Barkley Rosser — Who Is Really A Socialist? [Updated]

Barkley Rosser either makes a bad mistake in starting with Marx's definition of "socialism" as state-ownership of the means of production as exclusive, or he is carrying water for the ownership class that uses this arbitrary definition to demonize the opposition to its rent-seeking and parasitic rent extraction, e.g., by socializing negative externality, the result of which is now climate change. I suspect that he was shooting from the hip and shot himself in the foot instead of hitting his target. Disappointing for a smart guy. On the other hand, I often disagree with his analysis when it exceeds the scope of his field, which is economics within the scope of the conventional approach to it. Such is the case here, in my view, although he does bring it non-economic factors.

Wikipedia:

Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and workers' self-management of the means of production[10] as well as the political theories and movements associated with them.[11] Social ownership can be public, collective or cooperativeownership, or citizen ownership of equity.[12] There are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them,[13] with social ownership being the common element shared by its various forms.[5][14][15]

Socialist systems are divided into non-market and market forms.[16] Non-market socialism involves the substitution of factor markets and money with engineering and technical criteria based on calculation performed in-kind, thereby producing an economic mechanism that functions according to different economic laws from those of capitalism. Non-market socialism aims to circumvent the inefficiencies and crises traditionally associated with capital accumulation and the profit system.[25]By contrast, market socialism retains the use of monetary prices, factor markets and in some cases the profit motive, with respect to the operation of socially owned enterprises and the allocation of capital goods between them. Profits generated by these firms would be controlled directly by the workforce of each firm, or accrue to society at large in the form of a social dividend.[26][27][28] The socialist calculation debate concerns the feasibility and methods of resource allocation for a socialist system.

Socialist politics has been both internationalist and nationalist in orientation; organised through political parties and opposed to party politics; at times overlapping with trade unions, and at other times independent and critical of unions; and present in both industrialised and developing nations.[29] Originating within the socialist movement, social democracy has embraced a mixed economy with a market that includes substantial state intervention in the form of income redistribution, regulation, and a welfare state. Economic democracy proposes a sort of market socialism where there is more decentralized control of companies, currencies, investments, and natural resources.

In particular, critics of "socialism" that charge it is a failed system that history exposes as inferior ignore a factor that I regard as the most salient one, namely, the ferocious opposition and actual violent attacks of the capitalist, so-called liberal order  (read "bourgeois liberal" plutonomy)  on any hint of social power and control that would limit the power and control of the privileged elite and which imposes a dictatorship of the ruling class through their minions, behind a facade of representative democracy. In the US, for instance, the a bipartisan establishment is rife with corruption, much of it legalized.

Economists simply are not in a position to hold themselves out as experts capable of commenting definitively on these matters since they have put so many relevant factor beyond the scope of their subject matter. The result is an economics devoid of connection with reality.

In the real world, capitalism has been linked historically with imperialism and colonialism. Neoliberalism can be viewed as joined at the hip with neo-imperialism and neocolonialism. Neoconservative and liberal internationalism/interventionism are both based on "spreading freedom and democracy" which is equated with economic liberal as bourgeois liberalism, which is liberal chiefly in the sense that powerful elites are enabled by capture of the state to extract rent without limitation and to do so globally, backed by a powerful military and control of the global financial system.

This is becoming especially important now that "socialism" is becoming a hot topic and economists think that they are are in a position to be best informed about it and comment on it. That is not necessarily so. Very few have the breadth and depth of knowledge of Michael Hudson, for instance.

Socialism involves not only economics, but also other fields such as political theory, sociology, anthropology, history, general systems theory, psychology, and philosophy.

Oh, and did I forget physics, you know, like neoclassical economics is trying to imitate? See Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?

Is genuine socialism best characterized in terms of government that is actually "of the people, by the people and for the people" rather than being controlled by a ruling class and operated for special interests as a representative democracy under capitalism and the way the US was really organized under the Constitution?

Econospeak

Who Is Really A Socialist?
J. Barkley Rosser | Professor of Economics and Business Administration James Madison University

UPDATED

Yves Smith weighs in here. Useful in my view, but also incomplete. She also ignores the political aspect of external pressure, including threat of force and actual force, that I brought in above. It is very difficult to disentangle the social, political, financial and economic, especially when it involves key international and geopolitical input. Characterizing "socialism" based on such historical examples is naive, in my view.

For example, is Venezuela a "failed state" entirely owing to "socialist" policy or in part, even great part, owing to US pressure since Chavez, including a former coup attempt. Moreover, the sorry state that Venezuela was in prior to Chavez and which underlay his rise was a result of the comprador government that served as US puppet, a state to which is the US is working reestablish there. Simlarly, a great deal of Soviet and Red Chinese policy was a response to pressure, threat of force and actual application of force from the "free world" dominated by "capitalism" as the mortal enemy of "socialism"

Moreover, "capitalism" and "socialism" are such high level abstractions they are difficult to define technically in a way that can be measured quantitatively. And quantitative modeling is a sine qua non of science these days. Otherwise it is speculative in a way that is undecidable on data-based evidence. However, to reduce the problem to what is measurable often excludes material factors that are relevant. So the end-result is based on opinion, which famously suffers from cognitive bias, including ideological bias.