What Hillel didn't seem to realize, and I argued this point with him fruitlessly for years, is that his point is _exactly_ same point made by Mises and Hayek, that roughly attempts at centralized planning of the whole economy will fail because of massive information distortion and dysfunctionmal motivational incentives. M&H conclude that central planning wasn't possible at a high level of economic development. Hillel concluded that we need some better special kind of real democratic planning that would (Hillel never said how) overcome the epistemological and motivational problems that crippled Soviet planning past the "intensive" stage where focus on simply measured quantative plan targets (more tons of steel or hectares of wheat) is adequate.
--- Michael Pugliese <michael.098762001 at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/653/ticktin.htm
> No more historical abortions
> Hillel Ticktin highlights the bogus nature of
> planning in the Soviet
> Union and locates the central importance of Europe
> for the transition
> to socialism
>
>
> It is clear that we are living through a world
> transitional period,
> where socialism is wanted. However, just as in the
> transition from
> feudalism to capitalism a number of formations came
> into existence
> that were neither feudal nor capitalist, so in the
> current period
> there have been formations that are neither
> capitalist nor socialist.
>
> Such forms cannot lead anywhere. The Stalinist
> countries were, in that
> sense, a historical abortion that had to end, but it
> is perfectly
> reasonable to assume that we will see further
> examples of such
> distorted forms - although the world is in
> transition to socialism,
> socialism is not actually happening yet. There is,
> nevertheless, a
> demand from below for change.
>
> What began in 1917 as the natural progress of
> society ended up as an
> abomination. Trotsky talked about the conflict
> between the law of
> value and the law of planning under the new economic
> policy. But this
> was brought to an end, in a particular fashion, by
> Stalin. His
> concessions to the peasantry meant the destruction
> of the rouble,
> after which money no longer existed in the Marxist
> sense of the word.
> Goods could no longer be bought without standing in
> a long queue - the
> rouble simply was not the universal equivalent. It
> was impossible to
> buy the means of production. However, the elite of
> Soviet society
> would receive goods either for free or for very few
> roubles.
>
> Enterprises were officially based on profit, but the
> banks would
> always supply them with what roubles they needed and
> in reality profit
> was not a factor. I make this point because still
> today there are many
> who believe that the USSR was in some way
> capitalist, but this is
> clearly not the case.
>
> A certain social group, however we characterise it,
> took power
> secretly against the majority of the population. The
> only way it could
> maintain power was through force, through the
> atomisation and
> pulverisation of the population. This was done
> through a particular
> form of political economy which was neither
> socialist nor capitalist -
> there is a huge gap between nationalisation and
> socialisation, as
> could be seen in the Soviet Union.
>
> The power of the ruling elite was enormous. The
> secret police in
> Britain or even in South Africa would never be as
> extensive and
> powerful as the NKVD or KGB, precisely because of
> the nationalisation
> of the means of production in the USSR. When Marx
> talked of "barracks
> socialism" he had no idea of what this would mean in
> practice, and
> could never have conceived that nationalised means
> of production could
> give the secret police so much power. However many
> laws Blair
> continues to pass, giving more and more power to MI5
> and the secret
> state, they could not possibly have as much as that
> enjoyed by the
> secret police in the USSR. The reason for this is
> the existence of
> private property, which cannot be completely
> overridden under
> capitalism.
>
> That is why the NKVD had far more power than the
> Gestapo. With total
> economic power, it is possible to control every
> aspect of an
> individual's life. In the case of Nazi Germany
> people were put into
> camps, but the average person was not controlled in
> the way that an
> individual worker in the Soviet Union was. The Nazis
> retained private
> property, whereas this was not the case in the
> Soviet Union.
>
> The individual's place of work, their study
> programmes, their places
> of residence, etc were all tightly controlled to a
> degree that has
> only existed in the USSR. The ruling group was very
> weak, existing
> without the consent of the vast majority of the
> population and keeping
> its privileges secret. The only way it could survive
> was through
> atomisation.
>
> This meant obviously that workers did not control
> their product. On
> the other hand, there was no way of directly
> controlling people's
> productive output either. In Germany the Nazis
> actually did try to
> control people at work at one point. The Gestapo
> stood behind the
> workers, jailing those who did not work quickly
> enough or to a certain
> standard. Yet this could not be maintained - it
> meant an effective
> doubling of the workforce. This absence of control -
> either by the
> workers, management or ultimately the bureaucracy -
> was a feature of
> all the Stalinist countries. That is what all these
> states
> fundamentally had in common. Preobrazhenksy made the
> point very early
> on that Soviet Russia lost the advantages of
> capitalism, but did not
> yet have the advantages of socialism, where the
> majority of people
> identify with the system itself. In reality the
> majority were
> alienated and exploited.
>
> Rather curiously, though, certain leftwing
> commentators - Marcuse, for
> example - have argued that, whilst there was a group
> at the top, there
> was extensive grassroots democracy, but such
> argumentation is
> completely flawed. If people have no individual
> control over the
> labour process whatsoever, then they are
> economically atomised. Just
> as work under capitalism is atomised, as workers
> sell their individual
> labour-power, so in the Soviet Union they were
> atomised by the labour
> process and would work individually. Without genuine
> trade unions no
> collective action was possible, apart from some rare
> strikes and so on
> in the 1930s.
>
> The result of this atomisation was that there was no
> abstract labour.
> Abstract Labour assumes a highly flexible labour
> force, which is to
> say the flexibility and exchangeability of the
> labour force. That is
> why, in principle, the capitalist class is opposed
> to racism and
> sexism - it might support it from time to time to
> time for political
> reasons, in order to maintain its own existence, but
> when it does so
> it is actually going against its own interests in an
> economic sense
> and has a considerable cost. That is, for example,
> the reason why the
> capitalist class never supported apartheid in South
> Africa.
> Soviet 'planning'
>
> In the absence of abstract labour and therefore
> value, economic
> calculations and planning were impossible. I take
> the view that even
> in a socialist society based on democratic planning
> precise
> calculation is impossible. It is possible to base
> the
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