https://twitter.com/Mateba_6/status/1543441435437006849
China: allows markets controlled by the dotp to further productive forces and get people out of poverty whilst the majority of the worlds economy is still capitalist in order to prevent them being rolled
SDL: no, not like that! You gotta lose, too!
"Plansoctoids are mad coping contrarians whereas marketsocchads stay winning and are based"
- Deng Xiaoping
Like if you push most of these people they will end up incoherently describing something like Titoism or Dengism on paper with more co-ops but without the leninist and centralized state features that made them viable and with a parliamentary liberal democracy instead
If they realized that the only way market socialism can work as a transitionary period is through a birdcage economy (chinese term) requiring the central planning (cage) and basicaly an one party communist governing structure (cage owner) restricting ,guiding and standing above the market AND media (birds) they would be in shambles. Being able to be as hands on or hands off as they like across different aspects of the market economy but being able to intervene decisively and from a PoV not subservient to capital . Other wise you either just end up socdem or straight up fail and get completely taken over the the whims of capital and the market towards their own ends.
TLDR: Only a leninist state can chose to successfully be market socialist
Kinda hilarious that people like SDL and V*ush support Market Socialism but constantly decry the biggest self-described Market Socialist country of all, China.
socialism is when you use syllabic abbreviations, and the more of them you use, the more socialist it is
Won't lead to the reproduction of bougeoise elements of a capitalist society
time for some aimixin:
I think there should be a distinction made between "market socialism" and "socialism market economy." The former is a non-Marxian position that simply reduces socialism down to nothing more than "worker ownership over the means of production," and thus views a decentralized market of worker co-operatives as a form of socialism. The socialist market economy is instead a Marxian conception, viewing that markets are compatible with socialism as long as they remain subordinated under centralized public property.
In simpler terms, market socialism = society of worker co-ops (which is impossible to exist in a sustainable form), socialist market economy = economy dominated by public ownership and economic plans but with a subordinated non-public sector, which not only forms markets between itself but between itself and the public sector.
Anyways, I do agree with the point that the socialist market economy was a way to reduce bureaucracy. Trotskyists talk a lot about bureaucracy, but their solutions make no sense, proposing that somehow permanent revolution would fix it? Never understood that. Really, though, the cause of bureaucracy was underdevelopment.
Democracy comes from the Greek, "demos kratia," meaning "people power." If the people control production, then democracy means using production in a way to benefit people's wants and deeds. However, this inherently entails collecting information from the entire country's populace and the inputs and outputs of all enterprises, which requires an enormous amount of infrastructure, computing this information, which requires an enormous amount of computational power, and then distributing the results, which again, requires infrastructure.
This means underdevelopment inherently will lead to inefficient bureaucracy. And since democracy means doing what people want, this will, in very real terms, limit how "democratic" the country can be. The people may control production, but they will be unable to actually utilize it in a way to empower the people. They will instead find the system slow and clunky and unresponsive for their needs, become alienated from it.
I find it strange that the position of the socialist market economy is called the "revisionist" position when this is, indeed, the orthodox Marxist position. Marx and Engels argued that capitalism is founded on private labor and private appropriation, but that as it develops, it gradually replaces private labor with socialized labor, laying the foundations for socialism, i.e. the infrastructure and technology needed for central planning.
This is why Marx explicitly stated in the Manifesto that you cannot simply abolish all private property, but that it has to occur "by degree" alongside rapid development of the productive forces. Engels in The Principles of Communism spells this out even more clearly, saying that it is impossible to abolish private property in one stroke but only in proportion to the level of productive forces, as socialism is founded upon big industry, and "free competition" is the only way to bring forth big industry. Lenin also held this position, in Left-wing Communism, he says that it is not possible to abolish the petty bourgeoisie and the socialist government must learn to live with them.
Meaning, it is quite literally the orthodox Marxist position to think you have to maintain a market sector for some time. This is also why Marx thought you would still need a state, because if you still have a market sector, you still have class distinctions, and thus, in his Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, he points out that the continued existence of the bourgeoisie thus means you need a proletarian state to oppress the bourgeoisie for some time.
Now, Marxian political economy lays out a general direction of human development, but Marx never believed in an absolutely strict direction, that it was not possible to mix up historical stages under very specific conditions. Marx, for example, in latter to Vera Zasulich, argued that Russia could skip over the capitalist stage if the historical context for it allowed it.
From this point of view, I don't think it is necessarily wrong that the Soviets could have figured out a way to make their planned economy work by utilizing cybernetics. Interestingly, Che also criticized the Soviet rejection of cybernetics, and Project Cybersyn in Chile showed a lot of promise.
However, mixing up the historical process does make things a lot more difficult. High tech "big industry" would not be developing "naturally," so to speak, as predicted by Marxian political economy, but instead would have to be created deliberately from the ground-up, and it would likely need to be reformed over the entire system many times over.
While this may have indeed been possible, it was at the same time incredibly difficult, very expensive, and would require a lot of technology and training a whole generation of professionals who could handle this change in technology which had not yet existed.
It was possible, but very difficult, it was much easier just to return back to the classical, orthodox understanding of how the initial stage of socialist construction would look, going back to Marx and Engels.
The Soviet system was absolutely outdated by the 1980s, it seems weird to argue otherwise. The entire economy was still planned by hand, with methods developed decades ago, when the rise of the Computer Age was well under way. The outdated system was part of the reason they were not able to produce a wide array of consumer goods.
Blaming it purely on "sabotage", I mean, that did exist, but the system clearly needed reform either way. Either it reformed to use more advanced techniques, like the adoption of computers and cybernetics in planning, or it reformed itself to reintroduce markets, to do the necessary economic calculation on its own.
It's just the latter path was much easier. It was more than just easier, it was also more certain. It was already well accepted by all Marxists from Marx to Stalin, that markets could play a useful role in economic calculation, Stalin even praising their ability in "disciplining" the state planners in his book Economic Problems, and it was already well-accepted that this is a valid strategy for underdeveloped sectors, which Stalin had already defended the usage of in the agricultural sector.
This meant that cybernetics and computer planning was at the time, uncertain, and a newly developing field, while reforming by bringing back some markets was well accepted and understood. So it was not just easier in practice, but easier to get people on board with the policy, and so that's the direction both China and the USSR went.
Although, the USSR underwent this direction under Gorbachev, who carried it out arbitrarily, without any regards to Marxian theory. While Deng understood from a Marxian basis that "big industry," as Engels put it, is the foundations of socialism, so these reforms thus should only apply to small industry, a policy he called "grasping the big, letting go of the small." The USSR did not follow such a policy, introduced internal competition arbitrarily, and harmed its own development. Deng also used his special economic zones to experiment with what worked before expanding the policy, to avoid applying a potentially incorrect reform to the whole economy at once.
If the USSR had someone like Deng Xiaoping, they likely could have taken a Chinese path. But I also do not think it is impossible for them to have taken some sort of a cybernetics path, it was just more difficult, and more uncertain at the time.
This is my viewpoint at least.
A good post (though I'd quibble in that I think the SU's higher level of socialist development meant it was much harder to marketise and the cybernetic approach was the only viable one, if they'd started it in 1970)
Maybe I'm too generous but I've always assumed there's some though put into the whole market socialism thing and it's not as silly as it seems on surface level. Can't be bothered to read though.
It's a pretty contentious concept among the left. The fact that leftists in this post are arguing about it and will probably argue with my interpretation is proof of that.
Market Socialism (at least from my understanding as a Marxist) is a branch off or revision of Orthodox Marxism that has been historically practiced by Marxist leaders/ states; Tito's Yugoslavia is the best case example but arguably China, Vietnam and Cuba all do as well today. Some Marxists even think Lenin briefly did it with the NEP.
That being said, a lot of Marxists are very much opposed to the idea of 'markets' ever being compatible with Socialism, and any attempt to introduce markets into a Socialist system is an attempt at introducing bourgeois elements or straight up Capitalism back into society. And this is not entirely false. Yugoslavia eventually collapsed, not just because of Western pressure but also due to contradictions in their own system, and China and Vietnam do have pretty rich Capitalists that severely exploit their workers.
Anarchists are entirely opposed to it as far as I know (any Anarchists here can elaborate if needed).
I'm an anarchist who has realized a state is necessary to overthrow capitalism, so I'm not sure how much my opinion counts, but I'll try to do an analysis from an anarchist perspective. I don't think you can have a market economy without private property and we all now how Bakunin felt about private property. Additionally, as it's been mentioned previously, markets assign value, which creates hierarchical relationships, something we also really don't like. I can't imagine any anarchists favoring market socialism but I'd be open to other perspectives.
I’m an anarchist who has realized a state is necessary to overthrow capitalism
There's a lot to unpack here lol
I can’t imagine any anarchists favoring market socialism
Proudhon, De Cleyre, Lloyd Garrison, and others historically. There's also a strand in the modern-day trying to uphold this line of thinking through blogs and think-tanks, but on the ground they're pretty much eclipsed by syndicalist and insurrectionist practice.
Anarchists are entirely opposed to it as far as I know (any Anarchists here can elaborate if needed).
Not an anarchist but this mutualism/market anarchist thing is pretty en vogue on twitter, especially among the PNW scene.
Also wouldn't trade among decentralized communes essentially function as a market as there is no central authority to set price signals?
It could, but it doesn't have to. I think Graeber made this point really well in History of Everything (and less well in his other books) where he pointed out that goods have and do move around through mechanisms other than markets or planned economies.
He gives the following examples on pg. 23-24:
Dreams and Vision Quests: Pre-colonial Iroquoians would travel for days to get items they had seen in dreams, moving them from town to town over the years. In plains societies, the vision quest served a similar role.
Traveling healers: They would develop entourages of people they had cured who would divide their possessions among the troupe, allowing goods to travel across huge swaths of the American SE without markets.
Women's gambling: Gambling with shells, according to archaeologist Warren DeBoer, moved shells and other adornments halfway across the continent, again, without markets.
In Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, he argues that many "currencies" were enmeshed in social relationships that extended beyond the transactional nature of the market. Wampum, for example, was never just money (until the colonial era) and the transfer of wampum could also create kinship ties or end feuds. Even markets weren't always markets.
To move past history and into the speculative, anarchist have laid out plans for centrally planned economies which are accountable to their memberships and also partable. Parecon is one particular example. I'm not laying this out as an endorsment of parecon, but as a speculative counter-example to federated communes operating on market logic.
As a more open ended speculation, I'd like to ask: What might the Soviet economy have looked like if the Soviets had stayed democratic and if the workers had remained armed?
Famous morons: Tito, Lenin, every member of the Chinese communist party since the 80s, the Vietnamese communist party,
No, those people aren't market socialists, the theoretical framework underpinning Market Socialism splits from Leninism and most socialist tendencies at the crossroads of the calculation debate, which is ironic since it was a market socialist who accidentally/indirectly refuted his own tendency while arguing publicly with Heyak over the concept of planning itself
All those people you mention maintained a position of strict transitional-ism which market socialists reject because they glorify wage labor
I read the Deep Socialist lore like I read Star Wars/40K lore, that's how you keep it interesting
IS tanks are dreadnoughts and T-34 are Leman Russ'. Lenin is the God-Emperor and Stalin is Robute Gulliaman.
Actually I hate this now lmao
Tito was the market socialist. Limiting market socialism as a label solely to followers of Lange is pointlessly narrow and a heterodox definition of the word, that renders debating its merits pointless.
Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't, I'm not a Tito expert, if he was then he should have known better, goodness sake even Langes the father of it redeemed himself when he realized he had fallen into a rhetorical trap set by Mises
But either way I hate to break it to you the Lange model was the only "coherent" theory the marketists could muster, the Austrians were correct about one crucial aspect, parasitical capital finance is the motor that makes the market run, it's why certain market socialists like Lange, Kamikazed themselves to bring down Hayek by pointing out inventory input/output planning was already developing internal to capitalist firms and along interfirm networks and under socialism it would develop further, this was the 1930s the Austrians lost the debate and Hayek quite literally went insane and exiled himself to self-publishing
Even Austrians give the game away when they praise the likes of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Kōnosuke Matsushita, it's not a matter of whether non-market calculation is possible, it's always been about what type of calculation and for whose benefit as this gross-ass quote by a top Austrian so aptly demonstrates
Darwin, Marx, and Freud make up the trinity often cited as the "makers of the modern world." Marx would be taken out and replaced by Taylor if there were any justice... For hundreds of years there had been no increase in the ability of workers to turn out goods or to move goods... When Taylor started propounding his principles, nine out of every 10 working people did manual work, making or moving things, whether in manufacturing, farming, mining, or transportation... By 2010 it will constitute no more than one-tenth... The Productivity Revolution has become a victim of its own success. From now on what matters is the productivity of nonmanual workers. -- Peter Drucker, The Rise of the Knowledge Society Wilson Quarterly (Spring 1993) p.63-65[15]
If you have the time could you do a write up on this on c/marxism?
I would but I have toothache :sadness:
But Republic of Wal-mart had a good summary of the topic :stalin-approval:
it was a market socialist who accidentally/indirectly refuted his own tendency while arguing publicly with Heyak over the concept of planning itself
where can I read more about this?
The literature is pretty diffuse but Republic of Wal-mart had a decent section covering the topic, most biographies about Hayek and Langes also cover it
The NEP was neither market "socialism" nor was it a main economic driver of the USSR for decades. By the time of Lenin's death, he knew the NEP had run even longer than he had intended it to and wanted to see it's end with the transition to a planned economy - unlike Trotsky and his circle of ultra-Leftists who concidered any tactical retreat of economic policy heresy against their dogma or Bukharin's clique of right-opportunist capitulationists who desired to continue the NEP for decades with no regard for capitalist counter-revolutionary undermining.
Inferring Lenin was a market socialist is both historical revisionism, and reddit pol-comp brain rot.
The NEP was an intentional program to introduce markets into a socialist system in order to build the means of production of the USSR. The eventual abandonment of the market is a common ideological underpinning in market socialist thought, and saying the NEP wasn't a market socialist system because they planned to introduce a planned system is missing the forest for the trees.
There was no socialist system in the tail end of the Civil War and the early years of the war-ravaged USSR, go read a history book before trying to make historical conclusions.
It was a stop-gap measure to bandage over the wounds of famine and war communism through a temporary restoration of private trade and petty capitalism in order to allow the country go through a period of primitive acumulation. You're completely delusional if you think capitalism with any socialist or communist party at the helm is a form of socialism, just as you'd be completely delusional if you keep trying to push the naked lie that Lenin is a market socialist.
Where did you get the info that Lenin thought the NEP should be ended? I hear that line thrown around a lot but as late as May 1923 he was writing articles that seem to defend the NEP and it's role in socialist construction.
