Abstract
This chapter discusses, in sequence, (a) the debate over “market socialism” and (b) the Soviet planning process. Bertell Ollman’s 1999 collection, Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists, confronts critics with defenders of that hybrid concept. From analysis of the respective positions, it appears that reviving or preserving market practices tends to bring back capitalist relations. The way to avoid the rigidities of central planning is not to restore the pressures of the market, but rather to spread participatory mechanisms into every dimension of economic decision-making. Michael Lebowitz’s 2012 book on Soviet planning, The Contradictions of Real Socialism, addresses both the achievements and the shortfalls of the Soviet system, stressing finally the importance of democratizing production relations.
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Notes
- 1.
David McNally, Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique (London and New York: Verso, 1993); Bertell Ollman, ed. Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists (New York and London: Routledge, 1998). Page-numbers in parentheses refer to Ollman’s edited collection.
- 2.
Michael Lebowitz, The Contradictions of Real Socialism: The Conductor and the Conducted (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012). Citations to this book are here given in parentheses.
- 3.
The notion of a variety of possible vanguard practices can be derived even from Lenin. While some of Lenin’s actions fit Lebowitz’s “vanguard logic,” others, especially prior to 1917, belie the stereotype of an unvarying commandist approach. For a useful overview, see Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990).
- 4.
Coordination during the performance is not a problem for small ensembles; the difficulty increases, however, with the size of the group. A pioneering effort to surmount this obstacle is the 48-year-old, 31-member Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which performs without a conductor. A more recent example is Spira Mirabilis, an international ensemble of young musicians based in northern Italy, which sometimes enlists even larger numbers for its conductor-less performances (see online Guardian article, October 28, 2010). It is a true expression of labor as “life’s prime want,” and a model for the “society of associated producers.” On the one hand, it defies usual expectations as to the range of styles it can master and as to the number of works it will perform on a given occasion; on the other, its members depend on other orchestras for their incomes.
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Wallis, V. (2020). On “Market Socialism” and the Soviet Experience. In: Socialist Practice. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35066-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35066-6_6
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