The need for a socialist planned economy (2021)(marxist.ca)
marxist.ca
The need for a socialist planned economy (2021)
https://www.marxist.ca/article/the-need-for-a-socialist-planned-economy
10 comments
as technologists I think it's tempting for us to look at the idea of the economy, or at least like the idea of a planned economy, in terms of an optimization problem. Ordering the most "deserving" inputs and outputs, those that lead to some level of human flourishing, over whatever timescale and via whatever primary, secondary, tertiary effects etc and assigning resources to them in proportion to their importance - and that the problems that need to be solved are identifying what those best orderings are, and logistics.
I think this is something of a mistake. The best use of resources isn't nearly the biggest problem facing a planned economy. The biggest problem, currently seen clearly in both russia and ukraine simultaneously, is that when a planned economy crops up, for war production or socialist reasons, there is a great temptation for those involved to do corruption, at whatever level they can. falsify reports, change production numbers, all sorts of crimes to accumulate power over the flows of resources, such that that power can be leveraged to trade for other things.
The real problem to be solved is a social one. How to make the watchers who watch the watchers? Corruption can in principle never be fully prevented entirely - enough people believing that corruption goes unpunished and any system will fall. But building a system convincingly self-sustaining enough that everyone can't quite be sure that others aren't checking their work (and in a more positive framing, one where people feel good work is both expected and rewarded), one where people can be confident corruption will be found, will pay dividends in people policing their own behavior.
This goes for most economic systems as well.
I think this is something of a mistake. The best use of resources isn't nearly the biggest problem facing a planned economy. The biggest problem, currently seen clearly in both russia and ukraine simultaneously, is that when a planned economy crops up, for war production or socialist reasons, there is a great temptation for those involved to do corruption, at whatever level they can. falsify reports, change production numbers, all sorts of crimes to accumulate power over the flows of resources, such that that power can be leveraged to trade for other things.
The real problem to be solved is a social one. How to make the watchers who watch the watchers? Corruption can in principle never be fully prevented entirely - enough people believing that corruption goes unpunished and any system will fall. But building a system convincingly self-sustaining enough that everyone can't quite be sure that others aren't checking their work (and in a more positive framing, one where people feel good work is both expected and rewarded), one where people can be confident corruption will be found, will pay dividends in people policing their own behavior.
This goes for most economic systems as well.
I agree with you that this is not primarily a logistics but really a social problem. I think the section on the Soviet Union in the article addresses specifically that point.
> The proponents of the economic calculation problem now tell us that the proof of the failure of socialism lies in the collapse of the USSR. However, what failed in the USSR was not the planned economy, but the lack of democracy.
> The economy was not democratically planned by the workers, but by a state bureaucracy. The Stalinist bureaucracy usurped the democratic power of the workers and peasants who had led the 1917 October Revolution and expropriated the capitalists from power. The misery and scarcity created by the Civil War and the invasion of 21 imperialist countries, including Canada, was the manure on which the bureaucracy grew like a weed.
> In the 1920s and 1930s, the planned economy allowed the USSR to move out of its semi-feudal conditions and developed the means of production sufficiently to defeat the Nazis and become the second world power. But from the 1960s onwards, production became more complex, and the bureaucracy gradually became unable to calculate all the information to plan production properly.
> Indeed, how could it be possible that a few hundred civil servants in Moscow could plan an economy of hundreds of millions of people? The bureaucrats wanted to meet their production quotas, even if it meant cutting back on product quality and lying about the economic information in their departments.
> What authoritarianism and lack of democracy in planning does is to degrade economic information and undermine planning. This is what explains why the USSR has entered into economic stagnation. Bureaucrats then brutally re-established capitalism in the USSR in 1991, leading to shortages, mass unemployment, the return of prostitution, and more.
> As Trotsky said, “the planned economy needs democracy as the human body needs oxygen.”
An example of what that democracy could look like is presented in the next secion as well.
> There are several ways of imagining the democratic mechanisms under socialism. It will be up to the workers themselves to decide them. But, for example, we could have general assemblies in the workplace, so that the workers can decide together how to organize that workplace. We could elect workplace management committees, recallable at any time and accountable to the workers. Workplace and neighbourhood assemblies could send delegates to city and regional committees, to a national congress, and eventually a world congress, which would be responsible for coordinating the entire supply chains from production to distribution. Scientists, technicians and engineers could advise the assemblies and committees in their decision-making.
> State-of-the-art computers and algorithms from nationalized Amazon would be used to assess changes in demand. Information would be sent directly to workers in the collectivized factories so that they could coordinate storage in warehouses and distribution centres. These computers will be able to calculate production costs and the number of hours of work that go into the production of each commodity. And this will help elected committees to plan product prices based on the needs of the population.
> The proponents of the economic calculation problem now tell us that the proof of the failure of socialism lies in the collapse of the USSR. However, what failed in the USSR was not the planned economy, but the lack of democracy.
> The economy was not democratically planned by the workers, but by a state bureaucracy. The Stalinist bureaucracy usurped the democratic power of the workers and peasants who had led the 1917 October Revolution and expropriated the capitalists from power. The misery and scarcity created by the Civil War and the invasion of 21 imperialist countries, including Canada, was the manure on which the bureaucracy grew like a weed.
> In the 1920s and 1930s, the planned economy allowed the USSR to move out of its semi-feudal conditions and developed the means of production sufficiently to defeat the Nazis and become the second world power. But from the 1960s onwards, production became more complex, and the bureaucracy gradually became unable to calculate all the information to plan production properly.
> Indeed, how could it be possible that a few hundred civil servants in Moscow could plan an economy of hundreds of millions of people? The bureaucrats wanted to meet their production quotas, even if it meant cutting back on product quality and lying about the economic information in their departments.
> What authoritarianism and lack of democracy in planning does is to degrade economic information and undermine planning. This is what explains why the USSR has entered into economic stagnation. Bureaucrats then brutally re-established capitalism in the USSR in 1991, leading to shortages, mass unemployment, the return of prostitution, and more.
> As Trotsky said, “the planned economy needs democracy as the human body needs oxygen.”
An example of what that democracy could look like is presented in the next secion as well.
> There are several ways of imagining the democratic mechanisms under socialism. It will be up to the workers themselves to decide them. But, for example, we could have general assemblies in the workplace, so that the workers can decide together how to organize that workplace. We could elect workplace management committees, recallable at any time and accountable to the workers. Workplace and neighbourhood assemblies could send delegates to city and regional committees, to a national congress, and eventually a world congress, which would be responsible for coordinating the entire supply chains from production to distribution. Scientists, technicians and engineers could advise the assemblies and committees in their decision-making.
> State-of-the-art computers and algorithms from nationalized Amazon would be used to assess changes in demand. Information would be sent directly to workers in the collectivized factories so that they could coordinate storage in warehouses and distribution centres. These computers will be able to calculate production costs and the number of hours of work that go into the production of each commodity. And this will help elected committees to plan product prices based on the needs of the population.
That was tried as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_self-management
The article mentions the book that lays out this thesis. Here's a direct link: https://www.versobooks.com/products/636-the-people-s-republi...
Found your company and rule it as you wish, lets see if you retain your ideals all way to the top, or maybe not because that's the freedom and hard work you don't like. And I don't see why this article fits in this website.
Ideals won't let me discriminate the fact that the workers are the backbone of a company, not myself.
> the socialist calculation debate is not over
I am not an economist, but I worked on the infrastructure of the EU subsidies to the agricultural sector and it's all planned economy in everything but the name.
The only (major) difference is that EU manages the agricultural industry with subsidies, and not direct orders. That is, you can not survive as independent farmer. You only survive as a part of a larger scheme of things where you get a subsidy for planting potatoes, a subsidy to reduce milk production, a subsidy to keep reserve in a barn that you built by obtaining a subsidy.
See this for a starter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy
I am not an economist, but I worked on the infrastructure of the EU subsidies to the agricultural sector and it's all planned economy in everything but the name.
The only (major) difference is that EU manages the agricultural industry with subsidies, and not direct orders. That is, you can not survive as independent farmer. You only survive as a part of a larger scheme of things where you get a subsidy for planting potatoes, a subsidy to reduce milk production, a subsidy to keep reserve in a barn that you built by obtaining a subsidy.
See this for a starter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy
I think mixed economies probably work best with some central planning and some free enterprise. Like if you look at China when they sent full communist around the 1960s it was a disaster economically, but the situation from around the 1980s on when they still had central planning for things like rail and education but allowed capitalist enterprise to run along side has worked pretty well economically.
> For now, planning works, but it works for them, for the rich capitalists and their profits, not for us and our needs. The next step is for us workers to organize and take the companies into our hands. And to lay the foundations for a society oriented towards need rather than profit.