From: Rahul Mahajan <zeynept-AT-turk.net> Subject: Re: M-I: Market Socialism Date: Wed, 22 Jan 1997 18:35:53 +0000 I have not read Schweickart, Roemer, or whatever other proponents of market socialism people on this list seem to be in love with. If someone can convince me that market socialism is at all an intellectually serious idea, then I'll do my best to find sources like these, but so far it seems, from the writings of its boosters on this list, to be an idea utterly without value. On the other hand, it seems to me, that most of the defenses of planning I've seen here miss the point, with a few notable exceptions. The points are: 1. The discussions here, and, as far as I can tell, the general market socialist criticisms of planning, depend on hypostatized conceptions, dealt with for the most part in a highly fetishized manner, of planning and the market. Aside from one or two people, no one seems to have attempted to analyze these notions more clearly. Thence come claims, made without a second thought, or so it seems, that "planning" cannot respond as quickly to changes in demand or that it necessitates a slower pace of innovation than the "market" or, most prominently, that it necessarily involves far more massive calculations than a market system would. All of this stems from a lack of understanding that, on the one hand, the market as generally conceived involves a considerable abstraction from the quotidian facts of the running of any capitalist economy (this is not referring to political questions, but solely to organizational ones), and, on the other, the fact that the crucial defining characteristic of the market has little or nothing to do with its form of organization and everything to do with the social relations it embodies. What does all this wind mean? What distinguishes "market socialism" from other forms is not that it "allows competition" or "utilizes more efficient information-transmission mechanisms" (the abstract notion of the market), but that it retains the profit motive. Furthermore, to speak as if the "market" transmits information about how production should be organized so as to meet consumption desires completely obscures what really goes on. As Zeynep mentioned earlier, corporations under capitalism plan. Decisions are not automatically made by the interplay of idealized buyers and sellers communicating their preferences at the speed of light. Nor are the plans that companies make infinitely flexible. Bureaucratism, plus the profit motive, lead to the stifling of innovation more often than to the implementation of it. A socialist system may not be all that great at stimulating invention and discovery, but it only has to be roughly as good as capitalism, or even not quite so good, just as long as it isn't orders of magnitude worse. There is no reason to assume it wouldn't be better. 2. The main question about planning is political, not economic or calculational. As Justin has noted, democracy will make little difference if the plan is something rigid and only changeable on the time scale of years, but it's hard to fathom why he thinks that plans must be of this nature. There is no reason for them not to be at least as flexible, and organically rather than mechanically determined, as production in capitalism, if not before. The needs of consumers will be taken into consideration because there will be no entrenched bureaucracy with an authoritarian state behind it to keep its power and privilege intact. Ordinary people will make these decisions for some fixed period of time, then be rotated out at the end of their term. Furthermore, the plan will not be made by a bunch of people sitting in rooms full of computers in the capital city, but by a network that is articulated in just as complex a manner as the network that actually makes these plans in an advanced capitalist economy. The only difference will be the substitution of other motives for those that drive people under capitalism -- a mixture of fear of poverty and degradation for the poor, desire for professional advancement and conspicuous consumption for the petty bourgeoisie, and the profit motive for the rich (this doesn't even cover the real motives of many people who produce scientific, technical, and other advances, but that's another issue). Substitute the motives of your choice -- solidarity, interest in your work, desire to protect the freedom of one's society, a feeling of responsibility to one's fellow workers, a desire for respect, you name it. To reiterate: there is no calculation problem, or rather none that is of any more complexity than those that arise in a capitalist economy. Nobody will have to comprehend the whole plan or the whole economy. That was the kind of idea that had a lot of currency in the early parts of the century, but it seems a little naive now, at least to me. Things run without anyone understanding them. Plans are made even when they are not fully understood. As long as mechanisms for adapting to the exigencies that will inevitably arise exist, there need be no fear. Such mechanisms have no necessary connection with the retention of the profit motive. 3. Even among those with their heads high up in the clouds, it should be understood that what is relevant is not the construction of some abstractly workable model, but rather the construction of a model that is stable at least to small perturbations from the ideal. This is obvious, since the perfection of any model cannot be realized in practice. This said, it should be equally clear that any proposed idea of market socialism is highly unstable. This cannot be proven mathematically, but a cursory look at history should suffice. Capitalist social relations always reassert themselves. Even among the most enlightened people of the best will, they slip in the back door as soon as they get the ghost of a chance. I'll give a single example, although the history of socialism is full of them. In Spain, much of the working class and the peasantry had come very close to a true socialist consciousness. Engineers were in the same unions as assembly-line workers, and sometimes even drew the same pay. Doctors joined communes and consumed no more than illiterate farm workers. Furthermore, even without internal "markets," these communes performed incredibly well, often producing huge surpluses for the soldiers on the front line. In fact, they were by far the most efficient form of agricultural production that Spain had seen. Still, even in communes where there was no money whatsoever (some even experimented with having no fixed rations, allowing members to take as they felt they needed, but, not surprisingly, this was found to be rather difficult to maintain), the same old attitudes crept in in other ways, the main example being that, although there were purely socialist relations inside the commune, they dealt with other communes simply as capitalist enterprises. Any kind of socialism requires ceaseless vigilance against capitalism by the members of the society, at least until the "new human" is really created. A form in which markets and the profit motive are institutionalized could not conceivably remain socialist in any possible way, unless, of course, an authoritarian government like that in Yugoslavia or China or Hungary kept things that way. 4. Of course, in a transition to socialism, one will be dealing with a great many people who are still deeply infected with the idea of capitalism, so a transitional stage in which certain vestiges of capitalism are maintained will be necessary (yes, the NEP was essential in the Soviet Union, although, as so many proponents of market socialism seem not to understand, as an emergency measure, not as a fundamental policy change). Also for this reason, in addition to the more obvious one of imperialist assault, a government that rules by force will be necessary. With the one, as with the other, the idea should be not to institutionalize these abhorrent mechanisms but to use them to keep the society running while the transformation of the society into one where they are not needed is accomplished. Rosa Luxemburg was dead on when she said of the Bolsheviks, "The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances, and want to recommend them to the internaitonal proletariat as a model of socialist tactics." In this, as in much else, it seems that the market socialists and the various proponents of authoritarian socialism have a great deal in common. Rahul --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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