> This debate is getting weird. <
that is certainly true. perhaps you can directly answer the question of who or what is the vehicle of socialist planning, then? the state? the nation-state?
a comment on the recent war in yugoslavia below, since it's irrelevant but also requires a response.
> Certainly to reject the use of (more or less
> endless) qualifiers in discussing a purely contingent question
> is irrational.
what? i never rejected the use of qualifications. unlike you and yoshie, my concern was to be overt about such qualifications and contingencies, including the qualification of the impossibility of a non-transparent knowledge -- ie., a consciousness without an unconscious, to put it in crude terms. this raises direct questions of a certain marxist conception of socialist planning as _conscious planning_, defined against the paired formulation of capitalism as 'anarchic' or as 'the market'. that yoshie eventually concedes some of this in the sentence where she qualified (not knowledge, but) planning, even whilst inisisting in the next breath that she is qualifying knowledge and there is no neccesary connection between this and the presumed effectiveness of planning in the formulation of socialist planning, is what i find strange, but not without albeit dubious reasons.
>And
> of course it is easy enough in the abstract to provide a long
> list of hypothetical conditions and an equally long list of possible
> and impossible, desirable and undesirable, necessary and
> unnecessary plans under each set of hypothesized conditions.
> That would seem truly to be a *merely* academic exercise
> however.
rubbish. the abstraction was something conducted by both you and yoshie in what is still a long and gratuitous detour from my original query (on the status and history of the centrality of planning in certain marxist currents), and a detour which precisely made 'academic' by taking us down the path of 'biological givens' such as toilet paper and fables of odysseus.
> The phrase "natural needs" does indeed seem sort of pointless.
> Most of us need water rather frequently, but I don't see what
> is added to "need for water" by calling it a natural need. In any
> case the form even so-called "natural needs" take is usually
> historically and socially determined through various forms
> of struggle.
i agree, in which case you quarrel is with yoshie, who is already confused about whether she used the term biological givens, to describe the use of toilet paper no less. when i wrote that toilet paper is not a natural need or biological given (which is the same thing), yoshie responded by saying that i'm trying to deny biological givens and dispense with toilet paper -- all of which is a very wierd reading and a bizarre polemic indeed.
> I believe it would be impossible to plan in some platonic
> sense the quantity and variety of foodstuffs moved into
> New York or Chicago each day. Obviously, however,
> it is possible to abstract from past/current experience a
> fairly accurate idea of the number of unloading docks
> needed for that daily delivery. Waste and shortages
> would occur under a general plan for food shipments
> as they occur under present partially planned conditions.
so then, you are definining capitalism as 'partially planned', which certainly avoids the characterisations of capitalism as unplanned that i objected to in the original thread. but it still posits the state or bureaucracy you refer to below as assuming the role of consciousness? how does class struggle figure in this in a more concrete sense? one of the ways in which class struggle, both within capitalism and ostensibly socialist countries like the ussr, makes and made itself felt is/was as an 'innefficiency', or rather, a refusal of the plan. and, whilst this is a conflict over a specific plan, it also means that the centrality of planning given within a certain marxist tendency requires a good deal of rethinking, not least because it renders the state as the conscious planner and leaves no room for class struggle which takes on the form of a struggle against the plan. as i wrote: the path to socialism and communism by definition escapes state planning -- not simply this or that blue-print, but the very idea of blue-prints.
> How this would affect planning would have to be
> worked out in a given context -- partly no doubt
> through political struggle, partly through technical
> debate and study within a bureaucracy.
> Incidentally. With of course endless goofups and errors,
> war production planning worked pretty well in the U.S.
> during WW 2. Even rationing worked surprisingly well.
> And considering the inefficiency of the military mind,
> the U.S. still arranged for a more or less successful
> allocation of military units among the various fronts.
is war planning the model you aspire to, then?
> While I have often disagreed sharply with Angela's positions
> (such as her individualist and moralistic approach to the
> Yugoslav War),
in which case, you determined to misunderstand what that position was. among other things, contrary to those who wanted to assert the yugoslav govt as the repository of socialist aspirations or indeed socialism, or who more broadly thought that an analysis of the war could be done as if the only players were competing states (the US, yugoslavia, the EU), i argued time and again for some analysis of the class struggles (in both yugoslavia and eslsewhere) which composed this situation. i also objected to the propagandism of those who think everything, including racism, is permitted in the service of selling one's position. but this you already know.
Angela _________