File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-13.105, message 15


Date: Sat, 11 Jan 1997 17:31:37 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: The former Soviet Union: what went wrong?


On Sat, 11 Jan 1997, Justin Schwartz wrote:

> 
> their model and why I think it does not work, but not today. I did ask
> Louis,a ns will once more, for five essentiall readings on Cuba, so that I
> can learn what I should know at least by way of starting.
> 

Louis: Carlos Tablada, "Che Guevara"; James O'Connor, "Origins of
Socialism in Cuba"; anything written by Claes Brundenius, Andrew Zimbalist
or Frank Fitzgerald; anything published by Monthly Review; Carole
Benglesdorf, "The Problem of Democracy in Cuba"; anything written by Saul
Landau.



> Louis objects that my account of the problems of the Soviet economy is not
> Marxist because it largely ignores class struggle. I agree that the USSR
> was an exploitative system and, depending on one's definition of class,
> arguably a class system. However unlike Louis I do not think that goes to
> the root of why the Soviet economy got into trouble. In fact, Marxist
> economics is a theory of capitalism, and therefore, unless we buy into the
> state cap theory of the USSR, does not apply in any direct way to the
> USSR. (ALthough it applies indirectly in terms of Soviet interactions in a
> capitalist world economy.) 


Louis: I am not talking about class struggle in the Charles Bettleheim
Maoist sense. I am talking about social differentiations based on the
relationship to the means of production. The bureaucracy may not have
constitued a distinct class, but it has interests separate and apart from
the proletariat. More importantly, it *does* occupy a middle position
between the genuine bourgeoisie of the West and the Soviet working-class.
That is the social explanation of the reformism of the European CP's. It
tried to promote the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy by favoring that
wing of the bourgeoisie that was for accomodation with Stalin. (Ugh, there
I go talking like a Trot.)

The economic consequences of this is that the bureaucracy resists any
forms of economic organization which encourages political independence.
And genuine planning, as I have already stated, requires democracy. How
can you plan without input from those close to production?

The dilemma that this posed to the bureaucracy is most graphic with
respect to the communications medium we are using at this moment.
Networked personal computers are indispensable for genuine planning, but
who can control what kind of message goes across them? That was one of
Gorbachev's big problems apparently. The bureaucracy was anxious to keep
computing centralized on mainframes. It's interesting that Cuba is trying
desperately to set up a nationwide network of personal computers. This
indicates a level of self-confidence in the government that didn't exist
in the former Soviet Union.


> We do not have a non-state-cap Marxist theory
> of the nature of the Soviet economy. The best theory we have is the
> nonMarxist Hayekian one, which, however, is, as Chris Sciabarra has
> argues, _is_ a dialectical theory. I'd love to have a Marxist theory, but
> I'm apparently not smart enough to come up with one. This puts me in good
> company, as a lot of Marxists who have thought about it have also failed
> to come up with one.
> 

Louis: I am really no expert on why the Soviet experiment failed, but one
thing stands out in my mind that the Hayekian critique completely ignores
the political and economic context of an isolated Soviet Union. Hayek, by
ignoring this reality, served the interests of the world bourgeoisie
which was trying to strangle the Soviet state in its infancy.
 
This was a basically futile attempt to build socialism in conditions of
isolation. Marx warned that such an experiment was doomed to fail on its
own. Lenin echoed these remarks just before the revolution. His writings
of the last years of his life were exactly what you would call a "Marxist
theory" of the Soviet economy. I refer you especially to the speeches
delivered to the 2nd and 3rd congresses of the Comintern. I also refer you
to his article "The Importance of Gold." Deutscher, Carr (a quasi-Marxist)
and Ernest Mandel have also written about the problems of the Soviet
economy from a Marxist standpoint. Most important of all, of course, is
Trotsky's "Revolution Betrayed". Almost every word of these various
authors focus on the relationship of class forces internationally.
Deutscher and Carr are interesting in the sense that they conclude that
there was no alternative to Stalin, as bestial as he was.

I am curious, Justin. If somebody were to ask you which book explains
Stalnism better, would you recommend "Revolution Betrayed" or "Road to
Serfdom", and why?


> it wasn't democratic. Apparently it's utopian of me to argue that market
> systems would be better if they were socialist and global, but not utopian
> of Louis to point of hypothetical democratic planning systems that will
> somehow (how? we needn't be too specific) solve the problems of an actual
> command economy. 


Louis: Justin, you problem is not that you are a Utopian. Market
socialism definitely can be implemented as various experiments in
Eastern Europe at one time or another show. I simply say that I don't find
it inspiring. I hate the idea of competition and entrepreneuralism. One of
the things I find ironic is that all of the people in the United States
who go around stumping the hardest for all of this competition don't have
to worry about getting fired: the tenured professors. This is an ideology
that is enormously attractive to a petty-bourgeois strata in the Socialist
movement; it has not and will not become a rallying cry for workers in the
places like the maquiladora, Indonesia and Nigeria.

> 
> Well, you can _define_ planning as centralized nonmarket decisionmaking that
> actually satisfies demand and produces real use-values, but this is a
> verbal gimmick that does not answer the Hayekian crticism. Hayek would
> reformulate his objection to say that if that's what you mean by planning,
> planning is impossible because centralized nonmarket decisionmaking that
> satisfies demand and produces real use-values is impossible. This is in
> fact more or less the way Mises puts it.
> 

Louis: This is the sort of abstraction that I find almost useless to try
to reply to. How does one answer philosophical objections. Hayek was a
philosopher. You still are, from the sounds of a lot of the stuff you
write here. After I got my masters in philosophy in 1967, I joined the SWP
and put philosophy aside. I am interested in concrete class relations. I
learn from history, not epistemology, logic, etc.

When you use a word like "impossible", you have entered a world that
leaves me behind. It belongs to mathematics as in the case of it being
impossible to divide by zero. I have see planning with my own eyes in
Nicaragua. In this poor, war-torn agrarian country, huge progress was made
through planning. My experience with the adminstrators, engineers,
statisticians, computer programmers and workers is that planning *is*
feasible. I can extrapolate from this experience and imagine a world where
planning accomplished everything we need it to.


> 
> As I said, in the 1930s and during the reconstruction after the war,
> Stalinist planning or whatever it was was reasonably effective. The kind
> of quality that matters for intensive development were less important, not
> only for a mid-century war economy, but also for a devel;oping industrial
> economy. On the turf it claimed for itself in the 30s and 1945-60, Soviet
> planning was quite effective outside agriculture.
> 

Louis: This gets to the heart of our disagreement. As I said earlier, you
share with the Stalin supporters--both hard and soft--the notion that
everything was going OK. You are for market socialism in one country. I
would argue that any type of socialism is virtually impossible in one
country, or even a collection of postcolonial countries.

I also plan intend to show that the international context and the
political inheritance of the Stalin era prevented true planned socialism
>from being successful.. Chernobyl in particular is evidence of the dry-rot
at the foundation of the Soviet economy.

> 
> Do youmean the Trotsky who in 1932 said that the market was indisoensible
> for thye foreseeable future, taht it was mad to think that an economy
> could be planned down down the last acre of whaet and the number of
> buttons on a vest? (The Crisis in the Soviet Economy, Leon Trorsky,
> Writings 1932).
> 

Louis: Trotsky was not opposed in principle to markets and defended them
against the Left Communists during the NEP. He, unlike you, saw them as a
transitional measure in the face of the weakness of the Soviet state and
not as an end in themselves.


> 
> Sure, that was a factor. But even if you don't have to worry about being
> shipped off to the camps, a command economy provides at least two other
> internal, nonpolitical incentives to lie or miscalculate. One is that
> whatever rewards and sanctions are in place, they are directed towards
> meeting plan targets. Even if these could be calculated accurately and
> corresponded to demand, enterprise managers would be inclined to set their
> abilities to meet those targets artificially low and set their demands for
> resources to meet those low estimates artificially high. The second is
> that planners and enterprise managers are inclined to set their targets in
> terms of things that can be easily monitored and measured, as well as in
> term that are easy for them to meet, whether or not these correspond with
> any actual demand or use values. This will lead to systematic deviations
> from meeting actual demand.
> 

Louis: Justin, the idea that enterprise managers "would be inclined to set
those targets artificially low and set their demands for resources to meet
those low estimates artificially high" remainds me of statements I've
always heard that workers would not put out 100 percent under socialism
because there would be no pressure to produce. In an odd sort of way,
market socialism has the same sort of distrust of managers that many
right-wingers have of ordinary working-people. If we can not expect
workers and managers to act differently under socialism, then we have no
reason to expect them to ever reject capitalism. Your preoccupation with
dishonest managers and lazy workers is a reflection of bourgeois ideology.





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