Re: [Pen-l] Paul Davidson sums up

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

me:
>> nor did Marx say anything about central planning (that I know of).

Charles:
> I'd say it's implied as the
> negation of anarchy of production.
> "Central" just means planning the
> whole.  The center of a circle
> is equidistant from every point
> on the circle, so the center
> is a symbol for the whole. The Soviet
> planners weren't geographically
> in the "center" of the country, but
> planned the whole.

I think that it's more likely that ruling Soviet elite got its
planning scheme much more from Edward Bellamy than Marx (though this
Bellamy/GOSPLAN link should be researched) and the fact that they
literally did not know what to do with an economy which was largely
owned by the party-state (in order to pursue their nationalist program
of promoting growth).

Marx's discussions of central planning (or at least the ones that
Charles finds) are much too abstract. The "anarchy of production" can
be negated by either top-down control (as in capitalist and Soviet
factories) or democracy. These are quite different. The old USSR
clearly followed the first rather than the second. Of course, as any
manager knows, top-down control is never complete.
-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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