[lbo-talk] BDL on Sweezy: Deja Vu

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Mon Mar 1 03:14:32 PST 2004



>[lbo-talk] BDL on Sweezy
>Shane Mage shmage at pipeline.com, Sun Feb 29 21:58:07 PST 2004
>
>Brad DeLong writes
>>..."De mortuus (sic) nil nisi bonum" applies as little to Paul
>>Sweezy as it does to Richard Nixon or Joe McCarthy or Paul De Man.
>
>When Nixon died, Mr. DeLong's boss The Willy made a fulsome speech
>at the The Dick's funeral--although all that was called for in the
>way of a speech was to recite the phrase *de mortuis nil nisi bonum*
>and then promptly to sit down. Mr DeLong neither made a public
>protest nor resigned, as far as I know.
>
>As everyone on this list knows, I despise the Okhranik gravedigger
>of the revolution more intensely than Mr. DeLong ever could. But,
>whoever actually wrote it, "Economic Problems of Socialism in the
>USSR" was far from devoid of interest to Marxists. Paul Sweezy's
>comments at the time could now merit no more than a footnote to a
>footnote. But Mr. DeLong tears them out of any recognizable context,
>and then tears them apart in order to shit on the grave of a great
>man.
>
>Shane Mage
>Trotsky*ite*

It is telling that Brad De Long deliberately removed the recognizable context from his "obituary" of Paul Sweezy <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040223/004593.html> -- the context that De Long was perfectly capable of supplying four years ago, when Sweezy was still alive:

***** The Wayback machine

* To: pen-l at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx * Subject: The Wayback machine * From: Brad De Long <delong at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> * Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 16:08:27 -0800

I owe the context for a Sweezy quote from _The Present as History_...

The publication in 1952 of Stalin's _Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR_ would make possible today a more satisfactory reply to Mr. Kazahaya on the law of value under socialism. Briefly, Stalin's position is that the law of value still continues to operate under socialism to the extent that certain features of capitalism, particularly the operation of the price mechanism in the agricultural sector of the economy, have not yet been eliminated. Under full communism, on the other hand, the law of value will no longer apply. In the light of this explanation, which seems to me entirely sound, I should like to amend the statement which Mr. Kazahaya criticizes, by substituting "communist" for "socialist" and "communism" for "socialism." It would then read as follows: "In the economics of a communist society the theory of planning should hold the same basic position as the theory of value in the economics of a capitalist society. Value and planning are as much opposed, adn for the same reasons, as capitalism and communism." This conveys my meaning more accurately than the original wording and is, I think entirely in accord with Stalin's view...

<http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2000m02.3/msg00065.htm> *****

So, Sweezy wished to clarify the meanings of the terms "socialism" and "communism" by saying that the law of value still continues to operate under socialism to the extent that economy is capitalistic, i.e., governed by market discipline, whereas it won't under communism worth its name. As Jim Devine said four years ago, "Well, this is a pretty mild and inconsequential thing to agree with Stalin [or the Soviet economist(s) who wrote the work attributed to Stalin] about" (at <http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2000m02.3/msg00067.htm>).

Perhaps, De Long thinks that we must insist that the earth is flat if Stalin wrote that the earth is round. :-0 -- Yoshie

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