To read this content please select one of the options below:

In Search of the Socialist Subject: Radical Political Economy and the Study of Moral Incentives in the Third World

Including A Symposium on 50 Years of the Union for Radical Political Economics

ISBN: 978-1-78769-850-5, eISBN: 978-1-78769-849-9

Publication date: 7 May 2019

Abstract

For Leftists engaged in the study of political economy during the 1960s and 1970s, Cuba and China held particular promise as postrevolutionary states working to construct systems of production and distribution which were predicated on solidarity and mutuality, rather than on the exploited and alienated labor upon which capitalism depended. Against the claim that the desire for individual material gain was irreducibly a part of the human experience, China and Cuba offered the possibility of – in the parlance of the time – a “new man”: a political subject whose motivations were in alignment with a socialist economy rather than a capitalist one.

Based on research in multiple archives, this paper explores efforts on the part of radical economists in the United States – including the Marxists at Monthly Review, the young academics who founded the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), and a handful of older Left-Keynesians – to witness Third World experiments in nonmaterial incentives firsthand. What have often been dismissed as pseudo-religious “pilgrimages” were, in reality, voyages of discovery, where radicals searched for the keys to develop a sustainable, rational, and moral political economy.

While many of the answers that radicals found in Cuba and China were ultimately unsatisfying, Third-World experiments in moral incentives serve as a powerful example of “solidarity in circulation” during the “long 1960s,” and as an important reminder that attempts to keep social science research free of political contamination serve to reify disciplinary norms which are themselves the product of the political culture in which they were formed.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Tiago Mata for inviting me to contribute to this special issue, Michael Kazin and Angus Burgin for reading drafts, Nicholas Baran for providing me with digital copies of the Baran-Sweezy Correspondence, Houghton Library for funding my research into the Paul Marlor Sweezy Papers, Carl Riskin and Howard Wachtel for answering my questions about the RPE trip to China in 1972, and in particular, Thomas Weisskopf both for sharing his notes from the FFDARPE trip and for offering suggestions after reading a draft of the article.

Citation

Feldman, B. (2019), "In Search of the Socialist Subject: Radical Political Economy and the Study of Moral Incentives in the Third World", Including A Symposium on 50 Years of the Union for Radical Political Economics (Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Vol. 37A), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 65-83. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0743-41542019000037A006

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited