Science, Science & Marxism

[Carl Remick]

>From: "Scott Martens" <sm at kiera.com>
>
>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.

Am I grossly ignorant in seeing a basic, oil-and-water incompatibility 
between socialism and markets?  What happens when enterprises fail in 
market-based socialism -- are the losses socialized in a no-fault way, or 
are the management and workers responsible for the failure punished somehow 
for their lack of smarts and/or effort?  And what about enterprises that are 
lucky, clever or dedicated enough to achieve inordinate success -- are their 
above-average returns claimed as a public good, or are they retained for the 
particular benefit of the management/workers who achieved them?

Carl

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