This query is based on an argument advanced some years ago by Sweezy and Magdoff. I can't remember the exact source, but I believe it was an MR Review of the Month. They were speaking specifically of socialist society, and argued that one of the mistakes of Soviet theorists was to assume that there were "laws" for a socialialist economy just as there were laws for a capitalist economy. They claimed that political economy as a science applied only to the capitalist mode of production. I will try to locate the original argument, but perhaps someone else on this list remembers it more accurately. In any case, if Sweezy and Magdoff's argument, as I remember it, holds for a socialist 'economy,' it would *also* hold for all non-capitalist social orders, including all of the various tributary modes of production. The imperatives of the market (operating behind the backs of and independently of the wills of the agents) do not apply in *any* non-capitalist social order, and hence there can be no laws of motion for such societies, and no way of predicting (even *after* the fact) the development within them either of means of production or of relations of production. Carrol
