Towards a new socialism

This study provides theoretical implications to economic and social behaviors, and the possible theoretical solution to impossibility of equality in the Capitalist system (market system) . This means that within a capitalist democratic system, sameness of opportunity and human wellbeing are impossible. This is not only for a single country, but for all People who live in the “capitalistic mode of production and reproduction of life” . We want to show that the capitalist system (in democratic societies) continually produces inequalities. This is true for every productive cycle: capitalism produces unequal wealth. Impossibility of equality doesn’t only mean that individuals cannot be equal in wealth. But, above all, that in the capitalist system, inequality of wealth can only increase as the “total market” increases. If it is so, the economic policies applied to the current economic theory cannot solve the problem of equality. Therefore, public policies are almost always a naive palliative (or a mystification of reality).

Ever since capitalism came to be recognized as a new economic system, it has had vociferous critics, of whom none was more wide-ranging than Karl Marx. Marx recognized that behind its ideological patina of freedom, capitalism, like the exploitative systems of slavery and feudalism, was a social system in which a small class extracted from the mass of producers practically all output above that necessary for bare subsistence. An elite's ability to do so was grounded in its monopoly ownership of the means of production. However, Marx, and other critics faulted it for more than its exploitation and extreme inequality. Sharing much with romanticism, they believed that its very institutions of private property and markets corrupt society and its members. Nevertheless, Marx in particular recognized that capitalism, unlike earlier exploitative systems, was radically dynamic, producing unprecedented wealth, while transforming not only all it inherited from the past, but also its own nature so as to eventually even empower the producers. Yet his anti-private property and anti-market animus led him to believe that empowered producers would abandon these capitalist institutions. He did not imagine that the dynamism, wealth, and potential freedom that capitalism was delivering might have little chance of flourishing in the absence of these institutions. This article claims that Marx and other critics were wrong to fault capitalism's central institutions for the injustices that accompanied them. These institutions are not the problem. Instead it is the inequality that co-evolved with them and enables them to be used for exploitation. Ever since capitalism came to be recognized as a new economic system, it has had vociferous critics. It has been accused of generating inequality, grinding poverty, debased and alienated work, macroeconomic instability, destruction of community, more egotistic humans, and ecological devastation. For many of its critics, capitalism is not just exploitative but dehumanizing as well. The rejection of capitalism has often meant rejection of its fundamental institutions of markets and private property. However, most of the major faults identified by critics are not due to these institutions, but to the inequality that co-evolved with them and which enables an elite to use them to exploit workers and destroy the environment. Because many critics confuse the instruments with the cause, they advocate rejection of the full institutional order. Inequality has, of course, always characterized capitalism. Capitalism evolved with the rise of two new classes, one owning and controlling the means of production, the other dispossessed of all but its ability to labor. Inequality in income and privilege are the result of this specific form of wealth inequality and serve to reinforce it. It is from this extreme inequality in ownership and control of the means of production that the negative consequences of capitalism flow.

The aim of this paper is to show that the collapse of the Soviet-type centralised planning model makes it necessary for Marxist thinkers to identify a new production mode which can be assumed to sprout from the ashes of capitalism as the offshoot of the stepwise evolution of the one currently in place. In the author's opinion, this new production mode exists and is a system of worker-controlled firms, i.e. a model that can be rated as the outgrowth of the capitalistic dynamic since it is this that taught workers how to manage production on their own. Insofar as it is true that the 'goalposts' of modern democracy are majority rule and the underlying principle that each head is entitled to one vote, it is hard to see why this principle should hold good for politics but not also for economic processes. Setting out from this reflection, the author contends that the precondition for extending democracy today is proceeding from the political arena to the social sphere. Whereas central planning is founded on the utopian assumption that a social system may prove viable although it denies workers a say in decision-making and the right to pursue the profit motive, a cooperative firm system would not carry any utopian overtones since the members of worker'controlled firms would engage in business with the aim of maximising both their incomes and the satisfactioin associated with their work. The paper argues that, if a society resolves to adopt a plan and this plan is expected to be developed by close reference to the market, its organisation would prove much more efficient in a system of worker-controlled firms than in one with capitalist-owned firms.

Problems of Economic Transition, 1991

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017

Marxists have viewed the task of socialism as the elimination of exploitation, defined in the Marxian manner in terms the excess of labor expended over of labor commanded. I argue that the concept of Marxian exploitation commits both type-one (false positives) and type-two (false negatives) errors as a diagnosis of distributive injustice: it misses instances of distributive injustice because they do not involve exploitation, and it calls some economic relations characterized by exploitation unjust when they are not. The most important reformulators of Marx's concept of socialism, which implicitly or explicitly attempt to correct the Marxian errors, are Oscar Lange,

1989

My wife Margaret gave unflagging emotional support for my work. She also took on the task, often enough against my stubborn resistance, of edit ing my writing in a foreign language. My deepest gratitude is to my teacher and friend Murray N. Rothbard. To his scholarly and personal example I owe more than I can properly express. He read an earlier draft of the study and provided me with invaluable comments. Innumerous discussions with him were a never ending source of inspiration and his enthusiasm was a constant encouragement. To these people and institutions I owe a sincere "thank you." [p. 1]

Legal Form A Forum for Marxist Analysis and Critique, 2022

Marxist theory has provided the basis element for the interpretation of social evolution. That is the contradiction –a dialectical relation between productive forces and relations of production which drives evolution. This basis contradiction is not the only one. Yet it is the fundamental one throughout the course of mankind. Thus, in order to analyze and comprehend the societies that arose from twentieth century revolutions —primarily the October 1917 revolution in Russia— we ought to start from precisely this point. This is also the case if we wish to comprehend the development of these societies, namely the restoration of capitalism.

2017