Rob quotes important bits of Trotsky relating to the market. This doesn't
mean that Trotsky in any way viewed the system he is talking about as
*market socialism*. He's talking about a dictatorship of the proletariat in
which the smooth running of central planning depends to a great extent on
accurate feedback, and the market is one aspect of this feedback. If state
provision isn't meeting demand, market responses will be one of the ways
helping to reveal this. As will reports from consumer organizations, trades
unions, sectoral research units, and local offices of the central planning
authority, etc.
Now, Rob, would you care to say if you think
a) that Trotsky is in fact arguing for market socialism as an *alternative*
to the dictatorship of the proletariat with centralized planning and
centralized control of finance and foreign trade;
b) that Bolshevism-Leninism had on its programme the immediate liquidation
of the market from day one of the October Revolution;
and
c) that market socialism is more than just another way of saying that
market mechanisms will have an important but not decisive role to play in
the operations of proto-socialist society.
This will make it clear to me, to yourself and to everybody else if we're
just playing with words or in fact talking about an *alternative* regime or
even an *alternative* state to what was available in the early Soviet Union.
If we're talking alternatives then we can get down to discussing what the
Bolsheviks should have done instead, ie criticize their programme and their
methods of implementing it. If not, then we can get on with applying the
lessons of that period to the various programmes and methods on offer in
the workers movement today.
>From the huffing and puffing going on it sounds as if there's more at stake
than the realistic acknowledgement made by Trotsky here and by the Left
Opposition in general including Preobrazhensky in the New Economics that
the market will have a role to play in regulating some aspects of supply
and demand under proto-socialism. Is there??
If there isn't, why all the aggro?
An awful lot of this stuff was thrashed out in the party discussions in the
Soviet Union at the end of the civil wars and imperialist invasions as it
became necessary to adjust to a period of harsh isolation in the world
market without the hoped-for but unrealized support of a revolution in an
advanced capitalist country such as Germany. Preobrazhensky's essential
book (essential for Marxists) was part of all this, a kind of summing up of
the turn from war communism and militarized labour to the NEP and the
effect this had on the development of the Soviet economy all seen in a
Marxist theoretical perspective.
For a perspective during the actual wars nothing can beat Trotsky's book
"Terrorism and Communism" (against Kautsky's book of the same name),
preferably read in conjunction with Lenin's polemic against Kautsky from
the same period The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.
Trotsky's little book on the New Course also deals with this period a bit
further into the turn.
Cheers,
Hugh
********************
Rob wrote, responding to me:
>You:
>
>>>>Market socialism is a cowardly utopian cop-out. Anything to avoid the
>>>>life-and-death confrontation with the bourgeoisie that creating the
>>>>preconditions for real socialism will involve.
>
>Me:
>
>>>Market Socialism ain't gonna come about without fundamental and traumatic
>>>social change, Hugh. And it might just be a promising candidate for just
>>>the precondition of which you speak.
>
>
>You:
>
>>See above. Fundamental social change that stops short at market socialism
>>is a dry-as-dust academic illusion worthy of a Kautsky.
>
>And Trotsky:
>
>'It is necessary for each state-owned factory, with its technical director,
>to be subject not only to control from the top ... but also from below, by
>the market, which will remain the regulator of the state economy for a long
>time to come.'
>(at 4th Comintern Congress 1922)
>
>And Trotsky again:
>
>'The innumerable live participants in the economy ... must make known their
>needs and their relative intensity not only through statistical compilations
>of planning commissions, but directly through the pressure of demand and
>supply. The plan is checked and to a considerable extent realised through
>the market. The regulation over the market must base itself on the
>tendencies showing themselves in it, must prove their economic rationality
>through commercial calculation.'
>(*Byulleten Oppozitsii* November 1932)
>
>Cheers,
>Rob.
>
>
>
> --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
--- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
