By: Levi Rafael

Levi Rafael — Thu, 28 May 2015 19:32:05 +0000

Hands down, this is probably the most comprehensive study on central planning by a Marxist that I’ve seen since Mandel. I agree with the central theme that seems to arise: that the inefficiencies of bureaucratic planning are not the inevitable result of a centralized economy. Marxists get this criticism from left and right. The libertarians and other pro-capitalist tendencies blame all centralization as inefficient because it destroys the basis of private property as an economy divided up between individual producers. On the far left, anarchists make a similar assertion, but instead from the view that centralization inherently leads to bureaucracy and that centralism can be replaced with “solidarity,” or some sort of voluntary federalism while ignoring the fact that such an economy would not cease to be an economy of independent producers, giving rise to commodity exchange and exploitation. The Marxist response should be the opposite: centralism does not inherently breed bureaucracy and inefficiency. Bureaucracy actually prevents actual centralism from taking place, preserving it in form while in reality the economy is based on barter-like agreements between petty-bourgeois managers and specialists. It is worth noting that most enterprises in all of the Stalinist regimes had “pushers” in each enterprise who were illegally delegated by management to go out onto the black market to procure raw materials and sales in order to achieve planning targets. In summary, centralism divorced from democracy ceases to be centralism in practice, no matter what form it takes, and only gives rise to the same divisive tendencies and forces that revolutionary democratic centralism seeks to overcome.

Comments on: Socialist planning and the bureaucratic economy

By: Levi Rafael