Re: [OPE] the market and a classless society

GERALD LEVY wrote:
>
> Any way that working people decide to. Economic calculation under
> socialism is often (miss-)conceived as an attempt to find an optimal
> allocation of resources.

It is not a matter about finding an optimal allocation but how to
prevent squandering of society's resources in order to meet individual
demands and collective needs. For that you need some mechanism of
economic computation. The value-form argument has nothing positive to
say here.

Merely saying "learning by doing" is not good enough in a real
historical situation: the Soviet system started off in this path. One
needs to theorize in order to articulate consistent policies.

Moreover the value-form argument merely offers a philosophical
perspective that counters historical research. You say: to "abolish
value" is the same as a demand to abolish capitalist social relations of
production. But labour-value was estimated in pre-capitalist economies
as Jurriaan has pointed out. You may want to abolish a mystified market
mechanism but labour-value does not necessarily imply market exchange.

I'm sorry to be brief in this post as I'm writing under a time-constraint.

//Dave Z
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Received on Tue May 5 18:23:48 2009