Michael Perelman wrote:
I think that your reference to "disastrously"is overblown. The
USSR made
incredible progress, overcoming the destruction of two world wars,
and with
an economy undermined by Cold War threats and sabotage. The recent
capitalist development in both Russia and China would be impossible
without
the infrastructure put in place under planning.
On Marx's premises, the character of "planning" in the USSR, along
with other of its economic and political features, expressed the
various kinds of "individuality" from which it emerged.
There's a great deal of evidence that the dominant form of
"individuality", the form developed within the Russian peasant
commune, was characterized by "superstition" and "prejudice", as the
passage I recently quoted from Kara-Murza's Soviet Civilization: From
1917 to the Great Victory indicates (Kara-Murza making it an important
contributing "cause" of the "Stalinist repressions").
In other words, the dominant form had much in common with that
attributed by Marx to "masses" of 19th century French peasants and
made "responsible" by him for Napoleon III (a political expression not
treated by Marx as "progressive"). In the French case, Marx explained
this form in terms of the social relations within which these "masses"
developed and lived, conditions productive he claimed of an
"individuality" characterized not by "enlightenment" ("free
individuality'), but by "superstition" and "prejudice".
The social condition Marx emphasized was "isolation" (in this and
other ways sublating Kant on the requirements for and characteristics
of "enlightenment" understood as, among other things, liberation from
"superstition" and "prejudice"). (Even in his positive 1881 surmises
about the consistency of Russian peasant commune conditions with those
required for the development of "free individuality", Marx points to
the "isolation" of the commune as a feature inconsistent with these
requirements.)
"the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on
the wealth of his real connections. Only then will the separate
individuals be liberated from the various national and local barriers,
be brought into practical connection with the material and
intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to
acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole
earth (the creations of man). All-round dependence, this natural form
of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be
transformed by this communist revolution into the control and
conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on
one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers
completely alien to them."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
>
"The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live
in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations
with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one
another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The
isolation is furthered by France's poor means of communication and the
poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding,
permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of
science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no
diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each
individual peasant family is almost self- sufficient, directly
produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of
life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with
society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it
another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score
of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a
department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the
simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack
form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under
conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their
interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put
them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar
as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding
peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no
national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not
constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their
class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a
convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be
represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as
their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental
power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain
and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding
peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power
which subordinates society to itself."
"The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the
conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the
condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one
who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in
alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their
own energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within
this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved
and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the
enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment
but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his modern
Cevennes [A peasant uprising in the Cevennes mountains in 1702-1705. —
Ed.] but his modern Vendee. [A peasant-backed uprising against the
French Revolution in the French province of Vendee, in 1793. — Ed.] "
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th- brumaire/ ch07.htm
>
So, to show whether or not "planning" and other economic and political
features of the USSR were "progressive" in Marx's sense it would be
necessary to show that the social relations, including the "Stalinist
repressions", they created for "masses" of individuals were more
consistent with development in the direction of "enlightenment" than
those of the Russian peasant commune.
In other words, were the motives of Soviet "planning" "passions" in
the sense that Marx has appropriated from Hegel?
In his initial writing on the topic, Marx treated the motives of the
British in India as "passions" in this sense, though it appears that
he later changed his mind and judged these motives to have been
pursued too stupidly to work as "passions", i.e. as irrational motives
which, though irrational and without conscious intention on the part
of those so motivated, "supply the impelling and actuating force for
accomplishing deeds shared in by the community at large.”
One of the main "deeds shared in by the community at large" he foresaw
the "passions" of British imperialism accomplishing was improvement in
the "real connections" of "masses" of individuals by destroying the
"isolation" of the Indian peasant commune and, in this and other ways,
destroying social conditions that had "restrained the human mind
within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool
of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it
of all grandeur and historical energies."
"England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was
actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of
enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can
mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the
social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of
England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that
revolution."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm>
Davidson's remarks about "planning", by the way, ignore Keynes's.
Keynes, like Marx, made the nature and quality of "planning" depend
upon the degree to which it was expressive of a community made up of
individuals with the developed capacity to "think and feel rightly".
Ted
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