Robin Hahnel - Early Critiques: Orthodox Marxism and Welfare Economics

Early Critiques: Orthodox Marxism and Welfare Economics

Hahnel was an undergraduate at Harvard when he met Albert, who was studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over the course of roughly three decades the duo would produce seven books together. Among the early writings was "Marxism and Socialist Theory" an evaluation of Marxist and Marxist–Leninist theory that emphasized what they believed were serious flaws. Albert and Hahnel argued that while those aspects of Marxist theory rejecting the institutions of private property and markets were well-founded, other aspects of Marxist and Marxist–Leninist doctrine, including its economistic bias, dialectical methodology, historical materialism, class concepts, labour theory of value, crises theory and rejection of visionary thinking, and authoritarian values and tendencies, were either partially or wholly flawed; and often constituted obstacles in the struggle for social justice. Subsequently they produced "Socialism, Today and Tomorrow", which was an analysis of socialism in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, as well as a sketch of an alternative theoretical framework for socialism.

Their technical study of mainstream welfare economics, "A Quiet Revolution in Welfare Economics", was originally published by Princeton, but did not receive wide distribution. The underground interest in the book prompted its being made available on-line. They argued that traditional welfare economic theory was in an intractable crisis. The core approach that competitive markets produce social efficiency was yielding diminishing returns and "has thwarted, rather than facilitated, advances in analyses of the labour process, externalities, public goods, preference development and institutional structures." The traditional socialist solution of public enterprise combined with centrally planned allocation was found equally lacking. In conclusion they argued that in clarifying the reasons why traditional models were deficient they had cleared a path that suggested probable directions for an alternative paradigm. The significant social and ecological inefficiencies of private enterprise market economies, public enterprise centrally planned economies, and related variants, necessitated both the re-organization of production and consumption institutions and the search for compatible "allocative mechanisms that allow informed individual rationality to be fully consistent with social rationality." Their next step, the formulation of a relatively detailed "full" vision of an economy based upon participatory democratic planning was their attempt to provide an answer to this challenge.