[PEN-L:28039] Re: Market Socialism

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 14/07/02 11:11 -0700, you wrote:
> Building on Ian's quote from his ex-neighbor from Boeing, whenever a real
> emergency arises -- earthquakes, total wars ....  We retreat from markets
> and turn to something else -- at least as long as the crisis state
> remains.  Would the public applaud the entrepreneurship of someone selling
> bottled water for $10 to people fleeing the World Trade Center?
>  --
> Michael Perelman


I think marxism is not very good at noticing this. Possibly because of the
rigorously abstract way Marx analysed the underlying processes, people can
forget how they manifest themselves concretely.

Every society especially in crises has an overall view of its total social
product and the customs and laws that are necessary to sustain this. If
Adam Smith always assumed the existence of society, so should marxists. No
market has ever existed outside hman society, and a great range of human
productive activitities, social as well as material, which are use values,
and are not yet commodities. The status of the exploiting class is often
associated with public contributions to the non-commodity realm of society.

Indeed subtler readings of Marx suggest how capitalism has grown by eating
into areas of this social environment and using it to reduce the labour
content of commodities or create new commodities. Just as capitalism tends
to eat into the physical environment.

I would assert that no form of socialism, market or otherwise, can be
thought to be serious, if it does not address the flexible interplay of the
commodity realm of human reproduction  and the non-commodity realm. Indeed
I suspect that the transition to communism will be associated with the
blurring of this boundary.

Chris Burford

London