7. The economics of Socialism of the 21st Century¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter subjects the proposals of Heinz Dieterich and Arno Peters for a "Socialism of the 21st Century" to a rigorous Marxist critique, exposing them as reformist utopias that preserve capitalist relations while claiming to transcend them. Dieterich defines a socialist economy through six institutions: citizen participation in macroeconomic decisions, worker participation in microeconomic decisions, community participation in local economic decisions, participatory planning, labour-time accounting, and exchange based on equal values. He argues the decisive step is substituting price with value, claiming price functions both cybernetically—controlling economic flows—and accumulatively—enabling capitalist enrichment. For Dieterich, price is the functional equivalent of a revolver in a bank robbery; socialist transformation must remove this power from capital while retaining its cybernetic function.
The critique demonstrates that exploitation occurs not in exchange through price, but in production through extraction of surplus value. The capitalist's real revolver is ownership of the means of production, secured by the state. Removing it requires overthrowing the bourgeois state and nationalising the means of production—which Dieterich does not propose. His "dual power" within factories, placing labour-time labels on products alongside prices, is dismissed as utopian. Co-operatives within a market economy inevitably degenerate into capitalist enterprises.
Peters' model compounds these errors by retaining private ownership of banks and industries, expecting capitalists to act altruistically and accept only "wages of equivalence." The text argues this is fantasy: the sole motive of capitalist production is private profit. Modern owners play no direct role in production; factories could function without them. Peters' insistence on retaining private ownership is a cheap conjuring trick preserving capitalist relations while pretending to transform them.
The Marxist labour theory of value refers to average socially necessary labour on a world scale, not individual hours worked. Whether labour in a Caracas factory is socially necessary is decided by production conditions in thousands of factories globally, making Dieterich's calculation infinitely complex. His proposals idealise small-scale production, revealing a petty bourgeois mentality that vacillates between bourgeoisie and proletariat, preaching class peace and a "middle way."
Dieterich's vision does not entail nationalising the banks. He criticises the central bank's sabotage of the Bolivarian project yet advocates only replacing monetarism with Keynesianism—capitalism's "right boot and left boot"—not abolishing capitalism. His claim that socialism is the strategic alternative but currently impossible echoes the Russian Mensheviks who opposed Lenin and Trotsky by arguing Russia lacked conditions for socialism. Lenin's concept of dual power described workers' councils competing with the bourgeois state; Dieterich's proposals create no such power, urging workers to calculate "true value" rather than organise for revolutionary expropriation. The chapter concludes that this is not socialism but a brake on the revolutionary process.