>> at some point, then, you have to concede that the struggle for
socialism (and indeed communism) is a struggle against the plan.<<
and then sniped:
>You love this philosophic struggle against the phrase, in a good old
left-Hegelian fashion. That's really predictable.<
a struggle against the dead weight of the past, which does indeed roam and moan around in the phrase 'socialist planning'. hence, i wrote: "the topic of planning only emerges at a precise conjuncture within capitalism and within the panoply of socialist terminology: as a response to the crises of capitalism, most notably, the 1929 Crash." the conclusion being, "it's like people are insisting that post-1929 world is and should be the horizon of 21st C. communist politics which (whether one feels nostalgic for that moment, celebrates its demise, or remains thoroughly ambivalent), it ain't."
most of this post, as did most of my postings on this over time, in fact consisted of accounting for the concept as it emerged from a particular conjuncture and the distinctive limits of this. in any case, what's predictable by now is that you make stuff up, not only about what i write, but what you have written. that's either bad polemics or delusion.
i had written:
kelley wrote quite succinctly:
>bhaskar, then, is something akin to a humanist psycholgoy which says,
oh yeah, human desires change and we don't always know what we want nor
is what we want always predictable. ... this is quite different from a
lacanian formulation in which the very process of trying to be as
knowledgeable about ourselves as possible is the very process in which
those desires are generated and which obscures to us the political
character of those desires because it must.<
perhaps what it obscures in this particular instance is that each of the terms that are adopted as contraries in the debates over planning (market/state, anarchic/planned), where socialism is positioned on one side of these apparent opposites, is in fact an already existing set of pairs _within_ capitalism. to put it in althusser's terms, it poses problems ['anarchy of production'] on the terrain and within the horizon of a definite theretical structure". and this theoretical structure has a definite history, as i mentioned before.
the topic of planning only emerges at a precise conjuncture within capitalism and within the panoply of socialist terminology: as a response to the crises of capitalism, most notably, the 1929 Crash. michael's remarks illustrate exactly this, without his asking the question of the specific conditions and meaning of that aspiration, and without considering more forcefully what the crisis in and of capitalism consists of.
there are always two sides to any consideration of a capitalist crisis such as this: crisis as a weapon (the disciplining of workers thru mass unemployment/impoverishment being one); but also the crisis as the trace of worker resistance to which the financial crisis is a response. that is, crisis is also the ongoing effect of the irreconcilable antagonism at the heart of capital. planning, by which i mean the aspiration to plan capitalism -- of which the total work society is one option and historical moment (some might call this socialism, but i don't) -- is then the desire to reconcile that antagonism within/via the state. an eminently hegelian manoevre. couldn't be done in the ussr, where 'inefficiencies' and 'layabouts' were the re-emergence of the antagonism in a new form; and couldn't be done in the Keynsian plan, where inflation is the re-emergence of the same within money. that is, each plan, whilst trying to reconcile the antagonism merely prompted its reassertion as a different kind of crisis.
Negri wrote in his 1975 essay, 'The state and public spending': "Planning primarily involves reproposing, by means of organisation mediation, a terrain of the composition of class conflicts. We should keep in mind that at these levels of class struggle, the dual development intrinsic to the capitalist logic of rule (market and state) is completely affirmed. All of this, though, seems to be harking back to old times, when there was a reformist hope that the conflicts were really mediable and that the reorganisation of the labour market through a mediation between productive and social functions and social welfare could be sustained within foreseeable and controllable proportions, In fact, every highly developed capitalist country has witnessed the crisis of this project."
yoshie wrote:
> If anything, the premise of "incomplete" knowledge is *an argument
against all utopian socialist blueprints (a la market socialism and
participatory democracy, for instance)*, not against
the necessity of planning, socialist or otherwise.<
the argument against blueprints (from marx) is not an argument founded on a beleif in the unpredictability of human desires, nor even an argument on the imperfectibility of knowledge, but quite specificically, it's an argument about the historical contingency of any vision of the future we may advance, and one which becomes, if regarded as more than the stuff of science fiction, a definite limit on the creation of a radically different future.
at some point, then, you have to concede that the struggle for socialism (and indeed communism) is a struggle against the plan. hence, the question becomes not whether there should be planning, but whether we define socialism (and communism) _as planning_. that this has been the way in which socialism has been defined, as the presumed contrary of capitalism as 'anarchy', is precisely why the presumed alternatives of market socialism and participatory democracy have arisen. that is, neither of these suggest any critical account of planning, rather they offer another version of it. that the priveliged terms in the debates between these positions has been the degree of 'market' versus the degree of 'state control', or even the character of the state, suggests quite strongly the conclusion marx came to regarding 'blue-prints'. that is, in each case, it is what exists in capitalism now (the state and the market) that is re-worked as the limit concepts of the future, which thereby would bear no radical difference from the present, from capitalism.
finding a space for socialism and communism which is defined as the struggle against planning seems to me to be both important and crucial. this i think includes acknowledging struggles against the planning of the endless work society, which michael seems to think is the best option at hand (despite his comment for a zerowork future), as a critical part of the struggle for socialism and communism.
finally, a general point on the debates here: if, as an alternative to certain marxist orthodoxy, socialism is defined as both planning and struggles against planning (as the necessary line of flight from whatever present-time arrangements are), then that to me would be a significant move forward. as it is, though, too many seem unwilling to let go of the idea of planning as the differentia specifica of socialism and communism, mostly becuase they have already defined capitalism as unplanned. it's like people are insisting that post-1929 world is and should be the horizon of 21st C. communist politics which (whether one feels nostalgic for that moment, celebrates its demise, or remains thoroughly ambivalent), it ain't.
Angela _________