Would State Planning only give rise to a bureaucracy?

[Jacob Cliff]

Would it not? If the State planned the entire economy even if there was democratic participation, wouldn't there still be a really heavy bureaucracy growing? There would be many government agencies and therefore lots of employed bureaucrats - would this become a problem?

And also, did the USSRs economy represent a real planned economy? If not, why?

[Sinister Intents]

If worker's control is maintained, and the proletariat has hegemony, then they're may not be too much of problem with bureaucracy.

Just quick thoughts

[Jacob Cliff]

How is "workers control" instituted? Not arguing, but if self management followed suit, wouldn't anarchy in production? Economic planning requires just that — planning, not autonomous workers doing whatever.

Unless you mean workers participating in formulating the plan? If this is the case, how do they do that? Electing planners?

[Mr. Piccolo]

This is one of the thorniest problems when it comes to supporting planned economies. I would say that there is a natural tendency toward bureaucratization in traditional planned economies like the kind that we saw in the Eastern Bloc. This tendency also makes the emergence of counter-revolutionary "capitalist roaders" very likely. We have seen how the elite of the former Marxist-Leninist states enacted "revolutions from above" that resulted in the restoration of capitalism, which has benefitted many former nomenklatura members in the former USSR and the modern People's Republic of China, just to give two examples.

Any new planning system is going to have to include a counterweight to this tendency toward creating a bureaucratic elite. The Polish economist Michal Kalecki proposed a combined system of workers' councils at the level of the workplace and planning to counteract the tendency toward bureaucratization in planned economies and to give regular workers a voice in running the economy.

There were also plans by cyberneticists such as Victor Glushkov that would have probably made the Soviet economy much more efficient and would have made much of the Soviet bureaucracy redundant. Of course, the Soviet bureaucratic class blocked these plans and eventually opted for a type of market socialism under Gorbachev. After that turned out to be a disaster they scrapped socialism completely and brought capitalism back wholesale.

For a good discussion of the failure of cybernetic socialism to take off in the USSR see: http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNyet.pdf

[Rafiq]

Keep in mind the excesses of this problem was almost uniquely owed to the fact that the Soviet state took on the role of a conscious agent of historical development, in the absence of a basis in a real affirmative social class (that is, one that was not destined to be destroyed like the peasantry).

[Destroyer of Illusions]

How is "workers control" instituted? Not arguing, but if self management followed suit, wouldn't anarchy in production? Economic planning requires just that — planning, not autonomous workers doing whatever.

Unless you mean workers participating in formulating the plan? If this is the case, how do they do that? Electing planners?

The workers' control can be carried out only through the state apparatus.Actually as any state the worker's state has all the common disadvantages of power including the pursuit of bureaucratization.But this pursuit is healed by the purge of the state apparatus.


did the USSRs economy represent a real planned economy?

Yes,it did.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Economic planning requires just that — planning, not autonomous workers doing whatever.

I fail to see how these are mutually exclusive. If the autonomous activity of cells can produce your body, a conscious collectivity ought to be able to produce a well or an orchard.

[Comrade #138672]

Keep in mind the excesses of this problem was almost uniquely owed to the fact that the Soviet state took on the role of a conscious agent of historical development, in the absence of a basis in a real affirmative social class (that is, one that was not destined to be destroyed like the peasantry).Also, the very real threat of counter-revolution.

[ckaihatsu]

lots of employed bureaucrats


This is the key issue -- specialization.

Currently, under capitalism, the individual worker must sell their labor for the basics of life and living, and so has a direct interest in being 'special' and 'indispensable', against a system of routine commodification that has an interest in making all workers inexpensive, interchangeable, and disposable.

If by 'state planning' you would relent to accept the term 'collective planning', then there would be a clear difference in meaning -- instead of the material basis for any democracy-over-production resting with a still- labor-commodified layer of bureaucratic *specialists*, or bureaucrats, the material basis would shift to a genuinely *collective* social basis for the conscious planning of mass production, entirely transcending / superseding today's geopolitical realm of competing national interests (and each respective national system of labor commodification within).

With *collective* planning no one would have any *individual* interest in having to be 'specially skilled', or to 'stand out', because there would not be any societal / institutional basis for anxiety over one's own life and livelihood. It would matter very little to one's well-being as to what one decided to do with one's life, because social production would invariably be sufficient to support *everyone*, regardless of the composite of individual life choices. Collective production implies production by and for the common best interests, with none of it expropriated or siphoned-off for private-accumulation and/or state-bureaucratic institutional interests.

[ckaihatsu]

How is "workers control" instituted? Not arguing, but if self management followed suit, wouldn't anarchy in production? Economic planning requires just that — planning, not autonomous workers doing whatever.

Unless you mean workers participating in formulating the plan? If this is the case, how do they do that? Electing planners?


I would have a severe difference with the practice of 'electing planners' because that would be a de facto *specialization* of a social task that really should be entirely organically open to any and all who wish to participate in it, anytime.

Collective production would be *curtailed* by a substitutionist practice like political "representation", of any kind.

From a past thread:





I've gone over this issue in depth here at RevLeft and I've arrived at the conclusion that anarchist- / syndicalist-type local control is *not* incompatible with a global-scale centralized planning, as I've described here at post #2. So 'central planning' is *not* opposite to socialism.

There would have to be very good information flows, both upwards and downwards in scale, which -- again -- is certainly doable these days using the Internet and a discussion-board format like RevLeft.

The scale and extents of global-level central planning would be *limited* by the actual availability of on-the-ground willing participation, and most likely not *all* projects everywhere would have to be part of a global-scale planning initiative, or plan.

But for whatever *did* become both planned and participated-in *could* be centrally planned, and *would* be socialism.

[ckaihatsu]

Also:


labor credits framework for 'communist supply & demand'



http://s6.postimg.org/nfpj758c0/150221_labor_credits_framework_for_communist_su.jp g (http://postimg.org/image/p7ii21rot/full/)