No planned economy is feasible without ancillary markets, but markets in themselves – as transactional processes – do not imply any particular set-up of property rights except that it must be possible for individuals and groups to trade goods, services and assets. This is true both for Soviet-type societies, where trade continued, despite the best efforts to stamp it out, and for capitalist societies, in which a hell of a lot of planning occurs, unbeknown to a lot of Marxist tyrant intellectuals jabbering about “socialism”.
The New Marxist Exploiting Class, starting off with Evgeny Preobrazhensky and Nikolai Bukharin, confused the whole scientific discussion by counterposing state planning and market allocation. For the vulgar Marxist exploiters, the “law of value” became simply a synonym for market economy, and thus the law of value was counterposed to state-directed allocation, while state-directed allocation was equated with planning. Preabrazensky’s scheme was essentially to rob the peasants of agrarian surplus to finance urban industrialization, via an enforced taxation system. The idea was dressed up in a lot of fancy Marxist language, but that was basically what the Marxist scheme was. All of this has nothing to do with Marx, nor with socialist planning in any scientific sense. Stalin had the idea that commodity production is evil, and therefore he tried to abolish commodity production as much as possible. To collectivize the peasants, he simply put a gun to their heads. If you didn’t collectivize, you died, or were deported. The big stumbling block of Soviet planning had in essence very little to do with technical problems, although there were certainly technical problems which needed to be solved, and which often could be solved even with the technical know-how of the time. The biggest stumbling block was “how do you get people to cooperate with the plan, to the best of their ability.” That remained mostly an unsolvable problem. Because what the New Marxist Exploiting Class had done, was to smash every form of political opposition to its rule. The party substituted itself for the class, the central committee substituted itself for the party, the politburo substituted itself for the central committee and, in the end, the supreme dictator substituted himself for the politburo. Thereby the Marxist exploiters destroyed any kind of meaningful democratic participation and any kind of feeling among the population that they could freely have their say, without fear of persecution. It established a dictatorial regime, which terrorized people, and persuaded the population that any form of resistance against the communist party-state was useless and futile. Eventually, the population did accept this, but that also meant, that there were few citizen’s initiatives anymore to organize anything; people simply looked to the party-state to organize everything. The effect of all that was: spiritual decay, destruction of motivation, indifference, negligence and cynicism among the population. People produced products allright, but the products were often shoddy, or they were never even used. Buildings were built, but in strange ways without proper amenities, or they collapsed after a while, etc. Machinery was built, but components simply did not work. There was an enormous waste of resources, a burgeoning black market, and pervasive corruption. The Marxist bureaucrats moreover had very strange priorities, and often could not bring themselves to organize the production of very basic and simple human necessaries. For the super-revolutionary, ultra-radical Trotskyites and Cliffite exploiters, the narrative is surprisingly facile. There never was any socialism in the Soviet Union, and therefore there is nothing to be learnt about socialism from the Soviet Union’s experience. There was no real planning, only a chaotic, disorganized economy in which there was a wide distance between the formal economic relationships and the actual pattern of resource allocation. The socialism of the Trotskyites and Cliffites is a sort of never-neverland, a sort of dream of a faraway future, an ideal norm which is never reached. Socialism and Marxism for them is sugar and spice and all things nice, and if by chance nasty things were done in the name of socialism, Marxism or communism, then that was simply not Marxism, socialism and communism. In this way, the tyranny of Marxist concepts is comfortably saved from refutation or objection: the concepts apply, if they are proved successful, and if they fail, they never applied to start of with. More intelligent people can understand that this has nothing to do with reality, and moreover that it has nothing to do with Marx and Engels. After all, Marx and Engels themselves were very aware that there were all kinds of socialisms, some more despotic and some more desirable. It is a nonsense to say that the Soviet Union was not “socialist”, when its entire population accepted it as socialist. The best we can say is, that it was a specifically Russian socialism, formed under specific historical circumstances. In some respects, Soviet socialism was very progressive, in other respects extremely reactionary and oppressive. That is all very well documented. Soviet society changed, and conditions eventually improved, creating a system quite different from Stalin’s state terrorism. For the “true socialists” ridiculed by Marx and Engels, there is only one kind of socialism, a socialism that is sugar and spice and all things nice. In reality, there are all kinds of possible socialisms, and we have scarcely exhausted the possibilities at this stage in world history. Because of the financial crisis and rising unemployment and misery in the capitalist world, a lot of the Marxist intellectuals have become even more conservative than they were already. They start to say things like, “well, Stalin wasn’t so bad.” Or “Mao wasn’t so bad”.” They think that the Soviet Union and Maoism still offer the West a model for how socialism ought to run. They simply deny that planning disasters ever happened. In other words, they want to reinvent Marxism-Leninism and the Leninist substitutionist machine. But that is just to say, that they have not understood two things: (1) that the design of a socialist planned economy requires not backward-looking traditionalist thinking but creative, forward-looking thinking using your own brains, (2) that no economic technique is going to work, unless people want to cooperate with the economic system of their own volition. So the central issue is really how you create the forms of association which would enable real planning to be succesfully done. That is the gaping hole in Marxist theory, which no amount of mathematics can patch over. Marxists, for the most part, have never fully recovered from Stalin, and therefore they can scarcely “think” human relationships. They cannot “think” communism. So at this point, there is an almost completely lapse of the leftist imagination. Vulgarly, an equation sign is put between “democracy” and “organization”. According to this theory, things will be well-organized, if there is popular democratic participation. Thus, also, had there been more democracy in the Soviet Union as an add-on, there would have been no problem. This is largely bollocks though (it was bollocks already in the 1920s when Trotsky wanted more democracy and to militarize labour at the same time). It is bollocks not because democratic participation is a bad thing, but simply because democracy cannot solve many organizational problems. Indeed, democracy can be a stumbling block and an obstruction to getting anything worthwhile done. After all, why did the Leninist exploiters originally disenfranchise all their political opponents (if not banish, torture and kill them)? Because they knew very well, that if their opponents were allowed to vote, that the Leninist tyranny could or would lose the vote. And so the opposition had to be prevented from voting, or at least the voting had to be rigged, such that it did not get in the way of the Leninist modernization plans. There are certainly still Marxist tyrant intellectuals around, who want to impose their planned economy on the working class. Sometimes they shoot off sophisticated mathematical formulas to impress people, that there is no “socialist calculation problem.” They want to get rid of money and institute a system of primitive barter or computerized labour tokens, and they want people to get the full value of what they produce. All of this is unworkable nonsense and pseudoscience, but more importantly, it is radically confused about the means and ends of the project. The task is not to impose a system on people whether they like that or not, and hope for their cooperation nevertheless, but achieve the result of a better and more egalitarian distribution of resources by adopting any means which actually do produce the result of a better and more egalitarian distribution of resources. In other words, it is not a matter of getting fixated on particular planning techniques, allocation principles, or property rights, but of concretely evaluating what kind of approach will provide the best result, and flexibly test that out, adjusting according to the results. Rather than insist on a method as the only correct one, you have to look at the goal which the method is supposed to be conducive to. The great advantage of a socialist economy is that you can experiment with all kinds of allocative methods, and are not restricted to bourgeois methods. If however the Marxist doctrinaire exploiters hold sway, the new economy will be ruined, and human life will be devastated. Because people will not be looking at what really works, and what gets the best results, but whether a practice corresponds to the principles of the Marxist exploiters. By now we know very well what, in reality, those principles are (stripping away the lofty rhetoric): they are that workers should supply a surplus in the form of unpaid voluntary labour and in the form of taxes, so that the Marxist exploiters can enjoy their consumer privileges, and have the leisure to write their “philosophies of justice and exploitation” in their state-financed dachas. J.
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