Thread

Preliminary comments: For the sake of this post I'm going to avoid as much as possible the more pure politics but there will be undoubtedly be some overlap. Also, excuse that some of these claims will be handled out of order as it's a bit easier to group them by subject matter. And finally, I'll do by best to avoid simply rehashing the great responses already laid out in /r/badsocialscience this thread.

But Saying it's "constantly evolving" is like saying "it's just a prank!" after smashing someone's car with a sledgehammer.

No, Marxism isn't "evolving", it's backpedaling and trying to distance itself from old theory. Repackaging central planning in a bow and gift wrapping paper - see people who think advances in computing power can solve the planning problem.

This is actually trivially false going all the way back to Marx himself. Peter Hudis' book, "Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism" as well as Ernest Screpanti's wonderful "Libertarian Communism: Marx, Engels and the Political Economy of Freedom" both go into this very subject in extreme detail but we'll take for granted the claim that "to deny that Marxist theory isn't inundated with central planning is completely revisionist" is correct and then go from there.

The earliest direct confrontations with central planning within Marxian theory comes from the early debates between Karl Kautsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg, presenting models of decentralized conceptions and Vladmir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky presenting centralized conceptions^[1][2]. This lead to some rather vicious public debates and culminated in Stalin's eventual purging of Bukharin for his public support of the continuation of the New Economic Policy which brought market reforms to the early Soviet government.

Another figure caught in the crossfire here from outside the economic realm was one of the leading Soviet legal theorists Evgeny Pashukanis. Following the Russian Revolution Pashukanis developed a thorough analysis of socialist legal theory that lead him to quickly rise through the ranks of the Communist Academy, eventually becoming its Vice President. He too, following Bukharin believed that the immediate goal of any socialist republic to be the dismantling of the state apparatus and decentralization of economic affairs. As economic reforms turned towards collectivization Pashukanis was purged and his ideas censored until his rehabilitation under the Khrushchev regime.

Due to the (apparent successes) of the early Soviet Union centralized economic political programmes enjoyed a lot of play within socialist circles of all types. Hell, even Sameulson as late as 1989 is quoted as saying, "Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that... a socialist command economy can function and even thrive." However, as early as Khrushchev's Destalinization program the cracks were becoming apparent and a wave of decentralization theorists and market socialists began to appear. Even as early as the 1930s with Lange's responses to Mises.

In another good contemporary outlining various disputes on this subject appears in Elster and Moene's Alternatives to Capitalism

There are plenty of examples and debates regarding the efficacy of central planning for any long-term Marxian political project from both within economics circles and more general social scientific circles.

Notice how I never said that. I never said the LTV is wrong because of Mao. I said that Marxian thought influenced Lenin and Mao. That Marxian scholars supported Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

Sure, and as outlined above and by others within /r/badsocialscience there were, and are, Marxian scholars who were highly critical of those regimes both on political and economic grounds. Pashukanis and Bukharin being two Marxist scholars who were critical of the regimes from within them. And critical in very direct ways, the latter being the early Soviet governments chief economic theorist and the one who suggested market reforms in response to the effects of War Communism and the Civil War. Luxemburg, from without, wrote one of the most famous early criticisms of the Leninist program and was fairly accurate of the trajectory of the Soviet government took from 1918 to its collapse.

This is just not a useful way of arguing an academic subject. It's actually the same argument taken up by Naomi Klien to argue against Milton Friedman.

Their best attempt so far (temporal single system interpretation) relies on the fact that Marx was infallible and utterly correct in making this mistake. It's farcical.

This isn't really an argument. While one of the leading and most popular proponents of the TSSI is a bit of an asshole (the papers between him and Laibmann are some classic academic trolling) that is not really a useful criticism. And, even if we assume the TSSI false it does not do away with alternative solutions to Marx's transformation procedures.

It shouldn't be underplayed that any solution to it certainly does have theoretical implications, (i.e. the classic Sweezy/Bortkiewicz solution does away with the TRPTF.) I'm not sure they're any more devastating than the problems raised during the Cambridge Capital Crisis but I would be lying if I weren't to admit I'm speaking out of my depth on that one.

[1] Abu F. Dowlah, (1992) "Theoretical Expositions of Centralized versus Decentralized Strands of Socialist Economic Systems", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 19 Iss: 7/8/9, pp.210 - 258

[2] Howard, M. C. & King, J. E.(2014). A History of Marxian Economics, Volume I: 1883-1929. Princeton: Princeton University Press