By Nat Winn
This Socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.
– Karl Marx, The Class Struggle in France[1]
Why socialist planning?
Planning is crucial for establishing socialist relations of production. However, this is not true JUST because a plan can serve (ideologically) to mobilize the people. It is ALSO a way of establishing HOW social surplus gets deployed so that it serves the people and the communist road – and not mainly the expansion of capital.
Maoist planning does promote a central plan. It just also takes into account the fact that many details of its realization require local analysis, adaptation to distinctive conditions, mass line, etc. So there is a dynamic between centralization and decentralization – not the total negation of centralism.
More than maximizing consumption
If the goal of everything in the economic sphere, including the goals that frame our planning, is merely a way to maximize consumption, what does that mean? What is wrong with that? What about goals like creating a military capable of defending a new socialist system? Or dispersing industry from easily occupied border and coastal areas? What about dispersing industry in rural areas (to promote the proletarianization of rural people, and the influence of proletarians within rural societies)?
The problem with capitalist anarchy, which is about rival centers of appropriation and decision, is not that, as some people think, it makes a “mess” of things in an anarchic way. It is that there is an inherent manyness of capital — where each capitalist center does what is in their own best interest (as capitalists) and, therefore, the overall deployment and development of SOCIAL production is done in ways that proceed from aggregated individual interest, rather than larger social concerns.
And with a dictatorship of the proletariat and with a corollary growth of socialist industry, a plan is a way that the proletariat as a new ruling class and cause sets new and different priorities — enabling the people (for the first time) to ensure that their labor serves THEIR interests, not the blind, crisis-ridden anti-social accumulation of capital.
Socialism is a transition period. And we use the heights of power as a powerful instrument of that transition to global, classless communist society. And what does it mean to NOT put those tasks prominent in an understanding of planning? And Mao’s ten major relationships are a wonderful example of this. And it is also contained in the Maoist critique of “goulash communism” — where there is lots of talk about the “rights” of the people (rights to food, to education, to a job, to security, etc.) but somehow the most important right (the right to rule and transform society) is forgotten. This is in the Critique of Soviet Economics (which was also by Mao).
And what does it mean for the formerly oppressed to wield power over the economy? For some, that simply means “Gimme!”, as if the interest of the masses of people is simply more consumer goods.
And these two things are related: If the key crime of capitalist economics is that it prevents the people from getting consumer goods (if that produces both poverty AND crisis), then the goal of planned economics is simply to reverse this — to prevent crisis by the same means it ends poverty — by providing more goods at the grassroots. And it is worthwhile to explore what this leaves out of the picture.
For example: U.S. imperialism let Detroit die. And with it the Appalachian coalfields, and steel towns like Johnstown, Pennylvania. It is ruthless and heartless. Just walk through what it means for a whole city of highly trained working people (with homes and lives) being drained of work and investment! This is something that socialist planning would make inconceivable. Or when the monopoly capitalists chose to shift steel production to South Korea or Brazil, those decisions didn’t consider what happens to the tens of thousands of working people producing coking coal for steel production. It just gets shut down. And they, well, they survive as best they can.
Lenin says “Workers are free as the birds, to go wherever there is corn available.”
This suggests an aspect of planning that isn’t related to balances, prices, or the maximizing of consumer goods. It points to a whole OTHER TASK of socialist planning. And it relates to my military point. Or the need (in socialist countries) to organize machine production so that the economy creates the level of machinery that will enable collectivization of agriculture.
There is a case of a need for urgent socialist transformation that places REQUIREMENTS on the planned economy. And the need (in this case) is not a narrow consumerist need, but a need from the point of view of the communist road to provide machinery to cooperative and collective agricultural forms.
Relations of productions: three aspects
There are three aspects to the relations of production in our communist theory: First is the relations of ownership (which includes planning, socialist ownership forms, etc. And it is a place where we are not confined to “juridical” ownership but also raise questions of defacto control by those following a capitalist road.) The second aspect of the relations of production is relations IN production. Meaning: Are these revolutionized socialist production relations AT THE POINT OF PRODUCTION? Or is it indistinguishable from capitalism (with one-man management, punishments, rigid division of labor, etc.) And finally, the third aspect of socialist relations of production are the relations of distribution. (So distribution does matter, its not insignificant). And that has itself many features (narrowing of inequalities, raising up the bottom in society as a strategic goal, making key commodities cheap (housing, transportation, basic foods, education,) to transform the formerly impoverished conditions, etc.) And this realm involves an approach to wages, prices, physical distribution, etc.
And to us, even when we are discussing “relations of distribution” — it isn’t reducible to simply “more stuff to more people.” It also includes distribution policies that serve our long-term goals (again the abolition of the four alls).
On balances and supercomputers
“A plan is an ideological form. Ideology is a reflection of realities, but it also acts upon realities. Our past plans stipulated that no new industry would be built on our coasts, and up to 1957 there was no construction there. We wasted seven years. Only after 1958 did major construction begin. These past two years have seen great developments. Thus, ideological forms such as plans have a great effect on economic development and its rate.”
– Mao Zedong, A Critique of Soviet Economics
Planning based on balances (and imagined as a process regulated by super-computers) is the quintessential revisionist (meaning state capitalist) approach to supposedly socialist “planning.” Bukharin pioneered this approach (after his 1928 fall from his leading posts in the CPSU) when he developed an institute to theorize planning that was based on balances. And these same themes run (like a reactionary thread) through subsequent generations of revisionist economists. They are always looking for some “mechanism” (whether profit or magically omniscient expert detail) for “regulating” and governing a planned economy. It denies the role of proletarian politics and class interests, ongoing revolutionary transformation, and the crucial importance of communist priorities. And in all its forms takes “planning” away from the conscious activism of the people, away from the priorities of ongoing socialist revolution, and toward some larger impersonal expert “mechanism” that will identify need, supply, balance and indices in a classless, impersonal, anonymous way (completely divorced from the revolutionary process.)
Once computers arrived, the revisionist planning theories of “balance” plus market “signaling” often started to incorporate a magical idea that some central computer superbrain could keep track of all the rapidly changing details that the human Soviet planners constantly failed to incorporate. Soviet planning, even at its best during the explosive creative invention of a new socialist industry in the 1920s and 1930s, overestimated the ability to fix prices, outputs, goals and method centrally (in a way that underestimated how complex a modern economy is.) So, for some of them, their failure to function as godlike super-brains meant that they moved on to the straw fantasy that COMPUTERS might supplement THEM centrally, and solve all the nagging problems of Soviet planning.
By contrast, Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese revolution and a critical observer of problems within Soviet socialism, spoke of socialist plans as an “ideological form” — and argued that planning was an important way of setting economic priorities serving ongoing socialist revolution – while relying on, leading, and mobilizing the masses of people. Mao saw that it was a fantasy that the details of a modern economy could simply be “worked out” by some vast central planning agency…. and in his works emerging from the first decade of Chinese socialism, including the pivotal speech “10 major relationships,” laid out the outlines of a radically alternative approach.
The balances theory of planning was always looking for a “mechanism” to accumulate enough data to arrive at “balance” predictions and proposals. And both market mechanism AND some imaginary super-computer served as possible mechanism for such counter-revolutionary approaches to “planning” – mechanisms divorced from the emerging goals and experiences of ongoing socialist transformation.
The market mechanism is something that CAN be implemented (and was). By contrast, “the supercomputer creating balances” approach was always a fantasy, and couldn’t be successfully implemented. So over time and practice, the capitalist market mechanisms won out in the calculations and practice of revisionists. Socialist societies do (of course) need balances (of supply and need, of light and heavy industry, etc.) But those balances are not anonymous or divorced from POLITICAL decisions and priorities that are deeply entwined with class and road. All socialist planning must seek specific balances of specific kinds. And a major conceptual flaw in SOVIET planning initially was that they thought they could aggregate all the necessary input data centrally, and then declare the necessary balances. In fact, that’s never how it worked (because it couldn’t work that way.) And that led to the constant movement in Soviet planning toward market mechanism that ultimately became an important part of the restoration of capitalism.
Super-centralization up against its limits
Several gray economy features developed. First you had (attached to every workplace, etc.) a team of scrounger salesmen…. who would fan out in related industries and buy missing resources and products that were coming up short. And in that way, you had defacto markets in capital (and other) goods — to make up for constant shortfalls and glaring gaps in “balances.” Also, data was unreliable. Managers and ministers lied about whether their productive units had met their quotas. Or they lied about quality, etc. And so the quality of info (at the center) was often flawed, outdated and even simply false.
This problem of flawed economic reporting was also a huge problem for the Maoist communists during the Great Leap forward, when widespread lower-level exaggeration of outputs and false claims of big advances led to false optimism and mistaken decisions at the leading levels.
So on one hand you had Soviet institutions developing semi-legal salesmen scroungers similar to the main character in Catch-22. At the same time, the Soviet leadership dealt with recurring problems by developing an ongoing crisis mechanism of rushing in plenipotentiary teams to forcefully break up bottlenecks. When some key process got all fucked up, there were specialists who zoomed in — and kicked ass until the flow restarted. And that often solved very specific local crises at the expense of larger, surrounding production and supply.
The downside of this permanent emergency approach is that this too disrupted expected balances…. And that even when resolutions were reached (by intense pressure), the costs of these often-pragmatic emergency measures were unjustifiably high. Under Stalin they constantly TRIED to predict and achieve functional balances (which are needed in any economy). And since that failed often, they developed unofficial market mechanisms AND kick-your-ass emergency measures to avoid short-term disasters.
For example, transportation was a CONSTANT problem in the early, rapidly industrializing Soviet Union. Often fruit and vegetable harvests were respectable — but the produce rotted while waiting for transport. In a system that didn’t deliberately rely on or unleash the conscious activism of the masses of people, the party found itself in a constant pragmatic search for some OTHER mechanism that could foresee problems, establish quotas and prices, and correct errors.
Mao had a different approach: First he saw central functions as goal setting (as a question of road and priorities). Then he advocated multiple decentralized adjustment and decision processes. This was not a plan to micro-manage all the endless details of an economy.
Because such super-centralized approaches have inherent fatal flaws: 1) there is never enough data to really understand what is happening. And the data is often outdated before it arrives or else is false for other reasons. 2) They had a false theory that overemphasized steel. And the Soviet communists were ironically called “steel eaters” — because they one-sidedly believed that heavy industry steel production was the key to progress – specifically in contrast to light industry and consumer goods. That introduced the fundamental problem that the explosively expanding urban socialist industry naturally consumed rural products, but that same socialist industry wasn’t able to produce products to exchange with the peasant farmers for their food produce. The logic of a one-sided stress on heavy industry and steel led to an increasingly coercive extraction of food from farmers who felt they were simply being ripped off.
Mao developed a critique of Soviet methods, and counter-theory of priorities. Regarding the Soviet methods of the 1930s and beyond, he said: “You make the peasants run non-stop, but you don’t allow them to eat.” So he argued to take agricultural machinery production as the key link — and avoided blindly following Soviet projects that leaned toward giganticism. Instead Chinese socialist industry produced mini-tractors that the peasants themselves could deploy and repair.
If you “never have enough data in time” — then the pull is constantly toward markets where there is always a demand mechanism and prices to convey real time conditions.
In conclusion
For communists, socialist planning can only be socialist, that is, it can only be serving the transition to a classless freely associating society of individuals, if the plan is taken up and carried out by a conscious social force numbering in the 10s and 100s of millions, who support the said planning. Machines and balance sheets play a role in enhancing human capacity, though they cannot replace people as the most important factor in making history and more specifically, in working consciously toward a communist world.
Central planning can set goals and priorities, but there is much need for input and expertise of local conditions that must go into socialist planning as a whole. This involves utilization of mass line, a process where the ideas and knowledge of the people are synthesized at higher levels of leadership to develop the overall direction of a plan.
Socialist planning is, most significantly, political planning to walk the road from the seizure of political power and the overthrow of the capitalist rulers through a transition period of overcoming the stains and residue of the old society that threaten to reverse our course, onward to a classless communist society where resources and knowledge are shared for the good of all. It is not a computer game, the computers to the contrary, must work for us.