In need of alternatives, problems, and issues of non-capitalist mixed economies

We have collected a number of articles from the 30 excellent talks presented during the conference (available at www.karlpolanyicenter.org). Theoretical comparative global historical-sociological and political issues were raised with great erudition. It seems on this basis that balanced non-capitalist economies can take over the system of totalized markets which, following a neoliberal agenda set in the 1930s, has subordinated more and more social spheres. Here we focus on some historical, and very importantly, some intellectual problems around the history and the ideational problems of socialism. As one of the most important issues, the first two articles take us back to the history of the Soviet Union. Tamás Krausz shows with great precision that by the 1890s Lenin not only developed a clear idea of multi-stage socialist historical options for the whole world but specifically for a semi-periphery country. This idea is based on workers’ control evolving not from political will, but from capitalist developments themselves. He was not only a founding figure in such thinking, but during and after the revolution he was able to maneuver among wide-ranging socialist goals and political practices without falling into the traps of forgetting strategic targets or short-term realities. In his last works, he basically bequeathed a framework for how to think about the transition to and defense of democratic socialist production in a semi-periphery country without any real concessions to capitalism, state capitalism, and to mechanistic forms of state-socialism. Egy kattintás ide a folytatáshoz…. →