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On Sat, 29 May 2010 07:28:32 -0400 Andrew Pollack <acpolla...@gmail.com> writes: > This sounds like an important book. I'd want to know more about > Gluschov, though (and hopefully will after I get the book), and > what > alternative he posed. > Because Kantorovich's proposals on pricing reform were, as Mandel > points out in Marxist Economic Theory, abstract suggestions to make > then-popular market reforms more efficient. But those market > reforms > themselves didn't address the major problem: the frustration of > planning by the restriction of far more basic and simple > calculations, > because the bureaucracy at each level was hiding information from > itself (the central planners for instance, gave unrealistic orders > to > factory heads based on arbitrary decisions and the factory heads > lied > about their having fulfilled their part of the plan. And the > workers > were just told to shut up about the whole thing). Even with today's > computing power, the Liberman reforms, which the Kantorovich > proposals > were meant to aid, would merely have provided feedback from more > accurate pricing to a system headed back toward capitalism if the > reforms were allowed to follow their own logic. And of course more > accurate pricing even with the best computers was irrelevant to the > anti-Liberman forces. > What was missing was workers' control. And as Mandel points out > there > and elsewhere, the number of decisions needed to be made at each > level > of the economy once workers really control it are actually far > fewer. > Nonetheless, the TRILLIONS of trades made on the day of the stock > exchanges' "flash crash" last month show once again that computing > power is no longer an issue. > > PS to Jim: the end of your comment got cut off when you sent it. I think I meant to say that Ken (and Paul Cockshott and others) in the comments following the blog make the point that Kantorovich developed some effective responses to von Mises and Hayek concerning the socialist calculation problem. And the comments of Ken, Paul, and the others, do suggest that Kantorovich's proposals could not have worked unless the Soviet Union had also implemented some degree of workers' control. Andrew's point about the Soviet burearcracy itself acting as a major impediment to the realization of rational economic point is one that Hayek and Mises would have concurred with. But as Andrew also points out the implementation of workers control in the Soviet Union would have offered an alternative to the neoliberal proposals of Hayek and Mises. And Hayek's contention that a centrallly planned state socialist economy like the former Soviet Union would be afflicted with the dispersal of unarticulated economic knowledge that would be unavailable to the planners is matched in capitalist economies by a similar dispersal of unarticulated economic knowledge among workers, which is likewise unavailable for use by capitalists. Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant ____________________________________________________________ Penny Stock Jumping 2000% Sign up to the #1 voted penny stock newsletter for free today! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/4c012b6fa0c903d602m03vuc ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
