--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> >Well, some here _do_ want to plan everything.
>
> Peace be unto them.
Well, I don't want to market everything either. I think it's a pragmatic question and sometimes it's a mix. This thsi the lesson I take away from the Coase "theorem," which is not, of course a theorem but a question -- where you draw the firm/market boundry depends on the informational and opportunity costs. Taht's my lesson, of course, not what Coase said. Some want the boundry to be the economy -- thosea re the Total Planners like Charles. No markets, everything is intra-firm. That's not efficient for Hayekian reasons, more on this later. But some things can be planned and others should be kept of the market no mater the cost.
My particular lines, inspired by Dave Schweickarty's stuff, recently restated in brief form in his After Capitalism, is that consumer goods and the producer goods to make them should be sold in a fairly free market by firms that are worker-controlled. These goods include, e.g., food, clothes, luxury goods, household necessities, durables like refrigerators, etc, and the machine tools and supplies that go into making stuff like that. These firms would have to be profitable or go broke.
Capital should not be marketed (this is the part I'm fuzziest about); Dave thinks that new investment should come from banks that impose a sort of rent on the property the worker coopers use. They are socially owned, after all. I am not sure that there would even be the sort of financial markets that give Doug hives in this system. The bank would not charge interest, but the banker's job and rumeration would be tied to the profitability of the investments, as well as to how well it met other criteria like a clean environment, worker safety, and useful employment.
Crucially, labor would not be marketed either: workers would be cooperators who get paid profit shares rather than wages. Wage labor would be illegal as slave labor is today. The cooperators would have an enforceable right to a job -- if they couldn't get one in a coop, the government would provide one for them. Persons unable to work (the infirm, the aged) would be provided with ample social benefits. The system would not depend on the threat of joblessness.
Some things wouldn't be marketed because we know that planning can do better, e.g., public utilities, health care, schools --a ny place there arises what economists call a public good problem. Also some things like health care should be distributed according to criteria of need for moral reasons. Thsi is not true, and makes no sense, for stuff like toothpaste.
>
> > And I am
> >not sure that improvision is a good substitute or
> >alternative for marketing or planning.
>
> It's inevitable in any system. Any work process is
> full of it - it's
> one reason why experience and skill are important.
> Strange stuff
> happens and workers at all levels have to cope. In
> fact, that's one
> reason to give workers a lot more credit than they
> usually get from
> the bourgeoisie: spontaneous on-the-job creativity
> keeps the system
> going. We'd starve in the dark without it.
I agree, and I've said so in print. But the workers' creativity at solving problems that can't be specified in the labor contract is not a substitute for the large scale social choices that have to be made about whether to put our money and time into, e.g., roads or trains. Or toothpaste vs. CDs. Those choice call for institutional structures -- taht is, markets or plans. Or both.
>
> >ANd the datat processing point is not to the point.
> >The question isn;t whether the computers can handle
> >the info, but what the quality of the info that
> goes
> >into the computers is, and whether the people in
> the
> >planning board can handle it -- and whether
> planning
> >gives people the right incentives to get accurate
> >information.
>
> True of any system. There are stunning amounts of
> waste and
> inefficiency in American capitalism. Despite all the
> propaganda to
> the contrary, it's still a massive challenge to run
> large
> corporations - from the principal-agent problems at
> the top, to
> relations with distributors and suppliers, to
> managing people and
> processes, etc. But we tend to see our problems as
> just "problems"
> and their problems as fatal flaws.
Yes indeed, but we are going to match up raelw orld markets (capitalsit ones) with realw orld global planning systems (Stalinist ones), I think everyone but the ideologuesw ill concede that the amount of waste is less in the former. WHICH I DO NOT ADVOCATE. ARE WE CLEAR ON THAT? OK? I AM STILL A SOCIALIST. (I' am not yelling at you Doug, but at all those people who will say that I am an apologist for capitalism rather than using the experience as a reference point.)
>
> Why is it impossible to give planners the right
> incentives?
I don't say it is. Tell me how. I haven't heard a good story.
I'm not
> for a world of total equality, at least in some
> imaginable better
> world and not in some barely imaginable utopia. If
> planners fuck up,
> they get demoted and lose perks. If they succeed,
> they get promotions
> and gain perks. Fine with me.
That isn't enough and you know it. What's a "good job"? Hitting the plan targets? You know that is an invitaion to abuse and manipulation. Where is the feedback mechanism? I knwo you don't buy into Albert & Hahnel's idea taht we spend our livers inputing guesses about our future desires into computers. So what is it?
But we're also
> underestimating the
> human desire to do a good job. You see it
> everywhere, even on the
> floor of a Wal-Mart.
Sure, the Hayekian point is that id draw the market/firm line in the wrong places you will not have the info you need to do a good job.
>
> The Hayekian position about decentralized
> information comes from a
> despair about human capabilities to analyze
> situations and plan
> rationally.
That is true. Is it unjustified given what we know about the limits of planning? Bearing in mind that I concede the strengths in many areas?
Given the hash that capitalism has made
> of the world, I
> don't see why we should give too much credence to
> this position.
>
Oh come, now you are starting to sound like Charles. Why can't I say just as well, given the hash that the Soviets made of their part of the world . . . .
jks
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