Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Repitition and Market Socialism
In a message dated 7/14/02 7:48:43 AM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
When Stalin turned the whole nation into a work camp in order to meet
these unrealistic goals, he expanded the police force in order that they
may function as work gang bosses. Scientific planning declined and
command mechanisms took their place. As the command mechanisms grew, so
grew the administrative apparatus to implement them. The more
bottlenecks that showed up, the greater the need for bureaucrats to step
in and pull levers. This is the explanation of the monstrous
bureaucratic apparatus in the former Soviet Union, not scientific planning.
--
Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org
I actually agree that the above is a more than less accurate deciphering of the evolution of industrial socialism - as it emerged, in the second and third decade of the past century and the growth of the bureaucratic apparatus in the former Soviet Union.
I personally would have opted to work in one of the plants - that were being planned, where it was safer than the planning offices of the proletarian state. I have personally come to believe that industrial society by definition converts the country - any geographic areas, into a workcamp based on the vortex created by "the center" - there goes the neighborhood folks.
Thanks Lou for not only placing "planning" in a historical time frame, which implies that accounting is best understood in the framework of a specific timeframe but also outlining how the human drama unfolded.
("You call that a damn plan comrade?" Ivan says, "Actually it is only the second draft of the fifth presentation, but we are going to take matters to a higher level consistent with the goals of the proletarian social revolution. Let us not forget, tempo decides everything.")
Planning today within the bounds of capital is infinitely superior to the planning and accounting during the era of Henry Ford, Sr. It seems to me that planning has and is slowly morphing into accountability - not the demand for more administrators (bureaucrats), but rather, the striving for results based on interactive processes that link the consumer with the productive of material wherewithal.
Fifty years from now the planning question in the former Soviet Union is going to be reframed and clearly understood as impossible to solve during the decade of the 20's and 30s. Soviet society missed its need to leap forward during the 1950s and 60s. This leap would have had to be based on incremental improvements in the technological basis of the infrastructure. This would have not solved the problem of the bureaucrats and privileges.
When all is said and done, privileges, corruption and bribery - Soviet style, become a social power in connection with scarcity and the historic commodity hunger of humanity. "Commodity hunger" does not mean consumerism but the "hunger" created as the results of forever tearing the majority of humanity from the boundary of agricultural life.
(Sidebar: Lou, I believe a deeper conception of commodity production as a historical process is revealed in the term "commodity hunger." Maybe, I won't be regulated to antiquity this decade, although obsolescence is on my heels).
What the communist of the era in question meant by building the basis of socialism is pretty clear today and this simply meant the industrial infrastructure without private owners. That task was at least a couple of eras away from being able to satisfy in a minimum way, humanities hunger for articles of consumption. This hunger does not stand still and is a moving target requiring a computerized mechanism to keep in sight. Still yet, there is a human hand on the computer and he decided to take a two hour lunch break in a four hour work day.
Planning today has a somewhat different mode of existence, because the instruments of executing process has changed, not withstanding property relations.
Melvin P.
Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Repitition and Market Socialism
I think there is more advanced argument to be made against market socialism. If Justin has not been exiled from the list I would like a chance to make it in argument against the market socialists. p OK, shoot. What's the argument? Michael, I'll talk about this as much as I like, and if you don't like it, throw me off the list. Messages calling finis or otherwise to shut up because you don't like the content of civil discussions will be ignored. jks _ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Repitition and Market Socialism
When such debates become repetitive, sign-offs from the list increase. Sometimes I inquire about the reason, sometimes not. I don't want to throw you off the list. I don't think that I have thrown one person per year off the list. Most of the times, the person was purely disruptive and had nothing to contribute. I put a finis on threads from time to time. Most people don't take it personally. What I requested was that arguments not be repeated. Finis requests are meant to raise the signal/noise ratio. On Sun, Jul 14, 2002 at 02:32:43PM +, Justin Schwartz wrote: Michael, I'll talk about this as much as I like, and if you don't like it, throw me off the list. Messages calling finis or otherwise to shut up because you don't like the content of civil discussions will be ignored. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Repitition and Market Socialism
Justin Schwartz wrote: OK, shoot. What's the argument? Michael, I'll talk about this as much as I like, and if you don't like it, throw me off the list. Messages calling finis or otherwise to shut up because you don't like the content of civil discussions will be ignored. The problem is that we need more than talk. Some email lists tend to be exploited as mediums of the half-digested quip, even by those who have lengthy records in print publications. This is why I complain about your misspelled words. If they happened occasionally, I wouldn't mind but when nearly one out of twenty words is misspelled, it possibly betrays one in the act of typing rather than writing. I don't think it is useful to keep repeating truisms such as markets allow individual firms to react to the needs of consumers. For every truism such as this, one can respond with something like markets foster the concentration of political and economic power. Thus, you end up with a kind of debate in pop economic philosophy rather than any kind of rigorous examination of why the USSR ended up the way it did. The answer to this is in history, not pop economic philosophy. Any serious examination of Soviet history would reveal the disappearance of planning. Therefore, the Hayekian critique is mounted against a non-existent target. The Soviet government announced the first five year plan in 1928. Stalin loyalists, like Krzhizanovksy and Strumlin, who headed Gosplan, the minister of planning, worried about the excess rigidity of this plan. They noted that the success of the plan was based on 4 factors: 1) five good consecutive crops, 2) more external trade and help than in 1928, 3) a sharp improvement in overall economic indicators, and 4) a smaller ration than before of military expenditures in the state's total expenditures. How could anybody predict five consecutive good crops in the USSR? The plan assumed the most optimistic conditions and nobody had a contingency plan to allow for failure of any of the necessary conditions. Bazarov, another Stalin loyalist in Gosplan, pointed to another area of risk: the lack of political cadres. He warned the Gosplan presidium in 1929, If you plan simultaneously a series of undertakings on such a gigantic scale without knowing in advance the organizational forms, without having cadres and without knowing what they should be taught, then you get a chaos guaranteed in advance; difficulties will arise which will not only slow down the execution of the five-year plan, which will take seven if not ten years to achieve, but results even worse may occur; here such a blatantly squandering of means could happen which would discredit the whole idea of industrialization. Strumlin admitted that the planners preferred to stand for higher tempos rather than sit in prison for lower ones. Strumlin and Krzhizanovksy had been expressing doubts about the plan for some time and Stalin removed these acolytes from Gosplan in 1930. In order for the planners, who were operating under terrible political pressure, to make sense of the plan, they had to play all kinds of games. They had to falsify productivity and yield goals in order to allow the input and output portions of the plan to balance. V.V. Kuibyshev, another high-level planner and one of Stalin's proteges, confessed in a letter to his wife how he had finessed the industrial plan he had developing. Here is what worried me yesterday and today; I am unable to tie up the balance, and as I cannot go for contracting the capital outlays--contracting the tempo--there will be no other way but to take upon myself an almost unmanageable task in the realm of lowering costs. Eventually Kuibyshev swallowed any doubts he may have had and began cooking the books in such a way as to make the five-year plan, risky as it was, totally unrealizable. Real life proved how senseless the plan was. Kuibyshev had recklessly predicted that costs would go down, meanwhile they went up: although the plan allocated 22 billion rubles for industry, transportation and building, the Soviets spent 41.6 billion. The money in circulation, which planners limited to a growth of only 1.25 billion rubles, consequently grew to 5.7 billion in 1933. Now we get to the real problem for those who speak about planning during this period. As madcap and as utopian as the original plan was, Stalin tossed it into the garbage can immediately after the planners submitted it to him. He commanded new goals in 1929-30 that disregarded any economic criteria. For example, instead of a goal of producing 10 million tons of pig iron in 1933, the Soviets now targeted 17 million. All this scientific planning was taking place when a bloody war against the Kulaks was turning the Russian countryside into chaos. Molotov declared that to talk about a 5-year plan during this period was nonsense. Stalin told Gosplan to forget about coming up with a new plan that
Re: Re: RE: Re: Repitition and Market Socialism
I think there is more advanced argument to be made against market socialism. If Justin has not been exiled from the list I would like a chance to make it in argument against the market socialists. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would agree with Jim. While Michael may feel that the issue has been debated sufficiently, I am somewhat disturbed by the superficial analysis of market socialism that passes for critical thought on this list. As someone who has worked for the past 15 years in Jugoslavia and, most intensively, in Slovenia, I am dismayed by the level of discourse on workers' self-management, labour based economies, Jugoslav economic history, the theory and practice of market socialism etc. Quite frankly, I would not accept what is presented on this list at a second year level. I think Justin may well be encouraged to drop the subject , but not because he is going over old ground, but because it appears that everyone's mind is made up and they have no intention of being influenced by fact or argument.If anyone seriously wants to debate the theory of market socialism I think they should look at the basic literature. At risk of appearing arrogant on this, one place they might begin is my and Jim Stoddard's contribution on market socialism to the Encyclopedia of Political Economy. But please, the level of debate so far is hardly complimentary to the list. Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba I agree with Christian. I do not see any reason to restrict Justin's contributions, I think the main job of the moderator is not to restrict the content of discussion but the tone (avoiding flame-wars and the like). Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2002 10:52 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:27920] Re: Repitition and Market Socialism Here's my suggestion for Justin. Let's stipulate that everything you said so far is true. Do you have anything to add -- something that you have not already said? If not, the discussion is finished. If you have something new to add, let's hear it. This is pathetic, Michael. Having been on this list for a few years, I can only think of a few instances in which people have really moved conversations along, on this standard. Besides, so what if debates don't generate anything new for you? Isn't possible that people _learn_ through repetition? The members of this list have talked almost incessantly about the current crisis or whatever for at least the last 4 years, and yet you can never seem to get enough of that. My point is not that this isn't worthwhile--just the opposite. But it's true for Justin, too. If people weren't really interested, they just wouldn't bother. Give the list some credit. Christian
