How Crises Shaped Economic Ideas and Policies by Nicos Christodoulakis

Author:Nicos Christodoulakis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

8.3.3 Structure of the Communist Economy

The economic theory developed by Marx and Engels was castigating capitalism in every possible manifestation but on the system that would come to replace it no specific outline was uttered. Several great economic thinkers were fortunate enough to witness the application of their theories during lifetime. For example, Adam Smith saw the rapid growth of the market economy, Ricardo witnessed the abolition of tariffs, Keynes saw his advice about state intervention heeded by policy makers, Friedman’s theories were frequently adopted by monetary authorities, and the same goes for Mandel’s theory on monetary unions. In this way, the founding fathers had not only the satisfaction to see their ideas being put in practice but also the opportunity to intervene and comment upon. The founders of Marxist economic theory, however, did not live long enough to oversee the implementation of their theories in any society.13

Their argument on the communist mode of production and the interim socialist system focused mainly on how workers would benefit, since the exploitation and the mechanisms oppressing their class would have come to an end. However, on the crucial point of how production and distribution should be organized under communism, original Marxist theory was vague and uninformative. The undisputed legacy they left was that capitalism would be ultimately replaced by communism; a system where the working class takes over production and operates under the principle “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”. Communism presupposes the abolition of the state and its authority, but as this goal was not considered immediately feasible, an interim “socialist state” is necessary where individual property of the means of production is abolished and substituted by state property, thus the unsavory capitalistic profit is uprooted anyway. Some core principles are prescribed in the Communist Manifesto, fervently written in the midst of the social revolutions of 1848 in Europe.

Thus the question of how exactly to implement Marxism was left for self-appointed successors to provide an answer. The latter formed numerous schools of thought and proposed a great number of alternative practices. Internal conflicts were frequent, sometimes violent and deadly, as each one claimed to represent the original Marxist theory and authoritatively express the vision and prognostications of its founders. The most extensive and long-lasting economic system implemented in the name of Marxist theory was the model of centrally planned economy adopted during the twentieth century initially in the Soviet Union, and later in China and several East European countries.

Some argue that none of the analysis and evaluation of this system say anything about the original Marxist theory; they also claim that central economic planning and the uncontested rule of the communist party are alien to the theory of Marx and Engels. Nonetheless, the communist regimes are the only real life cases that can be used to evaluate communism empirically. All alternative approaches are hypothetical and imaginary, having no practical use for testing and evaluating the theory. A crucial aspect to test the validity of the

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