Kornai János: From Socialism to Capitalism. Eight Essays (Budapest, 2008) / angol nyelven
3 Market Socialism? Socialist Market Economy?
STUDY 5 Marx certainly did not advocate any brutal, repressive, totalitarian Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist state. Nevertheless, dictatorship was not incompatible with Marx, at least as applied to an indefinite period of transition to communism.4 Ownership. Marx’s thoughts are the following: under the capitalist system, productive assets are owned and managed by the capitalists. The capitalist class exploits the proletariat because it consists, not of mercilessly cruel people, but of the legal owners of capital. So the world has to be changed—it is time to expropriate the expropriators. It emerges from this train of thought that Marx and Engels were opting for public ownership. “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class...” (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto [1848] 1969). But they did not specify the route to complete centralization of all means of production in the state’s hands or the institutional framework of public ownership. In any case, Marx had a strong position on the ownership issue. In the Communist Manifesto, he expressed high appreciation of the progressive role played by early capitalism in cleansing society from the remnants of feudalism. But that period was over and capitalists had become a hindrance to progress. He made no fine distinctions between capitalists great and small. He simply wanted capitalism to give way to a new, more productive system. Coordination mechanism. The three huge volumes of Capital are devoted to the study of the market economy. Marx’s scholarly interest is focused on understanding of how the market works. His summary verdict is in stark contrast to that of his admired predecessor in classical economics, Adam Smith. Smith had great respect for the 4 Marx and Engels already wrote in the Communist Manifesto that the proletariat would assume “political supremacy” after the victorious revolution. Later, Engels formulated the Marxist position in this way: “...the necessity of the political action of the proletariat and of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the transitional stage to the abolition of classes and with them of the state...” (Engels [1872] 1976, p. 370). Lenin quoted the words of Marx and Engels with great emphasis in his famous book State and Revolution ([1917] 1964 1972a), which laid the groundwork for constructing the Leninist theory on the state and dictatorship. He wanted to demonstrate a theoretical continuity between the ideas of Marx and Engels and his own thoughts on the issues of creating dictatorship and rejecting.