commissioner.org
| Source | Michael Hoover |
| Date | 02/07/12/14:04 |
| below are several posts i sent to another list a few
years ago during 'market/planning' discussion... 1. Soviet central planning generally eliminated long-term secular unemployment and short-term cyclical unemployment associated with capitalist business cycles from the 1920 onwards. While elimination of mass unemployment was, in part, the result of extensive industrial growth, Soviets and other 'actually-existing' socialist states provided job security that was perceived as positive achievement and cannot be lightly dismissed nor should it be sacrificed as a valued goal. (my utopian self prefers a post-work society but that's for another post). Doing away with generalized unemployment gave working people confidence and encouragment to develop abilities and talents. Of course, critics asserted that the type of security existing in these economies, over time, undermined work discipline and failed to provide incentives for efficient and diligent work. And some people couldn't find kind of employment for which they were trained because of planning errors or geographical preferences (Soviet's had hard time getting highly skilled folks to go to frigid climare and barren landscape of Far North). A bit of frictional unemployment (i.e., people changing jobs and 'layabouts') also existed. In the main, however, central planning eliminated mass chronic unemployment as a social problem. There was nothing comparable to working-class districts in capitalist societies where jobless line sidewalks, hanging out in summer and winter, in good years and in bad, a constant feature of the social landscape. Yugoslav 'market socialism' provided for worker participation in a decentralized economy, availibility of Western-style consumer goods (and development of Western-style consumerism among more affluent social groups and economic regions; i.e., Slovenia & Croatia, the first to 'secede'), room for small private business and agriculture, and market-oriented price and wages systems. Costs of above included mass unemployment (up to 15% in 1980s, figure would have been higher except for migration of 'guest workers' to West Germany, Sweden, & Switzerland), chronic inflation, and foreign debt. Unskilled working class and poor regions bore brunt of joblessness, exacerbating already existing inequalities among social strata and ethnic groups. Opponents of central planning must consider that the return of large-scale unemployment is a large price for dropping that planning capacity of the political system. 2. Soviet central planning system certainly mobilized human (and natural) resources for rapid industrialization. Maximum investment was channeled into heavy industry (steel, iron, coal, electric power, machine building, and military). A kind of permanent war-time economy, Soviet economic mobilization was not directed to fulfiling individual consumer demands. Central planning system paid less attention to efficiency and technological innovation in pursuit of bulk output. And it worked. Between 1928 and 1975, Soviet growth rates averaged 4.7%/year, even including the devastation of WW2. By the 1980s, Soviet oil production peaked, new labor force entrants declined, and the environmental costs of industrial 'gigantomania' were revealed. The old extensive growth model had reached its outer limits. Gorbachev leadership launched greater initiatives for "intensification" of production methods and greater reliance on market-type demands. This also meant accepting inevitable trade-off of considerable joblessness since any return to a predominantly market-driven economy produces not just temporary mass unemployment, but unemployment as as basic feature of the social landscape, with all the consequences that this brings for market societies. (*real* point of my previous post) I stated in my previous post that *job security was perceived as positive achievement not to be dismissed nor to be sacrificed*. I should have indicated that, based on data collected from public opinion polls that were introduced, this was the view of the overwhelming percentage of working people in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. I spent some time with Soviet sociologists engaged in this work back then and they were very clear: professional/managerial types were more supportve of 'reforms' than was working class. Despite acknowledged poor quality of consumerable durables compared to capitalist West, most working people expressed relative satisfaction in these polls. Professional/managerial stratum expressed greatest dissatisfaction, as did younger folks who increasingly knew about and longed for Western consumer lifestyle. Perestroika initiatives neither sufficiently redressed exhaustion of 'extensive growth' model nor satisfied new consumer demands. In fact, such policies resulted in growing criticism and dismissal of planning system and increasing calls for marketization and privatization. I should have also indicated that 'frictional' unemployment in the Soviet Union was less than 1% until 1980s. 3. In any event, the Soviet system mitigated against opportunities for productive work allowing for individual initiative, personal satisfaction, and development of both mental and physical abilities. So yes, data collected by Soviet sociologists I mentioned in another post indicated that workers opposed threats to job security and they were alienated from the work process. Contrary to Soviet theorists, work in the USSR did not cease to be a source of alienation despite elimination of the bourgeoisie. Marx, in addition to citing capitalist exploitation, pinpointed the character of the work process and absence of opporunity for worker creativity and autonomy as sources of alienation. Assembly line work and unskilled manual labor in general was just as tedious and uninteresting in Soviet factories as in capitalist West. Of course, mass of people in former Soviet Union now experience alienation and job insecurity 4. Planning is obviously different from metaphysical 'plan.' Capitalism is planned, which neither contradicts Marx & Engels with respect to 'anarchy of capitalist production' nor obviates the condition that M called 'production without regard to the limits of the market.' Capitalists command (term used by bourgeois economists to describe Soviet-style central planning) factors of production, meaning that they decide how to employ land (natural resources), labor (humans), and capital (goods used to produce other goods - capitalism because capital in its money form is used to produce more money?). Of course, bourgeois economists further the mystification and mythification of all this by calling capitalists 'entrepreneurs.' If so-called marxists/socialists do not think that conscious planning of publicly owned and socially controlled means of production will improve upon capitalism's clumsy and costly privatized way of governing and correcting balance of production between main and subsidiary sectors of economy, then we may as well give up and become left Keynesians (or maybe pomo leftists, abandoning political economy and its critique). 5. Why go on about the failure of planning in Soviet Union given the circumstances in which it was attempted? And if comparative analysis 'is to be done,' the appropriate comparison (if any exists) is between 'actually existing' capitalism during industrialization and 'actually existing' socialism during industrialization (i.e., US between 1870s and 1920s & USSR between 1920s and 1970s, fifty year periods (long waves?) after which both experienced generalized crisis). Planning isn't a panacea. Nor are worker control and worker democracy. But such decisionmaking seems the only humane way to deal with matters that capitalist decisionmaking and planning can neither address nor even adequately recognize. And such planning doesn't have to preclude using markets and market techniques although 'the market' (note metaphysical similarity to "the plan") would not be the governing factor. The crucial issue for marxists/socialists should be how to move away from *market regulation* of economic relations. Misgivings about Bertell Ollman's utopianism notwithstanding, he points out the alienation of market social life and its rule by 'violence of things.' Interestingly, Marx's critique of market economics in _Poverty of Philosophy_ is outlined in a polemic against Proudhon's 'market socialism.' I've commented several times on this list (including post that initiated thread under this header) about the 'high price in unemployment, among other things, of Yugoslav market socialism. And David Schweickart's invocations of China's marketization ring increasingly hollow in light of mass layoffs, rural depopulation, and rising discontent (strikes and food riots). While *I* wouldn't want areas such as housing, transportation, and education to be subject to market forces, *decommodification* of labor-power holds the key to transcending 'the market' and assuring social access to the means of life. But I guess these decisions would be the responsibility of mass, comprehensive, democratic planning. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho