On 21 Jan 97 at 8:26, L. Project wrote:
> >I always had trouble understanding what the profit motive had to do with
> >innovation and productivity myself. The Internet is an example of
> >innovation devoid of the profit motive. I also have done my most creative
> >work in my non-professional life. I virtually ran an employment agency out
It should be clear that there is damn little of this type of
innovation or entrepreneurship, in contrast to the profit-
seeking kind.
> >The socialist rebuttal to the Viennese supposedly came from a certain
> >Oscar Lange, who I've heard of but never read. Lange was a market
> >socialist who tried to convince the world that workers could be just as
> >"entrepreneurial" as the capitalist class.
I don't think this is quite accurate. Lange wrote a little book with
Fred Taylor called The Economic Theory of Socialism, or some-
thing like that, which I read in grad school. He also wrote some
Keynesian macro papers. It is quite possible he wrote other
things on market socialism but I'm not aware of them. I'm quite
certain his ETS book is NOT a brief for market socialism. Rather,
it is an effort to show that publicly-run enterprises could, in
cooperation with a central coordinating authority ("planning" isn't
quite the right word), comprise an efficient economy. As I recall,
this entails the central authority organizing a process which yields
the information the enterprises need -- namely the 'correct' prices --
to know what to do. This is in my view quite different from market
socialism in the sense of Yugoslavia, where labor-managed firms
engage in actual market transactions. The Lange book helped to
spawn an interesting literature on planning which convinced me,
at least, that comprehensive central planning is infeasible and ever
will remain so.
> >After AES started to fall apart, some market socialists found that Lange's
> >arguments lacked the power that was needed and so they started to go back
> >to the Viennese school for further inspiration and guidance. Two Polish
> >economists, Brus and Laski, came to the conclusion that the problem with
> >market socialism up till now is that it didn't go far enough. They argued
> >that a labor market and capital market were necessary as well. The capital
As noted above, there are no actual markets in Lange's scheme.
> >Is all this starting to sound fishy, like just another word for
> >capitalism? Yes, dear reader, that's what comes next in the person of one
Market socialism is a lot like capitalism, but if something like
capitalism is what we're going to live with, then it offers some
appealing features, namely the breakdown of hierarchy within
business firms, a potentially more equal distribution of income,
and more tolerable conditions of work, among other things.
Just because it doesn't solve all problems, or very many, does not
mean it should be dismissed.
> >Aaak! Civil society. Another nostrum imported from Eastern Europe in the
> >dying days of state socialism. Civil Society is bunk. Bunk, I tell you.
Civil society is as old as de Tocqueville. If we grant that not
all collective goods should be provided by the central government,
then civil society is simply the most decentralized scale at which
collective goods can be provided, short of families. It is bunk as
a substitute for governments that are required to provide certain
services (e.g., national health insurance), but not as an adjunct
to such governments with its own appropriate functions. The left's
blindness to this tends to lead it to a knee-jerk advocacy of
national prograns to solve every problem, irrespective of the
capacity of the Feds to do the job properly or efficiently.
> >The great need today is not for institutions like the YMCA, coffee shops,
> >and food coops that do not challenge the capitalist state power. What the
Obviously the purpose of civil society is not to challenge
state power, but to contribute to the general welfare.
> >workers and peasants need are *political* instruments that can unite and
> >coordinate all of their local struggles. They need socialist parties with
> >revolutionary programs, just as much as in the days of Marx.
In the past in the U.S., of course, institutions of civil society
have become politicized and involved in insurgency. One
need only consider black churches in the civil rights movement,
to take a recent example. There are plenty of other examples
in history as well. Trade unions originated in civil society as
well.
> >. . .
> >as much power as can be realized. A successful revolution in Germany in
> >1919 led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht would have produced just such a
> >society. The state led by the workers would have come immediately to the
> >aid of the encircled and isolated USSR. Thus a genuine socialism would
> >have become at least possible and all of the silly Hayekian ideas would . . .
Lots of would being chopped here.
With Civility,
MBS
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