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Aeolius, it has been a while since I last talked to you about the subject so I thought I'd ask you some questions about your position on planned economies. I'm just going to post a list of all the objections to planned economies I can recall that I've come across and if you could respond to any of them you find questionable I'd really appreciate it. I've been studying a lot about the history of 20th century economics, but I'm not very well connected to other scholars of the subject so it's hard to keep up. 1) The epistemological/information argument of Hayek (The planning bureau cannot usefully make sense of the information it gathers so as to provide equivalent or better service than a market system) 2) The commensurability argument of Mises (Planning in kind cannot succeed because of the need for a single standard of utility to calculate with) 3) The argument against excessive state power vs. labour (Workers are put at a disadvantage in negotiating with a unitary state actor) 3) The argument of the "innovation decision" (There are inherent institutional problems in a planned economy that dissuade managers from deploying new technologies - stifling the growth of applied science and consumer goods) 4) The argument that effective planning and competitive markets provide the same outcomes anyway (Both schools of thought have a background in the idea of the Walrasian Auctioneer - To whatever extent a planning system is democratized its results will be suboptimal) 5) The argument that allocational failures (and possibly the reckoning of social prestige in terms of use-values rather than exchange values) lead to a persistent culture of hoarding (e.g. The massive and strange warehouse culture of the USSR). 6) The argument that the privileging of use-values frustrates people's desire to fantasize about and fetishize consumer goods (e.g. The sterile encyclopedia-like catalogues of consumer goods in the "thing-system" of the USSR economy and the persistent failure of the system to satisfy consumers' desires - Not just bread shortages but the failures of Soviet fashion, etc.). 7) The argument that having a "one-firm" economy creates massive barriers to entry for entrepreneurs that end up being oppressive. 8) The argument that the Marxist "politicizing" of the economy creates a situation in which the impersonality of bourgeois contract-culture and the intimacy of feudal caste and custom based culture is replaced by a socialist culture of crude and direct coercion (Bosses can only get things done by yelling at subordinates since their relations are not ideologically faciliated). 9) The argument that the ending of people's existence as "free labour" and the restriction of their career options by the state puts an end to the gains won in the creation of bourgeois "free individuality." 10) The related argument that a planned economy actually creates a new caste society similar to that of the Inca or of some ancient Mesopotamian cultures, and presents no actual possiblities for the realization of communism. 11) The argument that a planned economy is really only suitable for situations of total war, and not for peacetime economies. 12) The argument that a planned economy will necessarily be destructive of the environment because of its clumsy and massive acquisition of resources, and the rigidity of a "taut" economy that requires all parts to be working together continuously. 13) The argument that a planned economy will necessarily become more and more ossified because of the inherent difficulties of replacing equipment in such a closely synchronized production system. Well, I am sure there are others, but those are the ones I could recall off the top of my head. I go back and forth in my head about the desirability of a planned economy (In principle - I don't think it could realisticially be achieved in a short time span by any elected government in the near future, no matter how radical it was) but I'd be interested to hear what you thought about some of this stuff. MaterialConceptual fucked around with this message at 08:19 on Nov 8, 2014 |
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Nov 8, 2014 08:17
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Hey thanks for the effort post, I will read this tomorrow and get back to you. I'll try to track down some of the sources I was thinking of too. Obviously some of these arguments are of dubious value but I thought I'd just post all the ones I'd come across.
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Nov 9, 2014 14:16
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Aeolius posted:Yeah, sup duder? I still peep your blog every now and again btw. Thanks for the read! I've been working on the promised blog post about Zizek's theory of communism but it has been very difficult to write. I think I agree with his critics who argue that his thought is not actually dialectical but rather reflective of his basic principle of negativity. In this sense he is not as Hegelian as he says. This is the reason he has no interest in any positive conceptions of socialism like the ones we're discussing here. He would just argue that they are falling into the trap of a reified view of historical development. Anyhow I'll just respond to those points I have something to say about. 1) I tend to agree with Boner Slam on the point that central planning comes up against the problem of enterprises withholding information. Cockshott and Cottrell don't seem to have any good arguments against this point other than to argue for firm redundancy in order to create competition that will allow for the construction of a baseline against which to measure firm performance. At the same time it is usually argued that planners are basically overwhelmed with information (I'm thinking here of Nove's An Economic History of the USSR and Fernando Flores' arguments against planning based on his experiences in the Chilean Revolution) and have little idea how to discern what the important information is and why they should act in one way or another based on it. 2) I think that commensurability in terms of energy inputs is another possible common measure that could be used instead of labour time. Cockshott has admitted this point, but he argues that labour time is preferable for political reasons. As for Mises' argument, I was thinking of O'Neill's defense of Neurath's in kind planning when I brought that up. Of course if we accept the need for a common unit of account the argument against Mises that starts with Lange and ends with Cockshott and Cottrell is a reasonable response. 3) I'm not so sure I agree with this point. Have you ever read The Myth of Mondragon? There are reasons why it is difficult to mobilize against a single figurehead - namely the same sort of reasons it's hard to mobilize against contemporary global capitalism - the workers are confronted with the question "Well how else would you run things?" In some ways I see Mondragon as something like what the USSR was supposed to be (Of course it has reactionary roots and its ideology is premised on nationalism but in terms of its general structure it seems like what the Soviets were originally aiming at) however it is still difficult to discern whether the loss of workers' control is due to some inevitable tension between management and labour or if it is the result of the exogenous pressures from the integration of Spain into the system of global capitalism (Integration into the EU is usually cited). 3 [other]) I will take a look at that article. The points I brought up here and in 12) and 13) basically come from Manuel Castells' End of Millennium (He did interviews with former researchers from Akademgorodok and looked at secondary sources), Berliner's The Innovation Decision in Soviet Industry, and this blog post. 4) The main arguments against democracy for economic reasons come from neo-classical socialist economists who were working for the RAND Corporation and wanted to show that the American economy could be competitive with their image of the USSR's centrally planned economy (see Mirowski's Machine Dreams). This later contributed to social choice theory. I don't really have anything to add to the discussion since I'm not a neoclassical economist, just a humanities scholar with economic interests! 5) On this point 6) and 10) I'm drawing on this article which I highly recommend reading. Even if some of its conclusions are highly questionable it is some really fascinating historical research about the Soviet economy, its institutions, and its ideology. 8) I think I found this argument in Nove's An Economic History of the USSR. It has much less to do with how workers continue to exist as consumers and more to do with how planning orders are carried out from the top down in society. Many people also make this argument to explain why Chinese culture from the PRC is so much more brash and abrasive than culture from outside the PRC (e.g. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) and why service at restaurants in former communist countries is so notoriously bad. It also follows Badiou's arguments against ritual (Although he of course argues against ritual from a Maoist perspective). 9) I'll just mention in passing that the issue of social interdependence is already at the heart of Hegel's social philosophy, and one which he was never able to resolve within a bourgeois framework. 12) I guess the real question here is whether the gigantism characteristic of Soviet planning is really endemic to planning as such or whether it was a peculiarity of Soviet culture. 13) I'd suggest reading the Castells' chapter mentioned above on this. I sent Cockshott a quotation from it asking him about this problem but he never gave me an answer.
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Nov 10, 2014 10:08
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You should update more.
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JeffersonClay posted:As a teacher employed by the state, I think Marx's definition of value is complete bullshit. More to the point, I don't think there's a single Marxist in this thread. I think there might be some socialists confused about what Marx actually advocated. Any of y'all want to get on the "all state employees are parasites" train? It's amazing how closely Marx resembles Ayn Rand when you squint your eyes. I realize that's a pretty unfair critisism-- Ayn Rand thought soldiers and police were not parasites. The other thing to note is that Marx is studying Capitalism "from within" - he is developing his categories of analysis from a study of conventional political economy and the writings of members of the capitalist class. The way he describes state employees here is the way capital sees them (you've gotta have them around but they're ultimately just a drag on profitability). Of course I've seen a lot of people take offense to Marx's categories because he's too honest in places like this about how capitalism works. For that reason Richard Wolff and others tried to replace the terms "productive" and "unproductive" labour with "core" and "extended" working class, but I don't think it really works. These are precisely the kind of points Marx brings up that don't sit easily with meliorist social democracy and cause trade unions and social democratic parties to gravitate far more towards Keynesianism than towards Marxism. EDIT: For the record, most of the work I do would also be classified as "unproductive" under this definition. MaterialConceptual fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Nov 11, 2014 |
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Nov 11, 2014 05:58
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Aeolius, I'm about half way through that Bell article you posted, and aside from its rather appalling gloss on Stalin's relationship to the Soviet peasantry, it does substantially address a lot of the arguments brought up in Berliner and Castells regarding the "innovation decision." The article throws a rather different light on the cybernetic reformers of the Khrushchev era that Cockshott valourizes. It could be argued that (if implemented) their ideas would have only accelerated the worsening of the problems that Bell identifies. This argument could be made not only for technical reasons, but for philosophical ones as well. If you read Gerovitch's From Newspeak to Cyberspeak you'll see that the cyberneticians were most strongly attracted to the idea of computerized cybernetics because they associated it with the objectivity of mathematics, which they saw as a remedy to the highly arbitrary "newspeak culture" characteristic of the Stalin period. In some sense they wanted to reassert something like the law of value in order to stabilize Soviet society. Of course not all cybernetic systems would be incompatible with planning as Bell imagines it, but the identity he draws between subjective decision making and socialism would suggest that the system would have a much less "automatic" character than the one cyberneticians envisioned. MaterialConceptual fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Nov 11, 2014 |
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Nov 11, 2014 07:40
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Best Friends posted:Yes and they relate to real-world observation and data-driven analysis of history, and are subject to continuous modification if real-world observation indicates they are inadequate. The criticism being leveled here is not that Marxism has jargon, rather it is that that jargon is inapplicable to anything resembling reality. The defenses of Marxism here seem to be all about the internal consistency of Marx, ignoring criticisms of the external applicability of Marxism. Perhaps you missed the long list of criticisms of central planning (mostly from non-Marxists!) I posted in here in the spirit of asking "Is Marxism Dead?" Note that I am a Marxist. On that note I wanted to add to my previous comment about Bell's defense of central planning. Let's say that we accept his argument for why the Soviet planned economy stagnated (I don't think it's totally unreasonable given what I've read of the relevant literature). We would then be tied to an economic position that gets most of its validation from actually having been implemented...by Stalin and friends in one of the most reviled periods of human history. At least Cockshott and Cottrell can point to the roots of their argument in the Khrushchev reformist era, which most historians agree was not the worst time ever, but it seems that a defense of Stalin's economic arguments will inevitably have to involve a defense of Stalin to some degree, which really is a non-starter. Even if we were to equivocate by pointing out the horrors carried on the American side in the name of "modernization" it would never get anywhere. So the question is, if Marxism isn't dead, where could it go when facing problems like this? Isn't a huge problem Marxists face just the lack of a salvageable history?
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Nov 12, 2014 08:53
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Aeolius posted:I dunno if it's unsalvageable per se. It's not a subject that many are willing to discard their priors on, certainly. But a lot of highly detailed scholarship has come from the opening of the Soviet archives (from non-left historians, even), casting new light on most issues. E.g., Davies, Wheatcroft, and Tauger have made tight cases that the famine of the early 30's was not at all some deliberate Holodomor — a charge that even anti-communists like Ellman admit still lacks a smoking gun and, as Tottle shows, actually originated as Nazi propaganda. J Arch Getty (yet another lib) et al. have been demystifying the purges and penal system. "Everybody's favorite Grover" Furr has been publishing exculpatory critical historiographies taking apart standbys like Khrushchev's secret speech, etc. Biographies — such as Kotkin's mammoth trilogy, part I of which just came out last week — are showcasing ever more nuance and historical contingency than the bog standard "Hitlerian sociopath" account. It's actually possible to mount a non-batshit defense of Stalin, these days, though I imagine few still would. However, any such undertaking that then tries to excuse executions, any sort of forced labor arrangement, etc., would promptly and justifiably lose its credibility. Well I think the issue is that Stalin is the most prominent figure in Bell's historical account, and he refers explicitly to Stalin's writings in order to argue his point. It is true that we could rely on more general historical sources to argue Bell's basic point about planning (As he does when he points out the holes in Berliner's argument), and it's also true that the main point he is making does not inherently rely on an economy being in the same sort of state as the Stalin-era USSR, but it's not like we'll be able to avoid critics just throwing back "And you know who supported that? STALIN!" I agree that our historical perspective on the USSR is likely to shift considerably in the near future because of new research, but I'm not sure it will move that far beyond Nove's position that what Stalin did was basically to periodically starve the peasantry in order to pay for industrializing the country (With the added intention of weakening a class he did not trust and wanted to see converted into a class of workers). This of course was a feature of modernization theory inspired development programs as well, and some like Nils Gilman in Mandarins of the Future have tried to think a little bit more expansively about this era in light of the failures of neoliberalism, so maybe it is just a matter of recalling that the historical consensus shifts often and might do so again.
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Nov 12, 2014 13:07
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Friendly Tumour posted:And yet in the middle of all this very interesting economic theory (no joke) and moral denunciations of the capitalistic classes, I've yet to see how precisely Marxism is going to to be relevant in the 21st century. If you agree with the Hegelian/Marxian philosophy of history in which historical progress is driven by the sublation of contradictions, Marxism remains relevant because the contradictions of the world that capital built continue to persist. If you agree with the Neo-Kantian/liberal view that political wisdom consists of accepting the antinomic character of modern society, not forcing any one vision of the good on to it, and figuring out clever ways of working around the problem, Marxism remains just as much of a vicious aberration as it always has been. If you somehow can argue away the notion of progress altogether and believe in a cyclical view of history Marxism is a foolish fantasy based upon a very narrow historical perspective that is destined to disappear along with the prosperous age we live in today. Liberals are never going to have satisfactory answers to Marxist criticisms because Marxism views at least one of the core tenants of their philosophy to be a philosophical error and obstacle to progress. In other words, liberals are committed to maintaining the material conditions for Marxist critique to have some purchase. It seem reasonable to say that things couldn't possibly have gone any worse for Marxists in the 20th century, so the fact that Marxism remains the ideology of a vocal and critical minority suggests that there is quite simply nothing liberals could do to truly kill Marxism other than to renounce their fundamental beliefs and join the Marxist cause. This is entailed in the stubborn nature of the dialectical form of historical thought. So if we don't like the argument that Marxism is a "specter" these days, we could at least say it remains on liberal-provided life support. As for whether or not it will ever again become a truly going concern, I have no idea. History is highly unpredictable. These philosophical positions don't have eternal metaphysical bases for support, their rise and fall is determined by events.
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Nov 13, 2014 06:55
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Boner Slam posted:Well without the logistics guy, there is no material arriving at the factory. Surely he is essential to the actual production of the good. To the selling too, but that maybe another guy. Check out Chapter 1, Section IV of Capital: Volume II for Marx on logistics/transportation/etc. Marx posted:In the general formula the product P is regarded as a material thing different from the elements of the productive capital, as an object existing apart from the process of production and having a use-form different from that of the elements of production. This is always the case when the result of the productive process assumes the form of a thing, even when a part of the product re-enters the resumed production as one of its elements. Grain for instance serves as seed for its own production, but the product consists only of grain and hence has a shape different from those of related elements such as labour-power, implements, fertiliser. But there are certain independent branches of industry in which the product of the productive process is not a new material product, is not a commodity. Among these only the communications industry, whether engaged in transportation proper, of goods and passengers, or in the mere transmission of communications, letters, telegrams, etc., is economically important...
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Nov 15, 2014 03:37
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Aeolius posted:This is probably a good starting point. It's far from a complete model of the economy, but it's an explicitly non-equilibrium TSS Marxist foundation, illustrative of a number of the source material's central claims. Thanks for posting this, it's probably the only econ paper I've ever read I actually could understand since I've read Capital and Kliman's stuff...mainstream economics is just moonspeak to me.
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Nov 15, 2014 15:12
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Obdicut posted:You are entirely and absolutely right that this strongly supported private property, but it was private property as opposed to aristocratic property, not real social property. That's a somewhat questionable assertion considering that liberal thinkers also generally (Though I admit not exclusively!) supported dispossessing commoners of the commons in the name of "increased productivity," supported by fabricated claims that the lazy peasants weren't doing anything with the land and were just letting it go to waste. One thing that facilitated that dispossession was that the commoners often only had de facto control of common land and the de jure control continued to be a part of the aristocratic property system. This allowed the ruling class to reestablish control over commons that had fallen out of their control over long years of struggle (on a capitalist basis). There has been some great research on changes in the commons after the 17th century, but I can't remember any of the sources I've read since it has been a long time... icantfindaname posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality Actually this is not the "essential" Marxist critique, it is arguably the more tangential one that Marxists happen to agree with. But of course you would bring it up since it's accepted in mainstream economics and this fact supports your earlier claim that Marxists criticisms have long been superceded by mainstream economic thought (Leaving Marxists as a lunatic fringe of obscurantist and outdated cranks who work themselves into fits over the interpretation of musty old tomes). In the first place, market socialists would argue that it is a property of markets that is considerably aggravated by the capitalist system. That is because of...the essential Marxist critique! Which is that the expanded reproduction of capital implies a drive towards infinite expansion (Technically this was not Marx's original idea, but he developed it much further than Sismondi): "Marx, [i posted:Capital Volume I[/i], 'The General Formula for Capital'"] Ecologically interested Marxists then point out that the capacity of ecosystems to support economic development is limited, whereas the drive of capital is inherently limitless. If you try to curtail its drive to infinity it will start to run into crippling contradictions that will cause the system to break down. This is where these Marxists will argue that only a socialist economy can proceed in a deliberately limited way through conscious planning, to which market socialists add that infinite expansion is not a property of markets, but of capitalism, and therefore that market socialism is also consistent with this goal. The most famous Marxist who is writing on this topic is John Bellamy Foster. You can read his work in the Monthly Review or check out his books.
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Nov 20, 2014 01:11
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icantfindaname posted:So what is the Marxist "solution" to that? You're basically saying economic growth would go on forever. Well, yeah. Duh. Would you just stop increasing production and living standards? Even if that problem were somehow less bad under socialism, it's inherent to growth and production in itself, not capitalism. The Marxist argument is that at least with socialism we get to make a choice as to how much to grow or to not grow without the alien dictates of capitalist reproduction severely constraining our capacity to decide. All the other human problems are still obviously there to deal with. My personal preference would be to limit consumption for a generation and reallocate resources towards building out fusion power and space-based manufacturing technologies so that we could displace environmental problems into space (Similar to how, for example, Japanese environmental problems were "solved" by offloading them to China and Southeast Asia), but that is just my own idiosyncratic preference and it has nothing to do with Marxism. Any real plan for action would have to be fought out politically, it would just be fought out without the interference of capitalist imperatives.
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Nov 20, 2014 02:07
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Obdicut, as I said, it has been a long time since I read up on this topic. The texts I read were assigned course readings which I may or may not have lying around anymore so I will take a look through my files and see if I can find some sources for you.icantfindaname posted:So, basically you're declaring that socialism would fix all political problems. OK. I doubt it, considering the record of Really Existing Socialism, but I guess that's a valid position Obviously you are trolling.
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Nov 20, 2014 02:55
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Obdicut posted:If you can't even name anyone off the top of your head, how on earth are you sure that liberal thinkers generally thought that way? Alright so on the topic of the condition of the European peasantry, my main reference was Robert S. Duplessis' Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. I'll give you some quotes to establish the point: Here he is refering to the feudal system in the mid-15th century period following the Black Death. quote:Land was held by peasant families in individual 'tenements,' tenures or holdings subject to specific conditions although usually exploited in accordance with collective regulations enforced by communal institutions. Effective possession of most land resided, then, in the hands of the peasantry, which enjoyed hereditary usufruct so long as it fulfilled the obligations imposed by lords. The confusion of ownership and occupancy, not to mention disagreements over the nature and level of appropriate lordly charges, ensured continuous conflict over the division of the surplus generated by the peasantry. At the same time, extensive customary and written rights and organized village communities, together with control of the land and agricultural production, not only allowed peasants a good deal of autonomy in their daily lives but gave them powerful weapons for negotiating with or even defying seignorial demands (15). So yes the land was owned by the nobility, but their control of it varied considerably. quote:Tenants likewise had claims to a share of hay from common meadows, took building materials, fuel, nuts, and game from woodlands - where their pigs, the most common source of meat, also foraged - and fished in the manor's waterways. Lords typically claimed ownership of forests, fishponds, and streams and demanded recompense for their use, but peasants evaded payment whenever possible. So from the lords' perspective poaching was pervasive, although the peasants viewed it differently (17). quote:Initially, perhaps, landlords had enforced the regulations that mandated the sharing of common resources. But by the later Middle Ages, if not earlier, village communities, embodied in periodic assemblies of heads of households, discharged this and other important administrative duties such as levying taxes, managing the parish church's land, and, in frontier and other thinly populated areas, dividing and leasing vacant land to settlers. These functions conferred a good deal of power on village communities, enabling them to play a vital role in the defense of peasant interests against landlords, tax collectors, and other officials (19). Now we are talking about the early 16th century... quote:Seeking to assure that the majority of tenants would continue to enjoy access to the range of collective resources required for subsistence, villages often bitterly opposed landlord and yeoman attempts to enclose land, amalgamate strips, convert arable to pasture, drain marshes, clear wastes and forests (23). Now for some examples... quote:Although subject to moderately strong lordship, peasants in [Belgium and northern France] enjoyed both long leases and weak collective regulations that left nearly complete control over agriculture in their hands (26). quote:A nearly independent peasantry and weak lordship shaped the commercial agriculture that was beginning to emerge in...Holland, Utrecht, and Friesland...From the beginning, therefore, peasants enjoyed nearly complete ownership of their holdings, which they freely bought, sold, leased, and mortgaged. By the late fifteenth century, they owned as much as 50 percent of Holland's land, more than any other social group; the nobility had no more than a tenth. Because, moreover, nearly all noble holdings were widely scattered and did not include strategic land such as commons and forests, lords lacked an adequate material base for dominating the peasantry...(27) Overall the picture he paints is of a nobility suffering economically, while the peasantry is generally quite independent and prospering economically. The examples in northern France and the Low Countries are definitely unusual, but the general point is that the peasantry had considerable control over the land. On the other hand, he agrees that communal control, where it was strong, often prevented innovation. I have to go now but I will add more sources later.
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Nov 20, 2014 03:56
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Obdicut posted:Words Alright you're clearly more knowledgeable about the subject than me, I concede the point.
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Nov 20, 2014 05:48
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Regarding the question of whether or not Marxism is dead, what does the thread think of the career trajectory of John Roemer and the state of market socialism? The abstract to Roemer's recent "Thoughts on Arrangements of Property Rights in Productive Assets" reads:quote:Abstract: State ownership, worker ownership, and household ownership are the three main forms in which productive assets (firms) can be held. I argue that worker ownership is not wise in economies with high capital-labor ratios, for it forces the worker to concentrate all her assets in one firm. I review the coupon economy that I proposed in 1994, and express reservations that it could work: greedy people would be able to circumvent its purpose of preventing the concentration of corporate wealth. Although extremely high corporate salaries are the norm today, I argue these are competitive and market determined, a consequence of the gargantuan size of firms. It would, however, be possible to tax such salaries at high rates, because the labor—supply response would be small. The social-democratic model remains the best one, to date, for producing a relatively egalitarian outcome, and it relies on solidarity, redistribution, and private ownership of firms. Whether a solidaristic social ethos can develop without a conflagration, such as the second world war, which not only united populations in the war effort, but also wiped out substantial middle-class wealth in Europe—thus engendering the post-war movement towards social insurance—is an open question. Which if not a rejection of socialism, is at the very least (due to its appeals to "solidaristic social ethos" and "greed" as the key determinants in reproduction of economic formations) a rejection of Marxism.
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Dec 4, 2014 07:28
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Vagon posted:If it's alright to ask a slightly different question, would a (truly) socialist economic policy even be possible in the modern US without an absolute collapse of.. Well, the economy? It seems like deeply entrenched capitalist nations, such as the US, have the fabric of society revolving around it's particular ideology. That probably depends on what you mean by "absolute." The role of crises in Marxist theory is quite ambivalent. They are a huge focus of interest, because they obviously do provoke worker unrest and that's where a lot of the charges of "economic determinism" come from, but they're ultimately meaningless to the political-economic project (as opposed to the economic analysis of capitalism and its crises) if they do not encourage the organization of workers to establish socialism. Marx argues in the Manifesto that: quote:The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. But I really doubt that Marx ever thought that capitalism would actually end in the "common ruin of the contending classes" - which is what an "absolute" collapse of the economy would imply. Personally I think that an huge economic collapse would just lead to warlordism and an economy based on a combination of small-scale capitalism with slavery. Having lived capitalist economic practices for centuries, I highly doubt that survivors of a collapse would simply abandon them altogether. Slavery was the midwife of large-scale capitalist production, and I don't see why it wouldn't perform a similar role in the event of a massive destruction of capital that could make it tremendously profitable again. I suppose even that wouldn't constitute an "absolute" collapse of the economy though.
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Dec 6, 2014 14:44
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ronya posted:I'm again bemused by this sudden devotion to a distinctly non-Marxist proto-Keynesian view of the role of consumption/effective demand... Marxists, like Austrians, tend to maintain that the demand-side growth is intrinsically unsustainable and is supported only by illusory wealth/debt. If it's actually sustainable (under some different set of social-democratic capitalist policies, say) then there's no capitalist crisis; this is one reason why Marxists tend to emphasize neocolonialist transfers exploitation and a theoretical impossibility of periphery countries to become core countries, rather than on such demand-side explanations. Doesn't the Monthly Review school basically subscribe to underconsumptionism? I know they are widely considered to be Keynesian heretics, but their form of Marxism remains very popular precisely because it can get along with social democratic views to a point...
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Dec 11, 2014 08:30
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ronya posted:Looking it up, Sweezy's own theory seems extremely Austrian, right down to the erroneous intertemporal rate of consumption disguising unsustainable investment. This is, I suppose, unsurprising given the old Keynesian attitude toward price adjustment. Another argument against underconsuptionism I've heard is that capital can provide its own demand through the purchase of means of production among capitalist firms. Harvey's response to the argument Krugman is making here has always been "well, eventually they'll run out of stuff to buy."
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Dec 11, 2014 12:42
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On a side note I was wondering if anyone in the thread has read Marx's Theory of Price and its Modern Rivals by Howard Nicholas? I haven't seen it discussed much amongst the Marxist economics blogs but I found it to be a pretty interesting read. If anyone has read it, do you think that Marx's objective value theory has anything to contribute to a theory of socialist economics, or do you think that many socialist economists were correct to base their theories on [neoclassical] subjective value theory, or do you think that value theories like these have nothing useful to say about how a socialist economy might be organized?
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Feb 9, 2015 12:59
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Speaking of value theories, what do you all make of "Thermoeconomics?" They seem to use an "entropy theory of value" based on information theory and thermodynamics, which at least one of their advocates claims transcends the subjective/objective value distinction (Only if we accept the premises of a psychological hedonism which sees pleasure as stimulated by the acquisition of low entropy). I am hesitant to mark them off as a completely separate school of thought because as Mirowski has shown in More Heat Than Light and Machine Dreams thermodynamics and information theory have been absolutely critical to the development of economic thought since the 19th century anyhow, but they seem to have kind of taken off along with the econophysics movement since the 1980s.
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Feb 17, 2015 04:03
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