2) the quantitative dimension of economic problems is often not empirically investigated, despite the availability of a wealth of data sources, so that the relative significance of different kinds of problems is not well understood.
There's tons of literature on it. In general, if we discuss market economy and just focus on the capital-labor relation, we leave out some very important factors involved in markets: culture (norms & values, consumption patterns), non-market activity decisive for the very existence of markets (including household & voluntary labor), population (pressures created by demographic factors including unregulated population growth, ageing etc. which have financial effect), and legal frameworks. We could get obsessed by the horror of people dying in 9/11, whereas the carnage in traffic accidents, of preventable diseases and hunger/thirst is enormously greater.
3) little attempt is made to form a theory of a feasible socialist economy based on a realistic theory of socialist justice (or ethics), that could inspire positive alternatives to the ruling economic policies.
Well as regards the economic side, Makoto Itoh offers a useful introduction in Political Economy of Socialism. A useful complement to that is Catherine Samary, Plan, Market & Democracy. I think people like Oscar Lange, W. Brus and other East European economists offer useful insights, even Branko Horvat (I don't read Chinese and Japanese). There's people like David Laibman who are interested in this topic. I have yet to read a really good theory of socialist justice, but Gerald Cohen has meantime worked on that theme. There really isn't yet a socialist alternative to Rawls's theory of distributive justice, although Ian Gough offers a theory of human needs (which is a component of a socialist theory of justice). There's more to it than Pashukanis allows for.
4) The economic significance of taxation, and its political significance for the "social contract", isn't well-theorized.
The Marxian literature on public finance and taxation isn't very extensive. Apparently many people think this is either a bourgeois issue, a reformist distribution issue, or a sexual joke. But, if you compare the size of total taxation to net profits it can easily be concluded that ignoring this area is absurd, at least for a balanced view of what happens in a capitalist economy. People will talk about "surplus-value" but that aggregate includes profit, interest, rents, tax, royalties, insurance payments, revaluations (in respect of e.g. assets, depreciation and inventories) and various transfer claims. What matters to people these days is the net income they get, and that net income is to a large extent mediated by the state.
5) The advantages and disadvantages of allocation of resources via markets are often not clearly theorized; often one gains the impression that leftwingers think all markets are bad, and that all market economy is incompatible with social planning (despite more sophisticated analyses offered by such authors as Lange and Brus).
In the glory days of Marxism (i.e. the first decades of the 20th century) the idea developed that socialism equalled state ownership of means of production + popular democracy + workers' control of industry. However, this conception did not really come to grips with the implications of abolishing markets. If you abolish private decision-making on the basis of individual buying power, then there must be alternative methods of allocating claims. There is a great scala of possibilities here between holding a machine gun to somebody's head, and legally guaranteeing an entitlement to a good or service. Here in Amsterdam there's a lot creative solutions to that. Marxists have often rubbished social democrats without really understanding the problems. Second and Third International Marxism also tended to suggest that "the market" was the enemy, and that money was the root of all evil. This is a primitive interpretation, leading to a primitive socialism. Planning and markets are instruments for allocating resources in a just and efficient way. Marx's original critique was that the fragmented decision-making by private enterprises and the final market valuation of outputs only after they were produced, unleashed economic forces which nobody could control. The real question is therefore how planning and markets can be utilised in a controlled way, on the basis of real majority rule, to ensure the survival and prospering of all, the ultimate aim being an egalitarian society which can exist without ripping apart the biosphere. I have just been looking at the Western Marxist literature on the USSR and when you do that, you realise most of these famous Marxists could not even define correctly what capitalism actually means, what the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of capitalism are. At that rate, we're hundreds of years away from socialism, because the people most concerned with it cannot even define correctly what capitalism is or what socialism is.
In what manner do you think that left apparatuses of analysis prevent questions from being asked that we ought to be asking?
I think it has a lot to do with teleology (goals) and with morality (norms and values, culture). If I make take the example of the US elections: people debate whether or not to support Kerry, but the real issue is the gross absurdity of the US electoral system itself, which de facto disenfranchises the majority and which means really that justabout any alternative to the parties of the wealthy, short of really reactionary or fascist organisations, deserve support. As regards goals, an academic pursues his interests as he is able, within the constrictions of academia, but that does not automatically ensure that important questions are asked. As regards morality, leftist activism often is full of moral fervour, and some cultural associations are deemed radical while others are not, but without rhyme or reason. It's as much a moral fashion as anything else.
Is this explanation adequate in your view, or what needs to be added?
Heck, I would need to add heaps and heaps of things, but I don't even have the time to work on all that. I could work twenty years solid, researching it, and writing it all up. But I'm not even good at making money, let alone have a situation where I could get it all done. Who gives a shit about this research anyway ? Mostly what people are interested in is ripping off other people's ideas and getting a lot of insight at the cheapest cost, in aid of a life the maximises the quantity of quality experiences, that is all. Well, we all have to live our lives. As a socialist I tend to think it must be a group effort, so then in Dutch you say "gooi 't in de groep" i.e. "throw it into the group (for discussion)" which is what you do on a list like this. But what would be the goal of all this explaining ? As a socialist, I think your ultimate criterion has to be how does this help advance towards socialism ? But half the time we are in a predicament where we have to think how does this help my life ? Life is full of contradictions, dare I say it, getting it together can be hard.
"You also mentioned tax law that skews income towards capital..." etc.
Well the basic theoretical problem is the capitalisation of financial claims in all its implications. A good example of that is dollarisation, which enables the appropriation of wealth through currency issues. The trade in bonds and derivatives however is also gigantic, I would say overall bigger than the trade in stocks. This creates a substantive new (or maybe not so new) class whose net income derives mainly from financial manipulations and nothing else.
Marx primarily concentrated on those aspects of the economy of direct concern to the working class: those aspects related to the creation of material wealth. He paid much less attention to the distribution and consumption of that wealth, examining at most the "purest cases" of the operation of the law of value. His whole scheme of economic reproduction for example abstracts from monetary policy and credit, and from unequal exchange. If the productivity of labour becomes so great that a minority of the
workforce can create all the tangible material wealth, then the problem of the distribution of wealth becomes vastly more important than it was before. People may be shortchanged in production, but they can also be shortchanged in distribution and consumption, and possibly more so.
"Where else do you find leftwing thought on business and financial matters coming up short?"
I think all the writers you mention are important and insightful. But basically I would say (1) there are rather few attempts to link the phenomena of "financialisation" consistently to value theory and revise that theory where necessary, (2) the theory of property relations isn't so well developed, (3) it's not always clear to me how the analyses that are done, are related to the transition to socialist economy. For Marx it was clear that communication is an essential part of socially cooperative labor and thus part of the "hard core" of human anthropological specificity. But (4) systematic theoretical analysis of communication and its economic role by Marxists is hard to find. It's another area which has been hived over to management theory without contest. (5) the substantive economic content of imperialism, although often brilliantly illuminated, hasn't been systematically theorised (but that is a disputed proposition).
Really the most important problem that hasn't been solved is that of political organisation, one has to think through that on a lot of different levels, a bit like a skyscraper. Basically Lenin took the view that "the buck stops here, and here is where I start" which in itself isn't a bad idea, there's a limit to what you can solve by theory, but I don't think he really solved the organisational problems, not even in his own organisation. The culture he created was highly effective at smashing the opposition, but very bad at creating genuinely socialist forms of association. That is what Western socialists objected to, but it's not as though they've definitively solved the problems either.
Well anyway I had to work & sleep, stuff like that.
Jurriaan
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