>So, did you *plan* the course of this discussion from the beginning, or
at least have a clear idea of the direction in which to take it? Or did
the important substance flow mainly out of the process of discussion? I
am both kidding and serious.<
interesting question, but it was much more tedious than all that really. the latest post was rather a reprise of the comments I've been making throughout, specifically comments which some determined to pretend hadn't been made and preferred never to have to address, including my insistence that socialist planning is the blue-prints which Marx spoke of disparagingly for good reasons.
peter wrote some time back, "What makes socialism (and life, in fact) is the real, practical activity of many, many humans. Not a plan." I agree. encompassed in the presentation of planning as the way out of capitalism are many things, including a privileging of theory, the party, state and politics, derived from the particularly cartesian dualisms theory/practice, party/masses, state/society, politics/economics, in which the revolutionary impulse and possibility for the future is always said to lie in the first terms.
it is Lenin who in _What is to be done?_ sets up the most decisive and influential version of this, claiming that socialism is _always_ brought to workers _from the outside_, that workers as workers are only capable of being trade unionists and economistic, that the party is a party of intellectuals whose development is autonomous from the development of the working class, that if workers join the party they thereby become intellectuals and are no longer workers, that the party is a state-in-waiting, and so on.
for Marx, on the other hand, communist theory is not an autonomous practice, any vision of the future remains utopian insofar as it is separated from the given state of class struggles, 'spontaneous' working class struggles are always both political and economic and more than capable of being revolutionary (eg, the Chartists, the Communards), socialist planners (the utopians) are consistently lampooned ("The socialists desire the workers to leave the old society in order to be better able to enter the new society which they have prepared with so much foresight"), and, if there was ever any doubt, insists time and again that "only they [the working class] themselves, and not any providential saviours, can apply vigorous remedies to the social miseries that afflict them" (1880).
_What is to be done?_ is seen as the text of the Russian revolution, when in fact, everything about those events contradicts it. if Lenin were to have insisted on the theses of that work (a repetition of the 'Draft program of the social democratic party', 1895), as he for a brief moment did not, there would have been no involvement of Lenin in the revolution, and certainly no involvement by the Russian social democrats or bolsheviks.
WITBD is little more than an extended polemic against marxism, against those factions within the Russian social democratic party who insisted that the party be subordinated to the masses and not the other way round (Lenin renounced them as "demagogues"), Rabocheye Dyelo (or Self-Emancipation faction) whom Lenin accused of being 'spontaneists' for insisting on self-emancipation and that the notion of planning the struggle by the party should be abandoned for " a process of growth of party tasks and grow with the party", that the "tactics-as-plan contradicts the fundamental spirit of Marxism". between 1895 and 1902, Lenin regards the principal enemy as that of 'spontaneism', or rather, any position which sees the fundamental motor of history as class struggle and the masses as the principal agents of revolution instead of, as Lenin does, a schema were the principal and decisive agents are the "socialist intelligentsia" versus the bourgeoisie. for this Lenin, there is no working class, just as for the would-be-planners during the war in Yugoslavia, there was no working class struggles, only competing nation states from which to choose sides.
but who cares whether it contradicts marxism or not? this is only important in order to note that the Lenin of WITBD (in 1902) is no marxist. but that would matter little were it not also for the fact that events after the writing of this contradict his most cherished epistemology and political schema, prompting a critique from among others Axelrod and Luxemburg in 1903, and forcing him to change his position slightly, conceding that the socialist intellectuals are not, contrary to what he wrote in WITBD (but in fact returns to later much in his denunciation of _left-wing communism_), autonomous from the proletariat.
but more importantly, just as Marx wrote in 'The class struggles in France', "It is well known how the workers, with unexampled bravery and ingenuity, without a common plan, without means and for the most part, lacking weapons, held in check for five days the army, Mobile Guard...", so too Lenin was (from the distance of Stockholm) forced to praise the emergence of the workers' councils, and to seriously revise his formulation of the relation between party and masses. in a letter from Stockholm ('Our Tasks') he argues that the party is now to "clarify" the way for the "spontaneous revolutionary activity of the masses"; the party should be subordinated to the workers' councils and that the Russian social democrats should abandon their decision (a decision he had previously insisted on) to _not involve themselves_ in the councils because they were not revolutionary formations. no more claiming that 'spontaneity' is the enemy of the revolution because workers are genetically unable to accede to a revolutionary consciousness, Lenin now adopts the position of the Self-Emancipation faction he previously scoffed at: "We do not shut ourselves off from the revolutionary people but submit to their judgement every step and every decision we take, We rely fully and solely on the free initiative of the working masses themselves". but, so much has Lenin's previous position become orthodoxy, so successful was his campaign against the Self-Emancipation faction, that his letter to the party paper from Stockholm is not published (''til 1940!).
whether it takes his intervention to impose the subsequent line of "All Power to the Councils" (after he hesitantly claims that the conditions under which WITBD was written have changed or whether) or, as others histories of the councils have suggested (including Trotsky's) that various bolsheviks involved themselves in the councils in Lenin's absence, but since involvement wasn't officially allowed by the party, they did so as individuals up to until 1917, is unclear.
it is clear though by all accounts that the Russian social democrats and the bolsheviks were largely absent from the formation of the councils until very late in the piece and that the revolutionary movement of the councils both caught the bolsheviks unprepared and with a wholly miserable theory that could in no way account for it and which had to be revised.
and, despite Lenin's characterization of the change in his position as a simple response to changed circumstances, WITBD was not written as a conjunctural analysis of the class struggle, it was rather written as a series of principles: workers, he claimed, _never_ develop a revolutionary consciousness without the interventions from the outside of the socialist intelligentsia, and so on. Lenin was therefore forced to change his mind, and become the 'demagogue' that he had accused others of being for insisting that the party be a mass party of workers and not a group of "ten wise men" (as Lenin had seen the party), he must adopt the position advanced by the Self-Emancipation group and subordinate the party to the workers' councils. the masses and not the party show the way forward. but Lenin was always disingenuous in his polemics.
so by 1917, Lenin discovers the marxism he had polemicised against, realising that the workers' councils are not an arm of the party, that they had arisen _without_ the intervention and organising (let alone clarifications) of the party ad socialist intellectuals, and that they were revolutionary.
when it comes to writing _State and Revolution_, Lenin is more or less adopting the position of a council communist, insisting on the continual and inalienable power of workers to constitute and reconstitute the state, on a need to democratize the party, on the right of recall, etc which reverses his previous weightings of state/society, party/masses, theory/practice, etc. but, unfortunately, under conditions which are not necessarily of the bolsheviks own making, but which the response of the bolsheviks already has a basis in their own previous positions, this moment of class struggle marxism does not last very long.
in 1919 Lenin returns to prior formulations in his polemic against 'left-wing communism', and thereby sets in tow the dissolution of the councils as autonomous revolutionary forms, the collapse of the democracy of the party, and the complete subordination of the councils to the party. in short, Lenin returns to the theses of WTBD in 1919. what he has never given up throughout, and which allows this reversion, is specifically the notion that the party is the bearer of true consciousness. hence, when the notion of proletarian dictatorship is advanced after 1919-20, it is identified entirely as the dictatorship by the communist party (as indeed the anarchists and mensheviks claimed) since the party after all is the bearer of consciousness.
and, our would-be-planners here repeat this formulation of socialist planning as consciousness, introducing various humanist hesitations regarding full knowledge, without once realising that Marx's insistence against utopianism had nothing to do with this and everything to do with a refusal to offer blue-prints, since the difference between capitalism and communism is not a difference between working class and the bourgeoisie on the one side, and socialist intellectuals or the party on the other. it is a temporal difference _within_ the class struggle.
to return then to Rogers question, the problem with deciding what this alternative principle of production (to profits) is has tended to itself become a repetition of what already exists in capitalism: use-values. sounds very affable, but it relies in forgetting that use-values is the pair of exchange values within value. a theoretical issue perhaps, but one which (if a firm connection between needs and production is to be made which evades the gamble of the firm's production decisions) lends itself to the authoritarianism of the planning _of_ needs. not for needs, which in any case would still involve some of this, but the planning _of_ needs. ridiculous as it sounds, this is exactly what people have been saying: Chaz when he writes that "But from the perspective of the whole of society, capitalism creates new wants, wildly, anarchistically, willy nilly, without an overall plan".
but I agree with chaz's erasure of this when, contrary to his claim made up to this point and later, that it is practice (or rather class struggle, which I would say doesn't include socialist planning) which is pre-eminent in determining the path to socialism. moreover, the dualisms which keep getting repeated in _theories_ of planning (or socialism as planning), conducted with a good deal of distance from any concrete struggles, are a repetition of the kinds of rubbish Lenin wrote in WTBD. those dualism are only ever overcome in class struggles, which are not planned nor even necessarily admirable, but rather have often enough been forms of resistance to the planning regimes themselves, as the USSR's was been overcome by the systematic (but unofficial or criminalised) practices of absenteeism, alcoholism, shoddy production, sabotage and generalised disinterest, as Keynsianism was overcome by the 'rigidity of wages' and inflation. in each case, 'efficiency' was the casualty not of any ostensible failures in planning, but of a refusal by workers of work and of the needs that they were planned as having. that is, they struggled against specific plans but also the very practice of planning for needs by a anything which can be distinguished (state, party) from the shape and direction of class struggles. for the planners, more thought goes in to defending planning than to figuring out how class struggle, the struggle for communism, can take precedence in any planning regime without being, as it has been, cast as 'counter-revolutionary' and criminalised.
socialism anywhere would be a great advance. pretending this is reducible or the same as planning is nothing more than diminished expectations or a sales pitch for a politics which has passed its use-by date. no surprise then, that this is resorted to in much the same way as Lenin drafter WITBD and the Draft Programme of 1895: out of a sense of frustration with the working class, which led thereby to a derision of the working class' capacity for revolutionary action. the blueprints are used as, but cannot be, substitutes for class struggle by depressed intellectuals.
but this socialist planning is not marxism. why not concentrate on pushing the boundaries of what is possible and encouraging the new forms of resistance that have already shown themselves instead of thinking the future lies in planning? in doing the latter, what gets posited as the path, the way and the light, is not class struggle (in all its recognised and hidden forms) but the party and state, here presented as the bearer of knowledge, where and by implication, the masses and society are simply pieces to be shifted around as an exercise in "social engineering" (chaz's rather unfortunate but telling choice of words). once again, the masses without central organisation and planning, without the involvement of marxist parties, show the way. the j18 actions, which despite the determined ignorance of all of our would-be-planners, show much more decisively that class struggle is alive and well and has taken on new forms with the Leninists (of WTBD and LC) being pretty well absent (and hardly in any vanguard position) from the whole affair as they were from the Russian workers' council until 1917, in the Spanish workers' councils in 1936, in China between 1926-27 (contra the Chinese party's decision to subordinate itself to the Kuomintang), in France in 1968, etc.
so, where the would-be-planners make a wholly theoretical distinction between a socialist future which can be planned and class struggle, where the former is left up to intellectuals, the party, etc, and the latter drops out of sight only to re-emerge in the form of 'inefficiencies and obstacles to the plan, rosa luxemburg in criticising the bolsheviks already knew that any distinction between present capitalist circumstances and a radically different future is always a temporal distinction _within_ the class struggle and not one that gets comfortably resolved by attributing the future to a consciousness which exists autonomously from or even in a priveliged relation to that (as in the party or the state): "organisation, enlightenment, and struggle are not separate mechanically, but also temporally, different moments". so, in the same sense, use-values and exchange-values, the planning of use values, has tended to be used as a way of absorbing this temporal difference between capitalism and communism into a difference between tw0 sides of value, ie., two sides of capitalism. and here, dialectics is no longer materialist, but becomes the occassion for idealist fantasies.
[for those who've yet to become involved in the j18, or rather the global carnival against capitalism, the j18 site is at http://www.j18.org and the next round is to be the WTO meeting in seattle)
Angela _________