Subject: M-G: Re: M-I: planning please
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 1997 17:53:02 -0500 ()


dr. bedggood,
     I think that you are comparing some idealized form of 
planning with actual markets, an inappropriate comparison.  
Any comparison of actual planning with actual markets will 
give a rather different answer.  Thus, would you argue that 
the Soviet economy, one in which planning played an 
important, if imperfect, role reflected the implementation 
of "use values" rather than "exchange values"?  I note that 
it was a highly militarized economy.  Did all those tanks 
represent use values?  The most planning-oriented economy 
in the world today is that of North Korea, even more 
heavily militarized and suffering such massive food 
shortages that it has to kiss the US's ass and apologize to 
the ROK for the submarine incident so that it can get 
Cargill grain.  One million men poised on the DMZ, but GDP 
collapsing at 5% per year with massive food shortages.  
This represents the triumph of "use values" over "exchange 
values"?  You've got to be kidding.
     As for MS, it remains the case that of all the 
societies that were or are ruled by a Communist Party at 
one point or another, the one with the highest standard of 
living ("use values," folks) in the world is Slovenia, 
which is still a workers' managed, market socialist state, 
and one that has civil liberties and a functioning 
democracy as well, pathetically bourgeois as that may be.
Barkley Rosser
On Tue, 14 Jan 1997 13:45:20 +0000 
dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz wrote:


> 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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-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
rosserjb-AT-jmu.edu




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