Acceptance Speech for World Marxian Economics Award

Abstract

June 19, 2015It is an honor of mine to receive the 2015 World Marxian Economics Award from the World Association of Political Economy (WAPE). My sincere gratitude goes to WAPE and the award committee. My age and health conditions do not allow my presence at this conference, but let me use this alternative way to share with you my experience in the research of Marxist economic theories.In 1956-1959, I studied in the graduate program at the Department of Economics, Remin University of China. In addition to the classes of Marxist economists such as Song Tao, Su Xing, etc., I took time to carefully read volumes 1-3 of Capital as well as major works of other founders of Marxism. In retrospect, these three years not only provided the basic knowledge in Marxist economic theories but also led me to become a real Marxist in terms of the view of the world.In 1959, I completed my graduate study and started to work in the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences after 1978), which was the beginning of my research career in Marxist economic theory. In 1985, I retired at the age of 60, but my research has never stopped. In over half a century, I have published five monographs and about 150 journal articles.Now I would like to share with you my reflections on a few important theoretical issues that have long occupied my mind.First, the Historical Positioning of the Preliminary Stage of SocialismIn 1987, Deng Xiaoping pointed out that China was still at the preliminary stage of socialism, a fact that should be the starting point of everything to be done. The concept of preliminary stage of socialism differs from Marx's idea of the first phase of communism, Lenin's transitional period, or Mao Zedong's new democracy. The question is, is there any support for such a concept from the theoretical system of Marxism? Marx's idea of five successive stages of social development, i.e., primitive society, slave society, feudalism, capitalist society, socialism and capitalism, can be seen in quite a few of his works. Marx also suggests in the Economic Manuscripts 1857-1858 a three-stage i.e., from relations of dependence to personal independence founded on objective dependence and then to universal development of individuals with individual labor as social labor from the very beginning. From the perspective of political economy, the five-stage model is based on production, especially the evolution of the ownership of the means of production, while the three-stage model is based on that of exchange relations. The two models reveal the general law of the development of production and exchange, respectively. It is their unity that provides a means to measure any specific stage of social development. China has taken a rather special route from the new democratic revolution to socialism. In the sense of the fivestage model, after the confiscation of bureaucrat-capital and the socialist transformation of national bourgeoisie, public ownership became the main body of the national economy, which indicated that China had crossed the Caudine Forks and entered the first stage of socialism. From the perspective of the three-stage model, however, commodity economy and market economy is yet to be developed, and people will still be involved in labor exchange through market and commodity forms. That is to say, China will remain in the second stage for a long time. Hence, the perspective that integrates the five-stage model and the three-stage model will allow us to grasp theoretically more accurate the scientific content of the preliminary stage of socialism.Second, the Distribution According to Labor at the Preliminary Stage of SocialismMarx suggests that the first stage of communism is characteristic of the distribution of consuming goods according to labor, and commodity economy and market economy will no longer exist. …