[lbo-talk] Missing the Marx

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Sun Jan 2 09:41:31 PST 2005


Uh, living standards in Kazakhstan were higher in
> 1980
> than they were in 1910, or lower? They were nomads
> in
> 1910; now they've got a cosmodrome.
>

Your point. Chris? ? Sure, Stalinist planning was OK at basic industrialization. No one ever denied that it provided a floor of basic support that was at least minimally adequate, though not much more than that, for most people. But it couldn'y handle a complex modern economy. Doubtless it might have tottered along indefinitely -- like most Sovietologists I expected it would -- had not Gorbachev forcibly dismantled it without thinking of what to put in its place. (Poor fella seems to have bought the line that markets are natural and just grow.) And it would have looked more and more 19th century.

The Soviet model failed over "surpass and overtake" the West. Once upon a time, back in the 1950s, people in both East and West, on both right and left, seriously thought that the Soviet model might actually be able to deliver the goods better than advancded US or European capitalism. Khrushchev though they would bury the Us under a torrent of safety razors and nylon stickings (that's what he meant by that expression). The US Chamber of Commerce was worried that he might. People like Harry Braverman wrotes books that showed an astounding complacency about the acheivements of the USSR. (I have thsi book.) But if you don't see that turned out not to be so, you're smoking your own dope.

Look, fellas, outside this teeny corner of the world, defenders of any kind of planning, _including me_, have the burden of proof. Ideologically, we lost. Pointing to the great successes of Soviet planning just discredits you. Haven't you noticed? At best you have to be highly qualified and nuanced about those successes. Which in the appropriate contexts I insist on. But I don't advocate the Soviet model, even Mandel's cleaned-up nice and democratic Soviet model. (In which, if you read him carefully, about 1/3 of the economy is market, including consumer goods -- read the last few chapters of Marxist Economic Theory II again.) And you shouldn't either.

We have to be able talk about where planning makes sense and most specifically about why public ownership is necessary. And we have to face the fact that most people in the West anyway are not attracted by the Soviet model. I know, Chris, that it is different in Russia, where they lost what they had did not get anything better. There the nostalgia (the Ostalgie, they call it in Germany) is tremendius. But even there, Humpty Dumpty has fallen from his perch, and all Marx's horses and all Marx's men can't put the poor fell together again. We need to think again.

Please, no more reflexive talk that sounded plausible in 1955 but not in 2005 or even in 1985.

jks

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