Review of Radical Political Economics

This article presents a Marxist critique of the Cambridge school, focussing particularly on the work of Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson. Taking issue with those who see Cambridge economics as a contribution in the Marxian tradition, the author stresses the differences between the approaches of Marx and the Cantabrigians. After pointing out that the latter view history in a non-Marxian way, he goes on to argue that their economics has the effect of mystifying the basic social relations of capitalism. Finally, it is noted that Cambridge economics leads to a political strategy which aims at improving the distribution of income without altering the hierarchical structure of capitalist production.

This article focuses on the relationship between the construction of socialism and the use of sophisticated optimization techniques to formulate and execute a plan in a planned socialist economy. Many economists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have advocated reform of the planning mechanism from the perspective of promoting a more efficient use of resources through the increased use of techniques such as linear programming. It is argued that linear programming techniques may improve upon rule of thumb approaches to plan formulation and execution in some local situations. How ever, the extension of such techniques to an entire economy in an integrated fashion, often called optimal planning, obscures one of the fundamental problems of socialist political economy — the relationship between the planning mechanism and the construction of socialism.

The use of the market mechanism against the background of socialist institutions is not inconsistent with the values that define a socialist economy. The market as an allocative device neither entails material incentives of a bourgeois sort nor need it result in a radically unequal distribution of wealth and power. And contrary to the theoretically inadequate and empirically mistaken thesis of technological determinism, the market emphasis on efficiency need not result in an authoritarian organization of the workplace, fragmentation of work, or any other manifestations of alienated labor. Market socialism captures the advantages of the market minus its capitalist shortcomings.

This note deals with an experience in teaching one course in Principles of Economics at South Central Community College in New Haven, Connecticut. An attempt to radicalize the pedagogy and the content, utilizing Friere's techiques, was resisted by the students, all working class people. The conclusions drawn are: (1) working class stu dents face a contradiction that is not part of the experience of bourgeois students — altering approaches and conditions (even in courses) carry real risks; and (2) praxis and pedagogy must be differentiated along class lines of both the students and instructor.