Date: Sat, 18 Jan 1997 20:22:24 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: M-G: Re: planning please



Nick asks, would the workers recoup _all_ the profits? What about
provision for social needs? The answer is that there will of course be
taxes. If profits are post tax earnings, all of these go to the workers as
profit shares from coop earnings. Incidentally the coops are financed from
an assets tax on the value of the holdings. But the workers control the
disposition of tax funds too, because theirs is a working class and not a
capitalist government. So the workers, as I said in an earlier post,
directly or indirectly recoup all the profits.

Nick trots out the argument that what went wrong in the USSR was a lack of
democratic accountability. Planning + democracy can solve the calculation
problem, he says. Alas, this won't work. Nothing in the calculation
problem turns on a lack of democracy. The problem is that the incentive
structure of a planned economy discourages accurate reporting of
information, that it stifles innovation, and that rational planning
depends on a degree of grasp of the total economy in its dynamism that is
impossible to have. It may be modeled on a computer, but unless we are
willing to undemocratically turn our economy over to computers to make the
basic decisions, that will be no help. Indeed, democracy may make the
calcutaion problem worse by flooding the system with even more information
than it had to handle without democracy.

So we can agree taht there is no chjoice between democracy and
authoritrianism. Democracy is not a negotiable demand. But there is a
choice between markets and planning, and markets win unless planning can
solve the calcvuation problem.

Nick says that to him it seems that market socialism is a contradiction in
terms. That's only if what we are fighting is not mainly capitalist
exploitation of wage labor but market competition itself. Louis P says
that's what he's fighting, he hates it. Well, I'm not too fond of it
myself. But no one has yet convinced me that getting rid of it offers us
anything better.

--Justin

On Sat, 18 Jan 1997, Nick Holden & Kate Ahrens wrote:

> 
> If the workers receive 'all the profits', then how are the social costs of society to be met? How does such a 
> society cope with unemployment, retirement, the sick and disabled? It seems to me that this vision of social 
> markets is utopian, and similar in many ways to the dreams of Robert Owen - it is concstructed by taking the 
> individual in society, and building upwards to construct a model of how life would be for everyone. Each person 
> essentially gets 'all the profits' from their production, although they work together (in co-operatives, 
> naturally) to do so more efficiently.

SNIP

> 
> Those who argue against central planning as a means of promoting market socialism are constructing a straw man, 
> to knock down with ease. Stalinist monolithic central planning and petty bourgeois marketism are not the only 
> choices: we can be confident, I think, that workers after the revolution will be able to construct mechanisms 
> for planning the needs of communities and societies that are responsive to people's needs, operate 
> collectively, and take account of the various needs, and abilities that exist in that society. Some things 
> (railway timetables, for example) may require national level planning (or supra-national in the case of Europe) 
> but the idea that these jobs, of necessity, create a strata of beauracrats who oppress the masses unless they 
> are done through a market is surreal - make the beauracrats accountable to the masses, and the opportunity for 
> oppression disappears.
> 
> But the solution to this is not to say, 'central planning is the mistake'. We should say, 'the lack of 
> democratic accountability is the mistake'.
> 




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