Designing Institutions: Is it Possible?, was Market Socialism, etc.

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rod Hay wrote:

>
> If rationing is required, I think that we can design other institutions that do the job better than the market can. Hence my advocacy (and I think Jim's) of democratic control.

When a debate goes on as wildly as this debate has (and as the same debate has in the past on other lists), one strong possibility is that (a) the parties to the debate (a) really do not and cannot understand each other and (b) the propositions explicitly argued are not the questions actully at issue.

I'm not sure myself what the core issues at stake are, but I want to make a preliminary stab at naming one of them.

*Both* parties to the debate are deeply suspicious of Planning. And *both* parties to the debate see the other as dangerously committed to planning -- the danger being that of authoritarian and terrorist rule.

Justin believes that socialist planning of the economy wrong for two reasons:

        1. It won't work (it is inefficient) and those in control will therefore resort to terrorist or at least very heavy-handed methods ("Administrative Methods" the Chinese called them) to make work what is unworkable.

        2. Workers need a clear goal in order to be brought to vote for a socialist system. Hence it is important to design in advance (plan) the institutions which can work. The sort of negative organizing which I for example advocate (there are many variations on this, discussed at the end of this post) is impractical, utopian, because it can never attract a sufficient number of workers to bring about a social change. (I'm not sure how to word what follows, so I won't necessarily defend my specific wording.) And as a result those who favor such
organizing will *in practice* end up supporting some sort of minority ("elitist," "bureaucratic") revolution imposing an authoritarian rule by bureaucracy.

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Now, Rod is trying to make the debate as rational as possible, and very roughly speaking he and I are on the "same" side. There is a possible serious difference, however, as brought out in the wording of the post quoted above: Rod believes that institutions can be *designed*. He also believes in democratic control, however, and that may qualify the meaning of "design" in this context. In any case, I believe, roughly, that the designing of institutions *in thought* is fundamentally totalitarian. I object, that is, to the kind of "Planning" that Doug and
Justin both seem to propose: the planning in advance of the kind of institutions that will characterize a socialist order.

Now this kind of intellectual conviction will obviously be accompanied by reasonably strong feeling, and when that feeling comes out quickly, it results in the kind of insults that Justin and I exchanged.

Extrapolated into the future then, both sides (with some historical justification for each) believe that the other's position can only result in authoritarian terror. Now I doubt very much that either Justin or Doug would (at this time) propose shooting Carrol or Yoshie. And neither of us would propose shooting Justin or Doug. But they *do* think that our kind of "planning" will result (if successful) in people like them being shot. And we *do* think that that commitment to "planning" of their type will under quite possible historical conditions
(conditions that have in fact occurred in the past) result in the shooting of people like us.


This is clumsy. But I think Justin and Doug should recognize (even if they cannot understand) that both sides do object to planning -- it is just that each side has a different perception of the *kind* of planning which is most dangerous.

And it is important to see that each side also regards the other as impossibly utopian, and to see why this is so. And the kind of utopianism of which each suspects the other is the kind which, developed in practice, leads to authoritarian terror. But I'll leave that for another post.

Carrol