[lbo-talk] Understanding _Capital_ (Was Re: barbaric)

Tayssir John Gabbour tayssir.john at googlemail.com
Wed Mar 7 07:42:35 PST 2007


On 3/7/07, Dmytri Kleiner <dk at telekommunisten.net> wrote:
> I have never seen a logical explanation of how an exploitive class can
> develop in the context of free production. This to me seems like an
> illogical proposition which is an object of faith for anti-market
> tendencies within Socialism. In my opinion, it is bunk.

Anarchistic economic visions like Parecon reject markets for reasons like pervasive externalities, since only the buyer and seller are accounted for in any given transaction, which excludes all others who may be affected by it. They claim this contradicts the goal of "self-management," which they define as being able to participate in decisionmaking in roughly the proportion you're affected by it. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics#The_critique_of_markets>

(This may turn out to be empirically mistaken, but the logic seems reasonable to me. Also, real-world parecons may even feature so-called "black markets," as the society considers appropriate.)

Personally, I expect an advanced industrial economy will require large amount of planning, no matter what. Ours certainly does. Therefore I don't expect that market economies are necessarily desirable.

Tayssir



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