Hi Charles,
Charles Andrews wrote:
> Joseph, thank you for your detailed criticism of the analyses by
> Cockshott and Cottrell and by me.
Thank you for raising these issues. I'll also have to look up your other
books. I see you also wrote on single-payer health insurance ("Profit
Fever") and on the current crisis ("No Rich, No Poor"). I look forward to
seeing our analysis on these issues, but it may be awhile before I can fit
this in.
>
> Any society has surplus labor and surplus product in one form or
> another. Your method of argument is to identify the surplus in any
> analysis and every program, then insist it is capitalist profit because
> it is surplus. That seems to be the key difference in your approach to
> analyzing what the next economy will be, now that the historical limit
> of capitalism is coming into rather plain view (No Rich, No Poor).
With regard to profit, you write that "The firm is deprived of private
profit by means of the wage tax and by remittance of net profit if any to
the state." (p. 313) Thus you also describe that the firm produces
surpluses in the form of profit, but it hands this over to the state. We
differ on how significant this is.
I take account of the experience of the last century that capitalism can
exist in a number of different forms. A difference in form from Western
market capitalism doesn't necessarily mean that something isn't
capitalist. And the state-capitalist economies gave many examples of
trying to find the perfect market measures that would turn the "invisible
hand" to their advantage. It didn't work.
The problem, in my view, *wasn't* that they didn't eliminate the money
economy at one blow. (Well, they sometimes tried, but this didn't work.)
No, there will be a lengthy transition period between the overthrow of
capitalism and a truly socialist economy. Broadly speaking, it's the
extent of workers' control of the transitional economy, both from above
and below, that indicates the progress towards socialism. The various
capitalist forms and capitalist economic categories will continue to exist
to this or that extent for some time, even in the state sector. What
separates this from capitalism, however, is *not* that the capitalist
forms are now sanitized and pro-worker, but that the workers' actual
direction of the economy, both the overall economy and their enterprises,
is increasing. There will be a constant friction between the spontaneous
tendency of the the capitalist forms to pull the economy backwards, and
the struggle of the working masses to move forward towards conscious
social control. The mere fact that the workers have taken power in a
revolution doesn't mean that they are yet ready to throw aside all the
capitalist methods and institute a socialist economy. Their formal control
of the economy has to be gradually turned into a real control.
But the state-capitalist regimes thought the state sector itself proved
the existence of socialism, and that by prefecting various clever market
arrangements in the state sector, they could solve their problems. This
ended up reflecting that these regimes were becoming repressive and really
needed some criterion other than the workers' actual role in the economy.
>
> A minor aside: you say that From Capitalism to Equality "envisions that
> competition drives each firm to grow as far as it can." Actually, such
> competition for market share would often lead to shrinking a market in
> order to take a larger share. For example, a firm could make men's
> razors that succeed because they work and are tremendously cheap. That
> beats Gillette's waste of labor designing, manufacturing, and
> advertising the latest techno-gizmo razor. The demand for razors being
> fairly inelastic, the whole market would shrink, and we would be spared
> Gillette's huge waste of labor.
>
Yes, your example shows that it is conceivable that something good results
in an increase of market share.The problem, as I see it, is that you
assume that good results will automatically take place through this
competition for a market share. But one could also give examples where bad
things would result from a competition to increase market share. The
competition for market share is an "invisible hand" just as much as the
competition for direct profit. And the "invisible hand' has again and
again acted in unexpected ways and proved to be more crafty and
imaginative than envisioned beforehand.
-- Joseph
-----------------------------------
Joseph Green
[email protected]
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