"Solar Employs, Nuclear Destroys" say the bumper stickers, and while public debate may find the opinions of technologists to be of interest with respect to the second half of the slogan, it is up to social and economic analysts to deal with the first half. Do "soft path" technologies such as conservation and solar energy create more jobs? If they do, is that good? A prima facie case could be made that projects which require relatively more labor are regressive, leadings us all to work harder just to maintain the same level of existance. In this essay, Dan Luria and Lee Price examine this question on a theoretical level, first establishing what is really meant by "capital intensive" and "labor intesive "projects andsho wing that this is largely a question of the time distribution of labor. They then examine the impact of various contingencies on the job-creation aspects of these two types of projects. Furthermore, they attempt to clarify the distinction which must be made between long term political solutions to problems as opposed to "technicalfixes" which can at best provide a transitory and insubstantial relief.
Part 5 contains three excellent papers on the political economy of socialism. M. C. Howard and J. E. King examine the forces leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and note that the emphasis that Marxism places on the contradictions between the forces and relations of production help explain that transformation; in classic Marxian terms, the relations of production, in the form of Soviet Stalinism, inhibited the forces of production and contributed, thereby, to the system's collapse. Yet classic Marxism was unable to account for the fact that the push for more efficient productive relations came from above and not from below; in addition, classic Marxism did not account for the role that interstate conflict would play in the collapse of the Soviet Union. David M. Kotz investigates the factors that led the Soviet Union and China toward capitalism and notes that the lessons learned from those experiences are twofold: first, that a socialist system run by an elite is unstable and will tend toward capitalism and, second, that because socialism is incompatible with competitive markets, it must build on a viable form of democratic, participatory planning. The last paper, by Robin Hahnel, offers a defense and explanation of what one version of democratic planning might look like.This volume does more than pay homage to the academic work of Howard Sherman; it also serves as a measure of the extent to which political economy has come of age. To be sure, particularly in this era of rightist politics and global capitalism, it sometimes feels as though no one is listening. Yet compared to 1960, when Sherman earned his Ph.D., there were no political economy programs and no Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE). Sherman was one of the founding members of URPE and the major force responsible for the creation of the political economy program at the University of California, Riverside. Now there exist a variety of political economic associations and journals, established political economy programs, and a vibrant community of scholars who take a critical stance toward capitalism and neoclassical economics, while pushing for the creation of a more democratic and egalitarian future. Howard Sherman played a large part in the creation of this community, and the authors of this volume express the vision of a radical political economics that Sherman helped to create. This is an interesting collection of papers that must be read by all radical political economists.
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