Re: [Marxism] Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I am not sure that is really Andrew Pollack's position but that notion was certainly widespread among many socialists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In another post, I mentioned some of Otto Neurath's notions concerning socialist economic planning and how he had been persuaded by his own experiences as an economic planner for the Austrian-Hungarian government during WW I of both the feasibility and desirability of socialist economic planning. Lenin, cited the state capitalism of Germany during the Great War as a model from which the Soviet Union could learn from and Lenin sometimes said that with the introduction of central planning to the Soviet Union, the Soviet economy would be run like one giant factory. I also mentioned Ronald Coase's 1937 paper, "The Nature of the Firm" in which he basically characterized capitalist firms as being islands of central planning within a market economy and how this was related to ideas at that time on the socialist calculation debate. And I quoted from his Nobel Prize lecture where he acknowledged the connection between his research on the economics of transaction costs and his attempt to explain the apparent success of the Soviet economy. Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant http://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math -- Original Message -- From: Michael Meeropol via Marxism Subject: Re: [Marxism] Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2019 08:19:17 -0400 So Edward Bellamy was right? Giant businesses become so big that they "prove" socialist planning works --- and all we need is a "simple" government takeover and we have out UTOPIA?? On Sat, Mar 23, 2019 at 7:09 AM Andrew Pollack via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: Our Hearts Go Out To Denzel Washington go.dedicatedoffers.com http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/5c997120ab901712035c8st03vuc _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work
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So Edward Bellamy was right? Giant businesses become so big that they
"prove" socialist planning works --- and all we need is a "simple"
government takeover and we have out UTOPIA??
On Sat, Mar 23, 2019 at 7:09 AM Andrew Pollack via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:
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> >
> > 5. In my 1998 article on IT and socialist self-management I have a
> section
> > on potential uses in the sphere of social reproduction ("care work"
> etc.).
> > The struggles since then in this sphere - strikes and organizing by
> nurses,
> > teachers, childcare workers etc. - have all included staffing demands,
> i.e.
> > worker to patient/student/elder etc. ratios. At some point those ratios
> > will be flashpoints in national and global struggles as society-wide
> > calculations and the demands shaped by them come forward.
> >
> >
> >
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Re: [Marxism] Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work
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> 5. In my 1998 article on IT and socialist self-management I have a section
> on potential uses in the sphere of social reproduction ("care work" etc.).
> The struggles since then in this sphere - strikes and organizing by nurses,
> teachers, childcare workers etc. - have all included staffing demands, i.e.
> worker to patient/student/elder etc. ratios. At some point those ratios
> will be flashpoints in national and global struggles as society-wide
> calculations and the demands shaped by them come forward.
>
>
>
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Re: [Marxism] Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * 1. Great stuff, Dave 2. The book has a great chapter on Neurath Lange Leontief and others cited by Jim. 3. The chapter on Chile does a wonderful job of describing the use of its embryonic network IN STRUGGLE. 4. The objective socialization represented by Walmart Amazon et al is described thoroughly both in its current incarnation and inspiringly in terms of the potential for worker expropriation and control. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 3/22/19 10:27 PM, DW via Marxism wrote: These articles are congruent with and are strongly supported by the book the review article [*Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually] *in *Jacobin* by Leigh Phillips & Michal Rozworski, wrote about: *The People’s Republic of Walmart**: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. *For those actually interested in pondering the issues of actual socialist organization of the economy, both the review article and the book are worth the read. Right-on to editors of *Jacobin *for ignoring the peanut gallery cat-calls and drunken responses found here far too often. Again, prior to the 1960s the "Left" broadly speaking was quite pro-science and wrote and discussed it. Now? We got Louis and Jill Stein. In the interests of transparency for new subscribers, it must be pointed out that David is a huge fan of nuclear power, even bigger a fan than I am of movies by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Louis descends into his crotchety old deflection mode here. The issue of *planning *and the almost universally failed attempts under "real existing socialism" to make it work is essential to analyze or you shouldn't call yourself a socialist. The totally misused term of *productivism* is further nonsense since Marx was that, quite so in fact, despite all the protestations from the editors and writers at Monthly Review. And *expansion* of the productive forces can really only mean one thing, now matter how much green spray paint you put on it. A "missreading" my ass. What sophism! No matter, this is the the *rift *created between science and the Left since the days of the Vietnam War. I have no doubt that Louis will be defending anti-vaxxers next...at least that would consistent. [Oddly, Trotsky's infatuation will all things science based was a good thing, not a bad thing, and this was no less true for science in the first 10 years of the Russian Revolution. Louis might want to look around because the ENTIRE left was pro-nuclear energy until this rift occurred into the 1970s. But that is another story...] If one has followed Andy Pollack's writings on this subject (and this book he reviewed has yet to review himself!) is about the tools that can be used for central planning a communist society based on the *metaphor* of what has already been shown to occur with extremely large, essentially logistics-to-retail industry created by the working class and owned and driven by Imperialism. In case you were wondering it has nothing to do with Louis' deflection over one of the author's views toward..."geoengineering" (seriously?) or "productivism". Andy has written *extensively* on this question here on this list years ago when he brought to our attention the technological transition that allowed, say, a Toyota plant in Oakland to maintain almost zero inventory with parts being manufactured globally "just on time" via the advent of "business-to-business" software aka, "B2B". This dovetails neatly with Joe Allen's own articles on Logistics and why socialists should organize inside this industry (trains, trucks, airlines, shipping) as the key "choke point" of modern day Imperialism. Joe, who was an ISOer and retired Teamster activist when he wrote this, is now a member of DSA. The article is here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/logistics-industry-organizing-labor/ probably the best article I've read in the last 15 years written from a truly Marxist perspective. Another excellent article is by Kim Moody and two other writers "Seizing the Choke Points": https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/choke-points-logistics-industry-organizing-unions . These articles are congruent with and are strongly supported by the book the review article [*Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually] *in *Jacobin* by Leigh Phillips & Michal Rozworski, wrote about: *The People’s Republic of Walmart**: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. *For those actually interested in pondering the issues of actual socialist organization of the economy, both the review article and the book are worth the read. Right-on to editors of *Jacobin *for ignoring the peanut gallery cat-calls and drunken responses found here far too often. Again, prior to the 1960s the "Left" broadly speaking was quite pro-science and wrote and discussed it. Now? We got Louis and Jill Stein. David Walters _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I have posted this here before: A few years back, I co-authored an article on Friedrich Hayek. This article includes an appendix on the socialist calculation debates, including both the well known between Hayek and Oskar Lange, as well as the less well known between Hayek and Otto Neurath. BTW the socialist calculation debates were triggered in the first place when Hayek's mentor, Ludwig von Mises, wrote his 1920 essay, "Economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth" in response to Neurath's writings in defense of socialist economic planning. Here is a a link to the article by Mark Lindley and myself: https://www.academia.edu/3291616/The_Strange_Case_of_Dr._Hayek_and_Mr._Hayek And here is a link to Mises's 1920 essay: https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth/html And a link to Hayek's 1945 article, The Use of Knowledge in Society, where he summarized his views on socialist calculation. http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html I also have a review of David Laibman's book, Deep history: a study in social evolution and human potential. Although that book was mostly about Laibman's ideas concerning the materialist conception of history, Laibman also discussed socialist calculation issues as well. So I addressed that as well. https://www.academia.edu/205061/Review_of_David_Laibmans_book_Deep_history_a_study_in_social_evolution_and_human_potential "I think it is appropriate to point out that there is no reason to be smug about economic calculation under capitalism. " An issue which Lange addressed in his writings (and which was reiterated by Maurice Dobb too). Lange, citing A. C. Pigou's analysis of externalities argued that market failures were, in fact, rather ubiquitous under capitalism, so that we cannot expect capitalist markets to produce rational allocations of resources. Hence, the need for socialist economic planning to provide a corrective. A few other things to add: One point that I would make is that the young Ronald Coase made his own contribution to the socialist calculation debate with his famous concept of transaction costs, which he introduced in his 1937 paper, "The Nature of the Firm." https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~lebelp/CoaseNatFirmEc1937.pdf In that paper, Coase pointed out, that firms internally DO NOT work like markets and Coase made the argument why that should be rational behavior on their part, and more importantly, why firms should exist in the first place within a market economy. Back when he wrote that, Coase was a socialist (he would later become a conservative). He was a close friend of Abba Lerner, and like Lerner, was at that time very much interested in the "socialist calculation" debate. One of his concerns at that time was to show how to reconcile the apparent economic success of the Soviet Union with the neoclassical economics that he was committed to. His paper, "The Nature of the Firm" sketched out the kind of economic reasoning which could reconcile support for socialist economic planning with a commitment to neoclassical economic theory. For Coase, the key concept here was that of "transaction costs", which denoted the costs incurred by relying on the market and price system for organizing economic activity. It's precisely because transaction costs are often of significant size that people turn away from direct reliance upon the market and price system. Coase also used the concept of transaction costs in his famous 1960 paper, "The Problem of Social Cost", where he presented what has come to be known as "Coase's Theorem." http://bev.berkeley.edu/ipe/readings/The%20Problem%20of%20Social%20Cost.pdf Coase's Theorem has often been taken as constituting some sort of refutation of Pigou's analysis of externalities. But Coase himself insisted that in most cases involving environmental pollution, and probably for most other kinds of externalities, the relevant transaction costs are of significant size, in which case, Pigou comes back into his own again. It is interesting to note that both Oskar Lange and Maurice Dobb used Pigou's analysis of externalities to make their cases for socialist economic planning. And the young Ronald Coase himself had been supportive of socialist economic planning precisely because he believed in the existence of high transaction costs. And in his Nobel Lecture, Coase admitted as much concerning his own history: "The view of the pricing system as a co-ordinating mechanism was clearly right but there were aspects of the argument which troubled me. Plant was opposed to all schemes, then very fashionable during the Great
Re: [Marxism] Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I read the book in less than a day, eagerly anticipating each new argument in this wide-ranging defense of democratic socialist planning. Please read and promote it! https://www.versobooks.com/books/2822-the-people-s-republic-of-walmart On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 6:45 PM Andrew Pollack wrote: > > https://jacobinmag.com/2019/03/economic-planning-walmart-democracy-socialism > > _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * https://jacobinmag.com/2019/03/economic-planning-walmart-democracy-socialism _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
