Rebecca E. Karl - The Socialist Law of Value and the Rural Economy
Channel: Nathan Hill
Date: 2022-03-25

Rebecca E. Karl (New York University) - The Socialist Law of Value and the Rural Economy: Wang Yanan and Marxism in China, 1950s.
Friday 25 March, 12-1pm :

If the Law of Value – as a proposition about how surplus gets extracted and distributed socially – is a law that pertains to capitalist economies, how did theorists in China in the early 1950s try to re-theorize a socialist law of value that was not about exploitation, alienation, and appropriation, but that was about social redistribution and the creation of an economy that could overcome the production of rural-urban unevenness and instead produce the conditions for an equitable socialist economics? The debates about the law of value were highly technical from 1953 onwards, and they became highly politicized as well through the Great Leap Forward. This paper intends to take seriously the attempt to theorize a socialist economics, and in particular the question of rural extraction for urban industrialization, through the (unsuccessful) attempts to transcend the capitalist law of value in 1950s China. The Marxist philosopher, Wang Yanan, was at the center of these debates.

Rebecca E. Karl is a Professor of History at New York University. An author and co-editor of many books, her most recent is China's Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History (Verso 2020). She is co-founder of Critical China Scholars (criticalchinascholars.org) and co-editor in the positionspolitics.org collective.