Giuseppe Freni - Economic Theory and its History

Hobsbawm has written that historians, while drawing a clear-cut distinction between Marxists and non-Marxists and concerning themselves preferably with the former, have actually widened this group through the inclusion of a large selection of authors. In point of fact, he argued, this distinction is necessary if we are to write a reliable history of Marxism (see Hobsbawm, 1979, 61). In our opinion, instead, the most shared opinion is that the line separating what is Marxist from what is not has been progressively blurred. Maxime Rodinson (1969, 9), for instance, has remarked that, despite the efforts of Marx and Marxists to prove previous philosophical systems wrong, it is far from easy to pinpoint what exactly distinguishes the Marxist approach, and some commentators trace this fact to the involvement of an increasing number of intellectuals in academic research on Marxism. Indeed, an attentive Marx commentator such as Rubel has gone so far as to deny the legitimacy of terms such as Marxian or Marxist (see Rubel, 1974, 2021).

With specific regard to their approach to the next social order, Marxists fall into two broad divisions: those who describe socialism as a command economy founded on planning and those who assume that the correct Marxian view of a socialist economy is one which equates socialism with self-management.

In this paper, we will be arguing that the establishment of a system of cooperative firms reversing the current capitallabour relation is tantamount to a revolution, in that it results in the introduction of a new production mode. Subsequently, we will raise the question: is the idea of a revolution enacted by peaceful and democratic means and in successive steps until worker-managed firms outnumber capitalistic companies fully compatible with the letter of Marx and Engelss writings? From our perspective, the prerequisite for such a revolution is a certain amount of support from the public hand, in terms that the State would have to look upon democratic firms as merit goods and make provision for tax and/or other benefits in their favour.

An additional query we deem worth exploring is whether a form of socialism established through State intervention would be compatible with Marxs and Engelss theorisations. Although the best proxy for the system imagined by Marx is doubtless an economy in which labour managed firms operate within a centrally planned system, we wish to argue that a system with self-managed firms would be consistent with Marxs theoretical edifice even though it should fail to adopt central planning.