Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique, Verso £12.99 "THE TRAJECTORY of much of the left in the aftermath of the collapse of Stalinism has been...towards accommodation with liberalism, as if to try and fit in with the dominant ideological discourse is the best way to preserve critical thought. The result has been a series of efforts to depict socialism as little more than spruced up liberalism." SO SAYS Dave McNally, and never was a truer word written.
Marxists are currently experiencing the high tide of liberalism in the movements of the working class and the oppressed.
Assailed by 'internationalists' for the creation of a (west) European capitalist superstate, Marxists in favour of a vote for Liberal Democrats (see Robin Blackburn 'Ruins of Westminster' in New Left Review, April 1992), feminists for pornography and a whole gaggle of ex-revolutionaries mesmerised by the constitutionalism of Charter 88 and notions of individual liberty as the road to freedom, it is hard to know where to begin.
David McNally tackles one aspect of this. What began as a trickle with Alec Nove's The Economics of a Feasible Socialism has now developed into a flood of socialists who think that market socialism is the way forward.
For McNally, whether it is called 'market socialism' or 'democratising the market' or 'socialised markets', it all adds up to the same thing - a fatal concession to bourgeois political economy which undermines the socialist project. The man has a point.
McNally's exposition of the case against markets has the virtue of being both clearly written and historically situated.
Taking time to describe the Market ideology is the result of class policy case that the market was not a natural product of feudalism but had to be organised and legislated for.
The 'free' market was, he argues, the product of class policy and class power. As Karl Polanyi put it: 'Laissezfaire was planned'.
To establish this is necessary to examine McNally's classically marxist thesis that there is nothing natural or simply technical about the market - it a social product of class relations and is posited on the free market in labour power.
The argument within economics over the nature of capitalism and its market relations was taken up in earnest by Adam Smith who wished to add 'old ethics' to 'new economics. Smith assumed that the market would inevitable increase both employment and wages.
Sociability
Thus, in this book a different Smith emerges. One that rejects 'the selfishness school' and believes in humanity as having 'natural sociability'. This is a long way from the Smith described by Malthus, Hayek, Freidman or Thatcher, who, McNally asserts, hijacked Smith for their own ends.
The core of the book is the struggle of many radical economists to develop a coherent egalitarian theory out of the body of political economy as it existed in the 19th cenErnest Mandel; 'Resisiting high tide of liberalism and idealism' tury.
That fight was really joined when Malthus took up the commercial aspects of Smith's work to attack the idea that there was any right to subsistence - and in doing so undermined the 'moral economy' of the labouring classes.
This was Smith without the old ethics and led directly to the legislation which produced the workhouse in the 1830s. The idea was to make the workhouse the last resort, to make unemployment as uncomfortable as possible.
A whole series of radical economists responded to this attack. Spence, Cobbett, Owen, Thompson, Gray, Bray and many others attempted to construct a radical alternative. The problem, as McNally sees it, and this is the problem of M FOI tool for equal exchange.
In this pre-Marxist radical view of the world, put crudely, capitalists are seen as parasitic and it is their intervention in the process of exchange, trade and usury which is the root of exploitation. Thus it is directors, brokers, jobbers and other non-productive capitalists who are the problem.
Such an analysis, which missed the fundamental point that it was exploitation of labour power that was the root of inequality and class society, lead to the formation of co-operatives and labour exchanges in the early 1830s under the impact of the Owenite movement and campaigns for price reform.
Unable to exist as an island of socialism in a sea of capitalism the co-operatives and labour exchanges failed.
This whole discussion is illuminating and it is dealt with at length, precisely because those who wish to democratise the market today are seemingly unaware of it. Also they appear to be unaware of Marx's debate with Proudhon, the chief theorist of petty bourgeois socialism.
This discussion is used to validate key aspects of Marx's critique and to show that it is impossible to have equal exchange as long as private property exists; and that markets only exist in the context of the exploitation of labour power.
This may sound complex but it is worth wading through because it underlines the extent of the capitulation that is being made by those who advance the market mechanism as a system of regulation in socialist society.
Taken to task
It is to this that McNally turns in his last chapter. Here Robin Blackburn, Diane Elson and Alec Nove amongst others are taken to task for suggesting that the market could be the key economic mechanism in a socialist society and outlines how the problems of production, distribution and investment might be resolved in a socialism that did not make concessions to the market.
The problem with this section is that McNally reveals his 'state capitalist' origins. In one sense this can be avoided by simply not reading pages 180 to 188 of the book where the reader is subjected to an embarrassing attempt to make the state capitalist theory of the Soviet Union fit with the previous 180 pages. By omitting this section the book becomes more coherent.
Despite this failing, this book should join the growing list of theorists such as Ellen Meiksins Wood, Norman Geras, Terry Eagleton, Sheila Jeffries and Ernest Mandel who, in very different ways, are resisting the high tide of liberalism and idealism and defending the materialist analysis of history. It deserves to be read. International Marxist Reviow 14
equal exchange as long as private property exists