In še pregled radikalnih / marksističnih prispevkov na ASSA. Zanimivi so prispevki o tem, ali je problem sedanjega kapitalizma v tem, da je finančni neo-fevdalni kapitalizem zamenjal industrijskega. In prispevki o tem, zakaj se Kitajska še vedno (že 4 desetletja) tako uspešno spoprijema s pastmi kapitalizma in tudi z enkratnimi šoki, kot je korona epidemija. Odgovor je, iz maksističnega vidika, seveda znan: ker uspešno planira in plansko ureja, za razliko od “kapitalističnih držav”, ki alokacijo resursov in urejanje delovanja države prepuščajo večinoma trgu:
Finally, there was a session on ‘post-capitalist futures’ which, I think, exposed how market economies cannot cope with pandemics and reinforced the need for democratic socialist planning of economies. Robin Hahnel and Mitchell Szczepanczyk presented the results of their innovative attempt to model democratic annual planning in a post-capitalist economy. ComputerSimulationExperimentsOfParti_powerpoint Through iterative computer simulations of the planning process from local to central level and back, using a new computer coding technique, they found that it would not take a long at all to reach a feasible and practical annual plan to meet social needs with available resources which involved the participation and democratic decisions of people.
This was another compelling refutation of the critique made by neoclassical pro-market theorists like Von Mises and Hayek; and Keynesian pro-market social democrats like Alec Nove who argued that socialist planning was infeasible because there were just too many calculations to make. Only the invisible hand of the market and market pricing could do this. This paper showed that this was not true, especially now with the advances in computer programming. Democratic socialist planning can work and can replace market chaos.
At the annual conference of the American Economics Association (ASSA), there are sessions hosted by the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) for Marxist and other heterodox economists to present papers.
At this year’s ASSA 2021, many of the URPE sessions were concerned with the economic impact of COVID-19 and climate change, as did the mainstream sessions, but, of course, from a different perspective. But before I look at those sessions, let me start with the annual David Gordon lecture presented by a different radical economist each year.
This year it was Michael Hudson who gave the lecture. Hudson is a longstanding radical economist with a wide reputation. He considers himself a classical’ economist. His theme for the lecture was Has Finance Capitalism Destroyed Industrial Capitalism? Hudson argued that capitalism started as a progressive force in developing the productive forces because it was industrial capitalism. But since the 1980s…
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