>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 10/26/99 12:33AM >>
That said, Doug says that the Diane Elson article on the socialized market
(in New Left Review 172, Nov-Dec 1988), cited & criticized in the Radical
Chains review of Bhaskar, is very persuasively argued. Have you read it?
(I haven't.) I wonder Elson addresses the above questions in her article.
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Charles: There may be some equivocation in use of the term "market" on this thread. The bourgeois monopoly media uses "market" as a synonym for capitalism and private ownership of the basic means of production. Others seem to think that the "market" can be just a "price mechanism" abstracted from the rest of capitalism, "market" as a sort of grassroots information system coordinating needs/wants(demand) and supply. Socialism doesn't contemplate no system for coordinating demand and supply. But that coordination probably shouldn't be called a "market" because the word has been contaminated by the bourgeois appropriation of it as equivalent to only a capitalist demand/supply mechanism.
What I like about Elson's article is that it is rooted in a feminist critique. She says, "Though this essay is about forms of economic co-ordination, it starting point is neither the market nor the plan, but the production and reproduction of labour power. In a capitalist economy the guiding thread is the production and reproduction of capital; the creative power of human beings and the expression and dvelopment of needs beccome subordinate to the drive for profit. The guiding thread of a socialist economy must be the production and reproduction of labour power. To give this priority requires transformations in relations to the means of production and to the means of consumption; transformations within places of work, and within households; transformations in relations between producers and consumers. The touchstone for judging any particular form of economic coordination will be its implications for the process of production and reproduction of labour power. this is a wider ! view than the traditional socialist focus on workers, which tends to look chiefly at the implications for labour power in the paid labour process. This is certainly an important dimension, and the way in which labour power is used up clearly has powerful effects on the requirements for its reproduction. But, as feminists have always argued, unpaid labour processes in the household and the community are a the heart of the production and reproduction of labour power. 'Producers" has to be given a wider meaning than 'workers in paid labour' - a meaning which takes account of the fact that every producer was once a child, and will someday find their power reduced through ill health and age. Defenders of soicalits planning have placed far more emphasis than have advocates of market socialism on the implications of forms of co-ordination for labour, but, with a few exceptions, they have tended to take a narrowly "workerist" view of labour. In contrast, I shall give the household a c! entral role."
Charles: This feminist approach to the problem which seems to mean more a "household shopper-consumer agency" definition of "market", more power to the household shopper, seems completely different than the monopoly media euphemism "market" for capitalism.
If we get to a "Peoples' Price Society" rather than a " Price Mechanism" , and "household/worldwide shopping mall" rather than a "market", we may be on to something.
CB