So the "planning" through which "freely associated" "universally developed individuals" would organize the activity of meeting their "needs" (the instrumental activity that defines "the realm of necessity" of an ideal community) is not the "planning" criticized by von Mises and Hayek. The latter adopt a conception of "being" and of "human being" radically inconsistent with Marx's.
It also isn't the "planning" implemented in the Soviet Union, i.e. planning there wasn't part of the organization of production by "freely associated" "universally developed individuals".
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We haven't seen grassroots planning yet. We've only experienced the idiocies of top-down,
bureaucratic planning (in the name of the workers councils)
and as the history of the USSR and other Stalinist style political-economies
demonstrate, that doesn't work too well. Grassroots planning would have
the "market", the associated producers, planning production/consumption for
themselves. This "administration of things" would not be
fettered with party power climbers or other associated backstabbers
and bureaucratic bootlickers.
And as Marx put it to the then, purportedly revolutionary
Social Democrats in "Critique of the Gotha P":
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. **********************************************
Note that the communist society emerges from the capitalist society,
stamped, as it is, with birthmarks from the old society--shades of hegemony.
There is no mention of a "socialist" State (a contradiction in terms) which
through its party leadership leads/drives the proletariat
to the new Jerusalem of communism and there is no mention by Marx of how the
producers need to use a wage system and commodity production to get from
captalism via socialism to communism--that is indeed, part of the Stalinist mythology.
No, as Marx puts it, a producer gets, after deductions from the common fund,
a certificate from a socialist/communist society that entitles her/him to goods
and services which equal in labor time the amount the producer has put it.
It isn't that some goods and services are commodified and marketed and
others aren't. No, a producer does four hours of socially necessary
labor time on some socially designated project and withdraws goods
and services of an equivalent amount of socially necessary labor time.
Best,
Mike B)
Watch the communist manifestoon! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1oGIffyVVk
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