Re: Re: Re: Re: summary of calculationdebate

[Bill Rosenberg <w.rosenberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rob Schaap wrote:
>
> G'day Bill,

Gidday Rob and all

Thanks for all the interesting replies to this.  I'll briefly follow them up,
then tell you where I'm coming from.

Re innovation: I agree with all that Rob and others wrote about the source of
research and innovation - much comes from public funds (especially in branch
economies like Oz and NZ) - but since we started from talking about markets
here, that's really my focus on "innovation": getting new products to people (in
market terms: getting them "on the market") after they have been invented. It's
what Jim talked about -

> It's also important to bring in the "Austrian" distinction between
> invention and innovation. Methinks that the really great part of good
> innovations has been the hard work by scientists and tinkerers _inventing_
> new stuff (often done in not-for-profit government or university labs).
> Innovation refers only to the filtering out of which inventions are
> _profitable_ to the individual "innovator" (or packaging them to make them
> profitable). IMHO, there's no reason why the individual _profit motive_
> should be the only method to decide which inventions are tried as
> innovations and which not, as the Austrians would have it. Why not use a
> democratic method for filtering inventions instead?

Does the democratic method work? My observation at work of people democratically
(more or less) looking at ways to improve what they do, is that they are
reluctant to change more than incrementally - because they want to avoid someone
getting hurt. Significant innovations often displace current products; the risks
involved (already discussed) tend to be high, and most people are risk-averse.
So they are avoided. Or going back to the inventors themselves - the scientists
and tinkerers - it's a commonplace that an inventor is frequently not the best
person to make and "market" the finished product. Rob gives good reasons why
there would still be an interest in innovation in a socialist economy - but I
don't see them as dynamic forces, pushing the pace. It seems to me to be part of
the failure of the USSR (with no data to back up my assertion!) that it didn't
innovate fast enough to compete against the leading capitalist countries.

Re practicalities: Some of these products (as Rob points out) are simply far too
many variations on a theme, and I what he is relating from Tassie rings many
bells with me. But many of these "choices" fill genuine needs - new medicines
for each of 1001 new diseases we suffer from, create or discover; gizmos for the
kitchen; bits of software for all sorts of applications; clever tools for highly
specialised uses; new artistic works; .... I think to simply write them *all*
off as consumerism misses the point of where we (and society) are here and now.
To chuck out products just because the planning mechanism can't handle them
won't sound like a superior form of economic system to most people.

While computers surely make planning far more credible than in the 1920's, I
suspect the devil is in the detail - and more often the non-technical detail of
putting all this into practice - the negotiation of those social relationships
implied by the exchange of products.

Why my current interest in this? I've been asked to speak in a month or two
(can't quite remember!) to an ex-CP group (now the more-or-less Trotskyist
Social Workers Party) in a debate on globalisation. The debate (against a member
of the party) is along the lines of: is the movement against globalisation
(Seattle etc) anti-capitalist or just anti-corporate? How should it be advanced?

They will presumably be saying it needs to become anti-capitalist,
internationalist, socialist etc. Well, one of the things I want to say (I'm
there to provoke a discussion you understand!) is that the reason that the
movement will be largely - and at best - anti-corporate [ie anti big business],
is that, while people are increasingly tending to anti-capitalist, they no
longer see a socialist (ie non-capitalist) alternative as credible. There is no
alternative (to quote Maggie Thatcher in much narrower context) and people won't
fight something as big as capitalism unless they have an alternative.

Socialism is discredited largely (rightly or wrongly) because of the fall of the
USSR and Eastern Europe. It comes down to: what is the alternative to the
market? If you tell them: "a planned economy", they will ask where it has
worked. The kind of theoretical answers we've seen in the recent discussions on
this list won't convince: what empirical evidence people have about those
alternatives frightens them to hell rather than attracts them.

To convince people that socialism is an alternative, people have to see it as
practical - something achievable, that will work, that won't create more
problems than it solves.

I suspect you're right Rob about a mixed planned/market system (though as the
discussions on PEN-L have shown, that is scarcely a straightforward concept
either). That of course will be heresy to those I am speaking to.

Bill

>
> I apologise in advance for my rambling work avoidance style ... but let's
> assume a 'mixed economy / market socialism' approach to social
> transformation - and try to keep it somewhere near the parameters of
> conceivable political platforms.
>
> >Two things strike me: changes in the economy, and practicalities.
> >
> >Changes in the economy: how does a centrally planned system introduce/allow
> to
> >be introduced innovative industries? Innovation tends to be high risk -
> can't be
> >sure about inputs until some experience is accumulated; and can't be sure
> of
> >people buying the product. It would seem likely that a planned economy
> would
> >find it difficult to not only accomodate but encourage such behaviour.
>
> Well, innovation has the same character wherever it is to happen.  In Oz,
> what R&D there is (and there is precious little), is mostly done in the
> public sector - Oz business won't touch it unless they get whopping tax
> breaks, and then it's mostly market research anyway.  So R&D costs are
> pretty directly socialised, and risk diminished by market research ('demand
> management' as JKG called it) itself done at public expense.  All I'd be
> adding to that would be socialising the profits a little.  And the
> difference between public awareness and public manipulation would be
> stressed, too - an awful lot of what we call advertising and marketing just
> has to go (as those WorldCom stats show, telecom network access would cost
> nary a penny but for Veblenesque marketer-opportunists coming in to take
> advantage of useless competition and duplication).
>
> A self-controlling sector within a market socialism context would have some
> interest in innovation.  Firstly, innovative technique would diminish
> aggregate necessary work time.  Innovation in the commodities themselves
> would be recommended by cross-sectoral competition (ie. whatever economists
> call it when people, say, go for a holiday instead of buy a digital TV), by
> ecological considerations (the ecology being a boat we're all in), by vying
> for investment funds (I'm envisaging a single public investment mechanism,
> charged with, inter alia, 'picking winners' - which markets have been doing
> appallingly on Wall St of late, after all), by public acclaim (reckon we can
> never get enough of that stuff - Hegel's talk of 'recognition' seems closer
> to the mark than Stalin's of 'bourgeois ego'), by human curiosity (when
> Francis Bacon caught his death freezing chooks, he wasn't doing it for
> money), and by giving a toss about the wider community (which we all insist
> on maintaining and instilling in our kids, even though our current system of
> material punishments and rewards militates against it) etc.
>
> The thing is, I admit, that there's a lot of evidence about that the
> innovator doesn't do as well, as the early adopters, for the reasons you
> enumerate.  If a market we're going to have, a once-off reward *to the
> company or sectoral collective* from the public investment bureau could help
> (we don't want to go the way of IP rights, as that's how capitalism stifles
> its own innovatory tendencies, no?).  That way, even the homo economicus
> that abides in (hopefully) transitional humanity will always put aside some
> of its resources to R&D and innovation.
>
> >Practicalities: with literally hundreds of thousands (millions?) of
> different
> >products, how are all those prices conveyed to those who need them, in good
> >time; how are they negotiated with those affected (I am sure in practice it
> is
> >not a simply technical exercise: if reductions are indicated, the producer
> will
> >argue; if increases are indicated the buyer will argue); how are they
> enforced?
>
> I reckon we're talking millions, but I don't think we'd suffer too much from
> a little less 'choice'.  My consumerism, such as it is, is a product of
> 1970s Tasmania, when there was but one beer on tap, one type of cheese and
> tomato toasted sandwich, one type of meat pie, one type of salt and vinegar
> crisp (called 'chips' here, but I never got used to that either) and one
> commerciual TV station.  Had no sense of going without whatsoever.  In fact,
> the one instance of choice life did proffer the young Tasmanian male
> consumer, whether to beggar oneself on a Ford Falcon or a GM Holden
> Kingswood, was terrible, as friends would be lost whichever way you went (I
> had an old Holden in Tassie for social reasons, and couldn't get the old
> Falcon I'd always guiltily wanted till I moved to the mainland - a
> four-cylinder car was, of course, a public admission of homosexuality; not
> an option in 1970s Tassie - and not to get a car at all was to condemn
> oneself to a life of lonely onanism).  Nothing there would come as a
> surprise to a Kiwi, would it?
>
> So I'd be happy for a bit of rational choice reduction on the part of the
> government.
>
> As for the consumer's state of information - well we'd still have the net -
> and everyone would have access to it (like they do in Singapore, and they're
> soon going to have in Sweden).  And there's nothing wrong with a sound
> central prices policy with respect to staple goods either, is there?
> Especially now that the centre has the net and all that computing power
> available to it.  And, while we're at it, give the government a monopoly
> over transport & communications infrastructure, health care, education,
> credit/investment, and fossil fuels, too.  All that stuff has either already
> proved itself in a mixed economy context, or recommends itself in light of
> Keynesian or environmental logic.  Same with hefty capital gains and death
> taxes, I reckon.  That should avoid the spectre of capitalist dynasties
> getting big enough to capture the political process.
>
> >At times of crisis (such as war, dire poverty, revolution), such things
> will be
> >more easily accepted. What about in good times?
>
> I reckon I resent not having an AU Falcon XR6 because people I know, no more
> worthy than I, do have 'em.  Reckon I'd be happier with what I had if that's
> what others had.  Reckon I'd be prepared to swop a fair bit for a little
> respect in the workplace, easier work loads, a secure healthcare environment
> and an equitable education system for my little ones, a sense of political
> relevance, and a sense that humanity was not ever on a razor's edge, the
> disappearance of ads, and, of course, the European Nations Cup on
> free-to-air telly!
>
> >Rob seems to be suggesting we should focus planning on a subset of critical
> >products: i.e. a mixed planned and market economy? That reduces the size of
> the
> >problem, but probably intensifies some of the problems above, doesn't it?
>
> Well, you'd have to be careful, but a mixed economy is, I think, inevitable.
>  The capitalist world (and not just during times of war) has a history full
> of evidence we could study to find out where to draw the line in the sand
> between central planning and price mechanism.  I reckon we could draw it
> where I've been drawing it without offending the lessons of experience and
> the sensibilities of an indignant but nervous electorate too much, doncha
> reckon?  The one item of Engels's account of dialectics that comes to mind
> here is that bit about quantity becoming quality.  Questions come to mind
> like: "How far along this road do you go before 'mixed economy capitalism'
> becomes 'market socialism'?" and  "How capacious, fast and reliable must
> computing become before the informational qualities of the fabled price
> mechanism become completely eclipsed?"
>
> Yours in avoiding lecture-writing,
> Rob.