> Date: Thu, 12 Oct 1995 15:21:53 -0700 > Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To: Multiple recipients of list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: [PEN-L:808] Re: the kulak question > To Louis Proyect: > The scissors crisis peaked in 1924 and after that > the prices tended to move back toward each other. Remember > that the starting point was the famine year of 1921 when > food prices were through the roof. > The most successful collectivized agricultural economy > has been that of Hungary before misguided decollectivization > and half-baked privatizations recently. That economy, long > the breadbasket of the CMEA (Old Soviet joke: "Leonid, let's > have more oranges in our five-year plan!" "No, Hungary does > not produce oranges.") was definitely market socialist. The > NEP could have worked if managed properly. > Barkley Rosser > Barkley: I don't accept that Hungary was 'market socialist'. It was percisely because it continued to be subject to arbitrary centralised micro-interventions that the proponents of MS in Hungary finally decided to push for the restoration of capitalism from about 1985 on. They realised that MS is precisely a "contradiction in terms". To see how MS was finally driven to vanishing point - when subject to historical experience, and not just theoretical elaboration - see the closing chapters of 'From Marx to the Market', by W Brus and K Laski, Oxford UP 1989 (they were both practitioners and supporters of MS in Poland). The crunch comes when it turns out that in a market economy (of which MS must definitionally be a variant) the freedom of units to take decisions can only be founded upon unambiguous rights of private ownership. Mondragon, of course, operates within a capitalist economy anyway: it is an estimable form of workers' cooperative, but its existence and success tell us little that would help to construct any kind of non-capitalist economic system. Hugo Radice [EMAIL PROTECTED]
