>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
Isn't the point of abolishing capitalism to create the world in which
we aren't governed by the "law of motion"? Marx wrote: "This fact
simply means that the object that labour produces, its product,
stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of
the producer. The product of labour is labour embodied and made
material in an object, it is the objectification of labour. The
realization of labour is its objectification. In the sphere of
political economy, this realization of labour appears as a loss of
reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the
object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation" (at
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844-epm/alt/labour.htm>).
When products of our labor cease to confront us as "something alien,
as a power independent of" us, as if it were "a law of nature," we
will bid farewell to the "law of motion."
That said, many historians of class societies before capitalism argue
that, before the advent of agrarian capitalism and/or the Industrial
Revolution (depending on whom you ask), the so-called "Malthusian"
pattern exercised a law-like power:
***** ...This economic history course is an historical study of
European economic development from the height of the Medieval
'Commercial Revolution', in the late thirteenth century, and on the
eve of the terrible economic and demographic crises of the fourteenth
century, to the eve of the modern Industrial Revolution in the
mid-eighteenth century. To demonstrate that the processes of
historical economic growth are not linear, we thus begin with a
period of long-term or secular economic expansion that was not
destined to continue with 'economic progress'; that will be followed
by the aforementioned crises and the so-called 'Great Depression' of
the Late Middle Ages (or Renaissance), a period of dramatic economic
contraction (1320-1470); that was followed by a painful economic and
demographic recovery (1470-1520), and then by another expansionary
era known as the era of the Sixteenth Century 'Price Revolution'
(1520-1640), which in turn was followed by another period of economic
stagnation and, in some regions, of contraction, known as the
'General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century' (1640 - 1750), which
continued up to and helped set the stage for the modern Industrial
Revolution era (1750 - 1820). We shall also see that all these
alternating patterns of economic expansion and stagnation/contraction
were accompanied by a corresponding demographic expansion and then
stagnation/contraction, until the modern Industrial Revolution era,
which was accompanied by a veritable Demographic Revolution.
Furthermore, we shall note that generally speaking, if not
universally in western Europe, living standards tended to rise when
population fell, and fell when population continued to grow, until
the Industrial Revolution era, when this so-called 'Malthusian'
pattern was finally broken....
<http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~munro5/201LECT.htm> *****
Yoshie
