Quotessence
Home / Authors / Michael Ellman Biography

Michael Ellman Biography

Author

Related Quotes

“The role of money in the Soviet economy was limited by the fact that many consumer goods (housing, public transport, education, medical care) were basically allocated (or heavily subsidised) rather than sold at market prices. (Rents, fares and charges for medicines did exist, but they were relatively insignificant.) Because of this, and because of the fact that producer goods were rationed, money in the traditional model was not a universal medium of exchange. There were many things it could not buy.”

Money
Book:Socialist Planning
Create image

“According to Marxist–Leninist doctrine, the survival of money and financial flows in a socialist planned economy was something of an anomaly which would in due course disappear. Stalin assumed that in the higher phase of communism, when collective ownership would have disappeared and state ownership would have become universal, goods would circulate on the basis of direct product exchange (i.e. physical exchange without the intermediation of money).”

Money
Book:Socialist Planning
Create image

“The class struggle which, according to Marxists is one of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, is ultimately based, according to Marxism, on the division of society between the owners of the means of production and the proletarians who do not own the means of production, and have to sell their labour power to the capitalists. In order to overcome this contradiction, Marxists advocate the socialisation of the means of production. In the traditional model, socialisation is identified primarily with state ownership.”

Class StruggleSocialization
Book:Socialist Planning
Create image

“The political system in which the traditional model is embedded is a dictatorship, that is, a system in which the ruling group impose their will on society, and deal with opposition (real and imaginary) by repression (i.e. arrest, deportation, imprisonment, execution). This dictatorship was originally known as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. This formula expressed the idea that it was a dictatorship of the proletariat, by the proletariat, for the proletariat. Although the formula ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was abandoned in the USSR under Khrushchev, along with the Stalinist terror which it had been used to legitimate, it was retained elsewhere. For example, in China it is still orthodox. A ‘people’s democratic dictatorship’ is the officially favoured description of the political system in China, but in essence this is the same as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.”

Dictatorship Of The Proletariat
Book:Socialist Planning
Create image

“The dictatorship has important economic consequences. For one thing, it makes disasters more likely. Because feedback is suppressed by censorship and repression, it is much easier than would otherwise be the case to pursue policies which have disastrous consequences, such as the collectivisation of agriculture. Even when these policies lead to famine, the extent of the famine can be hidden by censorship and control over the movement of people. The leadership has an interest in hiding the extent of the famine so as not to undermine the image of the Glittering Future towards which the Party is supposedly leading society. It is not an accident that the worst famines of the twentieth century were in China and the USSR.”

Dictatorship Of The Proletariat
Book:Socialist Planning
Create image

“The fact that the state-socialist countries were backward countries desperate to catch up partly explains why it is that, instead of executing the legacy of Marx, i.e. of constructing an egalitarian, non-market society with a truly human organisation of the labour process and an end to the division of labour and the exploitation of man by man, they were actually mainly concerned with executing the legacy of Peter the Great, the Meiji Restoration and Feng Guifen.”

State Socialism
Book:Socialist Planning
Create image

“In the traditional model, the dominant form of ownership is state ownership. The state owns the land and all other natural resources and all the enterprises and their productive assets. Collective ownership (e.g. the property of collective farms) also exists, but plays a subsidiary role, and is expected to be temporary. In due course, it is expected to be transformed into the higher form of state ownership.”

State SocialismState OwnershipTraditional Model
Book:Socialist Planning
Create image

“The mistake the Bolsheviks made was not in aiming at the modernisation of Russia. That was entirely sensible. Nor was it a mistake to ascribe a major role in the economy to the state. This is quite normal in the modern world. Their mistake was to suppose that successful modernisation required the elimination of the market and of private enterprise. They did not realise the role that the market and private enterprise can play in generating and maintaining self-sustaining economic growth. Looking at all economic activity as if it were a zero-sum game was very one-sided. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks failed to realise that for the state to attempt to micromanage every farm, factory and office is a very inefficient form of management, that wastes information and potential local initiatives and entrepreneurship. Furthermore, coercion tends, in general, to be less effective than market incentives in raising labour productivity, and to be indifferent to human suffering and loss of life (see Chapters 6 and 7).”

BolsheviksModernization
Book:Socialist Planning
Create image