Re: DeLong on Paul Sweezy: Deja Vu

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

> The day that fool DeLong returns to this list is the day I picket
> Michael Perelman's house.  He is a disgusting red-baiter.  If he
> were in front of me now I would smack him in the mouth.
>
> Michael Yates

It is telling that Brad De Long deliberately removed the recognizable
context from his "obituary" of Paul Sweezy
<http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2004w08/msg00287.htm>
-- the context that De Long was perfectly capable of supplying four
years ago, when Sweezy was still alive:

*****   The Wayback machine

* To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
* Subject: The Wayback machine
* From: Brad De Long <delong@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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