To start, I think the below is only for the more dedicated students of the
subject; most pen-lers will want to skip it. There's no real content added
in either this missive or the one it was replying to. It's also too long.
Repeating what's at stake: Max is >>still utterly unconvinced, at any rate,
of the following, which is what [he] think[s] we have been arguing about
[i.e.] that democracy facilitates planning ...<<
I wrote: > For your consideration, one way to organize planning that would
allow democracy to facilitate it:
>1) democratic control over the enterprise helps keep the managers honest
and also promotes morale and thus productivity. <
He responds:>> Sure, but that has nothing to do with planning.<<
This is true only if one defines the issues surrounding planning in the
narrowest possible way! I think it's an issue of political economy, not
narrow technical economics.
>The former (say, embodied in the ability to fire managers) encourages the
rank and file to trust the managers in their dealings with the planners. <
>>But the issue is not workers trusting managers, but enterprises (workers
and managers, abstracting from the internal hierarchy) subsuming their
interest in the plan. I don't see how democracy within the enterprise ...
has an important bearing on the relation between the enterprise and the
center.<<
I don't see any reason to abstract from the internal hierarchy. That kind
of abstraction would allow us to abstract from the class divisions which
made old Soviet-style planning even more difficult and distorted than the
usual information-based critique has it. (This is similar to Robin's recent
posting, which if I remember correctly said that the information problems
of Soviet-style material balances planning could be solved, but not its
lack of democracy.)
BTW, I was NOT advocating the enterprises "subsuming their interest to the
plan." That's the Soviet-style, hierarchical, class-ridden, way of looking
at things, one that should be rejected.
I was instead looking at how the interests of the enterprises could be
_harmonized_ with those of the planners and co-ordinate with a mutually-
agreed-to plan. The plan depends not only on what the technocrats at some
future Gosplan want but what the enterprises (and especially the enterprise
rank-and-file) want. Negotiation, not dictation, is the goal.
> 2) in addition to various generally-accepted rules and regulations which
would apply to all enterprises in order to encourage the communication of
accurate information to the planners, it seems reasonable to presume that
a<
In response to this fragment (which makes no sense at all given the way he
mangles it), Max writes that: >>You treat this casually, but it is the crux
of the problem. Calculation is susceptible to technological advance (though
the magnitude of calculation and information involved still dwarfs existing
computer capacity, in my view). The problem is getting accurate information
and having the plan's instructions carried out without the eye and hand of
God behind every economic agent.<<
Max, this is a BS way of arguing (first, slicing and dicing what I said and
then ignoring what I said). I was NOT talking about the calculation issue
(that's point 6, below). In fact, I WAS talking about the information issue
-- and the political economy of the issue of cooperation of the
participants with the plan.
The key issue -- one that applies under capitalism too, by the way, and
will apply just as strongly in the ideal social democratic dream -- is the
principal/agent problem. By addressing the issue which you elide, i.e., the
basis for societal consensus, I am directly addressing the issue of the P/A
problem. Rather than repeat what I said and have you again ignore it, I'll
refer interested readers to my previous missive ("more planning &
democracy").
> 6) all of these elements are made easier with simpler and more automatic
methods for making planning decisions (of the sort that Albert & Hahnel
write about).<
>>Re: my 'spaghetti' charge, this seems to contradict all the emphasis on
democracy.<<
This assertion assumes [or seems to assume since accusations of presenting
"spaghetti" seem meaningless at best] that people will never democratically
agree to having their various organizations should fit together in a
coherent, rational, way. On a more abstract level, it seems to make an
illegitimate conflation of centralization with dictatorship (or
decentralization with democracy).
To give an example: the US Congress, in conjunction with the Big Friend of
Paula Jones, can decide on a coherent plan for the nation's government:
balance the government budget within certain parameters (defend some
programs, gut the others, defined in a broad and abstract way). Within the
totally distorted one dollar/one vote parameters of capitalism, that's
democratic planning. Then, within that plan, various compromises are made
serving various special interests. The specifics of the "plan" are
implemented.
Obviously, socialism would involve more than budgetary planning, but the
example is about how central control does not contradict democracy.
Max rejected the idea >> that individuals and organizations will act much
more selflessly under socialist democracy;<<
to which I replied: > I was proposing and predicting that socialist
democracy allows people to act on the social values that they cannot act on
when atomized, when relating to each other only through the market. Rather
than abandoning self-interest, I hope that socialist democracy would allow
people a more _mature_ conception of self-interest.<
Max responds that: >> I hope so too, but I have doubts. Doing away with
capital ownership doesn't do away with worker/enterprise/community/industry
self-interest. It may even exacerbate it. The market atomizes society
because property rights facilitate the pursuit of self-interest, I guess.
(If it isn't obvious, I haven't read marx in about 25 years,...<<
On the last, Marx is hardly the font of all knowledge. I don't think anyone
on pen-l thinks that he is.
Besides, I already addressed this issue of enterprise self-interest. I
talked about how enterprises could be linked together (as with interlocked
directorates of capitalist corporations), which you promptly ignored. If
this is the way you want to discuss these issues, let's call the whole
thing off.
BTW, I don't know for sure that democracy will all people to attain a more
mature conception of self-interest (thus, I used the word "hope"). I say
that we give it a try, though. Rejecting the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie, we have to give people a chance to do better rather than
assuming that they'll do worse.
>>Instead we will have new political rights which people will reach for to
the same end. This calls the mind the folk wisdom about academic quarrels
-- that they are so vicious because so little is at stake -- and suggests
that with less well-defined rules of engagement (political rights being
more elastic than property rights), warm and fuzzy feelings towards the
Plan may not be forthcoming.<<
And you said you liked democracy? this shows profound distrust for people.
I also don't understand where the "less well-defined rules of engagement"
came from. Why can't people decide on specific rules, like Robert's rules
of order for reaching decisions? why can't they endorse some kind of bill
of rights? history shows that people are very much in favor of the Bill of
Rights in the US (unlike the propertied elite, which favored the
unvarnished Constitution).
The idea that political rights are more elastic than property rights is
nonsense. The capitalists have made their property rights very elastic:
they can dump all their external costs on us and on nature and internalize
external benefits from us with little cost, a veritable dictatorship
(unless we organize opposition to this nonsense). Though easy to define in
practice, property rights are amazingly fuzzy in practice (due to
information problems, externalities).
The point of democracy is to give people more power. That means that for
each, MORE (not less) is at stake. So the Henry Kissinger folk wisdom
hardly applies.
If academia were organized more along the workers' control model (the
teacher's co-op) rather than the hierarchy-imposed "publish or perish"
model, the HK folk wisdom would lose all validity, since the academic
competition would fade. (Of course, people outside the co-op might be
treated badly, but that's another issue, one I dealt with in a part of my
missive that Max ignored.)
BTW, I was NOT invoking "warm and fuzzy feelings." Who was doing that?
Skipping over a bit, I had written: >The point of planning is to allow more
complete democracy.<
quoth Max: >> I think the point of planning is to improve economic outcomes
(social efficiency), whereas the point of democracy is to ensure justice.
<<
Though I'm all in favor of efficiency (not liking waste), an emphasis on
efficiency alone is pretty meaningless. Efficiency means the attainment of
a given set of goals at minimum cost. The key issue is what these goals are
-- and how these goals are decided on. (As another Jim on pen-l emphasizes,
a Nazi death camp can be efficient, killing social pariahs for the least
cost.) To a socialist such as myself, the goals have to be decided
democratically.
To separate the fight for democracy from that for justice is to impose a
compartmentalization that would weaken the movement even further.
Further, the point is that such democracy helps make the plan work better,
though Max ignores my argument there.
>>Fair-minded people can commit economic blunders, while planners can be
unjust.<<
Such is obvious. I don't see why this assertion is relevant.
>>You seem to be close to the following formulation: we need to destroy the
political power of the capitalist class ... because it is impossible to
domesticate this power under bourgeois democracy to the point where justice
is secured. Planning is not, then, about economics (social efficiency);
it's really about equity. This dovetails with your concentration in all
your posts on political arrangements pertaining to democratic participation
and your neglect of the normative economic principles supported by a
planning process, democratic or otherwise.<<
Equity and efficiency and democracy have to work together; they should be
seen as complements, not substitutes. These are the normative principles.
Ultimately, the economist's abstract conceptions of equity and efficiency
must be subordinated to what people want, i.e., democratic decision-making.
Planning is one part of making this work.
in pen-l solidarity,
Jim Devine
