Bill Lear writes: >>Perhaps Jim Devine, who seems to have a cool head about this, can intercede and tell me if I am being unreasonable. I feel the flames rumbling---but that's how I respond when I feel that democracy is being swept aside as some romantic fantasy, and that engaging in queries about the forms of institutions which may be constraining it is labeled as some sort of semantic game. ...<< I can't intercede, though I'm flattered that you ask. Not only have I been frying my brains in Palm Springs on a inlaw-financed family outing (so that my head isn't very cool), but I think its unfair to Wojtek for me to come in. After all, I think that you are basically right, as should be clear from my recent missives. I think that you and Wojtek are talking past each other. He seems to be making more of a sociological (social-scientific) point (i.e., that formal organizations are not the same as what really is happening) rather than a political point. However, I'm not sure. In another missive, Max S. wrote: >>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 [i.e., me, Jim] said about a legion of autonomous grass-roots groups pursuing a single national agenda.<< Bill Lear writes: >>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.<< I think that this was well put, so I reproduced it verbatim (though obviously more could be said). I want to add that the "legion of autonomous grass-roots groups pursuing a single national agenda" (that Max seems to be sneering at) is nothing but a misrepresentation of what I was talking about. It may be a misrepresentation based on my own incomplete or muddled presentation, but it is wrong nonetheless. First, I never assumed that the grass-roots groups would all be pursuing the same agenda. A common agenda can _only_ arise from debate and discussion and compromise amongst the various groups, which will often agree to disagree. That agenda will change over time, according to the democratic will. (BTW, in order to get socialism in the first place, rather than some elitist coup d'etat, the grass-roots movements would have to have a certain unity of agendas.) There will be a lot of the "logrolling, etc." that Max fears. However, since the capitalist class will (hopefully) out of the picture, logrolling and the like will not be a necessary part of the story. The fact is that the inside-the-beltway special-interest "politics" that Max is so familiar with is a necessary component to a democracy totally corrupted by capitalism. Absent capitalism, the various grassroots groups can learn to work together rather than buying each other's votes. I am not saying that capitalism _always_ gets the kind of depoliticized "politics" that allows it to thrive. However, a socialist democracy would lack the various forces that exist under capitalism that encourage depoliticization of politics. Second, the groups will not be autonomous from each other, just as currently one can work for EPI and belong to GreenPeace (or for that matter, the gun lobby) simultaneously. They will be autonomous _from state control_, in the sense of having civil liberties, etc. They will be different from, say, corporate PACs or the two main US political parties, which are under corporate thumbs. Third, without vibrant democracy outside of the state sector, democratic planning cannot work. The government needs to be kept honest. Further, without the kind of flow of honest information from the grass-roots to the center that is encouraged by the people's sense that the planners are planning in the people's interest (rather than, say, the planners' career interests), planning fails. I had said: > That's because you're probably thinking of a "plan" as being the USSR-type.< Max replied: >>Yes, but only in the general sense that it embodies goals that are conceived at the center or top. << I want to reiterate that the planners might (and should) be elected democratically and face an independent press that keeps them honest and, more importantly, a vibrant and politicized mass movement (consisting of a lot of different grass-roots groups) outside of the state sector. >>If the economy is one thing there can only be one plan. The more decentralized a decision-making structure, from major industrial sectors and regions to individual enterprises and communities, the less the implied synthesis of plans, emphasis plural, justifies the label "planning." To try to simplify this, if enterprise A thinks their output should trade at a 2-for-1 ratio with the output of enterprise B, how is this resolved under "democratic central planning"?<< To give an equally simplistic answer: the plan might determine the quantity Y of a product X that should be produced (for consistency with the overall plan and the democratically-decided goals of the plan). Assuming that the product is a necessity, the government would issue Y ration coupons equally amongst the population. Each coupon would purchase one unit of X. Then people would "buy" the X from the workers' co-ops. The workers' co-ops would have the power to decide how to produce the X; democratic control over the production process is the major advantage of workers' control (in addition to the inherent benefit of having democracy). Consumers would decide which co-op to buy from, rejecting the X that is of low quality. Those co-ops who produced products of sufficiently high quality would be able to sell them and redeem the ration coupons for money (or other kinds of ration coupons) from the planning authority, thus covering costs. Those that didn't would have to clean up their acts. (Alternatively, they could give the consumer a larger quantity of X in return for a single coupon.) BTW, the value of the coupons to the co-op would be set by the planners, to reflect the internal and external costs of the production of the product. This example largely ignores the issue of prices (unlike Max's question). If quality could be quantified (which of course it cannot), one might think of the ratio of number of coupons to quality of X as a "price." In the example, consumers play a big role in determining this "ratio" in a quasi-demand and supply scenario. Individual co-ops would have limited effect on this ratio. The story could be complicated (introducing a larger role for prices) by allowing consumers to swap coupons with each other (coupons for product X for coupons for product Z, etc.) or allowing consumers to make extra payments (on top of the ration coupons) to the co-ops. I do not want to go farther, because I am hardly an expert on planning and rationing (and don't want to be _too_ boring). The point is simply that planning could co-exist with not only workers' control but also consumer choice. BTW, my understanding of planning suggests, following Pat (no relation) Devine, that planning's main role concerns _investment_ rather than production. Maybe someone could give us a summary of Pat's schema. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] "A society is rich when material goods, including capital, are cheap, and human beings dear." -- R.H. Tawney.
