Abstract
It is not ‘market socialism’ and the application of economic calculus by individual state enterprises which is at issue, but the particular economic, social and institutional conditions under which so-called ‘market socialism’ is applied: It is indeed essential under socialism that state enterprises maximise some measure of profitability and respond to the structure of market demand. But this does not mean that socialist enterprises should apply economic calculus and cost accounting in the same way as under capitalism: In a capitalist enterprise wages are a cost of production which is to be minimised or kept down so as to increase the enterprise’s rate of return. The cost concepts and the social process of ‘keeping costs down’, therefore, are an expression of capitalist production relations which evidently are contradictory with the operation of an industrial enterprise under socialism.
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References
Premier Zhao Ziyang’s ‘Report on the Work of the Government’, Second Session of the Sixth National People’s Congress (NPC), 15 May 1984, Beijing Review XXVII:24 (1984), p. iv.
Mao Zedong, Selected Works vol. V, p. 290.
Provisional Regulations Concerning the Development and Protection of Socialist Competition’ adopted by the Executive Meeting of the State Council, 27 October 1980, in Almanac of China’s Economy, 1981 ( Hong Kong: Modern Cultural Company, 1982 ) p. 220.
Ibid., p. 221.
Ibid., p. 221.
P. M. Christensen, ‘Plan, Market or Cultural Revolution in China’, Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay), XVIII (7 May 1983 ), p. 649.
Ibid., p. 649.
Ma Hong, ‘On China’s New Strategy for Economic Development’ in Almanac of China’s Economy, 1981 p. 314.
Mao Zedong, Selected Works vol. V, p. 287.
Provisional Regulations Concerning the Development and Protection of Socialist Competition’, p. 221 (see note 3).
For further details see our analysis in chapters 7 and 8.
Under ‘socialist competition’ this process is said to lead to ‘socialist combination’ through consolidation, mergers, and so on, of ‘backward enterprises, that is, as part of the process of socialisation of production which ‘lays the material foundation for the consolidation and strengthening of the socialist system’. See Ma Hong, ‘On China’s New Strategy for Economic Development’, p. 315.
Oskar Lange and Fred M. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1938) reprinted in Wayne A. Leeman, Capitalism, Market Socialism and Central Planning ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963 ) p. 23.
Ibid., p. 23.
K. Marx, Capital Book III (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959) chapter 4.
Liao Jili, ‘Restructuring China’s Economic System’, in Almanac of China’s Economy, 1981 pp. 335–6 (my italics).
Ibid., p. 336.
See Zhao Ziyang ‘Report on the Sixth Five Year Plan’, Fifth Session of the Fifth National People’s Congress, 30 November 1982, in Fifth Session of the Fifth National People’s Congress(main documents) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1983) pp. 113–5.
Mr. Cardin Goes to China’, China Daily, 10 October 1981.
Economic Reporter (Hong Kong) (several issues), The China Business Review (several issues), see also State Statistical Bureau, Statistical Yearbook of China 1981 (English edition) (Hong Kong: Economic Information and Agency, 1982) pp. 5–21.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
K. Marx, Capital, Book II (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954 ), p. 407.
See P. Salama, ‘Vers un nouveau modèle d’ accumulation’, Critiques de l’économie politique, nos 16–17 (1974).
For further details, see Michel Chossudovsky ‘Underdevelopment and the Political Economy of Malnutrition and Ill Health’, International Journal of Health Services, XIII: 1 (1983) pp. 69–73.
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© 1986 Michel Chossudovsky
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Chossudovsky, M. (1986). ‘Market Socialism’ or ‘Market Capitalism’?. In: Towards Capitalist Restoration?. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18415-6_7
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