Introduction

The unceremonious crumbling of the soviet style experiments with socialism has left the profession of Marxist studies under enormous pressure to seek a new orientation. Instead of summarily rejecting all utopian blueprints as before, Marxists are now called upon to come forward

with a more concrete image of what to expect in socialism, not only its emergent institutional framework but also the social upheaval that might intervene in the process thereto from capitalism. The view that animates this article, however, is that creative thinking about the institutional architecture of the future socialist society must, at least at this historical juncture, receive priority over questions of the so-called 'transition' to socialism, as questions of transformatory action as such are largely dependent upon the answers we provide to the key question: What is socialism? In fact it is arguably one of the lessons of the past that Marxists had concentrated more on fomenting revolution than on the substance and material repr oductive viability of the post-revolutionary society.

Over the past decade, the writing on socialist institutional construction has been quite fecund and included, among other things: a studied re-engagement with the work of Marx's 'utopian socialist' contemporaries; investigations of the possibilities of building socialist institutions upon the foundation of a market economy; and the development of various models of democratic or participatory planned economy. However, while much of this writing has been productive of crucial knowledge for successful future directed social action for socialism, it suffers, in my view, from a major lacuna. As I have argued elsewhere (Westra 2000; 2001), this gap stems from a lack of clarity over the fundamental ontology of a genuine socialism, and associated with this, the absence of a solid understanding of precisely from where in Marx's corpus are the most robust and enduring insights into socialist institutional construction to be found.

My intention in this article therefore is to draw to the fore the powerful insights into the socialist institutional architecture embedded in Marx's corpus, and demonstrate how they impinge upon the important questions of motivation, calculation and economic discovery that are at the forefront of the current debate over post-capitalist social change today. (1) Hence, this article will be organised as follows: In the section succeeding this introduction my intention is to defend the position that a particular apprehension of Marx's project of the political economic study of capitalism, undergirded by his monumental Capital, constitutes the repository of the most fundamental presuppositions of the institutional configuring of a viable and genuine socialism. Next, I will introduce what I have dubbed an ontology of socialism, which is derived from Marxist political economy, and outline its three core principles. Finally, it will be demonstrated how the principles of the ontology of socialism that I introduce offe r direction for the creative implementation of genuine socialist forms of motivation, calculation and discovery in the next wave of socialist construction in the new millennium. Of course, this article does not pretend to treat the above issues exhaustively. As well, it is worth reiterating that it is a work of theory, serving a sort of 'under-labouring' function for more concrete, action oriented initiatives.

The centrality of Marxian economic theory

Marx's Capital and his project of the political economic study of capitalism has in general been apprehended as a sub-theory of historical materialism, and has largely been mined for its insights into the historical trajectory of capitalism and the tendencies embodied by capital for the realisation of a socialist historical outcome. My understanding of Marx's formative work, which is informed by the Uno approach (2) to Marxism developed in Japan, understands Capital rather as an endeavour to capture the inner-working or deep structural logic of capital, and to explain thereby, how it is even possible for the commodity economic principles of capital to reproduce the socio-economic life of an entire human society. According to the Uno approach, Marx's work in Capital constitutes a distinct project within his corpus as a whole because of the ontological uniqueness (3) of the social subject-matter of Capital. That is, it is only in capitalist society where the economic is reified, tending to disengage from the so cial--the political, ideological, religious, etc. with which the economic has been enmeshed in all other human societies--and then wielding other social practices according to its own self-serving chrematistic.

From the perspective of the Uno approach, (4) the project Marx embarked upon in Capital (though unfortunately did not survive to complete), (5) was intended to establish three revolutionary and enduring components of socialist future directed thinking. First, Capital was to constitute a genuine economic theory of an 'economic' society that reproduced its material existence according to the abstract impersonal commodity economic dictates of the law of value. In this regard, when Unoists discuss Capital as the formative attempt to construct a theory of a purely capitalist society, what is inferred here is not the belief that the historical development of capitalism will realise a teleology of capital, but the possibility, given the actual reificatory tendencies exhibited by capital to subsume material life and operate it for its own self-aggrandisement, of extrapolating the tendencies to a theoretical conclusion in a sort of thought experiment that 'lays bare' the logic or laws of capital unencumbered by non-ec onomic or non-capitalist interference. (6) The theory of a purely capitalist society therefore constitutes a model of a bourgeois utopia where all inputs and outputs of the production process are presumed to be commodified and economic activity completely regulated by impersonal, society-wide self regulating markets. And where there exist only three social classes--capitalists, workers and landlords--that are the personification of economic categories. Finally, in a purely capitalist society the law of value constitutes the determinate operating principle governing all socioeconomic interrelations and the reproduction of socioeconomic life. To sum up, Marxian economic theory embodied in the theory of a purely capitalist society constitutes the ultimate critique of capitalism, for it demonstrates how even in its ideal operation capital or societies where material existence is reproduced primarily according to the principles of capital constitute the limit form of what a human society should not be: That is a s ociety where human beings abdicate their responsibility for the reproduction of material existence to an extra-human force7 (which reproduces material life for the abstract purpose of augmenting value); and which necessarily requires the commodification of labour power for its operation.

Secondly, Capital was intended as the conceptual gateway to the study of what Uno dubbed 'the general norms of economic life' (1980) .There are two fundamental dimensions to this important notion in the development of Marxist theory. First, because in the history of human society it is only in capitalist society where economic life tends to become reified or as put by Postone (1996, 156), 'self-moving', the theorising of capital yields all-important insights into the study of material existence in non-capitalist societies where the economic can only be separated analytically from other social practices. As I have argued elsewhere (Westra 2000; 1999), the operationalising of the well known conceptual infrastructure of historical materialism necessarily required the establishment and grounding of terms such as economic base, mode of production, etc. as economic concepts within the study of capital. Marx himself captured this cognitive sequencing with his statement: 'Human anatomy contains the key to the anatomy of the ape' (1973, 105).

But there is more: Marx often adverted to socialism as simply requiring the 'peeling off of the commodity economic skin' or stripping away the 'capitalist integument' in order to arrive at a labour process that is a feature of all human society. It was but a small step from here then, to the crystallising of the position within Marxism that the institutional contours of socialism are set by capitalism (involving the historical development and progression of the labour process), and that socialism demands only that their capitalist 'control' or operation (under the auspices of the working class) be abolished. Uno and Sekine (Sekine 1986b) however, were not satisfied with this, for though they accepted the fundamentality of the metabolic interchange between human beings and nature which Marx's notion of the human labour process captures, they realised how within itself it contained no impetus for continuity. Rather, the guarantee of such is always a social matter inexorably connected to the nature of the labour and production process through which the material life of a society is reproduced according to certain principles, and under the constraints of a given set of social relations. In other words, the economic reproduction of all human societies necessitates the social determination of 'what is to be produced', 'how it is to be produced' and 'in what quantities it is to be produced'. Capitalism of course, as captured in the theory of a purely capitalist society, determines this objectively according to the impersonal dictates of the law of value. In the slave societies of antiquity on the other hand, such was decided by authoritarian fiat. The socialist alternative of the future will also have to confront such questions. Hence the notion of general norms of economic life is entered into Marxian parlance by the Uno approach in recognition of the importance of problematising human material reproduction, and as a means of conceptualising the constituents of such that must be satisfied in any particular form of soci omaterial reproductive organisation.

Thirdly, Capital was intended as a scientific foundation for socialism, though the precise way in which the work accomplishes this has not been well understood. From the perspective of the Uno approach, Capital reconstructed as the theory of a purely capitalist society constitutes the underpinning of the distinct project of Marxian political economy, (8) the purview of which is solely capitalism, a peculiar and historically transient social order. As such, it admits of no application whatsoever in the sustaining of a theory of historical teleology or in the confirmation. of a particular historical outcome. Rather, the theory of a-purely capitalist society constitutes the prism through which material or economic life, an indispensable ingredient of all human existence, is first rendered 'transparent' (such being a unique effect of commodity economic reification adverted to above). In this sense, our knowledge of the general norms of that component of social life spring from the study of the peculiar modalities by which such norms are satisfied by the chrematistic operation of capital. Therefore, in demonstrating with scientific precision how the operation of an historically constituted, extra-human commodity economic logic actually satisfies the general norms of economic life, the theory of a purely capitalist society conclusively establishes the socioeconomic feasibility of socialism, a society where the satisfaction of those very norms will be ensured by the conscious decision-making of freely associated human beings (Uno 1980). Viewed from another angle, the theory of a purely capitalist society exposes the ways in which capital has contaminated the 'life-world', and in so doing, provides us humans with knowledge of what is required to reclaim the life-world from capital, and re-constitute our material existence according to the economic principles of socialism. This is precisely why Marx perceived his Capital as the scientific foundation of socialism. And it is upon this point that the most fundamental revolut ionary claims of Marxism are predicated.

Marx's Capital and an ontology of socialism

If, as I have argued, capitalism constitutes the limit form of what a human society should not be--one that abdicates the responsibility for the reproduction of its material existence to an extra-human force--then the thrust of our preliminary conceptualisations of socialism should be that socialism, far from being institutionally prefigured by the historical development of capitalism, rather constitutes the antithesis or institutionally structured 'opposite' of capitalism. And predicated upon my claim that the reconstruction and completion of Marx's Capital as the theory of a purely capitalist society furnishes the clearest and most precise apprehension or 'definition' of capital, and the fact that socialism involves not only the dismantling of the reificatory structures and residues of the commodity economy but the betterment of human material reproductive conditions visa-a-vis capitalism, it makes sense that our understanding of what in fact is constituted by socialism, at least in its most fundamental inc arnation, be derived from the theory of a purely capitalist society. As such, I will now set forth the three cardinal principles of what I have dubbed an ontology of socialism that emanate from the theory of a purely capitalist society.

First, in logically unravelling each and every category of the commodity economy, the theory of a purely capitalist society conclusively demonstrates that capitalism is much more than an in-egalitarian, exploitative, or class society. Rather, first and foremost, capitalism is an ontologically peculiar, 'upside-down' reified socio-material order where the responsibility for the reproduction of human economic life is abdicated to an extra human force, which then wields economic life for the abstract purpose of value augmentation. Therefore the ontological principle of socialism that springs from this understanding of capitalism, is that socialism constitutes a non-reified economy in which the responsibility for organising human material life is vested in human beings themselves, and that material reproduction is managed for concrete human purposes.

Now, this is far from a trivial point. For example, setting to one side the problematic notion that self-regulating markets can be unhinged from the capitalist mode of production, market socialist proponents advancing models of egalitarian social outcomes while seeking to harness the 'efficiency' properties of markets overlook the fact, and I will revisit this question in the context of the discussion of socialist calculation and discovery, that the efficiency of marketisation is necessarily an expression of commodity economic reification, and the economic reproduction that it affords is always a by-product of the abstract extra-human goal of value augmentation. Put differently, in answering the questions required for the viable material reproduction of any human society of 'what is to be produced', 'how it is to be produced' and 'in what quantities it is to be produced', market socialists necessarily must respond: 'only that amenable to the dictates of commodity economic value'! Thus market socialism sets pe rpetual parameters to the creative development of human material reproductive potential to that manageable by capital, and thus must be disqualified in principle as offering a genuine socialism. In short, the first ontological principle of socialism acts as a referential bulwark against creeping reification in socialist society.

Secondly, characteristic of economic life in the bourgeois utopia captured in the theory of a purely capitalist society is the effacement by capital of direct person-to-person socio material relations of domination and subordination that marked pre-capitalist society. Premised upon this is capital's fetishistic claim to represent the embodiment of individual freedom and to be a social order that suspends class conflict. However, what the theory of a purely capitalist society definitively establishes, is that capitalism is in fact a very peculiar class society, where on the basis of the commodification of labour power, the direct producers are compelled to work-paradigmatically at least-solely by economic means. A genuine socialism therefore, demands the de-commodification of labour power. But this must not be allowed to occur through the revival of forms of extraeconomic coercion as was the practice in soviet style societies, for capitalism already constitutes an historical advance over that. The principle of an ontology of socialism that flows from the foregoing therefore, is that socialism demands the de-commodification of human labour power without the reinstatement of extra-economic compulsion.

It is instructive here that soviet style socialism had a much wider appeal in the so-called 'third world' as opposed to the developed capitalist West. Workers without the historical experience of capitalism, already bound by authoritarian socio-material relations of inter-personal domination and subordination, were with good reason seduced by the guarantees offered by soviet style experiments of universal health care, educational opportunities, mass employment, a social safety net, and so on. While the scorecard is certainly not in as to the extent to which capitalism is able to sustain the aforementioned constituents, the peculiar commodity economic freedom attendant to the paradigmatic economic compulsions characteristic of capitalist society (the so-called 'freedom to lose') always acted as a bulwark against soviet style overtures of security and freedom from dire want, which came with the price tag of authoritarian modalities of labour control.

Thirdly, if in a genuine socialist society work is to be compelled neither by economic nor extra-economic means, workers must become self-motivated. Again, paradigmatically at least, such is impossible in capitalist society no matter how handsome the remuneration or benefits accruing to labour. For as the theory of a purely capitalist society displays, in recruiting workers as commodity economic inputs to produce any good deemed appropriate for the satisfaction of its chrematistic of value augmentation, capital renders labour indifferent to use value in production. Therefore work, that most essential human activity upon which social life itself rests, is destined to perpetually remain in capitalist society something with which to secure only future enjoyment; that is, a dis-utility or alienated (Sekine 1997 vol. 2, 217). The surmounting of worker indifference and the enabling of self-motivation in even the most arduous forms of work- to realise Marx s vision of work as 'life's prime want -- requires a genuine socialism to adhere to this fundamental ontological principle: the re-entrenchment of the use value dimension of socic-material life. This ontological principle of socialism itself has several complex dimensions that will be elucidated in the subsequent discussion. What may be stated here preliminarily, however, is that it constitutes the Linchpin of the socialist edifice precisely because it captures the necessity for socialism of cleansing human material life of the force of commodity economic value, as such is exposed in Capital, and re-embedding economic existence in the human life-world that will then abound primarily with only use value material reproductive considerations.

Calculation, motivation, discovery and the ontology of socialism

Calculation. At the centre of the debate among those who believe a 'complex' modern non-capitalist socialist economy to be a practical impossibility, proponents of so-called market socialism and defenders of various forms of socialist economic planning, is the question of economic 'calculation'. To trace the contours of the debate over calculation through its twists and turns across the better part of the twentieth century would certainly outstrip the bounds of this article. However, for expository purposes the core problematic may be succinctly summarised as follows: Reflecting the predominance of neo-classical economics in economic discourse, with its concern over the so-called allocation of scarce resources among competing ends, the challenge for a viable socialism was presumed to be the ability of planning mechanisms to simulate or possibly even trump the 'efficient' information transmitting property of the market and the tendency of markets to approach a 'Pareto-optimal' equilibrium outcome. (9) It is pr ecisely the attempt to meet such a requirement of socialist economic organisation, for example, that animates the recently posed and influential models of democratic participatory planning of Albert and Hahnel (1991) and Gockshott and Cottrell (1997). For Albert and Hahnel, equilibration of supply and demand is to be effectuated through an iterative planning process where decentralised micro-level consumers' and workers' councils make allocatory demands that are subject to revision according to information transmitted from relevant meso- and macro-level bodies. In the model of Cockshott and Cottrell, democratic central planning is to achieve an optimal equilibrium balancing of inputs and outputs vis-a-vis information derived from direct calculation of labour time, transmitted through computer networks.

The endeavour of such models to defend democratic and participatory modalities of economic planning against those opponents of socialism convinced the scope of the planned economy to be exhausted by soviet style exemplars is certainly laudable. However, my concern is the way in which the models unwittingly co-opt some of the dubious presuppositions of neo-classical economics. The fact is, neo-classical economics teats the market as a supra-historic 'economic' institution and never problematises the effacing and replacement of face-to-face socio-material reproductive relations marking past human societies by the integrated system of self-regulating markets characteristic of the capitalist commodity economy. Contrariwise, Marxian economic theory recognises that the equilibrative tendencies of the capitalist market stem precisely from the historically specific and ontologically peculiar modus operandi of the capitalist commodity economy that involves the production of use-values as value objects utilising commod ified labour power. That is, in a purely capitalist society the law of value constitutes the fundamental organisational principle of material reproduction guaranteeing the viability of capitalism as a human society by ensuring that basic goods are neither over-produced nor under-produced relative to the existing pattern of social demand. (10) But it does this while simultaneously managing the economic life of human beings for the abstract purpose of value augmentation.

Under the spell of the neo-classical apprehension of the world, the multi-variegated matter of socio-material communication in human society is reduced to the abstract and technical issue of 'calculation' that ignores the heterogeneity of use value and in fact compels a studied disinterest in use value. As already noted, in capitalist society the direct producers are rendered indifferent to use value in production, for as commodity economic inputs into the production process of capital they are recruited by capital to produce any goods that happen to be in social demand, such that capital may pursue its abstract chrematistic of value augmentation. Further, capital instils a disinterest on the part of workers in their role as consumers to the wherewithal and modalities of use value production. For workers simply find themselves spending the value equivalent of their necessary labour on the historically determined necessities of life produced in what confronts them as the production process of capital. The over all effect of this commodity economic compelled disinterest or indifference enables the daily production of use values with the potential to destroy life on the planet itself, not to mention the lives of so many workers along the way. Therefore, fixated largely upon the abstract and technical question of economic calculation, society-wide economic planning designed to simulate the equilibrative tendencies of the society-wide integrated self-regulating system of the capitalist market could actually exacerbate the worst features of use value neglect characteristic of capital. True, particularly in the case of Albert and Hahnel, the iterative participatory-democratic procedures built in to their model may serve to partially counteract the above trend. But in the end, positing a general equilibrium as the socio-material reproductive goal of a socialist society, will only smuggle back into socialism the abstract principles of operation of the capitalist commodity economy.

Informed by the ontology of socialism derived from the reconstruction of Marx's Capital as the theory of a purely capitalist society, my argument is that a genuine socialism cannot countenance the society-wide commodity economic sundering of production and consumption generated by the capitalist market. Instead, socialist planning demands the reconnection of production and consumption that must develop around the concern over use value (its re-entrenchment in economic life) and engender respect for the earth. (11) This will necessarily entail the creative re-design of socio-material communities, for if the notion of a plan is to have a socialist substance there can be no equivocation on the question of scale. In this sense, critics of economic planning like Nove (1983), Steele (1992) and Sayer and Walker (1992), are essentially correct to point to the optimality of the capitalist market for performing society-wide abstract calculation; (12) a position buttressed by the view that if socialism is simply about s imulating the former, why settle for second best? But they are so very wrong to believe the only alternative is a retreat into a kind of Luddism.

For example, on the basis of the Unoist approach to Marxist economic theory, Sekine (1988) has offered the rudiments of a model of viable socialist economic reproduction and institutional configuring predicated upon a distinction between 'qualitative' and 'quantitative' use value production. The importance of precisely this sort of creative thinking for the debate over socio-material communication resides in the fashion the model interweaves various operative principles of economy such as decentralised planning, and co-operation and 'reciprocity' in Polanyi's sense of the term. And further, in the way it would incorporate what Itoh (1995) refers to as 'small-m markets'; that is, not the historically specific integrated self-regulating market of the capitalist commodity economy, but markets in the sense adverted to by Marx, functioning external to the material reproductive life of the community, of the sort that existed in the interstices of the world since ancient times, that may persist benignly in a sociali st society (more on this below). Qualitative use value production then, constitutes production of use values by independent democratic local communities, largely insulated from the ravages of global markets, working 'for themselves'. Such goods destined for final consumption might include housing, clothing, furniture, toiletries, children's toys, etc., as well as foodstuff production utilising local community area land and chemical free greenhouse technology, hydroponics, and the so-called 'guerrilla gardening' so ubiquitous in both urban and rural communities today. Quantitative use values such as means of production, heavy infrastructure goods, heavy consumer durables, construction materials, and so on, would be produced in state industrial agglomerations deploying the latest labour saving techniques such as robotics, with production planned to satisfy the demand of local communities (as local communities would contribute to the final consumption needs of the state sector). Given the attendant requirements for transportation, storage and complex networks of upstream and downstream linkages, quantitative use value production activities might initially take place in former capitalist cities unless access to resources dictated otherwise.

Underpinning the socialist reconnection of production and consumption and re-entrenching the use value dimension of economic life with the tethering of work to its use value outcome, would be a concerted drive towards the overall de-reifying of socio-material communication through the shrinking of the scope of the abstract quantitative calculation of the impersonal self-regulating capitalist market. Evolving as part of this process from the outset of the transition initiative will necessarily be the creative deployment of alternative complex multi-variant systems of socio-material communication operating with for example, local currencies, so-called 'need exchanges', and micro-systems such as the much touted Local Exchange Trading Scheme (LETS). (13) Further, as the important work of Itoh (1995) argues, not only the small-in market, but other economic forms such as money, the wage, credit, etc., which long antedated capitalism, may be utilised in creative combinations in the creative reconfiguration of the so cialist human material reproductive anatomy that is far more wide-ranging than what has been forthcoming in the often arid plan/market debate.

Motivation. To engender new forms of genuine socialist motivation, specifically the self-motivation which constitutes an integral component of the ontology of socialism, further requires that the reificatory infrastructure of the commodity economy that separates work from its use value production outcome must be shattered and the material reproductive anatomy of society radically transformed. For example, as the soviet style experiments demonstrated, while eliminating markets through the instatement of society-wide economic planning largely de-commodified labour power, worker alienation persisted in the disinterestedness of labourers in production processes the product outcome from which they were structurally disconnected. The Brezhnev era adage: 'They pretend to pay us so we pretend to work', encapsulated the predicament of lapsing 'moral' (extra-economic) incentives and the systemic inhibiting of 'material' (economic) incentives; a predicament that in a genuine socialism must necessarily obtain resolution in self-motivation for work, that hinges upon the re-entrenching of the use value dimension of socio-material life.

In the aforementioned models of participatory and democratic planning of Albert and Hahnel and Cockshott and Cottrell where the issues of use value re-entrenchment, and subsequently of socio-economic scale, are eclipsed by the concern over society-wide equilibrium outcomes, the response to the question of socialist motivation is not very satisfying. Without the economic compulsion of the capitalist market, Cockshott and Cottrell for example, slip towards a quasi-feudal arrangement utilising a 'poll tax' which 'establishes that all have the same obligation to work for the common good before they work for themselves' (1997, 345 emphasis added). For their part, Albert and Hahnel advocate 'peer pressure' as the compulsion to work (1992, 62); something that has recently been referred to as 'Orwellian' (Ticktin 1998, 75). As I have argued, a regression to forms of extra-economic coercion would be untenable for those with the historical experience of capitalism and the peculiar commodity economic freedom that it off ers. To constitute a genuine advance over capitalism work in a socialist society must be compelled by neither economic nor extra-economic means. In short it must be self-motivated. And accomplishing this demands the terminating of the commodity economic separation of production and consumption and the indifference to use value in production fostered by such.

To be sure, the complete overcoming of alienation in work and the rendering of work according to Marx's vision of such as life's prime want, as with the aforementioned dereifying of socio-material communication, will not be fully realised in the immediate future by even the most committed socialist efforts. For example, within the material reproductive model founded upon the distinction between qualitative and quantitative use value production introduced above, it would have to be recognised that the work in the state industrial enclaves, because increasingly distanced from final consumption, would constitute the most alienating work in a socialist society. This as opposed to the production of qualitative goods at the level of the largely self-sufficient communities the existence of which incidentally would also increasingly facilitate the crystallising of effective forms of direct democracy. Required in the case of quantitative production then would be the democratic rotation of labour forces from qualitativ e use value productive communities to begin to realise Marx's vision of liberating human labour from the commodity economic induced drudgery of performing a single productive task over the course of a lifetime. Further, the arduousness of state work could be increasingly offset through greater employment of automation and information technology. But given the debilitating impact of centuries of capitalism upon human socio-material intercourse, it will take time for the regularisation among communities and economic sectors of relations of reciprocity and co-operation that would enable the withering away of forms of state and the flourishing of a world socialist commonwealth as 'the kingdom of freedom'.

Discovery. Argumentation from the perspective of the 'Austrian approach' to bourgeois economics (Kirzner 1997) concurs with the work of Stiglitz cited above (see note 9 above) in questioning the standard neo-classical account of the information transmitting properties of markets, but then proceeds even further to dispute the very model of social action predicated upon such. That is, for the Austrians, at the core of actually existing capitalism and the fount of capitalist vitality is not the routine of transparent price informed action of social agents which the notion of a Pareto-optimal equilibrium state captures, but a process of entrepreneurial discovery unfolding in an environment of 'rivalrous' competition and under conditions of economic disequilibrium. The Austrians present the entrepreneur as the indomitable hero of capitalism, forever 'scanning' the economic 'horizons' (Kirzner 1997, 72); and following upon this, able to dynamically mobilise the so-called 'un-thought-of' or 'tacit knowledge' of econ omic life to produce the market driving profit making discoveries that are synonymous with capitalist economic growth. Therefore, according to the Austrian approach, it is precisely the entrepreneurial discovery process and the conditions which foster it that constitutes the test for a viable socialism that hopes to pose an historical challenge to capitalism.

Without entering into a prolonged discussion of the way in which the theory of a purely capitalist society handles the issues of the equilibrative and dynamic tendencies of capital which divide bourgeois economics , (14) let us begin to unpack the Austrian claims from the perspective of the ontology of socialism set out above. First, as with their neo-classical counterparts, the Austrian approach does not problematise use value. Thus, whatever the ascribed ingenuity of the Austrian entrepreneur, the exigencies of commodity economic value self-augmentation will perpetually set clear parameters for the so-called entrepreneurial scanning of use value space. That is, the use value horizons of the entrepreneurial discovery process are necessarily delimited to those conducive to the reification of human material existence characteristic of capital. The point here then, is that socialism demands not only creative thinking about the concrete modalities of de-reifying material life and dismantling the structures and r esidues of the commodity economy as per the first ontological principle of socialism, but following several centuries of capital's grip on human economic existence and the life-world, of creatively thinking about all the use value potentials that commodity economic governance of our material affairs has ruthlessly frustrated and crippled. Hence, given that the opportunities for profit seized upon by bourgeois entrepreneurs will routinely produce use value outcomes that conflict with the goals of human socio-material betterment entailed in a genuine socialism, entrepreneurial discovery as such can hardly be accepted as a test for a viable socialism.

Further, there exist a cluster of social use values on the horizon of the twenty-first century--ecologically sustainable agriculture, ecologically sensitive mass transportation systems, resource regenerative sources of energy, re-configured urban and rural community infrastructure--that all appear extremely resistant to capitalist productive governance. Trapped by its 'market mentality', as well as its lack of sensitivity to the heterogeneity of use value, bourgeois economics has little understood the importance of differentiating between what I have preliminarily referred to as 'endogenous' and 'exogenous' change (Westra 1996), and the implications of such for probing issues of the 'great transformations' that have marked capitalism, and of course, the great transformation that a genuine socialism deploying the above use values will embody. The importance of the foregoing distinction is related to the Unoist periodising of capitalism according to the institutional architecture, modalities of capital accumula tion, and dominant and characteristic forms of use-value production marking the world-historic stages of capitalist development. (15) What the history of capitalism so glaringly demonstrates, is that while endogenous change entailing incremental innovations in productive technique and labour processes to gain market advantage has been assimilated by capital within the context of a specific stage of capitalist development with the relatively minor interruptions or crises attendant to capitalist business cycles, exogenous transformations in the world-historic structure of capital accumulation marked by the incorporation of new energy sources, mammoth investment in new fixed capital and infrastructure and the requisite restructuring of economic institutions, has been purchased by capital only at tremendous human cost of world-wide depression and world war, and is necessarily predicated upon overarching social reorganisation. One only has to consider the sort of great transformation involved in the transition fro m the capitalist stage of Imperialism of the turn-of-the-century to that of so-called 'fordism' or what the Uno approach has dubbed the capitalist stage of Consumerism representative of the period of capitalist development following the Second World War. (16)

The lessons to be drawn from the forgoing with regards to the question of economic discovery are on the one hand then, the fact that whatever the empirically cogent insights into the working of capitalism captured by the respective models of social action bifurcating bourgeois economics, their relevance would be limited to the case of endogenous change. The world-historic rise of a new stage of capitalist development that dynamically transforms the fundamental structural modalities and scope of capital accumulation owes more to a combination and juxtaposition of conjunctural factors and deep structural propensities than to market equilibrative trends of capitalism or the special talents of wily bourgeois entrepreneurs. On the other hand, as theories of phases of capitalism (17) illustrate, the mere fact that capital only laboriously is able to manage the exogenous use value demands that have historically confronted it, further confirms Marx's view of capital as a limited and 'alien' mode of organising human m aterial affairs. Thus, setting aside for the moment questions of the tractability for the march of value of use values beckoning humanity from the portals of the new millennium, history suggests that capital never lets go of its fundamental structures of economy--in this case those of the petroleum/automobile economy--without the sort of murderous destruction that enveloped it in the Twentieth Century world wars. Against this backdrop, the genuine socialist demand of this article for the re-configuration of productive communities and the socio-economic infrastructure in a manner that utilises new sources of power and deploys the new use values cluster on the horizon, and which fully employs human resources should not appear particularly daunting. Though it requires a re-conceptualisation of what in fact is meant by 'discovery' that considers questions of so-called un-thought-of knowledge in regards to epochal, stage transformations of capitalism and the sort of revolutionary change demanded by a genuine socialism.

The second major point to be made in relation to the issue of economic discovery follows from the work of Adaman and Devine (1997). As they maintain, the tacit knowledge of the discovery process is not just limited to an entrepreneurial cohort in society but is actually quite widespread. Thus the essential question for socialists is how to endow socialist publics with the appropriate capacities to productively mobilise such knowledge. It is precisely here in my view that the issue of socio-economic scale and the re-connecting of production and consumption in reconfigured productive communities, and the contribution such makes to the fostering of new forms of motivation becomes all-important. It is arguable that no form of socio-material organisation would release the inventive, creative energies of human beings better than one in which individuals and communities worked 'for themselves', and where the thrust of material life was in the direction of inculcating a concern amongst producer/consumers of use value outcomes and production modalities. In this sense, the heroes of socialism will be empowered working people whose thinking about socio-material existence has broken free from the commodity economic chains that have hitherto bound it. As well, as studies of technological change in soviet style socialism confirm (Rosenberg 1994), besides the cumbersome bureaucratic structures of society-wide planning, it was efforts to perpetually enlarge the scale of production economies that impacted so negatively on processes of innovation.

The final substantive question regarding economic discovery that this article intends to address concerns the matter of economic competition. From the perspective of the proposed framework for socialist construction predicated upon the distinction between qualitative and quantitative use value production, it is primarily the nexus of competition and discovery within the context of quantitative or state sector production that warrants our attention here. For it should be evident that as per the above treatment of the issues of motivation and the endowing of socialist publics with the appropriate capacities to mobilise tacit knowledge, within largely self-sufficient communities of people working for themselves through social productive relations of cooperation and reciprocity, innovations to improve the quality of life should be regularly forthcoming. And freely disseminated 'known' or even 'partly-thought-of' knowledge and information of best practices would provide the underpinning for the further realising a nd deployment of un-thought-of knowledge to revolutionise socio-material life. The enterprises of the state sector however, producing quantitative use values for the independent communities, would optimally have to be exposed to competition to reduce costs and innovate. How the handling of enterprise closures might unfold would differ according to the possible ownership schemes, (18) though for the socialist society as a whole, given that such production facilities were highly automated, the impact upon employment of labour would be minimal. And again, following from the assumption that mobilising tacit or un-thought-of knowledge is in fact not the prerogative of a narrow social cohort, a genuine socialism predicated upon the re-configuring of productive communities and the combining of varying forms of socio-material communication can be expected to engender a dynamic process of economic discovery.

Conclusion

This article commenced with the claim that though only exceptionally mined for that purpose, the Marxian political economy research agenda founded in Marx's Capital constitutes the repository of the most fundamental and enduring insights into the socio-economic institutional architecture of a genuine socialism. The key to unravelling such insights it was further argued, resided in a particular apprehension of Marx's formative work. It was then demonstrated how deriving from the Unoist recasting and completion of Marx's Capital as the theory of a purely capitalist society was an ontology of socialism offering a set of principles to guide socialist actors in the remaking of their world. If there is one signal conception animating the ontology of socialism it is the view tat contrary to a hitherto received Marxist convention, a genuine socialism is not institutionally prefigured by capitalism, but in its most fundamental incarnation is to be approached as the antithesis or institutional opposite of capitalism. T he article ten proceeded to elaborate through the prism of the debate over calculation, motivation and discovery in socialist construction, means by which the foregoing conception could be operationalised in a genuine socialism.

As I suggested in the last lines of the second substantive section of this article it is the ontological principle of the re-entrenchment of the use value dimension of socio-material life which constitutes the linchpin in the socialist institutional edifice. To return the responsibility of managing human economic affairs to human beings themselves demands the dismantling and deconstruction of the commodity economy and its vestiges and residues and the re-embedding of economic existence in the life-world and the use value material reproductive concerns such entails. However, this is necessarily predicated upon the extirpating of the sine qua non of capital--the commodification of labour power. Yet, for socialism to constitute an historical advance over capitalism, such de-commodification must occur without the re-instatement of forms of extra-economic coercion. In order for work to be compelled by neither extra-economic or economic means workers must become self-motivated. Selfmotivation in work though, requir es the overcoming of alienation or the studied disinterest and indifference to use value outcomes of work which capitalism and socialist experiments designed to simulate its society-wide abstract calculation procedures engenders. Reconnecting work and its ultimate purpose--the satisfaction of human needs and wants through the production of a multitude of use values-- obliges socialist planners to rethink the question of socioeconomic scale. That is, re-entrenching the use value dimension of socio-material life necessarily entails the creative re-configuring of productive communities and the contemplation of new modalities of socio-material communication that explodes the views of such as simply a technical question of economic 'calculation'. Finally, the vitality of a genuine socialism hinges upon a process of economic discovery which problematises use value and the exigencies of exogenous socio-economic change. For it is both in the recovery of use value potentials trampled by capital, as well as the develop ment of those unmanageable according to the dictates of value augmentation which exist on the horizon of the new millennium, upon which a socialism clamoured for by a major social constituency will necessarily be predicated.

Notes

(1.) See for example the path-breaking work of Adaman and Devine (1997).

(2.) The founding monographs of the Japanese Uno approach are Uno (1980), an English translation of the abridged version of a two volume work written by Kozo Uno in 1950-52, each available only in Japanese; Sekine (1986a;1997); and Albritton (1991).

(3.) See Albritton (1998;1999).

(4.) To be sure, there exists several different currents of the Japanese Uno approach to Marxism. My work is influenced in particular by the development of Uno's theories in the writings of Thomas Sekine and Robert Albritton (see note 2 above).

(5.) It is the signal contribution of the Uno approach to Marxist theory in my view to have refined, reconstructed and ultimately completed Marx's Capital as the theory of a purely capitalist society. The ultimate refinement of the theory of a purely capitalist society to date is Sekine (1997).

(6.) Without wading too deep into the epistemological thicket here, the Unoist claim is that the logic of capital is dialectical and that Marxian economic theory is guided by the 'material force' of the dialectic of capital and is thus able to reproduce that logic in a self-contained dialectical thought system that 'objectively' captures all the categories of capital. See Sekine (1980;1998); Albritton (1998;1999).

(7.) The use of terminology to describe capital such as 'transcending human force' or 'extra-human force' is not intended as an expression of the problematic 'Kantian' antimony between the social and natural worlds. Rather they exist as expressions of the phenomena of commodity economic reification in the sense that capital, though a socially and historically constituted object, at a certain point takes on 'a life of its own' as it wields human material reproduction for the satisfaction of its abstract purposes. As put by Albritton (1998, 70): 'One of the peculiarities of capital is that it is a subjectified object that objectifies subjects. It is an object in which self-expanding value takes on the properties of SUBJECT writ large, and in the process converts human subjects into commodities or mere objects used by value to expand itself'.

(8.) From the perspective of the Uno approach the theory of a purely capitalist society certainly does not exhaust Marxian political economy. Unoists argue that the latter necessarily requires a levels of analysis approach in which Marxian economics is supplemented by a mid-range stage theory of capitalist development and a more empirical historical analysis of capitalism. Unoists of course argue that levels of analysis are not an arbitrary imposition upon Marxism as Capital itself combined the theorising of the abstract principles of operation of capitalism, the theorising of the constituents of the liberal phase of capitalism, as well as abundant historico--empirical illustrative material. The Unoist claim however, is that in passing away prior to completing Capital and the dawn of the stage of imperialism, Marx did not fully appreciate the need to mediate the study of capital's abstract logic and that of its historical unfolding with a stage theory of capitalist development. See for example (Albritton 1991 ; 1992).

(9.) It is worth indicating as an aside here, that a current of neo-classical economics (Stiglitz 1994) has challenged the assumption of the 'perfect' information transmitting capacity of markets and suggested that socialist models predicated upon that view would fail to produce the desired outcomes if operationalised in the world beyond theory. Proponents of market socialism (Putterman, Roemer and Silvestre 1998) counter with the claim that 'real markets' could in fact be utilised to achieve egalitarian socialist outcomes. However as I have intimated above, if by real markets what is meant is the integrated system of self-regulating markets of the commodity economy, the reified socio-material existence demanding the commodification of labour power that such would perpetuate does not constitute a genuine socialism whatever the egalitarian propensities built into it.

(10.) This position is ultimately supported by the solution provided in the theory of a purely capitalist society to the infamous so-called 'transformation problem' the subject focus of which is the relationship between value and price categories in Marx's Capital. See Sekine (1997 vol. 2) for a complete elaboration of the problem, replete with mathematical proofs, and Westra (1999) for a succinct summary.

(11.) Duncan (1999) offers a strong argument for the importance of agriculture in any future socialist endeavour.

(12.) The oft-repeated mantra of the existence of a 'complex' division of labour as an impediment to socialist planning neglects the fact that such, as it has developed in capitalist society, reflects precisely the predominance of the commodity economy in organising material reproduction and the polluting of the life-world by value. Economic life operated by other principles preceded capital, and principles other than those marking capitalism, hopefully including creative advanced socialist ones, will be at the core of human material reproduction long after the age of capital has passed.

(13.) There is a growing literature on processes of socio-material communication, as I have termed it, which involve the re-localising of our economic lives. See for example, Meeker-Lowry (1996), Korten (1999) and Shorthose (2000).

(14.) Quite simply, what the theory of a purely capitalist society demonstrates (Sekine 1997 vol. 2), is that the tendency towards equilibrium is a feature of the widening or prosperity phase of the capitalist business cycle where accumulation proceeds at a given level of development of the productive forces. The disequilibrative thrust of capital accumulation is a hallmark of capitalist crises and depression, and of the deepening phase of capital accumulation where a 'clustering' of innovations in the replacement of fixed capital raises the organic composition of capital, and as such permits the ongoing accumulation of capital at a higher level of development of the productive forces. From the perspective of the theory of a purely capitalist society, raising the organic composition of capital is something forced upon capital (and by association, the 'entrepreneur') in order that it may reconstitute the industrial reserve army which was absorbed during capital's prosperity phase; and as such, maintain the com modification of labor power. Put differently, it is only through capitalist crises that capital is able to sustain the capital/ labour relation or relations of production appropriate to the capitalist commodity economy (though following crises, always at a higher level of development of the social productive forces).

(15.) Albritton (1991) offers the most complete development of the stage theory of capitalism from an Unoist perspective.

(16.) For a defense of the appellation and conceptualising of Consumerism as best capturing the differentia specifica of the post-Second World War phase of capitalism, see Westra (1996).

(17.) For a wide-ranging discussion of questions of phases of capitalist development including representations from the predominant schools of thought on the topic, see Albritton, Itoh, Westra and Zuege eds. (2001).

(18.) Sekine (1988) suggests such enterprises might be felicitously structured along the lines of the contemporary capitalist corporation, involving the separation of management and ownership, and that the latter would be held in the form of equity shares owned by communities, the state and amongst the quantitative use value producing enterprises themselves. There would be no individual ownership. An extended non Unoist discussion of similar questions of varieties of possible ownership forms, that is quite useful, may be found in Roemer (1994).

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Richard Westra is Senior Lecturer in the Division of International and Area Studies, Pukyong National University, Busan, South Korea. He is co-editor of the volume Value and the World Economy Today forthcoming from Palgrave.