As for what to do the day after the revolution, I'm pretty much with the market socialists. Much of the injustice of capitalism is in its selective institutionalisation of rights. Owners of capital have the right, enforced by police, to dispose of assets, make decisions for firms, and decide on the fates of workers, but workers have no legal claim on the institutions that they work to sustain or on the products of their labour. It is certainly much easier to imagine a world with markets and prices but without absentee owners or special rights derived from owning capital than implementing some untested plan.
Marx' unwillingness to put forward a real plan for how a socialist economy should work leads me to think that he was more interested in a socialist revolution making sure workers made decisions, based on a larger notion of social good than just return on capital, than in abolishing markets. Trotsky's later statements about how socialists shouldn't be very interested in appropriating small concerns gives this kind of thinking some currency in post-1917 socialism. If there is a better alternative to markets, it should come out of the natural (and dialectic) evolution of a post-capitalist world, and not out of plans and models - at least that is how I read Marx.
Certainly that strikes me as a better socialist credo - a better one than inventing non-market economic models.
That is why I can't see Mises and Hayek as offering such damning critiques of socialism, except perhaps if one imagines that centrally determined production goals can substitute for a market. Understanding the functioning of capitalism is important, but abolishing markets just isn't that immediately relevant to class revolution.
Scott Martens
-----Original Message----- From: Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Friday, January 18, 2002 5:47 PM Subject: Re: Science, Science & Marxism