Date: Tue, 14 Jan 1997 13:45:20 +0000
Subject: M-G: planning please


Justin,
 The MS thread has not run into the ground. I, for one, am still 
waiting for a reply to the paper I posted on the M-I list. In that 
paper I argue that the market mechanism,  as understood on this list, 
is specific to capitalism - it is not a universal mechanism that can 
be plugged into any society at will to allow a bit more free choice 
here or there. You know a pair of shoes unstead of two left shoes (I 
wont mention "no shoes at all").
It represents the law of value and capitalist social relations - which 
entail labour-power as a commodity.  Planning on the other hand 
represents the proletariat fighting to gain control over the use-values 
that it has produced. 
Planning vs market is therefore an expression of the contradiction - 
use-value/exchange-value. Justin, to arrive at this conclusion one's brain 
must `go up' in response to Marx's method; it is not sufficient for 
one's heart to `go up' on sight of the red flag. 
 
Nobody has shown that it is wrong to base my objections to market
 socialism on the fact that (a)  genuine socialism must presuppose a proletarian 
revolution - anything less is "social capitalism". i.e. capitalism. 
(b) if the proletarians are in power i.e. dictatorship of the proletariat-  
why would they want the market? 
Not because of some ahistorical Hayekian principle based on a fetishesed 
understanding of the market mechanism that they will carry into the 
new society as part of "all the old shit".  No. Because planning as a mechanism 
for the allocation of social labour is in principle much more efficient than the 
market. 
[ But both are abstractions which we should define, even roughly. The
Market is the idealised operation of the law of value which values commodities 
according the socially necessary labour time embodied in them by 
means of supply and demand, and allocates social labour accordingly 
to the production of exchange-values.   
Planning is the idealised operation of the  democratically expressed 
needs of workers which are integrated centrally in order to allocate 
social labour to the production of use-values.]  

So (c) markets figure only if the preconditions for central planning cannot be met.
 i.e. so far the concrete cases of isolated, backward states, where for Lenin and
 Trotsky, COMPROMISES with the market are necessary for survival. But 
no real Boshevik forgot for minute that the market, even as an 
adjunct, re-introduced the law of value [use-value/exchange-value 
contradiction] back into the workers state with a vengeance, 
threatening the rise of a new bourgeoisie.
Or in the related case, obviously, in the case of the stalinised plan, where 
Trotsky saw the market as a `crutch' for a lame plan. But when workers stand 
up they throw away their crutches. They don't carry their crutches 
with them in one hand, when holding rifles in the other during a 
seizure of power! 

If a, b, and c, why therefore do you make a case for market socialism 
unless  you accept (i) that planning is a priori less efficicient 
in allocating social labour than the  market; or (ii) that past bungled
 bureaucratic planning represents conclusive evidence of the failure of 
genuine planning and evidence for the market to augment planning, 
or (iii) horrors of horrors, you really in your uplifted heart,  want to raise 
the Red Flag in Congress.  
None of these are reasons for a Marxist as I understand the term, to advocate 
market socialism.  They are however, non-Marxist, bourgeois reasons 
for advocating market socialism.    

Dave.


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