Cmde. Brown:
Charles, there is no doubt in my mind that planned economy was a splendid solution to the multiple problems Russia faced - but let's not get carried away.
^^^^^^ CB: You mean carried away like those dead miners suffering in an unplanned economy ?
Planning is so elementarily rational that how rational people could sit around and try to rationalize non-planning, chaos, anarchy of production is a testiment to how people can get carried away ( for a price I guess). Planning is almost synonymous with rational. Of course every last detail cannot be planned, but any half-intelligent person should be in favor of as much planning as possible. You know "Intelligent Design".
As Marx says, the difference between us and animals is that we plan our work before we do it.
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There were serious internal problems that did them in, not their enemies. We've been on that road many times, so let's not repeat ourselves.
^^^^^ CB: My point , as many times before, is that the seriousness of the "Internal" problems was due to the impact of the conduct of imperialism, especially the military attacks, which nobody can deny were the most horrible and largest in the history of humanity.
I am saying straight out that but for the attacks by imperialism and the nuclear threat, the SU would be doing fine economically, as would all the other countries that started down the capitalist road.
Most importantly here, the serious internal problems you refer to were not in the least due planning ! To claim the opposite is idiotic. If there had been a market the serious problems would have been worse.
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Far more important is a broader point, raised inter alia by Gramsci and Polanyi, that the organization of the economy is not everything, you also need civil society.
^^^^^ CB: In Hegel, civil society is the bourgeois economy, no ? Anyway, you'll have to argue it a bit more to claim that Russia didn't have one. Do you mean it only had a little capialism so it only had a little civil society in the Hegelian sense ?
Gramsci lived at the time of the SU. I don't recall him saying anything about the SU lacking civil society.
(I just found out that Sahlins studied with Polanyi; Polanyi was a substantivist in economics. So, I guess the culture of "civil society" is what you are getting at. Whatever)
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Russia lacked the latter, Trotsky recognized that and hoped that the proletariat would step up to the plate and fill in the void by self-organization. Maybe he was right maybe he wasn't, but we have no way of knowing because another path was chosen by Lenin and Stalin - one that filled that void in with the state.
^^^^^ CB: Lets not get carried away. Surely Lenin and Stalin sought to nurture the development of proletarian culture and society.
Anyway, I doubt very much that lack of socalled civil society had as much to do with the problems of the SU as the enormous military attacks and pressure imperialism put on it.
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The fact that this solution worked for a while - and worked quite well indeed - does not mean that the lack of civil society was not important. Actually it was - it was did the USSR when central controls were dropped by Gorbachev.
But even within the central planning there serious problems with information flow. The system needed good information to function efficiently, but did not have the apparatus to procure such information. It relied on reporting by plant managers and local authorities - and these in the good old Russian fashion pilfered whatever goodies they could and wrote false reports to cover that up. This is a well known thing not the US propaganda, that resulted in the so-called "taut planning" which introduced another systematic error into the planning process. The planners knew that plant managers were intentionally providing false reports and they tried to correct that by "guestimating" their actual capacity and needs.
^^^^^ CB: Sure there were mistakes in planning, but not such that one would conclude that they should not have planned or , more importantly that planning was a cause of the serious problems. Planning was correct in principle. We should not draw the lesson from the failure of the SU that planning isn't the best future of human economy. We should draw the opposite conclusion. The history of the SU argues for planning of economies in the future. It supports the abolition of the market in the basic economy. Small markets in an overall basicaLly planned economy is what follows from the experience of the SU. Also, just correct the errors you mention. Learn from experience, don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
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Another systemic problem was the informal economy - the pre-modern social relations carried over to the industrial age that sabotaged all rational planning by nepotism, under the table deals, informal barters, theft or informal "privatization" of public resources from widely spread shirking to bribery and to theft. Then there was the idiocy of the rural life - drunken stupor, herd mentality, and mindless violence - carried over to factories and urban life. For a glimpse, check out Venedikt Yerofeev, _M-oscow Stations_ http://www.ukauthors.com/article2090.html- a harrowing description of the "ordinary" life in x-USSR. Toward the end, it was not planning anymore at that point but a guesswork and shadow economy all over.
We do not know how well central planning would function in a society that actually had a functioning civil society that would keep these social dysfunctionalities under control. If Japan is any indication (actually they have something quite close to central planning) - I would imagine that the US would be a Soviet republic today. But it did not happen this way, and that is a reminder that economic system is not enough.
Wojtek
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CB: Agree. Yes, good point on Japan. The experience of the U.S. economy , today, right now, makes more planning the obvious way to go.