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Comrade Foley's paper was a big disappointment. His nod to complex systems theory is little more than the kind of speculative reference found in many popular attempts to apply the theory (see "Emergence" by Steven Johnson, or any other book referring to the Santa Fe Institute with which Foley is now affiliated). Foley starts off by creating a false dichotomy of "Communist" planning and social-democratic tinkering with capitalism, and fails to mention the analysis of where Stalinist planning went wrong by Trotsky or any subsequent Trotskyists. And he fails to address the very specific proposals for what democratic socialist planning would look like by Mandel. The latter's writings on this are particularly important in assessing Foley's proposal, as they address the supposed "bottom-up, top-down" dilemma identified by Foley. For Mandel, the solution is a careful articulation of decision-making at ALL levels, bottom, top, and every level in between. And there would be a rule that decisions will be made as low down the hierarchy as possible, both for efficiency and democracy's sake, with each higher level only making the absolutely necessary proposals for aggregate targets (but at the same time allowing maximum democratic input on such macroglobal problems as climate change). Foley, in contrast, talks of a vague combination of the "bottom-up" phenomena of "complex, adaptive, self-organizing systems far from equilibrium, and “top-down” processes of system change and evolution: "Bottom-up change arises from the spontaneous and decentralized adaptation of the components of a complex system to new local circumstances. Top-down change is initiated by some central point of control which can enforce a diffusion of changed behavior through a complex system." The key to this unarticulated "solution," and the resulting gap or even mismatch between bottom and top, is revealed in the questions he poses, showing he doesn't feel confident in our ability to supercede the market: "What would these alternatives look like? Do we need to imagine different methods by which innovators can mobilize resources than the current system of credit and debt contracts? Do we want to move toward a system that shares with global capitalism a spontaneous, bottom-up social dynamic, but militates against the concentration of wealth and income capitalism entails?" This lack of confidence is what's behind his -- and others' -- attraction to self-organized, complex adaptive systems. They appear to provide structures which arise spontaneously out of the actions of what were thought to be atomized actors. In a sense, they're a kind of "objective socialization," to use Engels' phrase. BUT THE ADVOCATES OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS BELIEVE THE SOCIALIZATION SHOULD BE LEFT IN THE OBJECTIVE, NOT THE SUBJECTIVE, SPHERE. Bringing it into the subjective sphere would mean believing that we can PLAN the kind of emergent phenomenon which complex systems bring about semi-spontaneously. This is not to say that complex systems theory doesn't have tools we could use: in fact knowing the extent to which systems organize themselves tell us when we can let the computer (or interacting social networks like neighborhoods) run on their own. That's the beauty of the software behind Google, the Sims, Amazon, etc., etc. The problem for us is how to allow social structures to take the information provided by those tools and vote on their policy implications -- a problem which, as Mandel (and Cockshott and Cottrel and others) shows, is easily solvable. On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:40 PM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: >> Alternatives can be analyzed in terms of the bottom-up, top-down language of >> complex systems theory. Alternatives will have to transcend the growth >> paradigm shared by left and right in the twentieth century. >> full: http://homepage.newschool.edu/~foleyd/NotesCrisisSocChange.pdf ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
