Thanks for the Jason Hickel pointers.
I only "discovered" Marxism a couple of years ago, and have only
scratched the surface of the literature, so maybe I'm missing some
thinking which already addresses some of my questions, but a
situation such as the following comes to mind:
Suppose the revolution has occurred and capitalism has been banished
to some far-off island, or maybe vanquished entirely. Now the
workers or the people are in charge. Let's suppose someone decides
to build, say, an electric vehicle. In order to do this, he or she
needs lithium from Bolivia, energy locally, labor or sub-assemblies
from all over, and so on. Of course, he or she is building this
vehicle not because of profit or to accumulate, but rather because
it seems like a good thing for everyone, and a lot of people agree
with him or her.
But suppose the Bolivians with the lithium have decided to limit
their production for their own reasons. Maybe they don't like the
destruction of their land, maybe they want to work only ten hours
a week, maybe the mountain of lithium is sacred, who knows?
Under capitalism, the Bolivians would suffer a coup, or maybe a few
of their leaders would be corrupted, or maybe a neighbouring country
would invade and compel them to sell their lithium -- and their labour
to mine it. But now we have socialism. So these questions come to mind:
(1) If there is central planning of some sort, the Bolivians have the
right to strike and so on, so it seems as though they can block the
production of the electric vehicle. (There is no longer the idea
that all such things are "progress".) With no central planning,
that's the end of it, anyway. Obviously, not all technologies will
be doomed by this situation, because maybe the Bolivians want to
have electric vehicles, themselves. If I'm not mistaken in some
way, then...
Question: Who has written about these kinds of situations from a
Marxist perspective?
Question: Who has discussed governance of a socialist world, in
general or in broader terms?
Comment: Marxist-oriented theorists talk a lot about capitalism,
but, ironically, a lot less about socialism. My (perhaps naive)
assumption is that true socialism implies some kind of extreme
democracy, with the people or workers controlling all of the
factors of production, including both labour and natural
resources. Am I wrong about this?
(2) Almost everything I have read about post-revolutionary economics
is vague, or qualitative, or both. Where is a place to start for
Marxist quantitative economics, econometrics, and the like?
Comment: I majored in mathematics and economics. Somehow, in school,
no one ever mentioned Karl Marx. The closest we came was a
discussion about how Soviet central planners fixed prices of vodka
and television sets. (The process basically consisted -- if my
professors got this right -- in deciding the quantity to be
produced, then reading the price from that point on the demand
curve. The difference was a kind of "profit" which supported the
state in lieu of taxes.) We did a lot of optimization, some
portfolio theory, input-output analysis, and so on, and Keynesian
models of national economies. But nothing about socialism except for
vodka and TVs.
(3) In a world where capitalists can't foist the costs of their
pollution, poisoning, exploitation, enclosure, and so on, onto
others, and the incentive of profit is gone, I would expect an
economy naturally smaller and more sustainable. On the other hand,
maybe the Bolivians would become greedy, and happy to despoil
their land and to work long hours in return for video games and
microwave ovens. While Hickel talks about some top-down planning
to control, say, waste and resource usage, which might be seen as
"supply side" management, who has talked about "demand side"
parameters affected by socialism itself?
Comment: Maybe communism doesn't have a solution for environmental
problems or resource limitations, but certainly the analysis is
greatly changed.
In short, I'm very interested in pointers to any discussions about
forms of socialist governance and socialist economics. I assume that one
size doesn't fit all, that Europeans and Chinese and indigenous peoples
("first nations") might all want to do it differently, but socialism can
be a big tent, can't it? Especially, how are conflicts resolved between
local governments and larger (national or global) governments?
On Sun, Nov 29, 2020 at 02:00:06PM -0500, Louis Proyect wrote:
> Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2020 14:00:06 -0500
> From: Louis Proyect <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [marxmail] (99+) (PDF) A Good Life For All Within Planetary
> Boundaries | Andrew Fanning - Academia.edu
>
> [...] but would invite Marxmailers to check out Jason Hickel's
> articles here:
> [...]
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