So it seems that unless you have a trusted substitute for money, the money system or some barter-based substitute will rear its ugly head very quickly and give you all the problem associated with the money system (inflation, deflation, accumulation).
So it seems to me that there is an enormous deficit in Marxist ideology and that is an almost total lack of Marxist finance. It's almost incredible that an ideology could be so influential while, it seems, basically wishing away the entire social phenomenon of money and proposing no real orderly way to create a substitute for it. Marxism must be a very good idea indeed to survive such a big hole in the boat.
boddi
On 12/29/05, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Boddi:
> > I just finished a thoroughly capitialist book that was
> > nonetheless very interesting. Although not a big part of the
> > author's argument, he did suggest that Centralist economies
> > finance themselves largely through limiting the production,
> > consumption and prices of consumer goods and then using the
> > excess saved cash and/or simply printing more money, safe in
> > the assumption that price controls and few consumer goods to
> > buy will keep inflation from setting in - if artificially.
> >
> > What do folks here think of this proposition?
>
>
>
> That seems to be the way central planning economies worked, for the most
> part. Production limitation was mostly on consumption rather than energy,
> machine tools, or heavy mfg. Also there was import substitution policy in
> place. They also use a formulaic approach to wage increase - they need to
> raise at slower rate than productivity increases - to keep inflation in
> check, but they basically failed in these efforts. What did them in was
> three things: informal economy (hoarding resources, including labor, and
> barter among firms), social movements demanding better living standards
> (which they had to appease from time to time), and constant, since the 1960s
> declines in productivity growth rates. In other words, productivity rates
> were going south while the wages were going north, regardless of attempts to
> control them. Since the prices were administratively fixed, the
> inflationary pressure thus created manifested itself as persistent
> shortages, despite growing production. Of course, simple minds could not
> understand that and fancied fantastic conspiracy theories where the stuff
> supposedly went.
>
> There is some good empirical literature on central planning e.g. Feiwel
> _Industrialization and planning under Polish Socialism_ and _The Economic of
> a Socialist Enterprise_, Chavance, _The transformation of Communist Systems_
> also edited volumes by Wedel _The unplanned society_ and Connor,
> Ploszajski, Inkeles and Wesolowski _The Polish road from socialism_ (on the
> role of informal economy)
>
> Wojtek
>
>
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