File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-13.105, message 13


From: Zeynep Tufekcioglu <zeynept-AT-turk.net>
Subject: Re: M-I: Market Socialism
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 00:14:42 +0000



>Z, this misses the point. 

Aaargh! Weren't you on the old Marxism list? Bond. Zeynep Bond. Not Z. 

>The problem is that there are so few of us who
>participate in these struggles. Those who do, we don't have to be
>persuaded. It's those who don't who have to be persuaded. Whenever I talk
>to working class people about socialism, they want to know the answers to
>questions that only modelling can provide. Workers won't go along with us
>unless they think that socialism will be better for us.

Well, we live in different countries. Here, I spend time telling workers
that, no, simply burning down the parliament today won't solve the problem
because we should strive to have a participatory revolution, not an
apparatus-war with the state, and we should spend more energy and
disseminating consciousness to our fellow-workers instead of getting worked
up in strikes and resistances and cooling down afterwards and it is
important to keep track of petty details, etc. Not a single worker has yet
asked me if socialism was possible. "How can we get rid of them as quick as
possible" was the question. Some class-mates at my aren't-we-ever-so-smart
university did raise that objection. "Well, you can't overthrow this system,
it's too strong. Anyway, if you did, you can't replace it with anything
better. Blah, blah". Not one of them wanted to check the scene out by
attending a May Day rally. 

I'm not suggesting that that's the case there, or for you. But, here, it is
either a non-issue, or an excuse. It's my peculiarity that I think too much
of the post-revolutionary concerns as if it were the only problem. Right
now, it is not of great relevance for me as far as the struggle goes, but I
think the kind of socialism we envision has many important implications for
the pre-revolutionary struggle so, that's why I'm interested. 

>Well, if Hayek is right, we do have a general idea about what wouldn't
>work in Turkey, or anywaywhere else. Likewise if Albert and Hahnel are
>right, we have a notion about what might work perhaps in Turkey. The fact
>that a market socialist or democratic planning model would not be
>implemented in a concrete situation in the future exactly as written now
>is not to the point. 

What I'm trying to say is that even proving market socialism or
participatory planning would work is of no consequence to anyone who doesn't
want to fight. "Well, US will carpet-bomb here, so who cares what your model
is". No joke, it is a serious concern. Anyway, I know how the Nicaraguans
felt when US had a huge Naval exercise right off the territorial waters of
Nicaragua, name Granados I, to help them remember Grenada. Anyhow, we should
still discuss how and how not to plan. Can't do anything else, except hope
that comrades in the US do something. If they need to prove socialism works
in order to get the working class on their side and hence let anybody else
have any chance, fine. Great.

>1. People are not necessarily good predictors of their needs and
>preferences over any period of time. I myself "plan" by making a shopping
>list when I go to the supermarket. I always forget something important and
>have to go back at least twice during the week. And that's only for a
>limited range of items (food) for a very short period (a week). I cannot
>imagine having to predict everything that I would want or need for a year.
>Somethings are unpredictable in their nature. Children grow at unexpected
>rates and need sizes of clothing you don't anticipate. People develop new
>tastes and interests. Things break.What if I had failed tp predict the
>failure of my furnace? 

Since you are into modelling, you must also be much into statistics and
aware that those things can be tracked over a period of time and historical
data plus current sampling will give you a pretty good picture how many
furnaces in the country are likely to go kaput, give or take a few. Not a
problem at all.


As for being able to predict one's needs, I'm sorry if I sound arrogant, but
capitalists to it by asking people, devising a protype, pre-testing it and
then producing it. Most of the crucial information is collected beforehand.
Of course, there is the added complication of advertisement. That is what
really causes much of the fluctuation in the markets. Michael Jordan gets
paid more than the entire wage-bill of Nike, annually, if my memory does not
fail me. I've participated in a lot of feasibility, pre-marketing,
pre/post-advertisement surveys. They ask people, and people do know what
they're likely to want. 

I'm not saying that there will be no inefficency. Just a lot less than a
market system. The problem is when you don't test the consumers and
bulk-produce some pre-determined quantity. 

2. Aggregation of the preferences of millions of consumers is likely to
>result in compromises that fail to satisfy any of them very well even if
>people could know about them accurately years in advance. A planned system
>threatens to produce say, either too many or too few shoes of styles
>that really satisfy no one. One-size-fits all programs don't account for
>variations in tastes and preferences and risk, I would say guarantee,
>widespread dissatisfaction where it does not create actual harm by
>creating real shortages of things that people need. Maybe we could all
>live with ugly but servicable shoes.But what about a shortage of snow
>boots or mediciness?

I don't see why we have to produce ugly but servicable shoes. Give people
what they want, provided you also tell them what it costs the society to
produce them. Have some priorities. First we decide on the medicine and the
housing, etc. This "ugly but servicable shoes" is an incorrect extrapolation
>from the Soviet experience, which was not participatory planning at all.

>3. One nice thing about markets is that it provides a scope for raw tastes
>that don't have to be justified. A problem with Hahnel and Albert model
>you are discussing is that it puts people in the position of having to
>defend their tastes politically in areas where that may not be
>appropriate. I care a lot about music, especially classic jazz. This is a
>luxury taste, to be sure. Is there are limitred resources for recorded
>music, it is likely to be swamped by more popular preferences for lite
>jazz, rap, country, etc. Will the plan force me to defend my taste in
>terms of, e.g., preserving our cultural heritage, etc., when what's really
>at issue is that I like this music? Will it limit classic jazz output to a
>handful or recordings a year?

Why do you keep putting forth either/or situations. We have a wide consumer
base with all sorts of tastes. We don't produce only for the majority. Each
segment gets something pro rata their size, plus some allowance for
variation. In things like the Arts, we let musicians and artists have a
little room for producing things that don't yet have a demand. But, we ask
the society what is the amount of resources we want to give our wanna-be
artists. The plan is not "big brother". It is not a machine. It is a
collective decision making process.

>> accurate measure. Of course, there is the fact that people would be telling
>> *beforehand* what they wanted, instead of choosing from alternatives. To me,
>> that sounds not like a handicap, but a plus. To hell with artificial,
>> commercial pumped needs. Long live true creativity. 
>> 
>The beforehand problem is very serious, as I said. There is no reason to
>think that the needs one can predicts are nonartificial and the ones one
>cannot are artificial. 

Artificial I'm referring to is the ones created by commercials. Not a
function of predictability. 

>And I am disturbed by the thought that you or me or
>anyone else should set ourselves yup as arbiters of what people's true
>needs are. A rough hierarchy of needs is possiblwe and will command
>general assent. All humans need water, food, shelter, and clothing before
>they come to fancy shoes and classic jazz. But apart from that crude but
>necesasry division, I wouldn't want to have to argue that your
>hypotherical taste for rap is artificial and not worthy of satiusfaction,
>unlike my natural, nonartificial need for classic jazz. And if somone
>wantsto trade off smaller living quarters for fancy shoes, who are you to
>object?

The market is what drowns out "niche" markets. I like Jazz too, and I either
pay a huge premium for it, or don't get to listen to it. Why? The market is
dominated by audially-challenged kids who want to listen to something I
despise. The market is the worst when it comes to the question of minority
tastes.

I haven't said that we shouldn't do what people want. Let's do it, but let's
ask them. Instead of forcing them to choose from what's available, as in the
case of markets. Markets are undemocratic.



>Effiency can mean a lot ofthings. I want to take it here as the
>commonsense notion of avoiding waste, which is at the bottom a waste of
>human effort. If planning is inefficient in the sense that I argue, it
>results in an immense amount of human effort going for naught. 

Here we disagree. I think that it is possible to have inefficient planning,
but it is not possible to have  markets as efficient as planning can provide.

>Now, I
>think that the consequences of unemployment are bad enough for people that
>fair amount of inefficiency has to be tolerated to avoid i. But not an
>infinite amount. Even under a rational plan, inefficient enterprises
>should be streamlined or closed down and the workers given other work to
>do. 

If we give workers other jobs, what reason will they have for being
efficient, fearing their plant will close down?

>I don't think that planning can manage this. Shwo me otherwise. What
>incentives exist in a planning system to use workers productively, ration
>resources intelligfently, and so forth?

A debate that is not concluded, but not clogged either, imo. I think this
question starts with what kind of a revolutionary process we are discussing.
We'll get back to that one, on a longer post.

>> It is obvious one of the main problems with Soviet Union was the fact that
>> they continued to use capitalist indicators.
>
>No, they didn't. They might have been better off had they done so.
>Capitalist indicators would have involved reasonable approximations of
>comparative costs, how many yards of linen this ton of steel costs us, and
>so on against all other possible uses of resources. In short, money
>prices, as Marx explains in CI, Part I. The Soviet planners never had an
>accurate sense of comparative costs. 

True. I meant that they used "tons of x" as a goal. Obviously, there is do
direct correlation between tons of steel and quality of life.

Zeynep



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