Re-Envisioning Socialism Contributor(s): Patnaik, Prabhat (Author) |
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ISBN: 8189487965 ISBN-13: 9788189487966 Publisher: Tulika Books OUR PRICE: $21.78 Product Type: Paperback Published: April 2012 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Political Science | Political Ideologies - Communism, Post-communism & Socialism - Business & Economics | Economics - Theory - Political Science | Political Economy |
Physical Information: 0.6" H x 6.2" W x 9.4" (1.00 lbs) 284 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: The papers in this volume are informed by a perception that can be summarized as follows. A capitalist economy is a self-driven or 'spontaneous' system. State intervention in its functioning, driven by political compulsions, tends to make it dysfunctional. This necessitates either further interventions, leading to a transcendence of the system itself, or a progressive slide-back to the pre-intervention state. To say this is not to suggest that capitalism does not need the state. It does, not only for the maintenance of capitalist property relations and for providing it with the external, precapitalist surroundings that are necessary for its functioning; but also for accelerating, through its intervention, its immanent tendencies. But state intervention that is contrary to its immanent tendencies makes capitalism dysfunctional, setting up a dialectics either of subversion of or subservience to the logic of capital. It follows that all the shibboleths of capitalism, namely freedom, democracy and individual subjectivity, are actually unachievable under capitalism. They can be realized only if the spontaneity of the economic terrain is broken through the coming into being of socialism, where the nature of property relations is such that people can shape their economic lives through collective political intervention. The case for socialism arises precisely because capitalism is not a malleable but a spontaneous system. |