[lbo-talk] Stalinism (was Eric Hobsbawm)

[andie_nachgeborenen]

What he favored and what he argued for in his papers on the calculation debate were not necessarily the same thing. He ended up practically as a market socialist or advocate of market reforms. The calculation papers were, as you say, a theoretical contribution about how a pure planned economy could price efficiently using shadow prices and operating from pure neoclassical assumptions. He said somewhere that Marxian economics is the economics of capitalism and neoclassical economics is the economics of socialism..

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 12, 2012, at 3:52 PM, "Jim Farmelant" <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:


> As I understand him, Lange advocated different things at different times.  In a 1940 letter to Hayek, Lange said that his writings on the calculation debates were primarily theoretical in character and were not meant to layout practical policies.  In fact he said in that letter, that he favored a market economy with just the largest monopolistic companies being nationalized.  Smaller companies in non-monopolistic sectors would be left in private hands.  By the end of WW II, he had joined the Polish CP and he attempted to influence the Communist government's economic policies.  By this time, he accepted Poland's "real existing" socialism as the framework to work in, and he sought to promote policies to make that system work better, both in terms of making it more efficient, and making it more democratic.  He and other economists (like Kalecki, Brus, and Lange's pupil, Kowalik) were active in the reform faction of the Polish CP.  
> Jim Farmelanthttp://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelanthttp://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math
> 
> ---------- Original Message ----------
> From: andie_nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
> To: "lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Stalinism (was Eric Hobsbawm)
> Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2012 08:03:46 -0500
> 
> Lange is an advocate of central planning, not markets, a common misconception. His whole contribution to the calculation debate was to defend planning without markets against Hayek's attack on central planning. People should indeed read Lange more carefully.
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
> On Oct 12, 2012, at 7:08 AM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> They should have read oskar Lange more carefully to know that planned
>> economy can use market mechanism more efficiently than private one.
>> 
>> Wojtek Sent from my Droid
>> 
>> ^^^^^^
>> CB: Looks like China is proving Lange's theory in practice
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