[PEN-L:8308] market socialism, planned socialism, utopian socialism

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

     Questions have been raised in various posts about the 
class nature of market and planned socialism and whether 
either or neither of these is "utopian" in any sense.
     1)  Most tracts on how to carry out planned socialism 
say little about class relations, other than to have some 
vague handwaving about the workers controlling/owning the 
means of production.  How they participate in planning is 
left rather vague, even in the most advanced such argument, 
that of Cockshott and Cottrell.  A lot of such texts, such 
as the old Soviet math lit, including Kantorovich's Nobel 
Prize winning invention/discovery of linear programming, 
was/is strictly technical and mathematical with no class 
analysis at all.  Those that focus on class are usually 
vague on how to actually plan, e.g. Engels in 
_Anti-Duhring_, or the naive, if possible sci fi advanced 
remarks of Lenin about "every man an accountant."
     2)  It is true that Owen and Fourier proposed small 
utopias within larger market capitalist settings, and this 
may have warranted the dismissive "utopian" label attached 
by Marx and Engels.  But Saint-Simon proposed economy-wide 
planningl.  He was the French rationalist father of the 
whole idea, as Hayek pointed out in his _The Fatal Conceit_.
     3)  Market socialism in its worker-managed form 
emphasizes very clearly worker control of the means of 
production.  This is more of a class analysis than usually 
shows up in the planned socialist economy lit.  Of course 
there are those who imitate Marx and Engels, who go on 
about all the bad class relations in market capitalism and 
declare planning to be the answer, but then have very 
little to say about how planning will be done.  The 
planning in the actually existing socialisms did lead to 
stagnation and to bureaucratic elites controlling the means 
of production and the distribution of the surplus, if not 
actually owning the means of production.  The claim that 
those advocating planned command socialism have answered 
how to have the workers controlling things and also having 
a viable system that remains dynamic over time remains a 
utopian claim in the sense of "never having existed 
anywhere" and remaining unexplained how it could anywhere.  
This is the original meaning of the word utopian, although 
as I have already said, without some utopianism, we are all 
without hope.
Barkley Rosser

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
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