> Did Sartre's argument in Critique of Dialectical Reason over the
> practico-inert and the descent into Stalinism have a side argument
> about scarcity?
Yes, he diagnosed scarcity as the historical category of violence.
> bread lines. Given the pre-super computer age that Soviet planning had
> to exist in, how to balance and abjudicate the conflicting levels of
> immediate social need and long term infrastructure building, was
> something that overlaid with the vanguard substitutionism, was bound
> to lead to disaster.
But we're talking pre-supercomputer commodities. Planning took Russia from a broken-down, war-ravaged Fourth World periphery to a medium-tech manufacturing economy in fifty years, and a heavily planned economy is working similar wonders in China and Vietnam right now. Half of the EU is intermediated by the state, i.e. is subject to all kinds of non-market pressures, which hasn't stopped Nokia from stomping Motorola something awful, Daimler buying 1/3 of the US auto industry or Renault buying 1/6 of the East Asian auto industry.
-- Dennis