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Abstract
Marx posits a vision of socialism in which mass-produced items are priced via computation of embodied labour-time with remuneration such that one hour of actual labour is exchanged for items produced in one hour. But implementing Marx’s scheme today would incentivize increased individual labour time and drive a tendency to ecologically harmful “growth.” As pushing beyond capitalism remains indispensable, we must assess newer models of socialist planning and distribution providing alternatives to capitalism and market socialism.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Barry Finger for his invaluable assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See Jay, The Dialectical Imagination.
2 See, for example, Micklethwait and Wooldridge, A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization; Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life.
3 Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” 224.
4 Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism, 20–1.
5 Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism, 20–1.
6 Roberts, “The Informal Empire, Finance and the Mono Cause of the Anglo-Saxons.”
7 Shaikh, “The First Great Depression of the 21st Century,” 44.
8 Moseley, “The U.S. Economic Crisis: Fundamental Problems and Possible Solutions,” 60–1.
9 Carchedi, “Zombie Capitalism and the Origin of Crises.”
10 Roberts, The Long Depression, 270.
11 In this essay, I use “socialism” as a synonym for “communism,” that is, the classless society. I deliberately ignore the idea of socialism as the first stage of communism, which began not with Marx or Engels but with the Second International and was carried into the Third (and Fourth) International.
12 The end of the gold standard in the 1970s did not alter this fact. Although Marx assumed in Capital that money must be linked to a particular commodity, “the existence of such a commodity is in no way a necessary consequence of his analysis of the commodity and money…that the general equivalent must be a specific commodity was not proven by Marx, merely assumed…the existence of a money commodity is merely a historically transitional state of affairs.” Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, 70.
13 Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, 42.
14 Hudis, 197.
15 Marx, Capital: Volume II, 434.
16 Kautsky, The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program).
17 Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed.
18 Harman, “The Myth of Market Socialism.”
19 Schweickart, After Capitalism, 49.
20 Westra, “Economic Life beyond Capital,” 358–9.
21 Buick and Lawrence, “How Socialism Can Organise Production Without Money.”
22 Panayotakis, Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy, 10.
23 Löwy, “Ecosocialism and Democratic Planning,” 301.
24 The initial presentation of their model of socialist economy appears in Cockshott and Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism.
25 Adaman and Devine, “On the Economic Theory of Socialism,” 73.
26 Cockshott and Cottrell, 69–70, 78–82; Macnair, “Transition and Abundance.”
27 Macnair, “Debate: Inspiring View of Future Society.”
28 “Thus, while Cockshott and Cottrell’s model effectively disposes of the argument that direct calculation is practically impossible, on which the plausibility of [Alec] Nove’s advocacy of market socialism as the only ‘feasible’ socialism primarily rests, it…nowhere addresses the issues of discovery and entrepreneurship… [Cockshott and Cottrell] operate within the neoclassical epistemological paradigm in which knowledge is assumed to be objectively given and readily codified and transmitted.” Adaman and Devine: 73, 75.
29 Trotsky, op. cit. One might argue further that modern fiat money is a state creation, and its existence will continue — with different purposes, aims, and functions — under the public authority of first-stage socialism/communism.
30 “[P]rices in the Soviet Union were set according to the social or economic goals of the planning authorities and did not reflect costs or the pressure of supply and demand.” Samary, “Mandel’s Views on the Transition to Socialism,” 164.
31 Samary, “Mandel’s Views on the Transition to Socialism,” 184.
32 Devine, Democracy and Economic Planning: The Political Economy of a Self-Governing Society; Devine, “Market Socialism or Participatory Planning?,” 67–89; Devine, “Participatory Planning Through Negotiated Coordination,” 72–93.
33 Devine, “Participatory Planning,” 92. Devine sees this as occurring “because of different product specifications or because of different efficiency levels, whether due to objective differences or different internal working practices.” Devine, “Participatory Planning,” 80.
34 Devine, “Participatory Planning,” 77.
35 Laibman, “Incentive Design, Iterative Planning and Local Knowledge in a Maturing Socialist Economy,” 53.
36 Laibman, 53.
37 Laibman, “The Future within the Present: Seven Theses for a Robust Twenty-First-Century Socialism,” 311.
38 Laibman, “Mature Socialism: Design, Prerequisites, Transitions,” 504.
39 Laibman, “The Participatory Economy: A Preliminary Rejoinder,” 518. In this piece Laibman critically analyzes the “participatory economics” vision of the non-Marxist socialist Robin Hahnel, arguing that the model is “torn between nether poles of information overload and talk-talk, on one side; and automatic ratio-driven non-participation that degenerates into a replica of a spontaneous market driven process, on the other.” Laibman, 515–6. He also echoes Devine’s criticism of Hahnel’s use of a version of Walsrasian tâtonnement.
40 “Recall Marx’s observation that markets existed in the ‘interstices’ of the ancient world as adjuncts to the core modes of economic life. The genesis of the capitalist mode of production was the subsumption of material life in human communities by market operations. What has been dubbed the small-m market…as it existed in antiquity, may be co-opted benignly as one component of a socialist future.” Westra, 359.
41 Laibman, “The Future within the Present,” 313.
42 Laibman, “The Future within the Present,” 313.
43 Laibman, “The Future within the Present,” 314.
44 “Owen’s ‘labour money,’ for instance, is no more ‘money’ than a theatre ticket is. Owen presupposes directly socialized labour, a form of production diametrically opposed to the production of commodities. The certificate of labour is merely evidence of the part taken by the individual in the common labour, and of his claim to a certain portion of the common product which has been set aside for consumption.” Marx, Capital: Volume I, 188–9.
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Jason Schulman
Jason Schulman teaches in the Department of Political Science at Lehman College, The City University of New York in New York City, New York, USA.