve seen translations of Foucault, Deleuze and Hardt-Negri for example. I’ve heard they have problems with some translations being of poor quality sometimes, but the pluralism and openness is definitely there, contrary to many “popular” and journalistic opinions.  

Martin

But I wonder if Russia has well supplied universities and pluralist environments.

A. Agafonow

----- Mensaje original ----
De: Martin Kragh <Martin.Kragh@hhs.se>
Para: wrighti@acm.org; Outline on Political Economy mailing list <ope@lists.csuchico.edu>
Enviado: domingo, 29 de junio, 2008 20:03:01
Asunto: SV: [OPE] Advice to a postgrad

The best place to study the history of socialism and its political economy today has to be Moscow, but it requires at least basic understanding of Russian. However, as I've mentioned in earlier posts, there are large collections on the history of the European labour movements at for example the RGASPI archive. These documents exist in their various original languages, and include documentation from Scandinavia to the Europan continent in the 18-19th century. It was, if I remember correctly, the late D. Ryazanov who made these collections for the Marx-Engels archive, before it became politicized by the Stalinists. 

For those who attempt to learn more than basic Russian there are many completely unexplored documents at the open state archives, for example the Gosplan collection which is huge. I've gone through some of it but leave aside much because of my time limitations. However, one could now continue the classic works by Moshe Lewin and Alec Nove to analyze the "economists' debate" of the 1960s, for example, in much greater detail. For example, what is the role of state planning? Scarcity? How do you measure labour performance? Does the law of value exist in a non-market economy? I've found many such documents dealing with these issues in a highly sophisticated manner, but have not analyzed them in detail because it doesn't relate to my work as of now. And this is just to mention one of the few themes that remain for historians to explore... 

Martin

-----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
Från: ope-bounces@lists.csuchico.edu [mailto:ope-bounces@lists.csuchico.edu] För Ian Wright
Skickat: den 29 juni 2008 18:52
Till: Outline on Political Economy mailing list
Ämne: Re: [OPE] Advice to a postgrad (Thomas More Relies to market socialism)

Dogan

In Marx and Engels' time the word "dictatorship" referred to a temporary
emergency institution during transitional crisis, not the idea of a
continuing dictatorship. The meaning of the term "dictatorship of the
proletariat" was abused to justify the wresting of power from the
working class by the Bolsheviks. In all Marx and Engels' voluminous
writings the term "dictatorship" is linked to the working class a total
of only 16 times. Many of these instances were used when Marx and
Engels' were working in a united front with the Blanquists, and
functioned as a compromise slogan. Others instances were employed to
differentiate and distance Marx and Engels' ideas from the Blanquist
conspiratorial approach. Other instances were employed to distinguish
themselves from the anarchist idea of immediate dissolution of the
state. The "dictatorship of the proleteriat" is very far from the
"very essence of Marx's teaching" as Lenin would have it, and it
emphatically did not mean continuing rule by a totalitarian one-party
state.

On this issue, Richard Hunt's "The political ideas of Marx and Engels",
volumes 1 and 2 (1974), is a tour-de-force. He recovers Marx the radical
democrat from the totalitarian tradition.

I think the litmus test of a socialist economy is democratic control,
including such things as control in the workplace, and control over the
allocation of surplus-labour to either new production or a reduction in
the length of the working day. In a one-party state there is no
democratic control of this kind. The internal constitution of the single
party becomes the de facto constitution of the whole social organism.
You at least need multiple competing parties.

> So this is the characterisation of a capitalist society and challange to
> your illusionary concept of socilism: "when everyone's entitled to get
> as much for himself as he can, all available property, however much
> there is of it, is bound to fall into the hands of a small minority,
> which means that everyone else is poor." How are you going to face this
> challange. 

Markets of large numbers of people by definition have weak micro-level
coordination. This means they tend to enter states of statistical
equilibrium which have maximum entropy subject to any macro-level
constraints. So More is quite right: wealth gets scrambled and moves
toward an inegalitarian distribution, and this in many ways can be
considered a "natural necessity".

But the distribution of wealth that we see in capitalism is of a
distinctive kind. There's a long power-law tail due to capitalist
profit-income. If a society had different rules that controlled the
distribution of income -- in other words different macro-level
constraints -- you would get much more egalitarian distributions of
wealth even with markets.

So market socialism does not necessarily entail capitalist inequality.

To get a perfectly equal distribution of wealth the society would need
to formulate and enforce rules that tightly constrain the economic
activities that people can engage in; in other words, you'd need a
powerful mechanism to prevent the increase of entropy. In the past,
so-called Marxist states have employed a large bureaucracy to achieve
this aim.

I welcome Alejandro's perspective on these issues. And the history of
the working class movement, including its theory and practice, is not
exhausted by a certain kind of interpretation of Marx. The tradition is
richer and more contested than that.

-Ian.
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