Glad to see that Doug found Roemer's book irritating. I sure did. But I
also found many pen-lers responses to Roemer's book -- not to speak of
the little club that Erik Olin Wright organized to comment on the book --
even more irritating.
For your interest, Doug, I vented all my spleen on the
The best piece on planning from Trotsky is his "The Soviet Economy in
Danger" from October 1932 - the paragraph about
"Conditions and methods of Planned Economy" in particular. Here Trotsky
ridicules the Laplacian fantasies of total controll typical for the bureacracy
stresses the importance of
Trond Andresen and Mike Lebowitz have both recently pointed to the
undemocratic flow of information - which is tied in turn to the larger
structures of society - in the failure of Soviet-style "socialism."
Along these lines, in his book The Thinking Reed, written largely in the
pre-Gorby era,
Trond's comment implies that there exists "an optimal" rate of planning,
just like an optimal tax rate or optimal tariff rate. These are mythical
concepts, devoid of any applicability to real life situations. What
really determines how much central planning/market guidance depend on the
The question of how much central planning (as opposed to market
mechanisms) you can have before the system gets inefficient, cannot be
discussed without considering how to organize democracy, politics, the
media.
A program for this is IMO just as important as an "economic" socialist
program.
Actually I was partly inspired to ask the question by reading Roemer's _A
Future for Socialism_, which I find irritating in many ways. This urge to
Robin Hahnel has a very good review of Roemer's book in this month's
issue of Z Magazine. Worth checking out.
Alan
In message Thu, 27 Oct 1994 02:36:57 -0700,
Trond Andresen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
The question of how much central planning (as opposed to market
mechanisms) you can have before the system gets inefficient, cannot be
discussed without considering how to organize democracy, politics, the
Doug asks--
It seems that everyone these days accepts the Hayek critique of planning.
Are there any sharp new critiques of the critiques that the comrades
could recommend?
Some possibilities: 1) Roemer's _A Future for Socialism_ (1994),
beginning with Ch. 4, where he provides a brief
On Wed, 26 Oct 1994, Doug Henwood wrote:
It seems that everyone these days accepts the Hayek critique of planning.
Are there any sharp new critiques of the critiques that the comrades
could recommend?
Well, not everyone. I do, more or less, but there are Albert and Hahnel,
Pat Devine
It seems that everyone these days accepts the Hayek critique of planning.
Are there any sharp new critiques of the critiques that the comrades
could recommend?
As for sharpness, the reader will have to judge, but Paul Cockshott and I
have a piece that takes on the critique, primarily
Gil, can you summarize Stiglitz's argument in a short paragraph?
in pen-l solidarity,
Jim Devine
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles, CA 90045-2699 USA
310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950
You can see the beginnings of an alternative critique of Hayek in Zuboff,
The Age of the Smart Machine -- especially in her notion of the electronic
text. She is a liberal and working in an entirely different context, but
she shows how knowledge can be generalized by diffusing it via new
A number of recent posts have alluded to the current debate over the direction
of socialism for the future; market--central planning--participatory. This
seem to me to be a crucial issue for the left and I was wondering if we could
see an exchange on pen-l between some of the
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