Query about Leftist / Socialist Economics

1. this is a socialist state. Yes its true. So called capitalism has yet to arrive..

2. most dispute are as to where the klepto crats need to put there hored

You might be surpised by what you find.

...Ah-hahahahahahah! Whew! Thanx for the laugh; 'economics' is all ideology, perhaps the purest distillation of burgeoise thought. capitalism is just another word for theft and murder, and the 'lefties' think they can redeem the system of exploitation by spreading the proceeds around a little more...if you want to amuse yourself re 'socialist economix', go to the ZNet site and read about 'parecon', it's a fine example of how even putative opponents of the system can't escape it's categories.

What does "ideology" mean? I always thought it meant the study of an idea. Silly me. So when you want to study an idea, like you said you do, then why do you want "no ideology"?

Socialism hasn't been allowed to exist for longer than a year or two, thanks to the US. "The threat of a good example" has been violently and covertly destroyed wherever it happens in the world. If an effective substitute to capitalism is found, then the US would be threatened with revolution. Can't have that, sez the CIA and NSA.

Venezuela is an example of Socialism right now, today. Study about it.

But if you want information about Socialism, check out:
 http://www.isreview.org/issues/32/crisis_theory.shtml

If you don't believe it, check out the primary sources in the footnotes. Marx was an innovative economist still respected today. No economist ignores Marx. he is not dismissable.

There are a lot of good analyses on that site:
 http://www.isreview.org/index.shtml

Why is everyone so unhelpful to what is obviously a genuine question? You can't say you're against this system when you revel in making others feel bad for not knowing all that you (think you) do. I'm not saying this becasue I have no grip on theory - anyone who knows me can confirm that I have flexible, engaging intellectual mind - but because I use theory responsibly. In other words, I use it in conjunction with our emotions, to help us all GET FREE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE - not to just make myself feel better than other folks.

Also, on a semantic point, "ideology" is meant by the poster (correct me if I'm wrong) to mean a system of ideas, etc., that assumes the answers to begin with and constructs an ediface around it for manipulative purposes. This is vastly removed from true theory, which starts from reality and then proposes answers at the very end. Ideology is mentally "closed" to reality, theory is "open".

OK, that little rant out of the way, Gringo is correct that Marx is indespensible to modern economic theories, whether or not you agree with everything he was about. Same is true of sociology. I would also HIGHLY recommend the work of Vandana Shiva, Indian ecofeminist scientist and activist. She is very good at uniting the emotive aspect of the struggle with an understanding of how things work.

1: go to google

2: type in: radical political economics

3: read many of the articles listed


but of course, all the aforementioned insight is valid as well, although a little childish sounding. economy is slavery and exploitation with a common denomination of money

Check out Dollars and Sense magazine. It is probably the best source of socialist economics for the non-economist.  http://www.dollarsandsense.org/

The following historical examples might be worth looking at:

- the Paris Commune of 1871

- Spain during the Civil War of the 30's

- the Krondstadt Uprising of 1921

- the 1956 Hungarian revolution

- the Black Panther's Free Breakfast Program, mutual aid involving hundreds of thousands

- the Autonomous Municipalities in Chiapas

- the current events in Bolivia and Argentina, in addition to Venezuela

While I don't agree with all his ideas, I think Michael Albert (of Z Magazine) has written most concretely on how to get to a socialist economy from here. It's a type of council communism for the information age. I can't recall the titles of his books, but do an Amazon or public library search for Michael Albert. More of us need to be asking these questions and actually understand economics if we are ever to run society for ourselves,

"Why is everyone so unhelpful to what is obviously a genuine question?"
I was beginning to wonder this myself.


"Also, on a semantic point, "ideology" is meant by the poster (correct me if I'm wrong) to mean a system of ideas, etc., that assumes the answers to begin with and constructs an ediface around it for manipulative purposes. This is vastly removed from true theory, which starts from reality and then proposes answers at the very end. Ideology is mentally "closed" to reality, theory is "open". "
Yes, that's basically what I meant, but put better than I would have. Instead of "not ideology" I should have written "not propaganda or insubstantial emotional appeal" or something like that.


"...'economics' is all ideology, perhaps the purest distillation of burgeoise thought. capitalism is just another word for theft and murder,..."
If I understand you at all, I don't agree. Of course there was economics before there was capitalism. Of course serfs, peasants, slave, and the proletariat (not just the bourgeoisie) can think terms of cash, or trade, or value.


"three easy steps
1: go to google
2: type in: radical political economics
3: read many of the articles listed"...
..."Go to Your Public Library
You might be surpised by what you find."

Yes, obviously I could use these sources. I was looking for insight, from people who might know, where to start and how to narrow my search. I was asking for you help, dipfucks.



So...for those who were actually helpful--thanks a lot.

Hmmmm...peaceful towards whom? as a citizen, your tax dollars pay for the slaughter and subjegation of people overseas, and the repression of folks here in your polity...at best, you are compliant, law-abiding, a 'good german'. Re 'serfs, peasants, slave, prols, boozhies', not only can they think in economic terms, their very definitions as 'serf, slave, etc' comes from being under the aegis of economics, they are subjects of leviathan. and you're quite right, there was economics (e.g. murder and theft) before the boozhies rationalized their system of plunder gave it a name and imposed it on the world. what i want you to grasp is that force underlies all economics, a fact that the bourgeoise try to obfuscate to the best of their ability, and that 'state socialists' (i.e. state capitalists) don't have 'different' economics, they just rationalize their imposition of it via a different ideology.

youre the dipfuck for not taking that crass advice and looking into it.

all those remarks that hurt your feelings were valid.... and so was your question.


learn from it

The fiction that science of any kind, economics included, is not ideology (as you define it) is absurd, and completely without ebasis in reality. I highly recommend a book by Thomas Kuhn called STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS which outlines the distinctly human habits of the real scientific world, including the huma or social sciences. All ideas do not come out of a high-minded vacuum of desires and goals, but rather out of a need to either challenge or justify current social norms.

Yes, even economists decide on their dogma and willfully defend it against unpleasant facts, no matter what their position, claiming all the while the holy mantle of objective non-partisan peer-reviewed science of the utmost quality. Yeah, right.

So good luck finding any economic analysis "without ideology" because that simply won't happen. ideologies are inherent in analyses because humans are involved. It's like asking for journalism "without bias" and is identical to the "objective journalism" fiction. If you do find a "non-ideological economic analysis" it is likely that the ideology is skillfully hidden, or that you haven't realized the full implications of that analysis quite yet.

There is a good deal of truth to that as well - but simply because there is no way to totally expunge ideological "patches" over gaps in our knowledge, doesn't mean all attempts to understand a problem or system are equally ideological.

To "Peaceful Citizen"

Whatever would economics without ideology mean? You say that you already have a leftist stance on economics but based on "just emotional reasons". I conclude that you actually are searching for an ideology -- that is what you need to go beyond your emotional reasons. So I think that you are needing an ideology, but you would rather not call it by that name.

On the other hand, you seem to want to get into what is usually called econometrics -- just the objective facts, especially about "places/times where a democratic socialist model was actually used." For that, I would refer you to just about any source on post-World War II Yugoslavia, where one of the highest economic growth rates ever achieved on a national scale was sustained for several years under Communist Party management -- so that means with all the problems you find of interest, for example, level income distribution. My source for that Yugoslavian example goes back to, for example, coverage in the National Geographic back in the 40's and 50's. It's pretty standard information. So, whatever myths you are hearing from within the mind-controlled environment of the USA, the fact is that militant socialism (what is generally called "communism") has been shown to be capable of producing enormous rates of economic growth. (Whether such "growth" is always a good thing, and the whole "Green" critique of growth based on resource exploitation, is another question, a whole 'nother level of looking at things -- but a level that must be confronted in any contemporary study of economic theory.)

My sense is that, although your common sense leads you to a positive view of the socialist alternative to capitalism, you have been fed a lot of horse puckey all your life as a result of living in the USA. And, of course, objective sources of economic data have not been made available to you. But you have to realize that you are seeking good hard economic data, meaning statistics. As Mark Twain famously observed, "There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics." I think that a good place to start is right here in the USA. Here you can compare your own real-life observations with what the media presents to you as the "reality." I recommend reading Paul Krugman, a columnist for the New York Times who is a major economist without an ideological axe to grind. (He is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton, with Ph.D. from MIT in 1977.) Krugman writes for the general reader in the NYT but you can go to his technical work behind that (more than 20 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals) if you have the time. The reason I point to Krugman is that he does reference the hard economic data sources that you would like to see and he provides a glimpse into that world, free of the usual pro-capitalist, pro-global-trade spin of the corporate media. But you have to be aware that data free of ideology is an elusive commodity -- and just that word ("commodity") should put you on notice what you are getting into. That's why I recommend that you always at least start close to home with your own observations and look to see if what you are reading corresponds with that. For other economies and countries, you might study Sweden and Cuba. I think another interesting study is contemporary Russia, where I recommend the neo-Marxist ("alternativy") group, led by Aleksandr Buzgalin. Available in English at:

 http://www.alternativy.ru/engish/texts.htm

For an overview that isn't particularly ideological, I highly recommend David Korten's web-site, especially for Korten's analysis of what Adam Smith actually did say. Korten's website:

 http://www.davidkorten.org/

That much should get you beyond your current mind-set where you are still considering questions within the confines of the power-elite-defined discussion: "Doesn't price fixing always fail? Won't levelling income distribution hurt the profit motive and therefore the overall economy? Won't increasing wages just lead to more unemployment?" Apparently, you know people who take Rush Limpaw seriously. Price-fixing always fails? It worked pretty good throughout World War II -- I think that the US won the war pretty handily although with strict price and wage controls throughout the economy. If you're talking about price-fixing by transnational corporations and combines thereof, well, they seem to be working okay if your objective is to keep high dividends flowing for the owners of big oil companies. That isn't hard to document.

About high wages causing unemployment, well, we had wages rising in real terms from the end of World War II until about 1980 and, at the same time, we had a pretty successful full-employment policy. I think that unemployment is a subject unto itself and you need to study it free of preconceptions such as the idea that increasing wages (in real terms) somehow must always lead to unemployment. That whole analysis (which has been and still is taught as dogma in typical college courses) that you have high wages causing high inflation and resulting in the boom-bust cycle of capitalism -- that has been mathematically proven wrong by Nobel-prize-winning economists over the last few years. Think about it in the context of your own reality: here we have tremendous inflationary pressures about to explode on us, but have you seen rising wages? Do you see any decrease in unemployment?

About income distribution (I suppose you are also talking about wage differentials) and the question of the profit motive, some confusion is evident here. The profit motive is something that applies to businesses and must be differentiated from the wage incentive. Wage differentials are generally, although not always, incorporated into socialist economies. You also have to consider the matter of what is made available in the non-market context of many socialist economies -- that is, available without regard to the differential ability of consumers to pay, and thus making the wage differentials of less importance. I suppose that you have been influenced by pseudo-Libertarian concepts of income "redistribution" and all you need to counter that is a little common-sense thinking and analysis. That's really a loaded question with the "hurt the profit motive and therefore the overall economy" -- wow! Talk about ideological crap confusing factual questions! Always go back to your own life and what you see around you. Do you really think that if the richest few percent of Americans had to give up the recent deficit-financed tax rebates, given them out of public coffers by the Bush administration/congress, that such income leveling would hurt the overall economy (which is already on the brink of disaster)?

Marx is excellent, and you really should study that whole thing, but for a somewhat different analysis from the fundamentals and on up, I recommend looking at the little-known work of Marina Bianchi and others, available on-line at:

 http://massera.interfree.it/index.html

and/or

 http://massera.interfree.it/The_Great_Mystification.html

Finally, I recommend that you not waste more time within the confines of the discussion that you seem to have gotten boxed into. Stick with YOUR common sense -- not with some cheap media imitation.

Thanks, "politics as impossible", that is really a lot more helpful than the earlier post by "cynical reader of economic history."

And thanks again to Yumi-chan, Gringo Stars, tsalagi red, Gustav.

And sorry all for my sloppiness with terminology and the brouhaha it led to. All I wanted was some recommendations on some sources