Date: Sat, 05 Nov 1994 08:22:07 EST From: tgs-AT-cunyvms1.gc.cuny.edu Subject: Re: anticipation of demand Steve, I would not trace Stalinism merely to heavy industrialization policies. Nor do I completely share Andrew's belief that we will wipe out all specialization (this I too find a bit disturbing, not to break ranks, because there's a lot of Andrew's stuff that I really like; I really enjoy his optimism and idealism, and I myself am idealist always in aims, but hopefully never in analysis). I believe that Bolshevism went wrong for the following reasons, most of which were political. In the first place, there wan indeed the imperialist encirclement. Yet this by itself was no excuse. For revolutions will tend to occur, as Lenin and trotsky themselves point out, in backward and intermediate societies: thus there will be encirclement. The problem was in the Bolsheviks' response. Rather than evolve a political strategy democratic enough to permit them and their system to remain sane enough and rational enough, long enough to create standing policies in the Comintern to break out eventually of this encirclement, via European revoution rather than fascism, they quickly, because of their beholdenness to Kautsky's andChernyshevsky's /other Populists' statist ideas of vanguardism, which were in effect a call for a one-party workers despotism. This effectively attempted to abolish politics in the Soviet Union. And as Luxemburg shows in her pamphlet, the Russian Revolution, this only means that politics comes back in the form of a fearsomely gargantuous bureaucracy. Thus Lenin becomes increadingly obsessed with the question of who debureaucratizes and decorrupts the corrupt bureaucracy he has spawned, and comes up with--more bureaucracy. If we want a model of planning that works, we have to go back to the Paris Commune and Marx's writings about it, a model which fully involves popular decision-making and political conflict in the planning process. Paul C. has shown to my satisfaction that my idealistic notion that computers can successfully augment such a democratic process--carried out in national, regional , and local assemblies as well as workers' soviets and factory councils. Here's my model of democratic planning, Justin/Steve. It cannot be proven, because we live in a political world where the bourgeoisie has prevented its application, and the Bolsheviks, who had the chance, BLEW IT, because of th ideological blinders. ------------------
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