Institute economists split on whether capitalist crisis was producing a planned economy

Evidence

However, such optimism was increasingly undermined by the analyses of the effects of the world economic crisis, and of capitalist crisis policies and the planned economy, which were conducted by the Institute’s economistsPollock, Kurt Mandelbaum (alias Kurt Baumann) and Gerhard Meyerwho were more concerned with current events. … But what Pollock, Meyer and Mandelbaum presented in their articles up to 1935 allowed less and less room for faith in the tendencies towards the socialist planned economy contained within contemporary society. Pollock’s view was that the implementation of a capitalist perversion of the planned economy could be observed more and more clearly. Meyer and Mandelbaum, who reserved the term `planned economy’ purely for a socialist economic order, the basic economic possibility of which they were able to demonstrate, found that only political crisis measures could be seen in the capitalist countries, and that there were no tendencies whatsoever towards planned regulation of the economy. The authors in the Horkheimer circle connected the idea of a continued growth of objective possibilities with the idea of the avant-garde function of certain parts of the superstructure which were allied to mature productive forces, but conscious of their own lack of autonomy. It was this, apart from mere desperation over the progress of fascism, which kept up their hopes for socialism, and enabled them to evade and outflank awkward topics such as the proletariat, Soviet socialism, and the developmental tendencies of Western economic systems. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 503

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s later theory of ‘state capitalism’ (Pollock) and Horkheimer/Adorno’s critique of the administered world. — connects to: Institute members split over whether fascism was capitalism’s political form — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 509

Broader Connections

• Institute members split over whether fascism was capitalism’s political form #complicates (0.72) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 509