I mean in contrast to "planning a socialist market," which seemed and still
seems to me far more complicated and difficult than planning. Like I said
in another post (on the post-communist Czech Republic), it's all
_relative_. From another angle, Michael Perelman keeps saying in posts on
the planning-related threads that we can at least do better than
capitalists, since an astounding amount of waste is involved in capitalist
production, but I think he hasn't got any reply from listers:
>Jim Heartfield noted that Titkin estimates that more than half of the Soviet
>output was waste. I suspect that much more of the U.S. output is waste.
>Remember Doug's recent estimate that 5 million people are involved in
>telemarketing. Include advertising, lobbying .....
>
>What about the destruction of "surplus" agricultural products?
Michael Perelman also wrote:
>1. There is an incredible amount of waste in the market as we know it. Thus
>planning has a great deal of leeway for error if it were only to match present
>performance.
>
>2. Markets tap virtually nothing of what people are capable of accomplishing.
>Planning has the potential (not the certainty) of tapping into the
>potential of
>what Fourier called passionate labor, and elevating what society can
>accomplish.
Tom Lehman posted a neat saying: "The old saying is, failing to plan is planning to fail." He also said: "I don't believe that everything can be planned for or that everything should be planned for; not to say that you can't, but, then you introduce a certain rigidity into a system that anything out of the ordinary will cause it to break." I agree with him on this also. One doesn't have to and shouldn't wax utopian and aim for perfection (or "struggle against the plan"). It would be a great advance for humanity -- especially for those who live in the Third World and ex-Socialist countries -- if socialism could do _better_ than capitalism (or socialism before 1989 for that matter) on the following points: (a) predictable satisfaction of most human wants; (b) efficiency; and (c) democracy. Is there any reason that it's impossible to aim for this reasonable objective (better than C and S as they have existed until now)? Why not concentrate on _the concretely existing obstacles_ standing in the way of (a), (b), and (c) and try to remove them, instead of thinking in postmodern abstraction ("the plan")?
Yoshie