I'm not sure where this topic came from. From LBO-talk?
>This query is based on an argument advanced some years ago by Sweezy and
>Magdoff [Huberman?]. 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.
Since he studied only capitalism and modes of production that preceded it,
the theories that Marx developed as part of his political economy doesn't
apply to the "actually-existed socialism" of the USSR. But there's no
reason why more recent political economists can't develop some notions of
the "laws of motion" of USSR-type bureaucratic socialism.
>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.
This equates "laws of motion" with the unforeseen consequences of the
"invisible hand" of the market. I don't see why other systems might have
unforeseen consequences of purposeful action, though of course, they'd be
different. For example, Kornai argues that USSR-style top-down planning
encourages the rise of a shortage economy. Bureaucracies allow people to
rise to the level of their incompetence (the Peter Principle). Etc.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
