Originally Posted by
TheTexan
Found this review of Occam's book on Amazon. 1/5 stars.
Occam's Banana's argument within One True Path to LibertyŽ has little relevancy to the failings of 'central planning', nor does his definition and treatment of socialism as such seem to be anything other than an apologetic reaction. This is not because central planning itself was not a failure, but instead because the theoretical framework which he holds to deduce this failure is untenable. Occam's Banana holds fundamental assumptions, the pivot around which his greater critique rests, that are found to be deeply wanting. The first, which is a mere prelude to the second, is his assumption of the role and function of money. Occam's Banana holds to the notion that money can only arise and function through 'the free interaction of individuals'. This single statement is riddled with complexity and means nothing in and of itself - however at the same time it is the general key to understanding the entire method employed by Occam's Banana in examining questions of political economy.
After deconstructing it to the appropriate level, it simply means that money in a society not based on 'free exchange' will be arbitrary; i.e. will not represent price in accordance with an aggregation of individual choices. This begs the question, however - are prices formed on the market reflective of individual choice? Is the market mechanism the independent variable in price formation? Thus the problem has nothing to do with whether the state of the economy is in 'equilibrium' at any point in time - an argument that takes place between the Neoclassical tradition and everyone else - but whether prices are reflective of an aggregation of information of individual choices which takes its shape on the market. This cannot be true because the 'price mechanism', by which he means supply and demand relations on the market, is itself derivative of the accumulation and distributive process in capitalist production. Market relations, that is price relations, derive their shape at any point in time from the quantity of surplus value actually produced and its distribution. What appears to be the regulating force of individuals by virtue of their own self interested actions, i.e., the market mechanism of supply and demand, is in reality the superficial appearance that conceals the fact that the market mechanism itself is regulated by the capitalist class as a whole through their unique control of the process of accumulation. The distribution of surplus value is in turn conditioned on the mutual relations of economic classes and their relative economic positions. As these are socio-political relations, i.e., a they do not take place not on the market through marginalist 'analysis', it follows that whatever takes place on the market can take place only within the boundaries which events in the sphere of production (accumulation) and the peculiarities of the distribution of the social product (socio-political) establish.
The classicsts in general, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and their destructor, Karl Marx, shared in common this notion that distribution was something that happened not on the market but as a result of socio-political factors within their own historical context. Thus. the degeneration of economic theory finds its height in the attempted micro-aggregation of phenomena that are rooted in social relations, such as the determination of wages by the marginal disutility of labor interacting with the marginal productivity of capital, that this tradition represents. The main issue I see with this text is the audacity of basing an argument on the complexity of the price mechanism on the market without having an adequate description of the functioning and determinants of the price system itself. Of secondary importance is the fact that the problem was and is dynamism - the capitalist system, for all its faults, has proven to be extremely capable of espousing change. Planned economies could easily function as a refined form of redistribution, of simple reproduction or even reproduction with a surplus, which would be built off of the form of redistribution that lasted far longer than any form of capitalism has - Feudal societies allowed for reproduction, else we would not be here. What is in question here is not if they can exist or not based on some immutable laws, and not even so much the extent to which the technical structure allows for it, but whether or not the political structure is able to handle such responsibility without degenerating. This tradition not only opposes any political progression but hinders it because they consistently attempt to strip it of its legitimacy by contrasting a perfectly functioning economic system derived from the interaction of 'free' (by which they mean isolated) individuals with our own real social existence. This is called a self-fulfilling prophecy. This book is ultimately the basis for this line of thinking - in terms of immutable laws in the abstract that contrast the very existence we see in front of us. Ultimately, Occam's Banana's fiction is a far shot from the essence of not only socialism, but our material existence as well. His depiction of the former seems far more inline with state-capitalism, which is not only 'possible' but is an adequate first description of most of the twentieth century. In this indirect sense, his philosophical opposition to the centralization that capital had produced, and its constraining effects on freedoms, were quite correct. It is a shame he did not apply his critical mind to his own theology. The point which his entire argument within this book pivots, that central planning would fail because of the lack of a price system, reflects his methodology of simple cause and effect relationships on the individual level from which he believes all economic phenomena are derived.
What I find ironic from this forum, however, is that Occam's Banana has built a following of zealots that rivals the radical Marxists. If you are a follower and this offends you, I assume you recognize that your dashing and simplistic categorizations of 'socialists' offends them just the same. Perhaps you should actually read Capital or many of its offspring's before you come to dangerous conclusions. Capital is about capitalism, not socialism. For those of you not willing to read Marx, I would recommend Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy - specifically his section on Capitalism, as the rest of the book is superfluous (also for those not simply under the constraints of time). Schumpeter was an adamant defender of capitalism and a lousy horseman. His work gets to the heart of the virtues and strengths of Capitalism, center stage for him being the entrepreneur's role in innovating the means of production. If you are serious and not only interested in the defense of your ideology, I recommend it over this. Of course, I recommend Capital over both...I simply am under no illusions that anyone on this thread will actually take me up on that.
So, in conclusion I do recommend that everyone who plans to read this also challenge their mind and conventional wisdom with reading its counterparts, some of which I recommended above, to get a clear idea of what the real issues with both are. As for many of the other reviewers on this book, I find all these five star reviews very one sided. I would wager that they are all in one way or another affiliated with the Occam's Banana institute or the Austrian school in general. The plain fact is that Marx's socio-historic basis for his argument, whether one agrees with it or not, goes far beyond what Occam's Banana even touches in this text. The Socialist critique has no quarrels with markets or 'freedom', but the perversion of those elements when confined to the capitalist mode of production in which their product is concentration and centralization of power.
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