I’m extremely intrigued by the following interview, part of a tradition, a renewal of the socialist tradition in terms of information and complexity economics, that I have not encountered so far.

Read the full interview here.

According to the interviewee, Heinz Dieterich , it is the background to the recent announcements by Chavez in Venezuela.

I’m noting the abandonment of the idea of the nationalization of private property, see below, and the stress on a non-monetary value accounting.

According to Prof. Dieterich, his theory of a “socialism of the 21st century”, is quite influential:

“I developed it, beginning in 1996. It has been published with its corresponding theory in book form, from 2000 on, in Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, Central America, Brazil, and Venezuela, and, outside Latin America, in Spain, Germany, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, and Turkey. Since 2001, it has been appropriated all over the world. Presidents like Hugo Chávez and Rafael Correa use it constantly, and so do labor movements, farmers, intellectuals, and political parties.”

I’m excerpting the significant passages:

“Q. What would be the decisive step that the President would have to take to arrive at socialism of the 21s century in Venezuela?

A. They are two: 1. to gradually replace the regulating principle of market economy, price, by the regulating principle of socialist economy, value, understood as time inputs (insumos de tiempo) necessary for the creation of a product; and 2. to advance the economic participation of citizens and workers at three levels: 1. at the macroeconomic level (e.g., national budget); 2. at the mesoeconomic level (municipality); and, 3. at the microeconomic level (enterprise).

Q. Is the economy of socialism of the 21st century, then, a barter economy?

A. No. That is as erroneous as the pronouncement that nobody knows how to build socialism of the 21st century. The problem of economic injustice does not lie in money. It has nothing to do with whether economy is monetized or functions through exchange in kind (by barter). In the exploitative relation between slave and master, once the initial payment is amortized, money does not intervene, and yet it is one of the worst brutalities in history.

Injustice exists when a product “A” is exchanged for a product “B,” and their values — the labor time necessary to produce each one of them — are not equal, that is to say, when equivalents are not exchanged. Whether that exchange of unequal values (unequal labor efforts) is monetized — that is to say, whether it is expressed in monetary or natural form — is secondary.

Q. What would be the decisive step of the President, then?

A. It is not generalized nationalization of private property, because it does not solve the cybernetic problem of the market. It did not do so in the past and it would not do so today. Socialism today is essentially a problem of informatic complexity. Hence, the transcendental step consists in establishing socialist accounting (value) next to capitalist accounting (price), in the State, PdVSA-CVG, and cooperatives, in order to construct an economic circuit of production and circulation parallel to that of the capitalist market economy. The economy of state and social institutions can move step by step toward the economy of value and gain ground against the circuit of capitalist reproduction, until it displaces it in the future. Since the scales of valuation by prices, values, and also volumes are commensurable, there are no ruptures in economic exchanges that could cause a political problem to the government. In all this, the State and the majorities play an important role, but both are nowadays mainly with the project of the President.

To create this parallel circuit of the economy of value would be relatively easy, because values exist in underlying form in the present capitalist accounting. Values exist in it in such a way that, with the development of corresponding software, it would be very easy to establish this socialist economic circuit next to the capitalist one. Without this passage to the economy of equivalency, it is not possible to have a socialist economy.”