[Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) Soviet economic planning
Premise Checker
checker at panix.com
Mon Jun 20 00:32:19 UTC 2005
Soviet economic planning
The Times Literary Supplement, 98.5.22
http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2093487&window_type=print
Sir, - John Gray has given us an intriguing appre-ciation (May 8) of
Karl Marx's critique of capitalism and its destructive impact on the
social fabric.
He aptly spears the neo-liberals who close their eyes to the reality,
evident even to Marx, of capitalist concentration. Yet Professor Gray
offers little guidance towards the damage control that he rightly
assigns to representative democracy. There is no institution but the
State to maintain free markets in the face of corporate concentration,
or failing that, to assure by other means that economic giants serve
the public interest. Such tasks, of course, come perilously close to
the central economic planning that Gray and others rule out because of
its association with the "Marxist utopia" and Communist tyranny.
This hobbling assumption about planning results from taking Soviet
ideological claims at their face value. In reality, Soviet economic
centralism was neither Marxist nor planned. Lenin's original model for
planning was not Marx but the German Kriegssozialismus of the First
World War. Serious planning, of the indirect, indicative type, was the
work of Menshevik economists in the State Planning Commission
(Gosplan) in the 1920s, when the State had retreated to the
"commanding heights". But Stalin repudiated all this, purged Gosplan
and substituted a regime of military commands and allocations. This,
not the oft-cited "utopian experiment", was the system that finally
came to grief amid Gorbachev's efforts to reform it.
Soviet tyranny was not the consequence of planning; it was the worst
enemy of planning. Rejection of the Stalinist-style economy does not
preclude consideration of alternatives to the global corporatism that
John Gray has so effectively criticized. Rather, it should clear the
air for fresh ideas about our economic destiny.
ROBERT V. DANIELS
Department of History, University of Vermont, 442 Main Street,
Burlington, Vermont 05405.
More information about the paleopsych
mailing list