 Welcome everyone. Today's speaker is professor Rebecca Carl, a professor of history at New York University. She's the author of many books and I don't want to allow myself to indulge in praising her scholarship or giving much detail about her CV because it would just take precious time away from her presentation. The title of the presentation is The Socialist Law of Value and the Rural Economy, Wang Yanan and Marxism in China. I want to thank Nathan for inviting me. Thank you all for coming. I'll just dive in. This is work that I am presently in the process of revising and putting together for a monograph that may or may not come forth at some point. But the set of issues that today I'm going to talk about is to try to think about what is a socialist economics or rather how we can think the economic under socialism. How can it be constituted as a topos and an object of study? Now, if the question is asked merely as a problem of rapid growth and industrial modernization as a question of strategies for achieving certain predetermined goals that can be counted and accounted, then of course the question of socialist economics or the economic under socialism is doomed to being an abortive historical problem, always falling short in relation to capitalist economics. But as socialist economics is a serious problem in the fields of socialism, anti-capitalism and the economic anti-disciplinary can only be constituted as a problematic if we take seriously the fact that socialism is not capitalism monkei. And yet that it is also potentially trapped in analytic categories and historical contexts that somehow never could or did free themselves from their origins in classical and neoclassical economics. In this sense, socialist economics is an abstract question. How can it be philosophically constituted as something other than the particular economic strategies pursued by socialist countries, such as China's is also a very concrete question. What practices helped constitute the economic in some historically existing version of socialism such as China's in the 1950s? To approach this question, one of the main problems, I think that needs to be posed and considered has to be what is the new socialist person, the Xiaohui Zhuixinren, if she is not the capitalist classical and neoclassically posited economic person, the Jingjiren, who is naturalized in most social and political economic theory from the late 18th century onwards. The question of socialist personhood clarifies that the economic can never merely be a question of economics, but rather, and obviously, it must be a question of sociality, history, and of culture. Wang Yanan, the economic philosopher and translator of Marx, wrestled with this in similar questions, either directly or indirectly from the late 1930s through the late 1950s. For him, the question of the economic in its abstract and concrete social relation to personhood was a philosophical and thus a historical and practical question. In its most concrete and yet also most abstract eyes, Wang wrote many times in the 1930s and 40s on the problematization of economic person, often by critically attacking Werner Sombart's assertion that capitalists are the masterful creators of social life and thus the ideal personification of personhood in general. This reification that conflates individual desire or pursuit with a systemic logic becomes entirely ideological and thus historically philosophical when economic value, Jing Ji Jia Zhi, and historical values, Li Shi Jia Zhi become one through the transformation of the law of the jungle, the natural world, into the survival of the fittest, the human world. As Wang repeatedly said, this is just bad history. Most important for the present purpose, as Wang sees it, the problem of value and values, conflation becomes a key mechanism through which systemic logics are ideologically instantiated and materially substantiated through the narratively imputed individual history, individual hero of history. The narrative is not the mere superstructural or representational form reflecting content. Rather, the narrative of the individual hero capitalist who creates capitalism as a naturalized system of human nature creates the content itself. If that narrative then is constituted through economics, then one major way of transforming the historical material conditions is, as Wang asserts, by correcting the irrational historical, irrational economic relations among humans. What Wang calls for is a reconceptualization of the narrative that naturalizes some relations while denaturalizing others. So in the remaining part of this talk or this presentation, what I wanna think about is how narrative changes can be posed and posited, and thus how the value values conflation that leads only to mystification and alienation can be reoriented towards an exposition that provides a historical basis for a different kind of economic practice and thinking. These issues were seriously pursued in the thinking about and in Chinese socialism, thinking about and in Chinese socialism of the 1950s. They were never resolved and perhaps never could have been. The rural communes became the narrative center around and through which this new exposition was to be written. So just to go back briefly before I go to the 1950s, in the early 1920s, in the context of the socialist calculation debate in Europe, Ludwig von Mises, an anti-socialist and fervently anti-communist theorist of what came to be known as the Austrian School of Economics, declared that under socialism, and he was pointing here, of course, the Soviet socialism then in formation, quote, there would be no means of determining what was rational and hence it is obvious that production could never be directed by economic consideration, unquote. For von Mises and his partner in debate, Frederick Haye, this was a fatal flaw that doomed socialism not only to irrationality, but to impossibility. Working on the conceptual premise that the only mission of economics was the rationalization of production and consumption and circulation, socialism appeared to von Mises and Tehyak as an irrational rendering of social life that attempted to escape the unwavering laws of human nature. It's against this kind of imputed immutability that China's socialist economics was posed, particularly in the articulation of Wang Yan Nan, who had been a lifelong critic of the Austrians. And I've written, in my 2017 book, Magic of Concepts, I've written extensively about Wang Yan Nan's critique of the Austrian School in the 1930s and 40s. In any case, in China in the 1950s, for Mao Zedong and the Maoist faction of the Communist Party, the problem of conceptualizing and realizing socialism was never merely a problem of economic considerations, even though the original five-year plan of the PRC conformed to the Stalinist urban-first heavy industrialization policies that are most associated with the very socialist economism that became characteristic of Soviet competition with the capitalist world through the 30s, 40s and 50s. Yet by 1956 and 57 in China, at the end of the first five-year plan, a period of summing up experiences and learning from past mistakes ensued. In this process, not only were the economic achievements of the first five years of socialism in China tallied out, but even more consequentially, the very purpose of socialism, its social revolutionary goals was raised and redubated in light of the ways China's economic achievements had fallen short of socialist ideals understood in non-economistic fashion. The law value debate was joined at this time and is best understood as a process of trying to think about what a distinctive economics of socialism or socialist economics might look like. Certain participants in the debate took seriously the proposition that in socialism, the economic cannot be analytically or otherwise separated from the totality of life itself. And through the debate, they attempted to think about ways to subordinate economic practice to that totality. The debate proceeded vigorously through 1959, although to the extent that the debate got bombed down into modes of counting or accounting, the problem became enmeshed in an insoluble conundrum of using separable capitalist categories to think socialism. And in those terms, the indivisibility of socialism became impossible to conceptualize. Hence, to the extent that the debate was forced into conceptual modes of profit, price, commodity, labor and value, as separable categories of counting, there was no escape from the narrow logic of the law of value as an accounting mechanism rather than a new form of sociality. Now, Wang Yan Nan attempted to circumvent that whole problem, and I'll discuss that in a moment because I cannot give a full account of the debate here. But nevertheless, several aspects of the process, we have to grasp very, very briefly. And it's generally understood that the 1958 publication and translation of Stalin's problems in Soviet socialist political economy helped to animate the debate in China over commodity production, law value and other related questions. This text was published just as the communist when the boom chang feng was beginning to blow, and the rural commune campaign was being launched. Mao Zedong made extensive notes in the margins of this book in which he took great exception to Stalin's mechanical notion of how socialist economics should function. These notes were not publicly available at the time of the debates, although Mao's own interpretation of how socialist economics deviated from capitalist and from Soviet's concerns had recently been summed up in his April, 1956 essay, The Ten Great Relationships. In 1959, a major conference was convened in Shanghai on the problem of economic theory, of socialist economic theory. The first of its kind in scope and reach, it was organized by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing in partnership with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, held at Shanghai's Peace Hotel, over 240 economists and social scientists attended. It gathered together those who would continue the discussion of socialist economics that had begun in 1955 and 56, and that had restarted after the publication of Stalin's book. Shremu Chao, Sun Yefang, and Wu Jun now are most associated both with the original discussion of Stalin's book and with this conference. Wang Yanan, too, attended the conference, as did practically everyone of any note in the field at the time. Whatever the merits of the various debaters or of the various debates, it seems generally agreed by scholars today that this was the first and last possible time under Mao that such a free-wheeling discussion could and did take place. As is clear from the day new law of the debates, however, the terms in which the questions were posed became enmeshed in ideological intransigence and thus in political traps. It is unclear to me how it could have been otherwise given the specific political and then tragic historical context in which the issues were battled out. Abstract questions raised with reference and in dialectical relation to the particular set of historical problems were quickly concretized in the front political context where the abstractions became simplified into operational categories. In this operationalization, the inseparable social and historical nature of the question of socialism was lost in application. Now, my own interest in these questions is not in endlessly rehearsing the minutiae of the theories or the debates. Rather, my interest stems from my more general preoccupation with Wang Yanan, which in turn emerges from my interest in how the problem of the economic was and could be constituted in different historical errors when what counts as economic practice is thrown into question. Now, this was quite clear in the 1959 debates over what constitutes, what is particular about Chinese socialism? What is particular about socialism in China? The problem then of labor and the problem of profit could not be understood then in the same expropriative manner as under capitalism. That is in the 1950s and particularly in the construction and establishment of the communes, the problem of economics, what is the very terms of economic practice were thrown into question. As Isabella Weber has explored the problem of output versus profit was one of the major issues debated between Chen Bo-dan and Sun Yafeng from 1959 to 1964. And it's in the context of those debates that Wang Yanan also intervened. Wang was most concerned in the late 1950s to denaturalize categories. So it's to reinvent them into newly emerging social formations. Thus, whereas somebody like Sun Yafeng treated the law value as an objective law of economics, Wang treated it as an embedded law in a specific social formation. For Wang, the question of the study of socialist political economy was a problem of epistemologically or conceptually specifying the scope of the object of study. He wrote that the study of political economics cannot be construed as a problem of objective existence or merely of policy or laws. In other words, the study of socialist political economy is a problem of practice in which all practices must be conceptually treated as fully embedded in social and cultural worlds that are not reducible to a singular logic of economics as a discipline of accounting or accounting. As Wang clarified, the moment one tries to reduce political economy to a study of a singular object, a singular duixiao, one reduces its potential for producing new conceptual forms from the emerging concrete socialist practices on the ground. This dynamic conceptualization had to take as its object then the newly emergent form of the communes. In this regard then, Wang in 1959 professed himself to be a partisan of what was called the social relations camp of the debate over the law of value against the forces of production camp of the debate. For him and from the perspective of this social relations camp, the problem of socialist economics could not merely be about which categories, laws and structures could be enumerated as externalities to practice, but how categories of economic life were being created in socially transformed relations of production as internalities to social practice itself. That is, he was concerned with how practices of economic life contributed to the establishment of a new social formation altogether. That is the rural communes and how from within this evolving new social formation, new categories, new usages and new relations would and could be elaborated. In a piece he wrote in January, 1959 for the People's Daily for the Remy Dribal about the advent of rural communes, Wang noted that in the light of this new social formation, the expressive form and functional scope of hitherto existing economic laws had to be rethought. In this rethinking, one of the most important questions revolved around the relation of product, chanping to commodity, shangpin, that is the question was if what was now produced in the communes should be properly understood as product and not commodity or whether the product and commodity should be understood in some internally or externally related connection. Of course, the nature of the commodity economy was the major question raised by the rural commune form. It was on that issue, the whole law value debate hung. Nevertheless, Wang's position here is unique. As he articulates, the question could not be exclusively about circulation and price. That is how value was realized either in circulation in exchange or in relation to price, unless one wished merely to return to the problem of capitalist economics. Hence, it is the conditions under which product, chanping is produced and allocated that has to become a question of an internal to the social relations of production. Primarily, while the question of circulation and exchange is external and only secondary, in other words, it functions only with relation to its positional subordination in the new social formation. In this theoretical and material context, the problem of whether Chinese economy was socialist in a national sense, necessarily intruded as an important consideration. Wang wrote, quote, the reason the commodified product remains necessary is because to a large extent, we still require the law of value to play a positive role in stimulating production and enhancing the social forces of production. To the extent that, add that unquote, to the extent then that China's socialist economy was unevenly national or to put it differently, to the extent that the national economy and the socialist economy were not yet temporarily or spatially aligned, you had a mix of various kinds of economies at the time and the socialist, the most advanced form of the socialist economy then was the rural commune. The law of value was required for the regulation of the productive and allocative relations between the uneven sectors and for the positive stimulation of sectors, not yet producing and yet still stuck in producing, not yet producing products, sorry, and yet still stuck in producing commodities. In other words, the production of commodities is backward form and the producing of product of Chanping is the more advanced or socialist form. With the problem of commodity circulation having been in part transformed into the product, the problem of product allocation, in other words from Shangping Liu Tong to Chanping Fenpei, the mechanism of realizing value also had been transformed. It was no longer the old law value that dominated Jirpei, but the new law value regulated through the new social relations in which the overall productive process was embedded. Thus, if one sees the late 1950s in a transitional frame as comprising layered elements of the new democratic mixed economy, old forms of semi-feudal and semi-colonial productive processes, socialism and communism, then commodity production remained a vestige of a previous mode and its operation, including the old law value based in market exchange remained part of the totality but not in a determinative position. This was largely because the private profit motive was no longer extant under socialism, thus the striving for price and market were no longer of primary concern and comparative sectoral advantage was not the logic upon which product was produced. Instead, the product was part of a totality whose end goal was not profit but provision, gonging. Thus rather than pertain to different sectors of the economy, the law value positively regulated the uneven relations within a whole. This could clearly be seen, Wong says, through the rural communes. The most important point here is about the articulation of uneven social formations in a totality whose social logic has now been transformed. The mechanism or principle of potential transformation of unevenness will have been the rural communes as a new social formation whose integrated economies are not based on comparative advantage or profit but on the provisioning of human life and the enabling of the emergence of the new socialist person. As Wong says, quote, all what needs to do is to participate even once in rural commune planning conferences to listen to how commune members sum up their discussions and convictions about the proportionate investments they make in farming, forestry, husbandry, sidelines and fishery in order to understand that in making certain decisions as a collective and in terms of the overall situation, they do not consider the law of value or comparative advantage in their allocations of resources and labor power. In this situation, Wong concludes, the law of value is, quote, nothing more than the law of commodity prices that must be determined by the socially necessary amount of labor, unquote. Now, the problem of the socially necessary labor time complicates and also clarifies the matter. For some economists, such as Sunya Fang, socially necessary labor time was a form of calculation where the inspection and calculating required to account for efficiency turned the problem of labor into an economic mystic mode where abstract labor becomes a synonym to socially equalized labor as a mechanism of accounting. In Wong's terms, however, socially necessary labor time is a principle of social life where the concrete problems of the reduction of wastage and the provisioning of communes turns the economic as practice into a problem of how to establish the rule of personhood over economics rather than the rule of economics over personhood. Sorry. Rather than just reducing value to labor where labor is merely a countable unit of value, what Wong insisted was that value be derived from labor that is labor is value as a social form of the transformation of life itself. It is undoubtedly here, however, that the continued use of the law of value to regulate backward that is non-socialist parts of the economy can and did get bogged down into the counting mechanisms. And yet as Wong describes it or attempts to save it for the non-determinative and yet important socially regulative function, the law of value must be thought as intrinsic to the foundations of the socialist economic system and the national planning system. In its internality, and because it is at the mercy of human intervention rather than operating anarchically or independently in the marketplace, it can function without threatening to contaminate the non-capitalist totality of rural communes and their particular form of integrated social production and social life. That is if the law of value is not cast in its accustomed capitalist narrative role as player in circulation and exchange but rather is cast in a protagonist role as this primary exposition of the value of labor as a category internal to the new socialist formation of the rural communes. It cannot be threatening to socialist production, rather it contributes positively. By May 1959, the April conference was now concluded. The debate on the law of value moved into a next phase and Wong was very involved in that phase as well. So for him then, in enumerating the ways in which economists and commentators had hitherto misunderstood the law of value, Wong clarified that socialist planned economy requires the law to increase labor power and to accelerate production. And yet still he maintains that the law of value and socialism pertains primarily to the sphere of labor and production and not to the sphere of circulation and exchange. Wong is not concerned with what comes to be called in post-Maldungist discourse scientific management but rather with the reduction of wastage in the overall economy and the stimulation of product that could help China cope with the necessarily self-reliant autocrat strategy of development imposed upon it by the global sphere. He is interested that is in labor as a form of social life and livelihood rather than a source of accumulation of surplus value. In general, what this position allowed Wong to argue was that the rural communes were an advanced social formation that provided the conditions under which the positive stimulus of the law of value could be fostered while the negative attributes of such a law could be relatively negated. Wong argues this through a number of different essays that I will not go into. They are in a longer form of this presentation that forms part of a paper that is to be published very soon. What he argues, and here I want to note, of course, what lies in the background of the failure of all of this to actually grab hold of anything is the fundamental crash and crisis that happens in the Great Leap Forward and that informs the famine and the deaths of millions and millions of Chinese peasants and people. So I don't know, I cannot determine from the reading of or of anything that I have seen whether Wong is aware in 1959 of this looming crisis. What I do know is that from the end of 1959 to the end of 1962, he stops writing altogether and presumably he stops writing because his abstract ideas of the commune turn out to bear no relation to what's actually happening on the ground. But what I want to do is not to nostalgically look back and think about what would have happened if Wong's abstract ideas had actually come to be but to try to think about the realignment of economic production and sociality in the realm of economic thinking and socialist life and how that was being thought as a philosophical, economic and social problem at the time. And of course, one of the major problems was, I mean, aside from the looming famine and all the rest which was of course a tragic historical outcome but one of the major philosophical or mechanistic problems inhered in how the communes were to interact with one another and with the planned economy. Now this, as we know, broke down fundamentally but it was here then that the logic of the law value remains intrinsic to social and socialist production and is also externalized as a conscious tool of regulation. And here he analogizes the law of value and its function as part of a chess game or a go board, Ipanchi, right? With the mode of coordination not being market competition or profit driven growth but rather based in who can help whom in an overall scheme of development. Now there's to be sure, there's nothing in any of this thinking that helps a technocrat understand what and how to count and where to find the proper object, the dweisham of accounting. If value is derived from social labor and is not an extrinsic measure of that labor, the unit of accounting is not evident. But that is due then in turn to Wong's own conviction that fully exploring and explicating conceptual issues is an intimate and intrinsic aspect of identifying any object of analysis. In other words, the object cannot become before the concept, the concept has to be derived from an object. So on the one hand, Wong dismisses singular explanations of development and instead insists that it is only the dialectical interaction among and between relations and forces of production that provides the momentum for transformation and accelerated development. And on the other hand, in the specific context of socialist China of the late 1950s, there are still huge gaps and thus enormous unevenness in the overlapping modes of production still extant in social life. Whereas in capitalism, unevenness is an obstacle to transformation or put differently, whereas capitalism's purpose is to continuously reproduce unevenness and thus lock into place the unequal relations of time and place or space so as to better accumulate. By contrast in socialism, this unevenness is the very condition for the enabling and promotion of social transformation. Thus in the rural areas, the coexistence of different forms whether cooperatives and communes promotes the transformation of all into the more socialist form as their non-antagonistic contradictions lead to the process of quantity change turning into a change in quality. In other words, the way in which unevenness operates in socialism is progressive and it serves to stimulate transformations in social relations, whereas in capitalism, it is regressive and only serves as a principle of capital accumulation. And so for Wang, it's the emerging rural communes that provide the socially transformative principle upon which socialism as a generalized form of human life and personhood will have been articulated. Meanwhile, it is the law of value was embedded in the emerging socialist forms that allows and forces different levels of formations to interact in a totality whose logic is no longer the production of capitalist profit but rather the promotion of socialist provision. Now, as I said, we all know the consequences the Great Leap Forward and the enormous suffering that that entailed. The fact of the famine of course precluded the subsequent revisiting of any serious further consideration of socialist economics as a form of non-economistic social practice rooted in provision rather than profit in socially transformed relations of production rather than in the primacy of the forces of production. By the 1980s, when the debate over the law of value was rejoined in the context of post-mal reforms, the logic of the party and of social practice already had been transformed. The return in the early 80s of such economic thinkers as Shremu Chow and Sun Yat-Bang and Go-Jun, among others, can be considered good indicators that economics as a science of capitalism was poised for a comeback. The whole question of socialist personhood was thoroughly mutated into the demand that everyone perfectly embody economic personhood, thus short-circuiting alternatives to economicistic and productivistic social logics and social processes. So saying is not meant as a nostalgic reach for a lost past that could have been different. It is merely to indicate that the extended decade of the 1950s debates about socialism were perhaps some of the most consequential theoretical and practical discussions there could have been on the potential of a socialist economics or an economics of socialism. Revisiting those debates is meaningful for understanding what at that time was perceived to be in the realm of the possible and how fully the reality fell short. And I think I'll end there. Thank you very much for this extremely interesting and rich talk. So value is socially necessary abstract labor time and then I'm interested in the abstract there where in the first chapters of Capital, Marx talks about the relationship between concrete labor and abstract labor, which I understand as coming into being through competition in the commodity and labor market and the transformation, if you like, of concrete labor into abstract labor. And whenever I hear about, and I don't know this literature very well, but the law value under socialism or under any kind of non-capitalist mode of production, I wonder about the mechanism of mediation between concrete and abstract labor. And I wonder if that's something, I don't know, that was an issue in these debates in the 1950s. Sure, yeah, that's the wing of the debate I don't deal with. That's the wing of debate, the debate that continues to count labor as a unit of value rather than the value of labor as embedded in social forms. And so, I mean, obviously at some point in order to have a functioning economy and to have the technocrats who run that economy, there has to be units of accounting. And that's where the, what Wong is saying, that's where the translation doesn't happen. In other words, the philosophical concern with how to think of socialist economics with capitalist categories that are derived from capitalist histories and capitalist practices, that becomes the insoluble problem. Because if one is gonna continue to operate in a neoclassical or neoclassical economic categorical universe, it is very hard to break free of precisely these kinds of mechanistic questions that require one to account, mediate, and so on. And so what he's trying to do, what Wong is trying to do is think about how under the problem of socialist labor as provisioning rather than as the extraction of surplus value, how the provisioning gongin is going to realign concrete and abstract labor. In other words, there is no longer a gap. There's no longer that difference between concrete and abstract labor. If one thinks labor as the value of creating livelihood and creating personhood rather than personhood creating value. That's the best I can do there because, but people like Sun Yat-Fang, Shemu Chao, Gu Jun, and many, many others, I mean, I have a huge tome of these 240 economists and social scientists who arrived at the Peace Hotel at the Hoping Fandian in Shanghai in 1959 to debate out these questions. And a full 235 of them are trapped in precisely going round and round in these circles. And five of them are trying to think something else. So that in reading through, and they're vigorous debates, it's not like everybody who's thinking the same set of problems is thinking the same thing. I mean, Sun Yat-Fang comes out on the very wrong end of this, I mean, politically wrong end of this at that time, although he comes out on the politically correct end of it in the 1980s, when this gets rethought. But yeah, these are, Waiyan Nan was a translator of Marx, Capital One, Two, and Three, so he's intimately familiar with Marx's discussion of these things. And what he's trying to do is think his way out of the capitalist traps. He doesn't succeed in, I mean, I think that he's provocative for that reason. And the reason I'm interested in him is because he refuses to subordinate his philosophical thinking to party dictates. But by the same token, it's not practiced economy. It's not practical. Last night I was reading the poverty of philosophy and Engels has a nice introduction where he's complaining about Rod Berthes. And Rod Berthes is doing this apparently, using, trying to come up with socialist economics using bourgeois political economy categories by basically saying, we should try and find a way to make the law of value work without exploitation. And what was funny to me was it seemed actually a lot like Austrian style critiques of socialist planning where Engels says, if you try and do that, then everything will have to go, because you lose the market as the mediation between concrete and abstract value, you'll have to do it through sort of central planning by the state and that will interfere with people's freedom and will lead to shortages. And I was amazed, like, oh, this is Engels talking, right? And it sounds to me like that's, maybe not in those concrete terms, but that's sort of you and Engels and Wang Yan'an are maybe all saying that the trouble is once you have a revolution, you need to stop trying to use capitalist economic categories in your analysis of what you're trying to do in socialism. Well, I mean, Wang was, as I tried to indicate in my discussion, I mean, he's very clear that China presents not the national economy of China is not even, it's not evenly socialist. It is very unevenly socialist in fact, and it could very well be that way for a very long time. And therefore one has to use different conceptual categories for different kinds of things. But if one is reaching for socialism and not reaching for capitalism, then one has to reach for philosophical and conceptual formulations that don't merely repeat capitalist desires and capitalist narratives. And so he's not saying that, all of a sudden 10 years after the revolution, China should be fully socialist and everything should be abolished. He's not saying that at all. He's trying to rethink what the, I mean, as we know unevenness in Marx or as a problem of capitalist development is the premise upon which capitalism works, is the creation of unevenness, so as to further accumulate people like David Harvey and so on have discussed this as a spatial fix, whether one believes it's a spatial fix or some other Rose Luxemburg crisis of over accumulation, whatever it is, right? There you, colonialism as whatever, these are all familiar categories and familiar notions. So that for him, he's very clear that unevenness in capitalism is regressive. It holds places back. It holds people and locations enthrall to the domination by capital. But his understanding of unevenness in socialism is entirely different because there is unevenness in socialism, especially in China socialism in 1959, you have these very advanced forms, which are the communes, and then you have regressive forms, which are even though things are being nationalized already by the 1958-59 nationalization of private property and so on, you do still have private profit, private and various forms of production and accumulation that are not yet subordinated to the socialist principle. And so for him, the question of how to transform those sectors of the economy or those sectors of production into socialist forms is premised upon the unevenness where you have the advanced forms that will drag along and finally pull out of their capitalist backwardness will pull along other sectors of the economy. Obviously, none of this had enough time to work before it all crashed. And so yeah, it's not clear that there was an answer at that time or at any time to this question. It's just that he was not a fan as the Mao was not a fan of the anarchic marketplace as being the mediator of economic life. So Mao in 1959 makes very clear that the market has to be under politics in command to use a phrase. This is part of a larger set of writings that I've been doing on Wang Yan'an and these critical moments 1930s, 1940s and 1950s when the problem of the economic had to be rethought. So the 1930s in the context of the global depression, the 1940s in the context of the total war and the 1950s in the context of the transition to socialism at each point what constitutes economics not as a disciplinary practice but as a social practice had to and was rethought very fundamentally. And so at each point there were huge debates that Wang Yan'an was central to in many ways. So I've been trying to think through this periodicity of debate from the and of course the logic of concepts which I published in 2017 deals with the 1930s, 40s, 1980s, 90s comparisons. So I thought I would go back and do a more embedded 30s, 40s and 50s consideration which is what this is part of. Something that I think is really one of the most elegant features of capital as a book across the three volumes is that he starts with his own presentation of this is how I think the capital system works. And then through a very elegant progression you see how the bourgeois understanding emerges out of that. So it's a nice sort of historical materialist understanding of bourgeois ideology and in particularly the trinity factors of production form. But the marginal revolution hadn't happened yet. And then I think most Marxists I run across just see the marginal revolution as kind of basically the second international was getting powerful and scary. So they had to do some really kind of say course apologetics and get rid of value from their economics. And that doesn't, to me that doesn't seem like a very good account. Like there should be a way of sort of keeping with you know Marxist project of saying like why marginal utility is a sort of necessary development of bourgeois ideology. And I'm just wonder in his engagement with the popularity of marginal utility types in China did Wang Yanan having account of why this is happening? Well, I mean his account of why it's happening in China is a non-account. It's really just these are all these are these are these are compredor disciples of you know shitty economics economics you know from elsewhere and they're just you know ideologically bulldozed into this because it seems closest to the common sense. So that you know his dismissal of its adoption in China is very very is very offhand. And I mean he doesn't minimize how what a grip it has but he does minimize what you know he doesn't think about it in terms of a narrative of you know why this at this point. His critique of Austrian school more generally and why it is wrapped up in its relationship to the German new historicism which he equally despises, okay. And so that he thinks both of these are and that he pins these two the idea strangely I guess are not so strangely that these are in Europe backward economies that need to think their way out of backwardness into something and that these are and that these are mechanisms whether it's new historicism in the national economy nationally at that nationalist economies like with Friedrich Leist or so on or it's the Austrians that these are backward economies that need to think their way through and out the other side of their backwardness. I don't recall exactly. I mean it's been several years now since I read him on the Austrians and I wrote, you know and often I've given talks about the magic of concepts in various places and people ask me specifics about the Austrian school. I said everything I know about the Austrian school is in that chapter. I don't independently study the Austrian school of economics so that, you know I'm not an economist and I don't independently study it but the problem of the Austrian school for Wong is that it conforms to a certain kind of in a so-called backward economy where you don't have the mechanisms of imperialism or of imperial control and of colonialism or those are not the major mechanisms through which capitalism has advanced what you have are individual heroes who can go forth and fulfill their desires and so that it comes out of a national backwardness. Yes, of course that failed miserably and yes, and as I said Wong's and everybody Sun Yafang and Srimu Chow and so on all of them go silent from the end of 59 until 62, 63. And so one has to take this silence as either having been politically silenced or just being horrified at what's going on and therefore having very little to say about it in the terms that are discussed. By the time you get back from the disaster by the time people start re-engaging the question of economics you're into what the historian Morris Meisner has talked about as being the Thermadorian reaction to the Great Leap, in other words the return to certain kinds of private profit and so on and those are re-theorized and so the commune, yes the commune is heavily theorized through the 1960s and certainly through the 19, through the cultural revolution until it's disbanding in the 1970s, the late 70s and so on the communes then become re-theorized as failures as abject and absolute failures no matter whether they actually had some efficacy or not they are abandoned of course as a social form. So yeah, sure Chinese economists have taken up the commune form repeatedly specifically most recently in the debates Wente Jun and his debates over rural reconstruction and so on have revisited the communes as social forms so sure, yeah, there's a ton of economic work work from economists on that for sure.