Paul Cockshott wrote: ... In 'Towards a New Socialism', we make it clear that in a planned socialist economy there is no buying and selling between factories. ...
J. Green advocates a method of material balances to coordinate the work of factories. Both of them assume a conceptual framework of plan-versus-market, which has a tradition of many decades. Within that framework, the other choice - some variation of market socialism - soon leads back to capitalism. The problem with typical planning schemes, though, is that while they remove profit as a target and reward, they also lose the discipline of requiring producers to sell their product. The usual mantra is an escape to vague talk about democracy, but there is an economic solution: recharter corporations so they must operate on a breakeven basis. By doing this, a new commonwealth can retain competitive discipline on producers while society takes control of economic destiny. As long-time PEN-Lers know, suggested details are in my book of a decade ago, From Capitalism to Equality: An Inquiry into the Laws of Economic Change. Back then J. Green indicated he would spell out his criticisms of that book, but to my knowledge he never did. There are very few examples of a concise program for socialism as a successor to a developed capitalist economy. That's not so remarkable, but what is remarkable is the lack of interest in them by socialists. --Charles Andrews _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
