On Fri, May 16, 1997 at 14:48:23 (PST) Max B. Sawicky writes: >> From: James Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >A "democratic central plan" sounds like a >pizza/ice cream diet. Appealing in theory but >hard to imagine in reality. It reminds me of some >things you said about a legion of autonomous >grass-roots groups pursuing a single national agenda. As long as you define "central" to mean "conceived at the center or top", then you will be guaranteed to find it difficult to imagine. A democratically organized economy which is run with a central plan is simply one which could be run with a *single* plan (varying in the degree of control embedded within it) and conceived democratically. The locus of conception need not coincide with the locus of scope of the plan. Furthermore, a democracy may also decide that a "central" plan could very well include segments of the economy that would run on market-style supply/demand logic (say restaurants?), perhaps retaining public financing, etc., and with much of the authority for setting various details of the plan retained locally. It need not be the horror of minute planning you seem to envision. Didn't Cockburn and Pollin write a piece in _The Nation_ some time back entitled, "The World, the Free Market, and the Left"? Bill
