The case for the Planned Economy

[gendoikari]

Now I know no capitalists and not all socialists advocate for a so called planned economy, but consider these three thoughts next time you run up against someone who's anti-planned economy.

1. The economy is one of the most important things in daily life, it dicates how many are employed, how well everyone is able to live, and how many people can even be fed. The economy under leize Fair is uncontrolled. Like a wild beast. Everyone doing their own thing, trying to squeek by. With something so important, so dogmatically unstable that in just a few short years we can go from soaking up the champagne to wallowing in the gutters...do you really want that left up to chance or do you want it to be controlled according to mathematical principals that will keep it healthy?

2. See the above, and look at the great depression, while the rest of the world crashed, rush survied relatively unscathed.

3. Russia, In 1917 was just barely getting out of being a serfdom and it's farmers were just getting out of the fields..... In just 40 years the soviets, who might not have been true socialists, but definately had a planned economy went from basically that farming level of technology, to putting the first orbiting satelite in space. America on the other hand with no planning had to adopt in part the communist model to create nasa, and do the same... and they had an emmense technological head start, and vastly more resources.

[Tim Cornelis]

Get ready to hear "but a true free market this wouldn't happen" "planned economy is inefficient, read some Mises".

[gendoikari]

Get ready to hear "but a true free market this wouldn't happen" "planned economy is inefficient, read some Mises".

Planned V. Wilde, which one really seems like it would be the most inefficient, the one where human intelectual ability shapes it or the one where it's left up to the whims of human nature to shape it...

Human intellegence V. Human Greed.... which is better.

[AnonymousOne]

It depends on how we define planned. If we mean a community coming together and democratically determining what they would like produced, in a decentralized bottom-up fashion than no I don't oppose a planned economy.

If we mean a top-down authoritarian planned economy as was the case in the Soviet Union, PRC, Cuba etc. than I think we begin to have problems with planning. It's difficult for anyone, no matter how brilliant or thoughtful, to anticipate the needs of other communities without being a member of those communities. That leads to shortages, and wasteful excesses. Not because of any maliciousness on the part of the planner/s but just due to the inherent difficulty in trying to imagine every concievable need for a community.

So what do you mean by planned economy?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The economy doesn't 'dictate'. The state dictates. The economy is organic. It's us. We are the economy. If we wanted to, we could shut it down.

Your point about the USSR is void because ,as well as its economy did, it had little to do with worker-run Socialism. It was all top down stuff. That's generally what happens with economic planning.

[Klaatu]

An "unplanned economy" might actually be a threat to national security.

For example, the U.S. company Ford did business with the Nazis in the 1930s. In that sense, capitalism might lead to the downfall of freedom, not the other way around.

[danyboy27]

we currently live in a planned economy, and its always been the case since the early 1900s.

the capitalist titanic wouldnt have been able to stay afloat for so long without a minimum of predictability created by some degree of long term planning.

Its funny to hear all those right winger ***** and moan about the former soviet union, especially if you take some time to think about the fact that, many aspect of russia central planning have been massively borrowed by the capitalist to organize and create an universe of predictability where its safe to make money.

economic planning dosnt mean economic freedom or economic slavery.

[vyborg]

First of all, economic planning is not equivalent with socialism. Most of advanced capitalist state developed on the basis of economic planning, especially in Asia. For instance South Korea and Taiwan had 4 or 5 year plans for decades and decades. Even France had 5 year plans until recently.
In the 30s, basically any country was forced to economic planning due to the crisis. Democratic capitalist states, fascist capitalist states and Stalinist Russia, all planned economy, even if with different methods and results.

Marxist advocate economic planning because it is the most rapid way to develop productive forces. Economic planning is not an end in itself, but a tool. It is just like an aircraft that takes you on a great vacation. It could be not totally comfortable but as long as the direction is good, fair enough, you will have your destination.

The problem with Stalinist central planning is that it works only when economy is fairly simple because it lacks workers' democracy. As soon as economy gets modernized, as Russia after the 60s, Stalinist planning becomes less and less efficient and at the end collapses.

Bourgeois economists pretended that planning is unfeasible due to human nature or insufficient computation power. All these "ideas" has been refuted by history. The modern computers have sufficient power for planning. The problem is that central planning without workers' democracy cannot work. Only the proletariat knows what and how to produce, only the producers have the possibility to feed back in the plan the information it needs to fine tune costantly.

Finally: economic planning has been discussed since at least Marx (and even before). There are thousands of books, articles etc on this argument. Much of it is readable on the internet. Anyone who is interested can ask and I will suggest some useful links.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

we currently live in a planned economy, and its always been the case since the early 1900s.

the capitalist titanic wouldnt have been able to stay afloat for so long without a minimum of predictability created by some degree of long term planning.

Its funny to hear all those right winger ***** and moan about the former soviet union, especially if you take some time to think about the fact that, many aspect of russia central planning have been massively borrowed by the capitalist to organize and create an universe of predictability where its safe to make money.

economic planning dosnt mean economic freedom or economic slavery.

No, planning is anathema to free-market Capitalism and neo-liberalism. Capitalism lurches from crisis to crisis not because it is unplanned (though it is), but because the main aim of a Capitalist economy is to provide for a tiny few, rather than the whole populace. If you are of the rational, anti-statist opinion that an economy is not an 'it', but the organic sum of the people, then Capitalism can be shown to be unplanned and chaotic at all times.

[Tommy4ever]

An "unplanned economy" might actually be a threat to national security.

For example, the U.S. company Ford did business with the Nazis in the 1930s. In that sense, capitalism might lead to the downfall of freedom, not the other way around.

Ford also did business with the Soviets in the 1930s, and come to think about it the Soviets did business witht the Nazis in the 1930s.

[gendoikari]

Well the type of planning i'm talking about would be Bottom to top and top to bottom. what i mean by that is basically the communes would gather all the data and put in a request. At the same time they would be doing a tally of what they could produce and a central bureaucracy would run the numbers through a computer for allocation. And send requests back to local communes that were producing at greater rates what was in deficit.

"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need"

Of course without the profit motive in place we can say a lot about the production numbers, but the simple fact is that goods that are not consumables would last longer due to the absence of planned obsolescence. Which would reduce their demand.

[danyboy27]

No, planning is anathema to free-market Capitalism and neo-liberalism. Capitalism lurches from crisis to crisis not because it is unplanned (though it is), but because the main aim of a Capitalist economy is to provide for a tiny few, rather than the whole populace. If you are of the rational, anti-statist opinion that an economy is not an 'it', but the organic sum of the people, then Capitalism can be shown to be unplanned and chaotic at all times.

yes i do know that but neoliberalism didnt always existed, there was a time back in the day when capitalist did engaged in several reforms and at a certain extent accepted organised labor to create a more predictable environnement in wich s fews could make more money. this capitalistic establishment failed, (of course) and now the establishment dosnt really care anymore about any kind of stability.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

It wasn't long term planning in the form that State Socialism took, though.

The only extent to which planning occured was (I imagine yuo're talking about the 45-70s period) that they thought that full employment and low inflation could co-exist under Capitalism, by way of exploiting a supposed Long Run trade off, called the Phillips Curve. Of course, the problem was that the Phillips Curve provided a tenuous link at best between Aggregate Demand (via full employment and increases in productivity) and inflation, and therefore at best it was a short term phenomenon. Thus, there wasn't any real planning, just a mirage.

Capitalism, whether it be Keynesian, Monetarist, Libertarian or Neo-Liberal, lurches from crisis to crisis as it fails to allocate scarce goods both a) where needed and b) efficiently, leading to bottlenecking in some sectors and unsatisfied demand in other sectors. It is the least planned state of economics you could wish for. It simply doesn't know (or care) what happens to the macro economy in the future, as long as the conditions are satisfactory for profit making. That is the nature of the beast.

[robbo203]

Every economy involves planning. Even the most ultra extreme free market capitalist economy you can think of is full of plans at the level of business enterprises. These millions of separate plans relate and adjust to each spontaneously. Central planning in its classic sense is the proposal to coordinate and plan the relationships between these separate plans rather than permit them to spontaneously adjust to each other. In effect, that means the disappearance or dissolution of all these separate plans and their replacement by one single "society wide" plan . That is the only meaningful way I can think of in which you can talk about a planned economy because there is no such thing as an economy that does not entail planning or "plans".

If that is the case - if a planned economy means a single society-wide plan in which every conceivable input and output is coordinated and predetermined in advance - then it is obviously a non starter. Becuase everything is intercoonected all it takes is for the supply of even one input to fall short of what was planned and you would have to recalculate all the inputs and outputs once again. In the real world the one thing you can predict is that life will be unpredictable.

So you are left with the only other option on table - an economy that has many plans instead of just one. The question is - do you allow these many plans to adjust spontaneously through the market or do you allow then to adjust spontaneously through mechanisms established by a non-market and non-statist communist economy?

[gendoikari]

all it takes is for the supply of even one input to fall short of what was planned and you would have to recalculate all the inputs and outputs once again.

In theory this can be done, at least in the digital age. Especially with computer as advanced as we have today. Again, this is in theory.

[Revolutionair]

I was just about to say, dig up some old robbo203 posts. He has some good insights on how a single-plan economy won't work.

[Revolutionair]

In theory this can be done, at least in the digital age. Especially with computer as advanced as we have today. Again, this is in theory.

A computer is pretty stupid when it comes to thinking up things for itself. Humans will have to write all of the code for this to work, this is, in theory, almost impossible for a whole economy (so it is possible, just very hard). Now here comes the catch, people will need to give all of the inputs, these change by the second, adjusting all of the code and inputs every second IS impossible.

[gendoikari]

A computer is pretty stupid when it comes to thinking up things for itself. Humans will have to write all of the code for this to work, this is, in theory, almost impossible for a whole economy (so it is possible, just very hard). Now here comes the catch, people will need to give all of the inputs, these change by the second, adjusting all of the code and inputs every second IS impossible.
actually no it's not, there are programs out there that can play the markets for you based on such information. Are they complicated, yes but they exist.

[robbo203]

In theory this can be done, at least in the digital age. Especially with computer as advanced as we have today. Again, this is in theory.

In theory yes but in the real world deviations from the plan by the bucketload will always happen and all the time. The Plan will never get the opportunity to be implemented ; it will constantly need reconfiguring and updating. Instead of the single society wide plan moulding economic reality according to the intentions of the planners, the opposite will be the case. The plan will end up being hardly being worth with the paper it is written on.

It is not the lack of computing power that is the problem; it is the inherently problematic relation between the real world out there and the Plan itself. This is not simply a matter of natural calamities or logistical bottlenecks happening . It is also a matter of having to enforce targets to ensure delivery of inputs or consumer goods in the quantitites required as well as impose the strictest rationing

[ckaihatsu]

In theory yes but in the real world deviations from the plan by the bucketload will always happen and all the time. The Plan will never get the opportunity to be implemented ; it will constantly need reconfiguring and updating. Instead of the single society wide plan moulding economic reality according to the intentions of the planners, the opposite will be the case. The plan will end up being hardly being worth with the paper it is written on.

It is not the lack of computing power that is the problem; it is the inherently problematic relation between the real world out there and the Plan itself. This is not simply a matter of natural calamities or logistical bottlenecks happening . It is also a matter of having to enforce targets to ensure delivery of inputs or consumer goods in the quantitites required as well as impose the strictest rationing





[If] a planned economy means a single society-wide plan in which every conceivable input and output is coordinated and predetermined in advance - then it is obviously a non starter. Becuase everything is intercoonected all it takes is for the supply of even one input to fall short of what was planned and you would have to recalculate all the inputs and outputs once again. In the real world the one thing you can predict is that life will be unpredictable.

So you are left with the only other option on table - an economy that has many plans instead of just one. The question is - do you allow these many plans to adjust spontaneously through the market or do you allow then to adjust spontaneously through mechanisms established by a non-market and non-statist communist economy?


Robbo, I think there's a problematic conceptualization contained within your formulation here -- that of a static blueprint-like "Plan" that must be dogmatically adhered to, like a bureaucratic Stalinism that emanates from paper.

I'll suggest that a bit of complexity theory could be inserted here to re-conceptualize a planned (post-capitalist) political economy that's based on varying *weights* of importance for discrete goods and services. We only need to consider priority-ordered consumer-type "shopping lists", in the form of varying-strength *political demands*, to drive appropriate collectivized production.

Would we guarantee that every person's entire shopping list is fulfilled for every day of the year? Of course not, but what we *would* see is that people's top-priority demands would reinforce each other in the aggregate, effectively being true *political demands* on mass liberated labor for collectivized production. (This process could be updated and reiterated on a daily basis for all of society.)

I'll also note that once the compulsive need to use tit-for-tat linear exchanges is eliminated through the overthrow of capitalism, society could realize a *distribution*-based fluidity more akin to the circulatory system of the body where functions take place non-linearly, but nonetheless give rise to a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts whole being.








Connectionism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Connectionism is a set of approaches in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind, that models mental or behavioral phenomena as the emergent processes of interconnected networks of simple units. There are many forms of connectionism, but the most common forms use neural network models.




Basic principles

The central connectionist principle is that mental phenomena can be described by interconnected networks of simple and often uniform units. The form of the connections and the units can vary from model to model. For example, units in the network could represent neurons and the connections could represent synapses.




Spreading activation

Main article: Spreading activation

In most connectionist models, networks change over time. A closely related and very common aspect of connectionist models is activation. At any time, a unit in the network has an activation, which is a numerical value intended to represent some aspect of the unit. For example, if the units in the model are neurons, the activation could represent the probability that the neuron would generate an action potential spike. If the model is a spreading activation model, then over time a unit's activation spreads to all the other units connected to it. Spreading activation is always a feature of neural network models, and it is very common in connectionist models used by cognitive psychologists.




Learning

Connectionists[citation needed] generally stress the importance of learning in their models. Thus, connectionists have created many sophisticated learning procedures for neural networks. Learning always involves modifying the connection weights. These generally involve mathematical formulas to determine the change in weights when given sets of data consisting of activation vectors for some subset of the neural units.

By formalizing learning in such a way, connectionists have many tools. A very common strategy in connectionist learning methods is to incorporate gradient descent over an error surface in a space defined by the weight matrix. All gradient descent learning in connectionist models involves changing each weight by the partial derivative of the error surface with respect to the weight. Backpropagation, first made popular in the 1980s, is probably the most commonly known connectionist gradient descent algorithm today.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism


Also:


communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

http://postimage.org/image/35sw8csv8/

[CHE with an AK]

Considering the "economy" is already planned against the workers ...


http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j318/Tredcrow/2011/realworld1gl.jpg


... I would say we should at least readjust the plans.

[Rafiq]

Strong central planning is something that is vital to the survival of socialism. I don't buy the whole "Things will just 'work' out" dealio.

Something new has to be done, though, tweaks and the likes. Though, I don't really give a fuck, if Libertarian socialist rainbows and sunshines will work, I'm all for it.

[robbo203]

Robbo, I think there's a problematic conceptualization contained within your formulation here -- that of a static blueprint-like "Plan" that must be dogmatically adhered to, like a bureaucratic Stalinism that emanates from paper.

Well no - the problem is not with my conceptualisation of central planning. I am not the one who is advocating some mega society-wide plan that seeks to coordinate all the inputs and outputs of the economy. The problem really lies with those who, inadvertently or not, advocate such a crazy idea. They simply havent thought it through ...

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Considering the "economy" is already planned against the workers ...


http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j318/Tredcrow/2011/realworld1gl.jpg


... I would say we should at least readjust the plans.

Not quite.

The economy isn't planned directly against the workers, as such. It's planned to make as much profit as possible, whatever the consequences. Under Capitalism, the main consequence is the subordination of workers to wage slavery.

[black magick hustla]

"unplanned" economies only exist in the imagination of demagogues and pasty white people with computer tans

[Jimmie Higgins]

It depends on how we define planned. If we mean a community coming together and democratically determining what they would like produced, in a decentralized bottom-up fashion than no I don't oppose a planned economy.

If we mean a top-down authoritarian planned economy as was the case in the Soviet Union, PRC, Cuba etc. than I think we begin to have problems with planning. It's difficult for anyone, no matter how brilliant or thoughtful, to anticipate the needs of other communities without being a member of those communities. That leads to shortages, and wasteful excesses. Not because of any maliciousness on the part of the planner/s but just due to the inherent difficulty in trying to imagine every concievable need for a community.

So what do you mean by planned economy?

That's how I see it too and you can take it further to include capitalism. The capitalist economy isn't "free" it's planned but through the market and various competing firms. The WTO does a lot of planning and shaping of economies... just not centralized through states like in state-capitalism and not centralized through democratic processes like a socialist economy would be.

Most people who don't see those profits in a market-planned economy, but rely on wages or the products made by these companies probably would think that it's not planned very well when they get fired or if food prices or rent are too high.

Edit: Oh shit, folks on page 2 beat me to it.

[Jimmie Higgins]

In this debate about single vs. multi- planned economy, where does the working class fit in? Maybe "central coordination" would be a better way to talk about it. I mean workers would probably naturally figure out a centralized office or website or something where all the various communes could post their needs for labor or people who are looking can find something and so that becomes a centralized point without having to be a top-down job-placement scheme. I think a democratically planned economy would be similar. It would be impossible for workers to vote on one huge plan because such a plan would be too ridged, but it also wouldn't be possible for large-scale operations like a new rail-line going through several cities to be planned form city commune to city commune without some kind of coordinated effort.

So I think "multiple-plans" is inevitable in a bottom-up society run from workplaces and communities, but also some centralized coordination would also be necessary. Workers who make Orange juice probably would only need to coordinate with orange producing communes and then a food distribution organization or representatives from the communal restaurants and kitchens of communities (i.e. whatever workers do instead of supermarkets). So planning would basically involve the distribution/store workers to make estimates of how much they think they will need and coordinating with the workers at the juice producing site. But if the town or region lacked enough juice, then a higher level of planning and coordination would be needed by people. They would have to have town-wide or region wide decisions made maybe by a general popular body or through elected representatives or whatnot: people would have to consider all the needs, prioritize what factory or store or housing needs to be built etc.

IMO the problem of "centralized planning" is less in the planning than in the top-down nature of it in so-called socialist states. The USSR never had atomic-weapon shortages from their lack of planning - they had shortages in basic necessities and things that people wanted because the interests of the USSR rulers was maintaining their status quo.

[robbo203]

It depends on how we define planned. If we mean a community coming together and democratically determining what they would like produced, in a decentralized bottom-up fashion than no I don't oppose a planned economy.

If we mean a top-down authoritarian planned economy as was the case in the Soviet Union, PRC, Cuba etc. than I think we begin to have problems with planning. It's difficult for anyone, no matter how brilliant or thoughtful, to anticipate the needs of other communities without being a member of those communities. That leads to shortages, and wasteful excesses. Not because of any maliciousness on the part of the planner/s but just due to the inherent difficulty in trying to imagine every concievable need for a community.

So what do you mean by planned economy?

I agree . Except of course it is a bit of myth to suppose that state capitalist regimes like the Soviet Union were organised in quite the top-down, authoritarian fashion that is sometimes suggested.

There was a very considerable degree of decentralised decisionmaking in the Soviet Union (of necessity I would argue) at the state enterprise level - far more than is sometimes realised, I would suggest. People often make the mistake of confusing the political rhetoric of central planning, and the fanfare accompaning GOSPLAN's latest 5 year plan or whatever, with what actually happened on the ground. No plans were ever actually really fulfilled. What happened is that the targets were routinely modified and revised to make it look likle they were fulfilled. Instead of the plans moulding economic reality, economic reality moulded the plans Often the plans were not even made available into well into the implementation period.

The Soviet Union was very far from being a centrally planned economy in the classic sense of society wide planning and competition was rife at every level of the decisionmaking structure

[Thirsty Crow]

The Soviet Union was very far from being a centrally planned economy in the classic sense of society wide planning and competition was rife at every level of the decisionmaking structure
What kind of competitionm, centered around what?

[Rooster]

What kind of competitionm, centered around what?

At one level, heads of industries were encourage to over fulfil their part of the plan (which kinda goes against the idea of having a rational planned economy if people are constantly trying to change it), so they'd be competing with each other for resources (including labourers). There'd be competition between these heads for privileged access to materials and resources. Usually because there'd be a bonus involved. There's a story somewhere, I don't know if it's true, of a train being hijacked by workers so that they could get the materials on it.

[robbo203]

What kind of competitionm, centered around what?

Rooster beat me to it but here's a little handy quote from an interesting article for which i have provided a link. It relates to the period from the mind 1930s onwards when the Stalinist practice of so called "socialist emulation" was introduced

In response to such problems and because of the apparent inadequacy of earlier doctrine, ... the emphasis since the mid-1930's has been on competition (‘socialist emulation’), on reward for incentive, on profits, on prices that reflect more adequately market conditions, on 'economic accountability,’ on ‘economic laws.’ This was a return to the economic and legal institutions of the NEP, but within the framework of a planned economy."36 Such policies are normally associated with the reformists of the present day USSR, but it al began with Stalin. The author of a major study of Soviet planning summed up: "Within each ministry, enterprises competed fiercely for a privileged status, for reasonable quotas, and for easy orders. The same sort of competition existed on a lower level within each enterprise and on a higher level among ministries. The jungle of liberal capitalism of the past looks like a fencing tournament in comparison with this sordid infighting for influence interspersed with negotiations, shady deals and blackmail."37 (my emphasis)

(http://www.lrp-cofi.org/book/chapter4_stalinistcounterrevolution.pdf (http://www.lrp-cofi.org/book/chapter4_stalinistcounterrevolution.pdf))


There's plenty of more evidence along the same lines if you need it

[Thirsty Crow]

(http://www.lrp-cofi.org/book/chapter4_stalinistcounterrevolution.pdf (http://www.lrp-cofi.org/book/chapter4_stalinistcounterrevolution.pdf))


There's plenty of more evidence along the same lines if you need it

Oh yes, I'd be very interested in reading materials along these lines. Maybe you could send me links via PM?