Kari Polanyi-Levitt, Some Notes on an Article by Karl Polanyi on Socialist Calculability (Accountancy), 1924: Difference between revisions

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== Text Informations ==
== Text Informations ==
'''Reference''':<br />
'''Reference''':<br />
'''Date''': 1986<br />
'''[[KPA]]''': [[02/15]], 21-28<br />
'''[[KPA]]''': [[02/15]], 21-28<br />

Latest revision as of 00:52, 1 August 2020

The appended version of the rejoinder by Polanyi to a critique by L. von Mises and Dr. F. Weil of his previous article entitled “Sozialistische Rechnungslegung (Socialist Economic Accounting) published in the leading German language learned journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, (Vienna, 1922), is a carefully translated as possible, given my knowledge of the German language, and the inevitable time constraints. The original German version is available and I very much welcome correction and improvement of the translation. (Kurt - please???) The critique by von Mises of Polanyi's article of 1922 was published in the same journal under the title “Some recent contributions to the problem of socialist economic calculability" (Vol. 51, 1923), while that by Dr. F. Weil was entitled "Guild socialist Accountancy" (Vol. 52, 1924).

Margie and I have undertaken to produce a thematic treatment of the social philosophy of Karl Polanyi, as drawn from the totality of his writing, and placed within the context of events and the debates in which he participated. The present note is written in haste and inadequately attempts to indicate something of the content which informs the translated piece.

In the 1920s Ludwig von Mises inherited the mantle of principal guru of the so-called Austrian School of Economics, founded by Menger, Wiesen (sic) and Böhm-Bawerk. As professor of economics at the (then) prestigious University of Vienna he vulgarized the teachings of the founders of that school, and set it on an ideological course associated with the advocacy of liberal free enterprise capitalism. […]


Text in English to type

In fact, Menger, Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk were in no way advocates of free enterprise capitalism, and their insights into the functioning of a complex economy could have been a point of departure for the construction of a positive theory of a planned socialist economy rather than an apologia for liberal capitalism. We note in passing that the intellectual roots of the interventionist approach to development planning of underdeveloped regions of the 1950s as elaborated by P. Rosenstein-Rodan (of Vienna) are firmly based in the Austrian School of Economics. [See Rosenstein-Rodan and S. Avramoric in Pioneers in Development, 1984]. The theoretic framework underlying the work of J. Schumpeter also derives from the Austrian School.

The intellectual dishonesty practised by Hayek and Robbins in the late 1930s regarding Menger's work was noticed by Polanyi in England … […]

An unpublished monograph length manuscript by Felix Schaffer (sic) of the University of Wellington (?), N.Z. is invaluable in its detailed account of Polanyi's careful reading of the work of the Austrian economists in the period 1924-1930 and the development of his work on "socialist accountancy". Schaffer prepared a …

The differences are ultimately more important and Polanyi's technical difficulties with the specification of a functionalist model of a socialist economy are ultimately less interesting than the social philosophy which lies behind the model. Here we provisionally identify the following themes:

1) The rejection of market relations as unfree ("unfrei") in the sense of lacking "transparency". This directly derives from Marx, who explained, more clearly than anybody before or since, that capitalist relations of production are alienating in the sense that the human relations, which lie behind production and consumption, appear as the impersonal exchange of things ("commodity fetishism"). In a market economy man is "unfree".

2) The rejection of the centralized "collectivist" model of socialism (so-called command economy) as undesirable. Polanyi favoured a "syndicalist" organization of socialist society; thus, his admiration for Cole's Guild Socialism, and his bias toward the "view from below".

3) The desire to construct a positive theory of a socialist society, where the abolition of class antagonisms would open the way for the exercise of a measure of free will and social responsibility by citizens in their several capacities, principally as members of the community and consumers on the one hand, and workers (producers) on the other. Underlying this perspective was a regard for the sanctity of the individual, rooted in a humanistic, anti-clerical, Christian philosophy, which led him to reject economic liberalism as oppressive, likewise to reject, from early mechanistic and economistic versions of orthodox Marxism, political organization which substitutes the rule of the state or hegemonic (Vanguard)part over citizens and workers.

Text Informations

Reference:
Date: 1986
KPA: 02/15, 21-28