> I am not defending Soviet
> planning, no matter how non-central it was. I just don't see that it was
> the strawman Hayek and Mises attacked.
Hayek's premises aren't a good starting point for analysis of the failure of the Soviet system including the failure of Soviet planning. A realistic analysis needs to start from realistic premises about Soviet society and culture and the people who live in it.
A key feature of Marx's approach is that the assumptions from which an analysis begins, e.g. an analysis of mid 19th century France as in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, has to realistically capture the subjectivities of the individuals involved, e.g. of French peasants and the French petite bourgeois. Hayek's one size fits all conception of agents as everywhere and always "rational" in his sense is inadequate as an analytical starting point for the realistic treatment of any actually or potentially existing subjectivity.
When Marx's foundational ideas are applied to "planning" they produce very different results from Hayek's. You can't reach a conception of an ideal social organization as this would be conceived on Marx's premises from Hayek's premises. In a community of subjects of the kind able to have and having relations of mutual recognition, individuals are by definition not insatiably greedy competitors with each other for stuff characterized by the quality that more for one necessarily means less for others. The "goods" in such a society are things which when shared increase in amount.
An ideal social organization as conceived by Marx is, however, an unimaginably distant ideal (in so far as it's imaginable as practicable at all). If it's a true conception, it has implications for the transitional forms through which capitalism in 2002 might be transformed into a social organization closer to the ideal but the ideal tells us very little about the respective roles and nature of "markets" and "planning" in these transitional forms.
Even with respect to transitional forms, however, Hayek's premises lead to very different conclusions from Marx's. Hayek's involve a radically different conception of rationality and make no allowance for irrationality - the "logic of the situation" approach to social explanation assumes all agents are fully rational in the particular sense of the approach. In Marx, we have a set of individuals none of whom (including Marx) can be fully rational but a large number of whom are in social locations from within which some advance in rational self-consciousness is possible. The character of social progress has then to be thought through on the basis of these premises (one big problem being that it can't, without self-contradiction, be assumed that anyone is available able to do this in a wholly rational way). I have no idea what sort of answer to the question of the appropriate transitional roles and nature of markets and planning Marx's approach would give (I don't think much of use is available in the little Marx has to say about it). It wouldn't, however, be a Hayekian answer because it would be based on premises and reasoning radically different from Hayek's.
Many Marxist conceptions of "socialist planning" are radically inconsistent with what I've been ascribing to Marx for the reason that they implicitly or explicitly reject the foundational ideas involved. Cockshott and Cottrell, for instance, work out what seems to me to be a dystopia in which the problem of Soviet planning is understood to have been that too much freedom was allowed to individual production units. Their answer is to use the vast increase in computing power to solve this problem by eliminating the excessive "degrees of freedom" of the Soviet system. They see "consciousness" as "determined" in the deterministic sense pointed to above and so claim that workers in the former Soviet union had a "socialist" consciousness because they worked within "socialist" relations of production. This consciousness did not evidently, protect many of them falling victim to the various forms of social pathology that the collapse of the Soviet system produced. I won't be lining up to get in to their "socialist" society.
On the other hand, the various conceptions of socialism based on rational choice premises also produce implications for the transitional role of markets very different from the implications implicit in Marx's ideas for the same reason that the starting point provided by these ideas is radically different from the "rational choice" starting point. A key question for transitional systems worked out on Marx's premises would be how to make social relations and life in general more compatible with the development of rational self-consciousness, a question that doesn't arise if it is assumed that people are everywhere and always "rational" independent of the conditions in which they develop and live.
Ted Winslow