Socialism & Planning
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Just to pick up on some of the arguments in this month’s Standard, in Robin Cox’ article.
Some enthusiasts for central planning argue that the exponential increase in computing power in recent years now makes the concept quite feasible. However, this is to misunderstand what the problem is about. It is not the lack of sufficient computing power that makes the concept impractical but, rather, the attempt to apply it to the real world when the latter is constantly changing. Saying that ‘the plan’ can be rapidly adjusted to accommodate any change in the real world means simply that it loses its quality of being a ‘plan’ – something that is supposed to guide production in an a priori sense. The application of such computing power then becomes simply the means of tracking, rather than initiating, changes in the real world. This is a very useful faculty to have but it does not technically amount to ‘planning’.
This, I think, misses the point, if planners are working to an agreed outcome, then iteratively adjusting the ratios in the I/O plan would be eminently sensible, and I’d suggest that any notion of planning involves starting from outcomes and working back to produce those outcomes.
As, I think, Cockschott would note, the issue is not decentralisation: theoretically, decentralised planning is also computable, if each agent operates algorithmically. The whole issue is aligning outcomes with rational processes.
To take a slight detour, the worldwide economic plan is in place already, it is call the UN charter of Human rights, and articles 22 and 26, if extrapolated, are the rights to food, clothing and housing, that must be realised through worldwide co-operation. As a global mission statement they are sound, and each organisation in socialism would, presumably, have the fulfillment of those goals are their object/mission statement. Iteratively, each unit would flesh out how it would try to meet those objects (i.e. 2000 kCal per day of available food per person per day, etc.).
There is no need for a worldwide survey, historical demand plus benchmarking would suffice for this work.
The planning would then come in to play to show the required labour, and as a yardstick for where we were failing so that free labour could move between sectors in order to aid fulfilment, or society as a democratic whole could decide to adjust the targets.
Yes, making society subservient to a static periodised plan is antithetical to socialism, but dynamic planning to reveal and co-ordinate the effort to achieve global outcomes is necessary, and it has to operate worldwide. A universal inventory of goods would be necessary to make the whole system work.
More appropriate example are the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, the follow up to its Millennium Goals. The global groundwork has been done, the reporting and monitoring process is in place, the targets determined and what resources are required broadly calculated. It is the re-defining of the targets and the resource allocation being the main issue for any socialist society, to shorten the target time for completion of the targets.
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/
These are not similar to the Soviet/Stalinist era 5-year plans which I think was in the forefront of Robin’s mind, an enterprise’s short-, medium- and long-term business plans within a command economy.
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