From Monthly Review, via A Glimpse of the World:
Market Socialism: Utopian or Historical?
The idea of market socialism has become a major field of interest among political theorists, sociologists, and economists on the left. Even as proponents have devised many ways in which socialist values may be combined with market mechanisms, critics have expressed doubts whether such models can be coherent, or whether they are desirable or even feasible after all. In a well-known exchange between Ernest Mandel and Alec Nove, Mandel”a key critic of market socialism”insisted that the debate was concerned neither with reform strategies in given societies nor with the malfunctions which the market is meant to fix, not even with analyzing the possible directions of change; rather, in Mandel’s words:
Our controversy turns only around two questions: whether socialism as conceived by Marx”i.e. a society ruled by freely associated producers, in which commodity production (market economy), social classes, and the state have withered away”is feasible, and whether it is desirable. But processes of history surely should matter much more, and that is where we should focus our attention.
Yiching Wu was born and educated in the People’s Republic of China. He is currently completing a dissertation on Chinese intellectual politics and social movements, at the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago. For comments and criticisms, please contact him at yw16@uchicago.edu.
