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The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism: Toward Global Democracy
Argues that, although the word "socialism" is widely held in disdain in current discourse about the world's past and its future, the idea of socialism as collective rationality and popular democracy is far from dead. Describes a spiral of capitalism and socialism, of economic expansion and social progress, that creates opportunities for positive transformation at the global level. Boswell is professor and chair of sociology at Emory University. Chase-Dunn is professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
281 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2000
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April 13, 2020
The best description of the book is "thought provoking". First a disclaimer: I am not a sociologist and my expectations were built upon the previous work of one of the authors, namely the "Global Formation" (GF). While I found GF to be very useful analytical framework which (IMHO) properly reflects the structural features of the modern world-system, I expected this work to fit withing it's constraints and arguments. This largely holds, but a number of points seem to be contradictory or at least downplayed.
The authors claim labour value theory has been discredited but give no reference to this claim. Rejecting the labour value theory allows them to redefine and downplay exploitation, and that in turn makes space for the argument for market socialism.
Most of the book explains how inefficient "Stalinist" command economy was, however there is no depth. One would think that a bit of depth would come in handy rather to reduce over 70 of history of socialism to cliches. To begin with, the "Stalinist" command economy stopped being "Stalinist" with Khruschev's reforms, and due to it's inefficiencies it also stopped being command/planned economy (just because the market was "black" and unofficial, it doesn't mean there was no market). Also, there is a long talk about waste and inefficiencies as well as ignoring the role of intellectuals, even though precisely the "Stalinist" economy did stimulate invention, less waste and the "upgrade" of workers (and peasants) to engineers (and agricultural engineers).
Most importantly, the whole market socialism would greatly benefit from an analysis of Yugoslav experience which reflected more or less the model advocated by the authors. This is rather important because of the side effects which market socialism reflected especially in it's phase of expansion and development. Most notably market socialism created all the side effects of capitalism: income gap, polarisation, creation of internal periphery and unequal development, nationalism and lack of solidarity, etc.
On the global level, the key question is how to overcome unequal development and exchange. This question is dealt only partially and it comes down to interest manipulation to stimulate investments in the Third World, while at the same time issuing coupons (to all working population of the world) which would allow Third World workers to have additional income based on their investments in exchange for the wage to remain the same and therefore guarantee the profitability of the investment (also to bear in mind that all enterprises are meant to be social property, that is the property of their workers). Interesting thought but if we consider that in order to overcome the gap between the core and periphery, the rate of economic growth has to be faster in the periphery then in the core region. It is unclear how draining the value from the periphery will produce faster growth there (but that just as well might be my problem of having limited capacity to understand the complexity of this case)–one would expect that the core would have to sacrifice part of it's surplus, but that's contrary to the capitalist logic which is the basis for any market even if socialist.
The most important question which is not properly presented in the book (appears more as a sidenot) is how to develop the socialist logic in a capitalist system. The market itself reproduces capitalist logic and, as Marx pointed out, socialism still represent bourgeois right. There is not much logic nor sense using capitalist logic to produce socialist rationality (as the Yugoslav example shows) which turns out to be just the argument of the author's point why socialist states did not manage to transform the world-system.
The authors claim labour value theory has been discredited but give no reference to this claim. Rejecting the labour value theory allows them to redefine and downplay exploitation, and that in turn makes space for the argument for market socialism.
Most of the book explains how inefficient "Stalinist" command economy was, however there is no depth. One would think that a bit of depth would come in handy rather to reduce over 70 of history of socialism to cliches. To begin with, the "Stalinist" command economy stopped being "Stalinist" with Khruschev's reforms, and due to it's inefficiencies it also stopped being command/planned economy (just because the market was "black" and unofficial, it doesn't mean there was no market). Also, there is a long talk about waste and inefficiencies as well as ignoring the role of intellectuals, even though precisely the "Stalinist" economy did stimulate invention, less waste and the "upgrade" of workers (and peasants) to engineers (and agricultural engineers).
Most importantly, the whole market socialism would greatly benefit from an analysis of Yugoslav experience which reflected more or less the model advocated by the authors. This is rather important because of the side effects which market socialism reflected especially in it's phase of expansion and development. Most notably market socialism created all the side effects of capitalism: income gap, polarisation, creation of internal periphery and unequal development, nationalism and lack of solidarity, etc.
On the global level, the key question is how to overcome unequal development and exchange. This question is dealt only partially and it comes down to interest manipulation to stimulate investments in the Third World, while at the same time issuing coupons (to all working population of the world) which would allow Third World workers to have additional income based on their investments in exchange for the wage to remain the same and therefore guarantee the profitability of the investment (also to bear in mind that all enterprises are meant to be social property, that is the property of their workers). Interesting thought but if we consider that in order to overcome the gap between the core and periphery, the rate of economic growth has to be faster in the periphery then in the core region. It is unclear how draining the value from the periphery will produce faster growth there (but that just as well might be my problem of having limited capacity to understand the complexity of this case)–one would expect that the core would have to sacrifice part of it's surplus, but that's contrary to the capitalist logic which is the basis for any market even if socialist.
The most important question which is not properly presented in the book (appears more as a sidenot) is how to develop the socialist logic in a capitalist system. The market itself reproduces capitalist logic and, as Marx pointed out, socialism still represent bourgeois right. There is not much logic nor sense using capitalist logic to produce socialist rationality (as the Yugoslav example shows) which turns out to be just the argument of the author's point why socialist states did not manage to transform the world-system.
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