Eva Durant asked:
>What is your argument against democratic planning - besides it
>being "ideological"?
I have no argument against democratic planning per se, only questions about
how such a phenomena can come into being given the historical experience of
the 20th century. Marx posited a plausible mechanism for overcoming 19th
century capitalism. He saw capitalist production as leading to the emergence
and consolidation of a politically self-conscious and revolutionary working
class.
For quite some time after Marx wrote, his prediction appeared extremely
prescient. Nikolai Bukharin, writing in 1914, insisted that the correctness
of Marx's analysis was confirmed by the formation of a "proletarian army
which, as Marx says, has been trained, united and organized by the mechanism
of capitalist production itself"
This is hardly the place to go into the deficiencies of Marx's "two class"
model, other than to say that those deficiencies are strictly historical.
What I mean is the two class model was extraordinarily powerful for
analyzing historical possibilities in the late 19th and early 20th century.
I don't think it would be an overstatement to say that the very success of
Marx's model fostered essentially "anti-Marxist" adaptations to capitalism
and capitalist ideology that militate against the emergence and
consolidation of a politically self-conscious revolutionary working class.
Those adaptations have been structural as well as ideological.
The "joke" is that a large number of the influential anti-Marxist
theoreticians of the second half of the 20th century began their careers as
Marxists. The "end of ideology" theory that was popular in U.S. political
sociology of the 1950s and 1960s and evolved into the "end of history"
ideology was the brainchild of ex-communists. The pervasive anti-communism
of late 20th century capitalism is thus not just a naive reaction to
Marxism, it is also an adaption to and appropriation of strategic elements
of Marxism.
The late 20th century monopoly-capitalist state uses indicative planning
extensively while rhetorically ridiculing the "idea" of planning as
"impossible". What do you think Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve Board is
doing when it adjusts the key interest rates? What do you think the IMF does
when it imposes a "structural adjustment program? Planning.
That same national-security state everywhere uses the rhetoric of
"democracy" in its unceasing efforts to thwart the emergence of democracy.
The U.S. armed and financed mercenary terrorists in Nicaragua were "freedom
fighters". Thus both planning and democracy take on the phantasmagorical
quality of appearing to be the opposite of what you and I might think they
mean. The tactic isn't new or unique. After all Stalin, dispatched the
entire Bolshevik party (including Bukharin, of course) as
"counter-revolutionary plotters".
I can anticipate the objection that these adaptations have not resolved the
internal contradictions of capitalism. That's right, they haven't. But what
they have done is altered the potential for those contradictions to be
resolved through a revolutionary uprising in the way that Marx forsaw. I'm
not cheering, but I'm not Don Quixote, either. Those are windmills, Eva.
Permit me to suggest that a certain 19th century thinker already addressed
the slogans of "democracy" and "planning" in his "Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte". To say that he dismissed these slogans as "petit-bourgeois
ideology" would be to underestimate and overly compress Marx's subtle and
thorough analysis. What Marx demonstrated was how the defeat of the
proletarian uprising in Paris in June of 1848 rendered the subsequent
social-democratic slogans of the petit bourgeosie ineffectual in the face of
a continuing advance of reaction.
At the twilight of the 20th century, one might look back on the entire
century as one long "Eighteenth Brumaire" culminating in the unfunnily
farcical historical personalities of William Bonaparte Clinton and Tony
Louis Blair -- Crapulinskis on a gargantuan scale. I close with a quote:
"During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of
Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of
socialism, of communism. They had 'saved' society from 'the enemies of
society.' They had given out the watchwords of the old society,
'property, family, religion, order,' to their army as passwords and had
proclaimed to the counterrevolutionary crusaders: 'In this sign thou
shalt conquer!' From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous
parties which gathered under this sign against the June insurgents
seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest,
it goes down before the cry: 'Property, family, religion, order.'
Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts,
as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every
demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary
liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow
democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an 'attempt on society' and
stigmatized as 'socialism.' And finally the high priests of 'religion
and order' themselves are driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods,
hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, put in prison vans,
thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the
ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to
pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order.
Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs
of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses
bombarded for amusement -- in the name of property, of the family, of
religion, and of order. Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms
the holy phalanx of order and the hero Crapulinski installs himself in
the Tuileries as the 'savior of society.'"
So much for spontaneous order.
slime' mold n.
1. any of various funguslike organisms
belonging to the phylum Myxomycota of
the kingdom Protista, characterized by a
somatic ameboid phase and a streaming
phase in which the separate organisms
merge and produce spore-bearing fruiting
bodies. Also called <myxomycete>.
scum (skum) n.
1. a. a film or layer of foul matter that
forms on the surface of a liquid.
b. a film of algae on still or stagnant
water: pond scum.
regards,
Tom Walker
www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm
