Socialist Economy Poll

Balkan Beast wrote:I support State socialism, but I recognize that corruption and mismanagement (depends on who is holding the reigns of power of course) are major problems with such a system.

RedSun wrote:I voted for Syndicalism because it encompasses both market socialism and democratic planning. I currently favour market socialism, but I am leaning towards the transitional market-socialism-to-parecon idea as I learn more about Michael Albert's ideas (though I still have some questions I need settled before I give the idea my full support).

Pantheon Rising wrote:I think state socialism is just as bad as capitalism as it fails to provide true common ownership of productive forces and only creates a new class of bureaucrats and managers.

Godfaesten wrote:Glad to see no one voted for China like mixed economy

Comrade_Joe wrote:I believe in market socialism only as a transitional stage to the planned economy pretty much like NEP in USSR and only for the countries which never went through the capitalist phase.

Celtiberian wrote:Lenin's New Economic Policy is more aptly described as 'state capitalism'—due to the fact it's a combination of nationalizing the commanding heights of the economy and retaining private capitalist enterprise in all remaining industries. Market socialism is something else entirely.

Two models of market socialism currently exist. The first was theorized by Oskar Lange in 1936, and it was basically a form of central planning which featured mechanisms for mimicking market price signals, so as to rationally allocate resources between socialized industries. The second form of market socialism is much older and originated in the writings of Thomas Hodgskin, John Francis Bray, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. In this model, workers' self-management replaces bourgeois ownership and control of enterprises, finance is collectivized, and firms continue to produce in competitive markets. (The latter model was practiced in Tito's Yugoslavia, post-1950; Syndicalist Spain, to varying degrees; The Ukrainian Free Territory; etc.)

I agree that market socialism is most practical as a transnational stage between capitalism and a fully planned socialist economy. Nevertheless, I hold no antipathy toward those comrades who consider it a desire end in itself.

Comrade_Joe wrote:I think it's right to consider NEP as market socialism since you had private enterprise and market exchange. Look:

"(NEP) It is being recognized that the Soviet experiment in market socialism, roughly. I921-27"

Market Orientation of State Enterprises during Nep
V. N. Bandera
Soviet Studies
Vol. 22, No. 1 (Jul., 1970), pp. 110-121

I also found another similar statements. If you want i can transcribe them all.

State capitalism is consider the model which Stalin adopted in 1928, the planned economy and its five-years plans.

Admin wrote:Market socialism has come to denote a number of vastly different economic models, which doesn't surprise me, given the inherent fluidity of the word 'socialism'. Let's not allow the semantics skew this discussion.

Substantively, the NEP should not and cannot be conflated with the alternative models of market socialism because its defining characteristics (save the maintenance of a market at varying levels) simply do not correspond with theirs.

Comrade_Joe wrote:You talked about "alternative models of market socialism". My point is that NEP can be consider a model of market socialism. Of course, you may have more than one model as it was described above but it still market socialism.

Admin wrote:Allow me to reiterate. My point is that you can call it 'market socialism', but you would not be describing a system similar (beyond mere superficiality) to the aforementioned (alternative) models. Once we begin describing mixed economies as manifestations of 'market socialism', we have essentially evacuated the term of any real meaning.

Comrade_Joe wrote:Do you consider China a market socialist economy?

Comrade_Joe wrote:I think it's right to consider NEP as market socialism since you had private enterprise and market exchange

State capitalism is consider the model which Stalin adopted in 1928, the planned economy and its five-years plans.

Give me a practical example of market socialism.

No leftist tendencies are doing well lately. Social Democracy has just about ceased to exist, with most Social Democrats rejecting the idea of socialism altogether, "Marxism Leninism" is in terminal decline, most allegedly Trotskyist groups have been declining too, and anarchism, the default tendency leftists tend to slip into when they can't think of anything better, failed miserably in the "anti-globalization" movement of the '90s, and now has been demonstrating its basic unworkability for all the world to see in the Occupy movement.

Why is this? It's because the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a tremendous blow to the morale of the world working class, which it has yet to recover from, either materially or ideologically.

When and how can this be reversed? Well, class struggle inevitably bubbles up spontaneously, that's the nature of capitalism. And there has been quite a lot of class struggle lately. But it's all been quite defensive, with workers trying desperately and largely unsuccessfully to hold onto the gains of the past.

For a working class offensive, the working class needs to recover faith in the idea of socialist transformation, as otherwise workers can only just try to defend their positions in capitalist society, something getting harder and harder lately, as the world economy declines. And as long as most people still think that socialism is "an idea that they tried in Russia and didn't work," this can never happen.

And that's why arguments on Revleft always turn into Stalinism v. Trotskyism v. anarchism (the leftcoms seemingly being at this point essentially a subdivision of anarchism, at least here on Revleft).

Well, neither Lenin nor Trotsky ever baptised the USSR as a "socialist society," that was Stalin's notion, so that's a misdirected polemical jab. It was of course Trotsky (and Zinoviev too to be fair) who were most loudly denouncing Stalin's notion of "socialism in one country."

If you can't tell the difference between a society with no unemployment, no private ownership of the means of production, no coupon clipping stockbrokers, indeed few millionaires at all, free medical care and education, and steel and autoworkers getting paid more than doctors and lawyers, and a capitalist society, well then for you "capitalism" is simply an ideological abstraction you dislike, not a material reality impoverishing the working class.

Basically, just about every element of the standard economic program of any socialist party was actually implemented in the USSR. Badly implemented, but implemented. The problem was simply and merely the absence of democracy.

Now, for an anarchist to see an absence of democracy as proof that the Soviet regime is capitalist is understandable, as anarchism is basically just democratic bourgeois liberalism taken to its logical extreme.

But for a "left communist" to call the USSR capitalist on that basis is contradictory to say the least, given that Bordiga, the most famous "left communist," rejected democracy altogether. http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalinism-trotsky-t170335/index3.html

Celtiberian wrote:A few analysts may refer to the NEP as having been "market socialism," but Lenin never did. He described the model as state capitalism, as I do:

"[T]o a certain extent, we are re-creating capitalism. We are doing this quite openly. It is state capitalism. But state capitalism in a society where power belongs to capital and state capitalism in a proletarian state, are two different concepts. In a capitalist state, state capitalism means that it is recognized by the state and controlled by it for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, and to the detriment of the proletariat. In the proletarian state, the same thing is done for the benefit of the working class, for the purpose of withstanding the as yet strong bourgeoisie, and of fighting it."
Lenin, Vladimir. Speeches at Congresses of the Communist International, p. 118.

It's incorrect to consider centralized economic planning "state capitalism" due to the fact that no actual capitalists exist within the model. It's more accurate to refer to it as state socialism, in my opinion.

In my previous post, I provided the following examples: Tito's Yugoslavia, post-1950; Syndicalist Spain, to varying degrees; and the Ukrainian Free Territory.

Comrade_Joe wrote:You have to remind two things: first, the concept of "market socialism" didn't exist in that period.

I also don't agree 100% percent with that definition but it is true that there was an accumulation of capital by the state, isn't?

Why you consider Tito's Yugoslavia market socialism and NEP state capitalism if you had market mechanisms in both systems?