Die Neue Zeit
4th March 2011, 03:36
I don't know when this paper was made, but I'd like to reproduce part of the material in this thread for some discussion:
Value, Markets and Socialism (http://reality.gn.apc.org/econ/mfs.htm) by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell
Contrary to my thread title, the topics addressed will be in reverse order.
Anyway, this was the key paper I know of where they offer some sort of critique of David Laibman's planning model. In other words, and to their credit, Cockshott and Cottrell are the only Marxist Maximum Program theorists to have critically engaged everybody from Kalecki and Minsky to Schweickart and various market-socialists to Fotopoulos to Albert-Hahnel to Laibman (and perhaps even Devine, too).
We differ from most people writing on socialist economics in the years since the collapse of Communism in that we continue to advocate a planned economy. In doing so we are in the company of David Laibman (1992), and before setting out our own conception of socialism in may be useful to register our points of agreement and disagreement with his work, which is distinguished by a good knowledge of how planning systems actually worked.
Laibman distinguishes three phases of development of socialist planning:
We distinguish between project planning, in which the plan focuses resources on strategic sectors/and or projects; and systemic planning, in which all sectors of the economy are brought within a single framework. The latter, in turn, may be subdivided into a command phase and a comprehensive phase. ¼ We have then three overall stages in the development of planning: project; systemic-command; systemic-comprehensive. To each of these corresponds an evolutionary stage in the development of markets, or commodity relations. Our thinking about markets, then, is placed in a historical and social framework; this is essential if actual market processes are to be analysed in a way that avoids entrapment in the ahistorical dogma of `the' market, or the `free' market. (Laibman, 1992, p. 62)
Examples of these phases or stages of planning are, for the project stage the USSR in the 1930s, for the systemic command phase the postwar Soviet model (i.e., the stable 5-year plan system in the USSR, say, from the 1950s), and for the systemic-comprehensive phase the Soviet system between the late 1960s and the late 1980s (Laibman, 1992, p. 84).
One of Laibman's concerns is to explain why, despite the fact that the `historical model of pure socialism ¼ rested on the total absence of commodity relations' (p. 63), commodity relations persisted in all stages of the actual planned economy. He has a difficult task. His main aim is to criticize market socialism, but he must somehow rationalize the fact that market relations seem to have expanded in the transition between the `command' and `comprehensive' phases of planning. He has little difficulty in explaining the persistence of commodity relations during the period of project planning, attributing this to the persistence of non-socialist property relations in agriculture as in the classic Soviet account. This argument, however, suggests that as agriculture was transformed into a system of state farms, and hence brought within the planning system, commodity relations should have tended to disappear.
That market relations did not in fact disappear in the systemic-command phase is explained by Laibman as a function of a relatively low level of socialist consciousness. While, in this phase, the individual enterprise does not have property rights in the means of production it uses, and `in principle acts on behalf of society as a whole,' nonetheless
consciousness at the enterprise ¼ is limited; people in practice adopt the standpoint of the production unit at which their concrete experience is located. They therefore cannot rely on the political evaluation of their work in relation to the plan; they require `secondary confirmation' of the social utility of their work by means of market exchange. (p. 65)
We find this derivation of the persistence of the commodity form unconvincing. It is more plausible to see people's consciousness as being shaped by their production relations than vice versa. Only in a society in which goods take on the commodity form will sale seem relevant or meaningful. The problem is to explain why the commodity form itself should have persisted.
This is not difficult to understand if we take into account the familiar litany of problems suffered by the `command' economy. Citing Nove (1969), Laibman summarizes these problems as follows.
With higher levels of industrialisation and increasing complexity, the strain becomes intolerable as planning bodies try to master and use increasing amounts of information; this results in ever more serious errors and inefficiency. At the level of the micro-unit (enterprise), plan targets set in physical output terms result in distortion; since enterprises are rewarded in terms of plan fulfillment, they have perverse incentives to bias the assortment of output towards either heavier components (when targets are set in terms of weight), or lighter ones (when targets are set in terms of number). (Laibman, 1992, p. 64)
Against this background the maintenance of the commodity form is no mystery. If the sales of intermediate goods-sales in which both buyers and sellers were state enterprises-were `secondary confirmation' of anything, it was that the direct socialization of labour had not been achieved. The primary confirmation was, of course, the well known deficiencies of the planning system described above. These deficiencies-which became progressively more apparent as actual socialism moved beyond the `project' phase-are all expressions of an inability of the planning authorities to master the complexity of the structure of expanded reproduction. From this flow both micro-structural imbalances and the aggregated plans that generated the perverse incentives.
Were the planning authorities able to plan down to the detail, say, of the universal product bar codes used in the West, then the tales about producing massive nails to meet plan targets by weight would not arise. In this view of things, the problem was the excessive autonomy of the enterprises. The ability of enterprises to choose the composition of output meant that the system had too many degrees of freedom. No level of `socialist conciousness' could, without more information from the plan, ensure that the right mix of enterprise output was achieved. Resort to sale, as confirmation of the correctness of the mix, merely reconfirms that labour is still only indirectly social.
In this light the increased reliance on market relations within the system of plan formation, under the later `systemic-comprehensive' phase, should be seen not as an advance, as Laibman argues, but rather as a precipitate. Given the limited problem-solving capacity of the planners, the surplus coordination precipitates out as market relations. What Laibman fails to ask-and he is by no means alone in this-is what limits the solubility of planning problems?
Why did the regulatory capacity not keep pace with the growing complexity of the economy? Why could the increased mass of economic interrelations not be dissolved in the growth of the planning solution?
Our hypothesis is that it was a case of inadequate development of the forces of production. The forces of production in question were those of information technology.
This next part is the interesting part, because I've engaged with left-leaning posters on other boards who are for higher personal income taxes but no corporate taxes at all (http://www.rabble.ca/babble/canadian-politics/ndp-plan-slash-corporate-tax-rates) ("1948" and "Unionist"):
What would be the best form of taxes in a socialist commonwealth? The USSR traditionally raised most of its state revenue from a sales or turnover tax on the produce of nationalized industry. This gave the superficial illusion that people were not heavily taxed, since income tax could be kept down to negligible levels, and it is taxes on income that are most visible. The effect, however, was to depress the price of labor relative to other commodities, with the deleterious effects that we described above. There is a better alternative.
Ironically, in view of the strenous efforts made by Marxists to oppose the `Community Charge' (better known as the poll tax) under Mrs Thatcher's Tory goverment, a poll tax would actually be a good tax in a socialist commonwealth. The obvious objection to such a tax under capitalism is that it is regressive. A poll tax of £ 300 a year was 10 percent for a girl earning £ 60 a week, but only 1 percent for a professional man earning £ 2500 a month. If everybody earned the same hourly rate then this objection would fall, provided that those who had retired or were unable to work were exempted.
Socialists argue for progressive income taxes in capitalist countries in order to redistribute income from the rich. Meanwhile right-wing economists argue against income tax on the grounds that it is a disincentive to work. It is interesting how the advocates of social inequality think that the wealthy respond to quite different incentives from the poor. If the rich are to be persuaded to work, it seems that the only thing that they respond to is still greater wealth: hence the paramount importance of reducing taxes on high incomes. When dealing with the poor, in contrast, it is held that there is nothing like the lash of still greater poverty as a work incentive: hence the paramount importance of strictly limiting the benefits to which they are entitled. In a society of huge inequalities, arguments about incentives inevitably have this odor of hypocrisy. But again, stripped from their capitalist context they gain in rationality. If there is no inequality arising from exploitation, then someone who chooses to work only four hours a day would, under a proportional income tax make only half the contribution to the health and education system of someone who works an eight-hour day. Would this be fair?
The advantage of a poll tax in a commonwealth is that it establishes that all have the same obligation to work for the common good before they work for themselves. Once you had done your three hours a day to pay your tax, each additional hour worked would be your own. For every additional hour, you would get goods that had cost society one hour to produce.
Especially because they raise the possibility of poll taxes or head taxes, one question arises: would this bring back corvee labour as well? Corvee labour was the form of "taxed" labour used to build the pyramids, and naturally had better working conditions than slave labour in other areas of the world:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/pyramids-t145505/index.html?p=1936439
http://www.revleft.com/vb/egypt-worlds-first-t150006/index.html?p=2036393
http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalin-poll-t146936/index.html?p=1967783
Thoughts?
Value, Markets and Socialism (http://reality.gn.apc.org/econ/mfs.htm) by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell
Contrary to my thread title, the topics addressed will be in reverse order.
Anyway, this was the key paper I know of where they offer some sort of critique of David Laibman's planning model. In other words, and to their credit, Cockshott and Cottrell are the only Marxist Maximum Program theorists to have critically engaged everybody from Kalecki and Minsky to Schweickart and various market-socialists to Fotopoulos to Albert-Hahnel to Laibman (and perhaps even Devine, too).
We differ from most people writing on socialist economics in the years since the collapse of Communism in that we continue to advocate a planned economy. In doing so we are in the company of David Laibman (1992), and before setting out our own conception of socialism in may be useful to register our points of agreement and disagreement with his work, which is distinguished by a good knowledge of how planning systems actually worked.
Laibman distinguishes three phases of development of socialist planning:
We distinguish between project planning, in which the plan focuses resources on strategic sectors/and or projects; and systemic planning, in which all sectors of the economy are brought within a single framework. The latter, in turn, may be subdivided into a command phase and a comprehensive phase. ¼ We have then three overall stages in the development of planning: project; systemic-command; systemic-comprehensive. To each of these corresponds an evolutionary stage in the development of markets, or commodity relations. Our thinking about markets, then, is placed in a historical and social framework; this is essential if actual market processes are to be analysed in a way that avoids entrapment in the ahistorical dogma of `the' market, or the `free' market. (Laibman, 1992, p. 62)
Examples of these phases or stages of planning are, for the project stage the USSR in the 1930s, for the systemic command phase the postwar Soviet model (i.e., the stable 5-year plan system in the USSR, say, from the 1950s), and for the systemic-comprehensive phase the Soviet system between the late 1960s and the late 1980s (Laibman, 1992, p. 84).
One of Laibman's concerns is to explain why, despite the fact that the `historical model of pure socialism ¼ rested on the total absence of commodity relations' (p. 63), commodity relations persisted in all stages of the actual planned economy. He has a difficult task. His main aim is to criticize market socialism, but he must somehow rationalize the fact that market relations seem to have expanded in the transition between the `command' and `comprehensive' phases of planning. He has little difficulty in explaining the persistence of commodity relations during the period of project planning, attributing this to the persistence of non-socialist property relations in agriculture as in the classic Soviet account. This argument, however, suggests that as agriculture was transformed into a system of state farms, and hence brought within the planning system, commodity relations should have tended to disappear.
That market relations did not in fact disappear in the systemic-command phase is explained by Laibman as a function of a relatively low level of socialist consciousness. While, in this phase, the individual enterprise does not have property rights in the means of production it uses, and `in principle acts on behalf of society as a whole,' nonetheless
consciousness at the enterprise ¼ is limited; people in practice adopt the standpoint of the production unit at which their concrete experience is located. They therefore cannot rely on the political evaluation of their work in relation to the plan; they require `secondary confirmation' of the social utility of their work by means of market exchange. (p. 65)
We find this derivation of the persistence of the commodity form unconvincing. It is more plausible to see people's consciousness as being shaped by their production relations than vice versa. Only in a society in which goods take on the commodity form will sale seem relevant or meaningful. The problem is to explain why the commodity form itself should have persisted.
This is not difficult to understand if we take into account the familiar litany of problems suffered by the `command' economy. Citing Nove (1969), Laibman summarizes these problems as follows.
With higher levels of industrialisation and increasing complexity, the strain becomes intolerable as planning bodies try to master and use increasing amounts of information; this results in ever more serious errors and inefficiency. At the level of the micro-unit (enterprise), plan targets set in physical output terms result in distortion; since enterprises are rewarded in terms of plan fulfillment, they have perverse incentives to bias the assortment of output towards either heavier components (when targets are set in terms of weight), or lighter ones (when targets are set in terms of number). (Laibman, 1992, p. 64)
Against this background the maintenance of the commodity form is no mystery. If the sales of intermediate goods-sales in which both buyers and sellers were state enterprises-were `secondary confirmation' of anything, it was that the direct socialization of labour had not been achieved. The primary confirmation was, of course, the well known deficiencies of the planning system described above. These deficiencies-which became progressively more apparent as actual socialism moved beyond the `project' phase-are all expressions of an inability of the planning authorities to master the complexity of the structure of expanded reproduction. From this flow both micro-structural imbalances and the aggregated plans that generated the perverse incentives.
Were the planning authorities able to plan down to the detail, say, of the universal product bar codes used in the West, then the tales about producing massive nails to meet plan targets by weight would not arise. In this view of things, the problem was the excessive autonomy of the enterprises. The ability of enterprises to choose the composition of output meant that the system had too many degrees of freedom. No level of `socialist conciousness' could, without more information from the plan, ensure that the right mix of enterprise output was achieved. Resort to sale, as confirmation of the correctness of the mix, merely reconfirms that labour is still only indirectly social.
In this light the increased reliance on market relations within the system of plan formation, under the later `systemic-comprehensive' phase, should be seen not as an advance, as Laibman argues, but rather as a precipitate. Given the limited problem-solving capacity of the planners, the surplus coordination precipitates out as market relations. What Laibman fails to ask-and he is by no means alone in this-is what limits the solubility of planning problems?
Why did the regulatory capacity not keep pace with the growing complexity of the economy? Why could the increased mass of economic interrelations not be dissolved in the growth of the planning solution?
Our hypothesis is that it was a case of inadequate development of the forces of production. The forces of production in question were those of information technology.
This next part is the interesting part, because I've engaged with left-leaning posters on other boards who are for higher personal income taxes but no corporate taxes at all (http://www.rabble.ca/babble/canadian-politics/ndp-plan-slash-corporate-tax-rates) ("1948" and "Unionist"):
What would be the best form of taxes in a socialist commonwealth? The USSR traditionally raised most of its state revenue from a sales or turnover tax on the produce of nationalized industry. This gave the superficial illusion that people were not heavily taxed, since income tax could be kept down to negligible levels, and it is taxes on income that are most visible. The effect, however, was to depress the price of labor relative to other commodities, with the deleterious effects that we described above. There is a better alternative.
Ironically, in view of the strenous efforts made by Marxists to oppose the `Community Charge' (better known as the poll tax) under Mrs Thatcher's Tory goverment, a poll tax would actually be a good tax in a socialist commonwealth. The obvious objection to such a tax under capitalism is that it is regressive. A poll tax of £ 300 a year was 10 percent for a girl earning £ 60 a week, but only 1 percent for a professional man earning £ 2500 a month. If everybody earned the same hourly rate then this objection would fall, provided that those who had retired or were unable to work were exempted.
Socialists argue for progressive income taxes in capitalist countries in order to redistribute income from the rich. Meanwhile right-wing economists argue against income tax on the grounds that it is a disincentive to work. It is interesting how the advocates of social inequality think that the wealthy respond to quite different incentives from the poor. If the rich are to be persuaded to work, it seems that the only thing that they respond to is still greater wealth: hence the paramount importance of reducing taxes on high incomes. When dealing with the poor, in contrast, it is held that there is nothing like the lash of still greater poverty as a work incentive: hence the paramount importance of strictly limiting the benefits to which they are entitled. In a society of huge inequalities, arguments about incentives inevitably have this odor of hypocrisy. But again, stripped from their capitalist context they gain in rationality. If there is no inequality arising from exploitation, then someone who chooses to work only four hours a day would, under a proportional income tax make only half the contribution to the health and education system of someone who works an eight-hour day. Would this be fair?
The advantage of a poll tax in a commonwealth is that it establishes that all have the same obligation to work for the common good before they work for themselves. Once you had done your three hours a day to pay your tax, each additional hour worked would be your own. For every additional hour, you would get goods that had cost society one hour to produce.
Especially because they raise the possibility of poll taxes or head taxes, one question arises: would this bring back corvee labour as well? Corvee labour was the form of "taxed" labour used to build the pyramids, and naturally had better working conditions than slave labour in other areas of the world:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/pyramids-t145505/index.html?p=1936439
http://www.revleft.com/vb/egypt-worlds-first-t150006/index.html?p=2036393
http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalin-poll-t146936/index.html?p=1967783
Thoughts?