> because they lack a means to calculate relative value sufficient for anything other than robbery, and certainly not sufficient for directing activity fit for an industrial society.
That seems to me to be an argument against a planned economy, not against socialism. There's no requirement for socialism to remove markets as mechanism to determine value.
There is a requirement to reject a market based on private ownership of the means of production as the means to determine the individuals return for work rendered, not to reject market mechanisms in general.
In a sense you are right that Marxists and "Austrians" could agree that "intermediate" socialist policies that hamper the functioning of the market are doomed to fail. But some Marxists will believe that this is because an actual Marxist implementation could have freed the market from the limitations of the halfway house of social democrats.
E.g. a problem with the social democratic model of Norway for example is exactly that the market is stymied by all kinds of regulations that are intended to cushion society from the effects of unrestrained capitalism. These clearly affect the ability of the markets to accurately price e.g. the actual cost of a product, because it ends up pricing in societal costs of dealing with labour issues unrelated to what this company actually does.
But these are necessary to achieve a socialist programme under the constraints of capitalist modes of ownership, not because of the market.
As a specific example, in Norway it is incredibly hard to make people redundant, and even normal notice periods are typicall 3 months. These protections were hard won successes of the labour movements. But they are there to safeguard employees in a system where long term unemployment is a risk leading to reduced earning ability - possibly for the rest of your life if you end up losing career progression.
Consider a socialist system where the cost of employment are effectively borne by society whether or not there is currently work for you, and where you're not losing out on salary progression. In such a system you might want to strip most redundancy protections back to the bone, because they obscure the real costs of production and they obscure real unemployment.
By stripping such protections, society would be able to see what the free labour pool actually is, and take measures on that basis - whether it would be to lower working hours, or offer more vacations, or encourage more education, or offer up resources to people wanting to start new projects.
It is thus not the market that is a problem for Marxists, but a capitalist market under capitalist modes of ownership.
That does not mean all socialists, or all Marxists, want market economies, but there certainly are Marxists who see the market as by far the best means to calculate relative value exactly in order to direct activity fit for an industrial society. At least some Marxists and Austrians will in fact agree to levels of regulation in many areas that would cause "intermediate" socialists like social democrats to have strokes.
I'm not sure I would agree with a lot of what you say here, but nevertheless you bring a very important point that I think is chronically misunderstood, or overlooked, about Marx's analysis. Free market is a crucial assumption in Marx's labour theory of value. It is the free market that drives commodity (exchange) values towards their labour value, which then drives the whole Marxist theory of capitalism forward.
That seems to me to be an argument against a planned economy, not against socialism. There's no requirement for socialism to remove markets as mechanism to determine value.
There is a requirement to reject a market based on private ownership of the means of production as the means to determine the individuals return for work rendered, not to reject market mechanisms in general.
In a sense you are right that Marxists and "Austrians" could agree that "intermediate" socialist policies that hamper the functioning of the market are doomed to fail. But some Marxists will believe that this is because an actual Marxist implementation could have freed the market from the limitations of the halfway house of social democrats.
E.g. a problem with the social democratic model of Norway for example is exactly that the market is stymied by all kinds of regulations that are intended to cushion society from the effects of unrestrained capitalism. These clearly affect the ability of the markets to accurately price e.g. the actual cost of a product, because it ends up pricing in societal costs of dealing with labour issues unrelated to what this company actually does.
But these are necessary to achieve a socialist programme under the constraints of capitalist modes of ownership, not because of the market.
As a specific example, in Norway it is incredibly hard to make people redundant, and even normal notice periods are typicall 3 months. These protections were hard won successes of the labour movements. But they are there to safeguard employees in a system where long term unemployment is a risk leading to reduced earning ability - possibly for the rest of your life if you end up losing career progression.
Consider a socialist system where the cost of employment are effectively borne by society whether or not there is currently work for you, and where you're not losing out on salary progression. In such a system you might want to strip most redundancy protections back to the bone, because they obscure the real costs of production and they obscure real unemployment.
By stripping such protections, society would be able to see what the free labour pool actually is, and take measures on that basis - whether it would be to lower working hours, or offer more vacations, or encourage more education, or offer up resources to people wanting to start new projects.
It is thus not the market that is a problem for Marxists, but a capitalist market under capitalist modes of ownership.
That does not mean all socialists, or all Marxists, want market economies, but there certainly are Marxists who see the market as by far the best means to calculate relative value exactly in order to direct activity fit for an industrial society. At least some Marxists and Austrians will in fact agree to levels of regulation in many areas that would cause "intermediate" socialists like social democrats to have strokes.