Socialist Economic Development in the 21st Century

A Century after the Bolshevik Revolution

Alberto Gabriele, Elias Jabbour

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000545517
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Economía
• Categoría: Historia económica

Over a hundred years after the first socialist revolution broke the global monopoly of capitalism, a new class of socialist-oriented socioeconomic development is coming to the fore. Capitalism is still dominant worldwide, although its hegemony is no longer undisputed, and humankind is now faced with a key existential challenge. This book proposes an alternative path to overcoming the worldwide crisis of globalized capitalism. It offers a novel, balanced and historically rooted interpretation of the successes and failures of socialist economic construction throughout the last century.

The authors apply a multidisciplinary, holistic and purpose-based methodology to draw basic lessons from stylized facts, emerging in different areas of knowledge, ranging from political economy to biology, and from key national socioeconomic experiences, with a particular focus on China. The book is divided into three parts. The first is mainly theoretical and general in nature, identifying the major contributions bequeathed by the hard sciences to their social counterparts. Consistent with these findings, the authors offer a stylized interpretation of the contemporary state-of-the-art of the debate on the core concepts of economic science and advance a few elementary theories about what socialism in the 21st century could look like. The second and third parts analyze and discusses the core features of a few select experiences, which have evolved in certain countries since 1917, some of which are still unfolding.

The book will find an audience among academics, researchers and students in the fields of economics, political science, history, and geography, as well as, policy makers, particularly in developing countries.

Part I Capitalism and socialism as modes of production

1 Introduction to part I

DOI: 10.4324/9781003267355-2

Summary

1.1. Categories and concepts. – 1.2 Operational categories. – 1.3 Capitalism and primitive socialism under the meta-mode of production. – 1.4 Socialist-oriented socioeconomic formations. – Box 1.1. A non-dichotomist, heuristic concept of socialism: towards an index of socialistic development – Box 1.2. Socialist-oriented economies and socialist-oriented socioeconomic formations

1.1 Categories and concepts

In this work, we develop a somewhat novel and heterodox view of the global evolution of capitalism and socialism by critically extending the basic interpretative framework of the modern classical economic theory and proposing a partial reinterpretation of the category of the mode of production, in light of the lessons stemming from historical developments in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

We begin our journey by reviewing a number of key stylized facts emerging from recent developments in various scientific fields, which have traditionally been regarded as very distant from social sciences and political economy (see Chapter 2). We show that, when stock is taken jointly and judiciously of these major multidisciplinary findings, the overall weltanschauung underpinning the microfoundations of orthodox economic theory is untenably shaken. Therefore, we have to move the landmarks and boundaries of the range of thinkable and scientifically plausible evolution paths for the evolution of human societies. In this context, we focus in particular on the sub-set of emergent phenomena constituted by presently existing and (possibly) newly established economies that are significantly different from the classic capitalist model.

In this introductory section, we propose a few ancillary and taxonomic operational categories, which will be further developed and discussed in the following chapters, along with the (always debatable) concept of socialism in its entirety.

In this respect, a brief methodological and epistemic digression is warranted. The term category is to be understood in the Kantian sense of “ontological predicate,” meaning anything that can be said about an object. More specifically, we use the expression operational categories to refer to

the criteria and rules to formulate concepts that give support to the search and application of meaningful operations as procedures. Operational categories…specify the boundaries of replicability of the scientist’s actions regarding the production of facts and their communication to the members of the same linguistic community.

(Ribes-Iñesta 2003)

In the same work, Ribes-Iñesta also ingenuously clarifies the subtle semantic relationship among the terms concept, word, and category:

Scientific theories are special systems for building technical uses for words and expressions denotating and describing the conceptual objects and properties under analysis. The construction of a theory not only involves the identification of empirical referents, but also the definition of how words are used in relation to the properties and features of those referents to yield concepts. To do so, the function of concepts and expressions in scientific language is acknowledged in terms of the logical role they play regarding phenomena and events being referred to, described by, or defined by a theory. These logical boundaries delimiting the use or function of words as concepts are called ‘categories’

We welcome such a rigorous semantic approach and try to maintain a basic consistency with it in the remainder of this book. However, as our discourse often unfolds at a relatively low level of abstraction, we occasionally use the terms category and concept in a substantially interchangeable way.

1.2 Operational categories

The first operational categories we introduce are socialisticity and socialist orientation. The terms socialisticity (a noun) and socialistic (an adjective) are very ugly, yet they do exist in English and are useful. The adjective socialistic means in accordance with socialism, having the property of being socialist.¹ By construction, socialistic is a comparative adjective, which cannot be used in a dichotomous and absolute fashion (as opposed to the adjective socialist). That is, you can say that country A is moderately socialistic, or more socialistic than country B, but you cannot say country A is socialistic tout court.² Its origin is not a happy one, as it was introduced by Abalkin in 1988 to indicate the degree of approximation to what should be socialism, at a time when the USSR was already about to implode.³ However, Abalkin used the term only with reference to property rights, while in this work we employ it in a more holistic sense.⁴

Different from socialisticity and socialistic, the pair of terms socialist orientation and socialist-oriented are easily understood in their ordinary significance. Per se, they are rather vague, aspirational terms that refer to a moral, cultural, and voluntaristic attitude favorable to socialism. However, in the context of the argument developed in this book, we propose to attach to them an additional specific and dichotomous connotation. According to this connotation, an object is socialist-oriented or is not.⁵ We define as socialist-oriented those contemporary and formerly-existing national economies that comply with two necessary and sufficient conditions:

1. are (or were) run by political forces claiming officially and credibly to be engaged in a process aimed at establishing, strengthening, or improving and further developing a socialist socioeconomic system, and
2. can (or could) in fact be considered to be reasonably socialistic, i.e. to have advanced towards socialism along at least some (mainly positive) measurable dimensions in a multi-vectorial space representing key structural economic and social characteristics (see Box 1. 1).

Condition a) belongs to the political and historical domain. Therefore, the credibility caveat fully depends on the observer’s informed judgment on each country’s specific political-historical situation. Condition b), conversely, is predicated on quantitative socioeconomic evidence. Some of this evidence can be relatively straightforward to access (i.e., official statistics on the relative weight of public and private ownership in various sectors, human development indicators). Yet, a deeper, holistic interpretation of quantitative and qualitative evidence also depends, to a considerable extent, on the observer’s informed judgment. For instance, in the case of China, there is plenty of statistical information on State-Owned Enterprises SOEs and on industrial and technological policies. Yet, foreign and even Chinese observers markedly disagree on a key issue: whether or not the State exerts (directly and indirectly) a decisively hegemonic role in steering the national economy. This is obviously a crucial (although not exclusive) benchmark to gauge to which extent China’s economy can be considered socialistic.

We acknowledge that no definition of the term socialist-oriented is bound to be universally accepted. Even if this were the case, a fortiori, different observers would likely disagree among them when applying conditions a) and b) on a specific real-world economy. The most obvious example is again that of China. Even accepting in broad terms our definition, some observers would regard China as the most egregious instance of a socialist-oriented economy, and actually one that has advanced a lot towards becoming more socialistic in many domains. Others, however, would dismiss China’s official claims and declare strategic intentions as meaningless and cynical, and regard its socioeconomic fabric as one more authoritarian variant of market-based capitalism. Nevertheless, notwithstanding its caveat and limitations, we deem that the category of socialist-oriented economy fits our analytical goals, as it will become progressively clearer in the remainder of the book.

We now turn to the term Socioeconomic Formation (SEF). For the sake of this introduction, this term is to be understood straightforwardly as referring to a socioeconomic system endowed with a certain degree of internal consistency and stability, which historically prevails in a given locus identifiable in time and space, with the latter corresponding to a specific nation-state – i.e., a country.⁶ If they are (were) endowed with a sufficient degree of stability and resilience, socialist-oriented economies can be regarded as socialist-oriented SEFs.

In this respect, it is always important to remind that real-world socioeconomic systems only approximately match their abstract archetype. This token applies a fortiori to systems that have come to life historically as the product of long political struggles carried out by the teleological-oriented organization that put forward a strongly characterized project of societal change (as it is the case for those that originated from socialist revolutions).⁷

There are no examples of “pure,” or full socialism. This hardly surprising observation is obvious if socialism is understood in a very strong sense (according to the time-honored normative and humanistic cultural tradition of worldwide socialist and communist movements), as a state of things where major and demonstrable progress has already been achieved in all areas of societal life towards eliminating any form of need-dependency, exploitation, alienation, discrimination, and political or cultural repression, and towards an extraordinary expansion of the freedom of each individual along all her/his existential dimensions.

Alternatively, or complementarily, the property of being socialist might be understood in a much weaker sense, as applying exclusively to the domain of income/wealth distribution. According to such a far less ambitious criterion, a nation-state where the principle to each according to her work is universally applied and no forms of private property and of non-labor personal incomes exist⁸ could be regarded as fully socialist. It is clear that such a purely socialist distributional structure does not exist in any place in the contemporary world.⁹

Therefore, in order to avoid extreme nihilism, and to develop a discourse on socialism that is not blatantly anti-scientific, we maintain that the use of the apparently convoluted term socialist-oriented is often necessary to at least strive to approximate a realistic analysis of our subject.

1.3 Capitalism and primitive socialism under the meta-mode of production

Neither the US and the former leading imperial/colonial powers nor any small and middle-sized core industrialized country has ever embarked on a non-capitalist path.¹⁰ However, hard-fought historical progress in several areas – such as the quasi-universal¹¹ spread of core elements of the welfare state,¹² the formal (and, in part, substantial) overcoming of institutionalized racial and gender discriminations,¹³ and the expansion of sexual and reproductive freedom and of civil rights – profoundly improved the social conditions of working class majorities and underprivileged minorities in the North. Yet, many of these gains were subsequently lost¹⁴ with the advent of the “neoliberal”¹⁵ counterrevolution. The multiple evils of this setback are now self-evident: a progressive deterioration of income and wealth distribution has pushed back inequality to pre-war levels in most countries,¹⁶ paving the way for the present scenario characterized by social disruption, the rise of racism, and the substantial hollowing out of the traditional edifice of liberal democracy.

Socialism, as a mode of production,¹⁷ has taken roots only in some areas of the global South and is still in its infancy. Many large-scale revolutions have taken place in some areas of the periphery and semi-periphery, since the first decades of the past century.¹⁸ Various types of experimental forms of non-capitalist relations of production and exchange striving to overcome capitalist class power have been emerging, following an uneven pattern. Some of them eventually collapsed due to endogenous and exogenous factors,¹⁹ while others have proved resilient (at least so far), and new ones have emerged.

Embryonic forms of socialism – along with capitalism and pre-capitalist modes of production – are now present in some developing countries. Consistently, we refer to them as socialist-oriented SEFs, structured around relatively similar market-socialism models in spite of the very uneven level of development of their respective productive forces.

It can be cautiously and provisionally (due to the little time they have been in existence so far) posited that, in at least some of these countries, the present state of development will be seen in the future, with the benefit of hindsight, as having represented in fact a primitive stage of socialism.

As a result of the uneven and non-linear unfolding of historical processes in the center and the periphery, the contemporary world is characterized by the existence of multiple nation-states and various forms of inter-state cooperation and rivalry. However, taking into account the inescapable, yet evolving constraints imposed by the present global context, where international trade and financial relations are predominantly market-based, significantly different socioeconomic systems and super-structural articulations²⁰ are developing in various countries, ...