John Vertegaal wrote: > Although it's far from me to defend Davidson in all of this, given the above > indicated disconnect between Marxism and central planning, how then are > Marx's ideas to be implemented economically? In other words it would be nice > to see you put your money where your mouth is. Or is it all hot air?
We shouldn't expect Marx to tell us how to plan an economy, since his research and writing did not cover all subjects. I think he would agree that it's a mistake to get all of one's understanding of the world from any single individual, including from Marx himself. The socialist movement clearly learned from a lot of people. It was the 20th century effort to make a demigod out of Marx that obscured that. (Did that effort start with Kautsky? It culminated with Stalin and Mao.) As for how to run a socialist economy, there was a long debate within the socialist movement about centralism vs. decentralism. The USSR's ruling elite settled the debate, at least to its own satisfaction, in favor of centralism and a lot of their fans followed this lead. This choice of centralized planning was made partly to preserve their own political and economic power (against the capitalist powers invading and then encircling them and their own people). But the debate was never really settled on the intellectual level. In light of the manifest failure of planning a large economy (the USSR) and the way in which "market socialism" tends to turn into capitalism, I like Charlie Andrews' alternative of decentralized not-for-profit institutions embedded in a larger democratic society. I also like the way it's part of his scheme to reward workers with free education and how the system has a tendency to gradually move toward a non-market communism. See http://www.laborrepublic.org/. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
