File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-11.141, message 85


Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 11:53:26 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-I: Cooperatives?



I observe that after my last outburst Louis seems to have calmed down and
started to present some arguments. Well, good, that's more productive. I
still think he owes me an apology, but I won't hold my brief. And, by the
way Louis, Solidarity explicitly does not conceive itself tobe a permanent
group but as a sort of transitionbal organization whose task it is to
build our movement and ultimately merge into something bigger when we have it.

Carroll Cox once again raises the argument that there's no point in
building abstract models unless theres are tied into to trajectories of
struggle, since the specific shape of these will affect what models are
actually realized and in what ways. While I agree that it would be very
useful to think about how socialism could practically be achieved, I draw
the exactly opposite conclusion about models from the variability of the
circumstances in which they might be realized or deviated from. At present
we have no idea what shape a practical struggle for socialism would
take--I mean one involving actually bringing it about, as opposed to
winning workers and others to socialist ideas and defending and perhaps
extending reforms--and therefore no basis for speculating about how the
circumstances of struggle would affect the attempt to realize our models,
planned or market or mixed. 

What we need right nowm as far as a vision of the future goes, is a set of
reasionably convincing answers to the worry that socialism won't work
under the best circumstances. This is a major political and intellectual
obstacle to winning subordinate groups to socialist ideas. Getting those
answers means building idael models--as heuristics, not as blueprints, not
as something to be imposed by an elite leadership no matter what, and with
the understanding that any model one comes up will not be implemented as
conceived. The point of this is to identify problems to nbe solved and to
explore ghow they might be solved under precisely specified assumptions.
If we don't like the models we come up with, the precise specification and
explicit articulation will allow us to see where we have to change our
thinking to come up with new and better models. This sdebate is not only
politically useful, it will be practically useful in providing a
socialist government with a choice of various tools to test in practice. 

Now as to plans and markets. Louis basically says with regard to Cuba that
the problem with their economy is the US trade embargo, not the collapse
of the USSR and the end of fraternal subsidies. I think it's probably
both. Louis is doubtless right that Cuba would do a lot better if it could
tradew ith the US, its natural partner. But I don't think you'sd find
anyone in Cuba or any serious economist or politician elsewhere who thinks
that Soviet subsidies were not a big boost to the Cuban economy and that
their removal didn't hurt badly. I agree with Louis and Barkely that the
Cubans havedone wonderful things with education, health, and welfare--the
raw figures on literacy and life expectancy show that in comparison with
other Caribbean and Central and Soth American countries. But their
agricultural planning seems to me, from what I gather from supercial
reading, to be seriously deficient. Soviet style collectives don't work
work in Cuba or elsewhere, and I gather taht there is a move away from
them towards a slightly more cooperative model that allows for farmers to
sell some percent of their produce on thre open market. As to industry,
well, Cuba hardly has any. Of course taht doesn't mark it out particularly
in the region, but it diminishes the utility of the Cuban model for an
industrial economy.

Louis claims that what went wrong with the Soviet economy was not
totalized planning but badly politicized planning by technical
incompetents. I agree that there was a lot of the latter, particularly in
agriculture. Lysenkoism was a disaster and the kolkhozes never worked
well. In industry, though, the planning was fairly interlligent and
carried out at a reasonably high level of technical competence, and indeed
through the 1960s it was fairly successful. As late as the early 60s,
Harry Braverman could say that the USSR had shown, by its high growth
rates and rapid industrialization, that the Soviets yhad shown that
industrial planning could be as good if not better than capitalist models.
This was widely believed by capitalist economists too. But in the late
1960s and early 1970s the Sovuiets started to run into the problem that
qhile planning was pretty good at dealing with quantitative economic
growth, it had serious difficulties in handling innovation and qualitative
development. The problem wasn't technical incompetence and politicization,
although there was some of that, but the nature of the economic problems
the USSR faced once it had restored its industrial base after the war,
which was done pretty much by 1960 or so (an impressivwe achievement). 

At that point, the sort of problems Hayek had postulated and on which I'm
insisting started to kick in. They'd been there earlier but had mattered
less since the planning targets coukd be computed simply in large numnbers
of easily measured thingfs, kilowatt hours, tons of steel, etc. Once
economic growth became a matter of product diversification and innovation,
the Hayek calculation problems quickly became a terrible obstacle to
economic growth and development. 

The literature of the planners and the discussions of planning problems by
industrial managers, most of whom had probably never heard of Hayek,
started to sound like quotations from him. Bottlenecks and shortages
mushroomed as enterprises hoarded materials and understated their
capabilities so that they could meet plan targets that had decreasing
relevance to anything anyone could use. Consumers had no ability to find
alternative sources, so the pressure on the enterprises was entirely to
meet those irrational targets. Innovative technologies failed to be
incorporated into the plan because they were too disruptive, outside the
moderately dynamic military sector. Enterprises became decreasingly
productive and were desperately overstaffed because there was little
ability to shift labor about. By the late 1970s the USSR aws essentially
living on raw materials exports, like a third world nation. The crisis was
real. The crash was perhaps not inevitable. If Gorby hadn't taken apart
the planning system under the false assumption that markets would just
spring up, the USSR might be tottering along today. But the late USSR
vindicated the Hayek critique.

More intelligent planning might have made matters better. But I do not
think it woukdd have done anything but deferred the problems. 

Gotta go read Employment discriminaytion. More later.

--Justin





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