Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, A (original) (raw)
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Rothbard on Socialism in Theory and Practice
2003
[T] he extent of socialism in the present-day world is at the same time underestimatated in countries such as the United States and overestimated in Soviet Russia. It is underestimated because the expansion of government lending to private enterprise in the United States has been generally neglected, and we have seen that the lender, regardless of his legal status, is also an entrepreneur and part owner.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017
Marxists have viewed the task of socialism as the elimination of exploitation, defined in the Marxian manner in terms the excess of labor expended over of labor commanded. I argue that the concept of Marxian exploitation commits both type-one (false positives) and type-two (false negatives) errors as a diagnosis of distributive injustice: it misses instances of distributive injustice because they do not involve exploitation, and it calls some economic relations characterized by exploitation unjust when they are not. The most important reformulators of Marx's concept of socialism, which implicitly or explicitly attempt to correct the Marxian errors, are Oscar Lange,
1993
Here we base ourselves on the classical Marxist analysis of society. In Marx's view, the most basic distinguishing feature of different modes of social organisation is the manner in which they ensure the 'extraction of a surplus product' from the direct producers. This requires a little explanation. The 'necessary product', on this theory, is the product required to maintain and reproduce the workforce itself. This will take the form of consumer goods and services for the workers and their families, and the investment in plant, equipment and so on that is needed simply to maintain the society's means of production in working order. The 'surplus product', on the other hand, is that portion of social output used to maintain the non-producing members of society (a heterogeneous lot, ranging from the idle rich, to politicians, to the armed forces, to retired working people), plus that portion devoted to net expansion of the stock of means of production. Any society capable of supporting non-producing members, and of generating an economically progressive programme of net investment, must have some mechanism for compelling or inducing the direct producers to produce more than is needed simply to maintain themselves. The precise nature of this mechanism is, according to Marxist theory, the key to understanding the society as a whole-not just the 'economy', but also the general form of the state and of politics. Our claim is that the Soviet system put into effect a mode of Synopsis of the book In the remainder of this introduction we offer a synopsis of the main arguments to come, in the light of the problems and issues identified above. Chapters 1 and 2 tackle issues connected with inequality and inequity. The first gives an overview of the bases of inequality in capitalist society-bases which, as we have suggested above, social democratic amelioration is unable to eradicate. The
The End of Socialism, California Sociologist, 15, no. 1-2 (1992)
This paper argues that the events in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union force us to conduct a deep re-examination of the fundamental categories of Marxian theory to see whether in fact they stand the test of reality. It attempts to itemize preconditions for any such socialism or communism and isolate the conditions which, in the author's opinion, cannot be fulfilled. Based on that reexamination it argues that the classical Marxian vision of socialism or communism is no longer viable. Having made that critique, it considers alternatives to capitalism and argues that for the foreseeable future there is no viable alternative to the global market economy, although there are some very important and meaningful choices to be made for any society as it integrates into the global economy.
Monthly Review, 1989
Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is. Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the socalled civilized period of human history has-as is well known-been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class Albert Einstein, the world-famous physicist, contributed this article to the first issue of Monthly Review, which appeared in May 1949.