On 1/6/06, Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
>
> C. Boddi says:
> What sort of "anarchist" envisions a "stateless" state where the
> entire economy is centrally planned. How is that not a state?
>
> ^^^^
> CB; Take a look at _The State and Revolution_ for an explanation, comrade.
> In brief, anarchy-of-production occurs _with_ a state in full force under
> capitalism. So, anarchy-of-production is not even associated with lack of a
> state. In the course of the transition to communism the administration of
> people is repleaed by the administration of things, stateless anarchy comes
> in anarchy of production goes out.
>
> ^^^^
>
> B: Anyway, planning the whole economy centrally has the same flaw in it that
> anarchists see in the state - power. Too much power. It is simply too much
> power concentrated in too few hands.
>
> CB: Not if there is no private property in the basic means of p.; then there
> is no accumulation of wealth/power.
So if there's only public property, there's no power. Why didn't I think of that? More than that, why didn't the citizens of the Soviet Union think to say: "Hey, those guns and gulags are public property! You can't use them to kill and torture our fellow workers!"? That was a bit of a miss.
Charles, seriously, wake up man. Every gun, bullet and bomb the U.S. Armed Forces are using in Iraq is public property. People who have control of "public" property have tremendous power and when you extend the definition of public property to include all the major means of produciton, you extend the power.
> CB; Monopoly does lay the groundwork for socialism, yes. However,
> capitialists don't hate anarchy of production. That's a major way that they
> get over, by scavengering in the chaos, by keeping the working class on its
> back by all the "creative destruction" of anarchy of production. Capitalists
> would be gone without anarchy of production.
So every time a capitalist is trying to create a monopoly he's really being a socialist? Look, since the Italian city-states in the 1300's capitalists have found that a confederation of merchants, held together by contract is more powerful than a confederation of nobles held together by hierarchy. Individually, every capitalist would be king. As a class, they must limit each other to maintain cooperation. The only reason capitalists don't hate apparent anarchy is that it is not anarchy at all. It is cooperation.
> B: As far as central planning goes, it's not that one can't conceive a good
> planning apparatus, it's just that the more you think about it the more you
> will realize that a tremendous amount of information has to be digested
>
> ^^^^^
> CB; And then if you think about it a little more it's absurd and
> quasi-religious to believe that an Invisible Hand handles this information
> problem better than visible human beings.
The Invisible Hand *is* visible human beings.
> B: and some arithmetic notion like "cost accounting" is completely
> inadequate, for two reasons.
>
> First, it's impossible to model the real economy on anything short of a
> number of super-computers.
>
> ^^^^
> CB: What's your proof of that ? You seem to be thinkiing of an anarchistic
> capitalist economy, with private enterprise predominant.
> The main thing that has to be planned is means of subsistence as provided by
> societies standards "today" . The amounts of basic means of subsistence are
> substantially dictated by population size and demography.
The basic means of subsistence according to whom? You? Do these "basic means of subsistence" include cable tv? Because if not, we're going to have a problem.
> Second, and most importantly, your data have to be real. There is a
> huge difference between accounting (which relies on estimates of what things
> are worth)
>
> ^^^^
> CB: Worth ? Base it in labor inputs for now. Then we are moving to
> production for use, away from production for exchange with this socialist
> economy.
Right but labor inputs do no create use value in a predictable way unless your economy is based on subsistence farming. The whole notion of valuing an economy by labor units assumes that there is an objective standard of utility. Planning requires that you have some people do one thing and some do another. Why, if all labor is equally valuable? A worker risks the expenditure of labor. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn't. You can't take use-value out of the equations and once you do, things get real complex real fast.
>
> and marking to market (which actually requires using real prices on an
> ongoing basis). In the age of accounting, all great
> financial screw-ups are based on the detachment of the accounting
> model from reality. How, in a non-money system, do you possibly test
> your models against reality? In a centrally-planned economy reality is what
> the planners say it is. And then you find out they were wrong - in a big
> way.
The problem here is that you don't admit the Soviet Union and China screwed up. Of course the Russians and the CHinese have long-since admitted it. But what do you care?
> B:No matter how unrealistic capitalist companies get, they either have to
> sell their products or their financial instruments into a real market where
> people have to part with real money to buy them. I don't know of any polling
> technology that adequately mimics the marketplace.
>
> ^^^^
> CB: This ignores the REALITY, the undeniable FACT, that there are always
> losers among the capitalist companies who can't sell their stuff, so the
> makret mechanism in it anarchy is _not_ processing the information better
> than planning, and the resultant crisis for those companies that fail is a
> crisis mainly for the workers who lose their jobs , etc.
And the Buddha tells us that the nature of existence is suffering. So there are losers. If you risk all your labor on making something of uncertain value and nobody wants it, whose responsibility is that? Is a job meant to be a government stipend or is there a connection between the worker and the customer he serves?
> The notion that the market mechanism does such a great job of processing
> information is neoclassical myth, constantly rebutted in REALITY.
What system produces more economic growth?
>
> B.:I know that it's confusing because I seem to be simultaneously
> praising capitalism and socialism but I use Marx as my model. He did
> the same thing. And on this list I don't think I really have to
> derogate captialism all the time since I think we are all pretty well
> persuaded that it has serious flaws.
>
> ^^^
> CB: And Marx's recommendation is, famously, that we get rid of anarhcy of
> production under capitalism and establish socialism. Use Marx as your model
> all the way through to that.
No, that's where Marx tried to take the easy way out and got it wrong. I can't blame him any more than I blame Einstein for not coming up with Quantum mechanics. Marx is not the last word on Marxist political economy.
>
> I also think the fact that you can't find a group of leftists who do
> not find the Soviet model of central planning seriously flawed is
> significant. If we're not convinced then it's safe to say that nobody else
> is.
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: Yes you can find some. You can find lots of leftists who say the
> experience of the SU does not at all mean that planning in principle should
> be dropped.
But there should be a teeny bit more sympathy for it, no? It's not as if we haven't had time to chew it over.
>
> So I think the
> task of socialism now is to steer the anarchy of production in a more
> positive direction (and possibly creating even more anarchy and more
> production) rather than supposing we can slap controls on it and make it do
> what we want.
>
> Boddi
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: The "anarchy" in anarchy of production means "you" can't and don't steer
> it. That's why we want to get out of as much of the disorder that we can
> especially in subsistence and basic care goods and services. There's no
> value in spontenaity and surprise there. Maybe in art and sports etc. we
> would cultivate some spontenaity, surprise, individuality. No reason to put
> provision of basic needs as up in the air, uncertain , sporadic, unroutine.
Again, it's amazing to me to hear this from a supposed anarchist. We can't card catalog the economy. Perhaps I confused you with the word "steer" I was thinking more or "herding" the anarchy of production in a positive direction but I couldn't think of a non-pejorative word for "herding".
BTW, the basic needs are not up in the air. They are at Wal-Mart, Safeway and Home Depot, very predictably and at very good prices.
boddi