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Capitalism, Socialism,
Markets and Labour
In the 1970s I participated in debates on Marx’s value theory, arguing that Marx was not concerned to set up a model in which prices are determined by embodied labour in a way that can be depicted through a set of equations. Instead, I argued for a dialectical reading, that understood ‘value’, as used by Marx, as the concept of equivalence of different products which presupposed, and was underpinned by, the equivalence of different kinds of labour. This equivalence was produced by the treatment of all types of labour by owners of capital as merely ingredients in the production of profits (and thus labour became, in a real sense, abstract labour). This equivalence is never absolute and is in contradiction with the specificity of different kinds of products (use values) and labour (concrete labour).
I also made an intervention in Marxist debates about how to organize a socialist economy. Does socialism also require the abolition of markets, money and prices, with the economy coordinated entirely through central planning? Or is this both impossible, and undesirable, leading to concentration of too much power in the hands of the planning apparatus? I argued that money, prices and markets would need to be transformed so that they took a different form than they do in capitalist economies, a process I called “Socialization of the Market”.
Also published in German translation ‘Markt-Sozialismus oder Sozialisierung des Markets’, Prokla, No. 78, 1980; in French translation, ‘Pour la socialisation du marche’, Critique Communiste, No. 106-107, 1991; and in Spanish translation, ‘Socialismo de mercado o socialializacion del mercado?’, Inprecor, No. 78, 1990; reprinted in Cuadernos de Economia, Vol. XIV, No. 20 and 21, 1994.
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