Participatory economics: Was Khrushchev a pareconist?

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/modern-anarcho-communist-t149776/index.html


If your idea of a socialist economic system is economies that are isolated to certain regions for the sake of decentralization, then you're nuts.


I think that there are only superficial differences between what A & H propose and what Allin and I wrote.

I.e the Facilitation boards are in effect a planning agency.


Comrade, they rely too much on manual planning. Computers could render much council work superfluous.


Yes, the reliance on exclusively personal contacts and personal establishment of individual consumption plan priorities in parecon seems to me somewhat utopian (of Fourier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier)-style) .


Haha, come to think of it, parecon really would be sandwiched by pressures from market socialism, on the one hand, and Marxist models (Cockshott-Cottrell, Devine, Laibman, etc.) on the other.

While the pre-2000s Schweickart model or some other *proper* market-socialist model would most likely prevail in the immediate transition, Cockshott's suggestion of developing a shadow planning information system would lay the foundation of rendering many "personal contacts" and "personal establishment of individual consumption plan priorities" obsolete.




On the emphasis on decentralization and personal contacts, Khrushchev had a "hare-brained" scheme to replace the economic ministries of the Council of Ministers: the sovnarkhoz. From Wikipedia:


Vysshiy soviet narodnogo khozyaystva, VSNKh [...] was reestablished by Nikita Khrushchev when he introduced decentralization of the management of industry by means of sovnarkhozes. It was subordinated to the Council of Ministers of the USSR and managed industry and construction.

Sovnarkhozes were introduced by Nikita Khrushchev in July 1957 in an attempt to combat the centralization and departmentalism of ministries. The USSR was initially divided into 105 economic regions, with sovharknozes being operational and planning management. Simultaneously, a large number of ministries were shut down.

In practice, the ministerial compartmentalism was replaced by territoriality (местничество, mestnichestvo, in Russian economic slang), miscoordination and duplication of efforts, despite making the failure to fulfil obligations to other sovnarknozes a criminal offence.

Despite several attempts to patch the new organizational structure, it failed in its purpose to increase the productivity of the planned economy in the Soviet Union.



Thoughts?

[gorillafuck]

He wasn't a pareconist, no.

[syndicat]

you're being your usual absurd self. the Soviet economy went thru various phases of decentralization and then re-cenrtralization, which reflected power struggles between the elite Gospan planners and top apparachiks versus industrial managers. But the form of decentralization they used was always market-based. And the Soviet economy, whether in its more centralized or decentralized phases, was always managed by the bureaucratic class. there was certainly no worker and consumer self-management.

[Jose Gracchus]

I think you're trying deliberately to be provocative in an insincere fashion.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Provocative, yes. Insincere, no. Syndicat neglects to mention all three layers in Soviet economic decision-making. All the various economic state committees/commissions at the Council of Ministers, of which only Gosplan was the "mother" organization, stand on one end. The plant managers, state farm directors, and such stand on the other end. The ministries themselves were in fact in the middle. Nobody from Stalin down to Gorbachev liked "ministerialism," hence the sectoral bureaus, the sovnarkhozes, and the seven or eight official industrial complexes (http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-12715.html).

The "market base" Syndicat posts of is questionable, since Khrushchev's era was the struggle between Kantorovich and Kosygin, whereby the planners didn't side with Kosygin (this despite the attempt to reconcile diplomatically with Yugoslavia, lengthen the economic leash of Poland and Kadar's Hungary, etc.).

[Jose Gracchus]

Parecon is featured by bottom-up collaborative federations of base assemblies by working people to participatively plan and manage industry and economy. No one said the federations were particularly sectorial or geographic - in fact most indications I've had have been to the effect that the economy would be organized sectorially/industrially (thus canceling out the random Cockshott quote I suspect you will trot out to establish a regional duplication pattern common between parecon and Khrushchev reforms), while geographic consumer-end interests would be articulated in successive layers of participant-controlled organization.

None of that has anything to do with Khrushchev and his regional planning model.

[Toppler]

Yeah, because your "Ceasarian Social Proletocracy" has worked sooo much better than Dubcekism (actually I am not a "true believer" in Dubcekism, I just find him a sympathetic figure, with thought out ideas, and everybody who lived under him applauses his rule, even anti-communists, what has your "Caesarian Third-Worldism" accomplished? Nothing, it hasn't even been implemented anywhere ever , it only inspired laughter from me).

Yeah, but market socialism is counter revolutionary while some bullshit that idolizes an ancient Roman despot is supposedly socialism...

And yes, I do apprecitate many aspects of Soviet socialism too. I am not a sectarian asshole, I can see the merits of the ideologies that I view as imperfect.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Parecon is featured by bottom-up collaborative federations of base assemblies by working people to participatively plan and manage industry and economy. No one said the federations were particularly sectorial or geographic - in fact most indications I've had have been to the effect that the economy would be organized sectorially/industrially (thus canceling out the random Cockshott quote I suspect you will trot out to establish a regional duplication pattern common between parecon and Khrushchev reforms), while geographic consumer-end interests would be articulated in successive layers of participant-controlled organization.

Actually, Cockshott has a similar sectoral-syndicalist transitional road (sectoral as opposed to geographic). I've stated mild counter-objections to his objections to a broader, more state-based but not exclusively state-based transitional road (since at least there's the broader mix of outright expropriations, tax-to-nationalize, Meidner Plan, etc.).

At the base, these pareconist federations, however sectoral they may be, consist of *regional* *production* councils. It is these lower bodies that I have issues with, since they proverbially "look, walk and quack" like sovnarkhozy.

[Jose Gracchus]

You just ignored what I said. As before, there's nothing stopping parecon federations from federalizing industrially/sectorially as opposed to regionally. It is the consumer side which will be primarily organized geographically (though perhaps sectorially as well).

[Red_Struggle]

No, he was not a pareconist. His economic reforms and the later kosygin reforms allowed each enterprise to use their rate of profit as a signal of their "efficiency", instead of examining the profitability of the economy as a whole. What may be an economic loss to the individual enterprise can be a major economic benefactor for the economy as a whole, and this is where economic revisionism has its roots.