Date: Mon, 20 Nov 1995 19:04:24 +1100
From: Mark.Goudkamp-AT-uts.edu.au (Mark  Goudkamp)
Subject: re: market socialism/ planning?


I don't have time to contribute lengthy posts, but I thought I'd forward on
this article on planning to add to the debate around market
socialism/command socialism. It's by Chris Harman from the British SWP, to
which the Australian ISO is linked.

It raises a number of questions for all shades of socialists who accept the
lie that Stalinist planning represented socialism.

<Barkley Rosser wrote:

"Regional inequalities did not disappear in command socialist USSR either.
Slovenia is still socialist and in pretty good shape.
 "The question on democracy still holds and very seriously. Saying that you
are thinking about it is a weak excuse for avoiding it.
"FACT:  No permanent command economy in history has been a political
democracy.  Marx said he was for democracy, mostly, despite occasional
grumblings about "bourgeois democracy" and the "dicatatorship of the
proletariat."  We know market socialism can coexist with democracy.  Can
command socialism on a permanent basis?">


THE NEW AUTHORITARIANISM

'BUT SURELY if you break with the market you end up in a newversion of
Stalinism in Russia or Year Zero in Cambodia'.That was the retort thrown
at me by a student at a meetingrecently. It sums up a major objection made
these days tosocialist arguments from those attracted by the ideas of
TonyBlair's 'New' Labour.Whatever the faults of the market system, it is
said, it offerspeople freedom. By contrast, whatever the intentions
ofsocialists, at the end of the day our attempts to plan willinevitably
end in a tyranny which will destroy human initiativeand prevent economic
advance.Yet there is one feature of the New Labourite langauge
whichshould make question this argument_its increasingly
authoritariantone.  Tony Blair's stress is on 'duties', not rights. Jack
Strawobtained overnight notoriety for his attack on 'squeegymerchants'
and beggars. And Gordan Brown's now proposes to slashthe benefits of any
under 25 year olds who refuse to performcheap labour on a 'training
courses'_echoing the calls of FrankField for the unemployed to have to
draw up a 'job plan forlife'. The authoritarianism is not an accident.
Marx noted in =EECapital=EFthe other side to the anarchy of the market is the
tyranny of the factory. The 'free competition' of capitals compels each
toexploit its workers as much as possible. That involves stampingout
every form of freedom during worktime, so that the workerbecomes little
more than an appendage to the machine_theexperience of millions of people
today not just in the factoryor mine but also in the office or the school.
But the tyranny of the factory can only work if the bulk of thepopulation
have no choice but to accept it. They might have achoice as to who they
should work for, but not that they have towork for someone. This requires
a certain sort ofauthoritarianism is society at large, with restrictions
onpeople's ability to get a livelihood except through wage labourand with
moral codes which condemn 'idleness' and 'fecklessness'among the poor.
The founders of capitalist political economy understood this wellenough.
Thus David Ricardo could write 180 years ago against poor law measures
aimed at dealing with hardship, 'Instead ofmaking the poor rich, they are
calculated to make the richpoor...' and warn of the danger that 'the fund
for themaintenance of the poor should progressively increase until ithas
absorbed all the net revenue of the country'. The remedy to this had to be
to 'gradual contract the sphere ofthe poor laws' and to 'impress on the
poor the value ofindependence by teaching them that they must look not
tosystematic or casual charity, but to their own exertions for
support'.The language of today's 'modernisers' Tony Blair, Gordan
Brown,Jack Straw and Frank Fields is hardly any different. For
theirembrace of the 'freedom' of the market involves, in reality,
theattempt to subordinate the workforce of Britain to the dictatesof a
world wide system. They virtually admit as much with theirtalk of
'globalisation'. It exalts a situation in which the massof people only
matter insofar as they can be 'trained' as labourpower to make capital
competitive.There is, in fact, an amazing similarity between this
approachand that which led to the horrors of Stalinism. Both are, infact,
different versions of the same process, corresponding todifferent
historical conditions. Stalinism arose as the rulers of relatively
backward countrysought to 'catch up' with the advanced Western capitalisms
bysubjecting the national workforce to the 'rigours' of militaryand
economic competition. This is the fundamental reason for the barbarities
of the Stalinperiod. The British industrial revolution depended on the
slavetrade, the pillage of India, the starving of Ireland, the drivingof
the peasantry from the land through 'enclosures' and"clearances", the
workhouse, child labour, the vagrancy laws andthe Combinations Acts.
Stalinist industrialisation relied on theGulag of labour camps, the
starving of the Ukraine andKazakhstan, the bloody 'collectivisation' of
agriculture, theconquest of much of Eastern Europe, the suppression of the
non=81Russian minorities inside the USSR and the shooting down ofstrikes.
The total death toll of the one was not so differentfrom that of the
other_with estimates in a debate initiated bythe late Alex Nove in =EESoviet
Studies=EF ranging from 5=A96 to 20=A925million. As for the 'planning' of
Stalinism, it was as far from realsocialist planning are the 'business
plans' which exist in everycapitalist enterprise today and which are so
admired by theBlairetes. What was 'planned' was how the mass of people
aresubordinated to the blind dictates of a system of
internationalcompetition. And such planning failed, as business plans
alwaysdo, precisely because it could not foresee what competing in
theworld system would mean a few years hence.Blairism, of course, differs
from Stalinism, just as the businessplans of ICI or General Motors today
differ from those of theslave traders of 200 years ago. Blair is
concentred with makingan advanced industrial capitalism competitive in the
late 1990s,not a backward, overwhelming agrarian country in the late
1920s.What is more, Blair is still tied to a party reliant on
workingclass votes and money, however much he may wish things
weredifferent.Yet there is still a logic common to both, of trying to
subjectthe mass of people's lives to the dictates of an anarchic and
bloody international system. And the more that system enters intocrises,
the more horrendous are the 'sacrifices' demanded by thatlogic_whether it
is the shooting down of workers in Hungary in1956 or the bombing of the
road to Basra in 1991.





Mark Goudkamp
Postgraduate Reseacher/Organiser
UTS Students' Association
Tel: 330 1154, Fax 330 1157, e-mail: Mark.Goudkamp-AT-uts.edu.au




     --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

     ------------------