My favourite Mandels

["Jurriaan Bendien" <J.Bendien@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Henry,

I take your point. Actually, Ernest Mandel made the same point since the
1960: especially the sheer size of the (fixed) capital outlays of modern
business, and the span of business operations, requires increasingly
comprehensive planning. Basic elements of planned economy therefore already
exist within what Ernest Mandel called, for want of a better word,
"neocapitalism" or "late capitalism" or "the third age of capitalism".
However this is still planning within enterprises only (some of which
admittedly have a turnover larger than the GDP of whole countries these
days), perhaps combined with some state dirigisme, industry agreements etc.

The other point that Ernest Mandel makes is that you can have all sorts of
economic planning: despotic bureaucratic planning or fascist planning or
war-time planning or democratic planning, at various levels and varying
degrees of efficiency. The real question is therefore just what specifically
a genuine and effective socialist planning would look like, what sorts of
criteria it must conform to; and these are not just economic criteria but
also political and ecological criteria. Ernest Mandel thought that effective
democratic political participation was essential for the efficiency of a
planned economy, and that its absence ruined the potential of effective
planning.

Admittedly planned economies don't come into being because somebody thinks
they're a good idea, if history is anything to go by, they emerge out of
wars and deep social crises, i.e. out of drastic "market failure".
Nevertheless I think it is important for socialists to try and develop a
point of view on it. Socialism is not something that can come into being
without people being aware what it practically means.

Management styles, of necessity, must be adapted to the type of workers
we're dealing with, their skills, consciousness and so on. What is most
effective in one place at one time may not be as effective somewhere else.
But, certainly, for a socialist, productivity growth is not the only
criterion of good management. I take it to be a general aim of socialist
economy to reduce the need for a large managerial class through increased
workers'self-management, self-steering teams and so on. That is, without
denying the need for management as such, a lot of the managerial hierarchy
has nothing to do with economic efficiency, but with power relations and
skill monopolies.

J.


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