Date: Sat, 4 Jan 1997 19:44:56 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Cooperatives?


On Sat, 4 Jan 1997, Justin Schwartz wrote:

> 
> 
> So I agree with Louis taht critical appraisal of Mondragon and other
> real world experiments with alternative economicstructures is necessary,
> and I think thgis is just the sort of discussion we need, I do not think
> that pointing out the defects and failings of market models by itself
> offers asupport for planned ones.
> 

Louis: One of the reasons I got off of PEN-L is that one of Justin's
fellow enthusiasts for market socialism, Peter Burns, tried to engage me
in a debate one more time. Frankly, I am tired of this debate and will
probably say all I plan to say on this subject for the time being in this
post.

What strikes me is how little self-questioning Justin displays on this
question. The huge gobs of spelling errors (thgis; taht;
economicstructures) in a single paragraph should tip you off about little
engagement there is on Justin's part. He dashed this off in between dinner
with the family and a couple hours reading up on torts.

He is on automatic pilot. Schweickart's "model" serves the same role in
his thinking as the Transitional Program does in the Trotskyist world. I
once pointed out to Justin that Schweickart believed that Tito's
Yugoslavia was the realization of his market socialist model. This was
just a year or two before it started falling apart. His response? Hmm, I'm
not familiar with that work of Schweickart's.

He is not for the cooperatives in the real world, but only ones that would
exist in a socialist world. Hey, we all need a little bit of utopian
thinking to get the activist juices flowing, but who cares what model you
propose. That's besides the point. Cockshott and Cottrell have a model for
a planned economy that on paper is just as good as Schweickart's. They
show that modern day computers such as the kind that are used to track
tornados, etc. are fully capable of handling the sorts of problems that
supposedly would confound planners faced with pricing decisions.

I myself noted the same thing when reading Alec Nove's "Feasible
Socialism". Nove tried to show that bureaucracy emerged to handle the
scheduling and procurement of raw materials in the manufacturing process
of very large scale projects. I was astonished that Nove did not even
refer to computers once in this passage.

I have been working overtime lately to implement a facilities management
system at Columbia that handles just these sorts of problems in a breeze.
Indeed, they are installing just such a system to eliminate bureaucracy.

I still don't consider this a model for anything, however. The reason for
this is that people in charge of economics for a revolutionary society
have to deal with the class relations they face rather than one of their
choosing.

In Nicaragua, cooperatives became a bulwark of the revolution because
there was an objective basis for it. Small scale agriculture in the
countryside under Somoza lent itself to the sort of practices that
cooperatives embodied. Meanwhile, in Cuba, large state farms were more
productive because Cuba inherited an agrarian economy based on huge
plantations.

All this chitchat about models has very little to do with the Marxist
method. Sometimes it reminds me of the calls I hear on sports talk radio.
"What the Mets should do is concentrate on pitching..." When we socialists
talk about planning versus markets, etc., it gives us the same kind of
vicarious pleasure.

The one thing that does bother me about Justin's dogmatic insistence on
the superiority of market socialism is that it seems to be based on a
selective geography. You know that famous New Yorker poster where things
get smaller and finally disappear when you get west of the Hudson? Well,
Justin has sort of the same problem. He never gets very far east of East
Germany.

I once asked him about the Cuban economy which was highly successful in
the 1960s and 70s with zero markets. His response? Cuba? Don't know much
about that. Can't keep up with everything, you know.

Not knowing about the Cuban economy and saying that planning doesn't work
is a sign that you are only superficially engaged with the whole planning
vs market question. As a matter of fact, I would challenge Justin to a
debate right now about Cuban socialism. What would a market socialist
critique of the one country in the world that seemed to avoid the type of
bureaucracy and privilege that afflicted the Soviet bloc? Should I wait
until Justin finds that small country more interesting?



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