For what it is worth I have taken a completely different path to reach broad similar conclusions as Justin in this.
For instance I take Lenin's claim that the economic relationships of proletarian socialism (first phase of communism) is state capitalism.
Also the dangers of managing in a planning sense more than be actually planned for (again a point made by Lenin on the introduction of NEP).
Conscious control is obviously criticially important to realising proletarian interests. Illusionary "control" in this respect is self-defeating. I now generally avoid the word "planning" when talking about Proletarian Socialism and instead use the phrase "the proletariat managing and directing their own exploitation in their own interests".
There is no particular theoretical reason for this phrase rather it is a reaction to the utopian beliefs associated with "planning" within our movement. My phrase attempts to bring the contradictions of the first phase of communism to the fore, nobody need agree with this, but I hope that most can see that there is good reasons to challenge the reificiation of the idea of planning that has become a socialist fixation.
In this context the heuristics of "planning" and who is doing it is based in historical reality, the proletariate is not a free agent, it cannot freely pick what is or is not planned but works within the constraints of its context.
Over-planning going beyond what can be achieved works against planning as conscious control, which can be in the class interest of others than that of the proletariat (power can be derived from the contradiction, but not alas conscious control over the economic processes).
The massive international planning of capital today can thus be read in two ways. First the necessity of planning when socialisation of capital has reached its present state. Second, the contradiction that the amount of actual conscious control is somewhat illusionary and has roots within power relations that work against production itself.
The much lauded efficiency of modern capital to my mind at least is very overstated, from within there is massive waste of capital and labour, worse the role of management actually implementing the latest plan usually involves creating one crisis in production after another.
The problems of the old USSR's planned economy prefigure the problems of planning by the bourgeoisie today. The success of the "market" appears as no such thing, the markets role in this is very limited and often demarks no more than the boundaries of the largest capitals in movement. Insofar as the market reflects final consumption it has a critical role, but even here it is far from a free market, so hedged by deals and exclusions that serious questions have to be raised on what actually remains of its market functions.
I tend to understand the various responses that make up anti-globalisation in this light.
That is a longing for better state capitalism as the state represents one of the few bodies in through which mass interests can gain expression (bourgeois internationalism assumes a subservient role for states). An awareness that not only do the plans being implement represent the broad interests of a ruling class, it is also at the same chronically incapable of actually realising them to the degree that it prentends. Ironically there is also a response that, correctly in my opinion, sees a need for free markets in areas that are hemmed in by deals and exclusions (vital junctures for international capital's plans in fact).
Anti-globalisation thus tends from one perspective to be a progressive response to capital, but the very mixed nature of the anti-globalization's movement response, and expression of this, appears to harken to a retrun to some no-existant golden age, at least from the perspective of the traditional left which reifies "planning" to a cultish degree.
>From my perspective all anti-globalisation, despite the various modes of expression, is basically a honest grass-root response which often correctly identifies the problems and even suggests some of the solutions but in such an ill-developed framework that nothing immediate can be derived from this.
Cutting across the various critiques of the anarchist elements involved and the petit-bourgeois ones, I tend to see a natural unconscious political response which if anything demonstrates just how much ground we need to cover in order to raise this impulse (which is widely felt across the world) into a more conscious political direction.
This is no dry debate, or discussion in otherwords. It is not about models or even musings of efficient as against inefficient economic methods. But a critique yet to be formed of the tradition of the socialist movement and a vital territory which needs to be soughted out in order to form a correct political response to the emerging contradictions of our age.
Within the anti-gloablisation movement lie the seeds for real proletarian internationalism, all of which are too easily overlooked by a left in the grips of utopianism. To guage the depths of this one only has to look at the left's critique of anti-globalisation which begins and ends with the call to return to its political programs and nostrums, to abandon what it dines to call romatic attachments to an older form of capitalism (which are no such thing), and to judge everything on face value.
Greg Schofield Perth Australia
--- Message Received --- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 21:20:30 +0000 Subject: Re: Science, Science & Marxism <snip>