| Archive: Issue 5 - Fall/Winter 1997 |
||
| Assessing
cy.Rev: Even if one argues that the Stalinist forced march was necessary for the survival of the USSR, we still should not close our eyes to alternative visions to Stalin's heavy-industry model. Newly industrializing nations like China need alternative models since they are facing the same issues that Soviet Russia faced when it undertook projects like the Great Dneiper Dam. Ambitious schemes to develop hydroelectric capacity in China are threatening the ecology of the region on a mammoth scale. There must be other options besides "Second Wave" pyramid-building schemes and "Third Wave" Silicon Valley daydreams. Chinese hospitals and schools need electricity before they have electronic networks, and the Palchinsky course is the most rational way to get there. There are other efforts to reconcile computer technology and socialism that differ quite strikingly from cy.Rev's "Third Wave" vision. W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell co-authored "Towards a New Socialism: a Post-Soviet Model" to promote such a vision. Cockshott is a computer systems engineer and his expertise helps to give the book a firm grounding in the technology it espouses. They advocate centralized planning though the wide-scale use of networked computers, rather than the decentralized version of market socialism that cy.Rev embraces. Instead of rejecting a Soviet-type model out-of-hand, they present a re-engineered version. Cockshott and Cottrell argue that the labor theory of value can provide the underpinning for both wages and prices in a socialist society. If we can quantify how long it costs to produce something, then we should not only be able price it accurately but make sure that factories can do it on time. This seems somewhat like the operating principle of the former Soviet Union, so why didn't it work there?. The answer is two-fold. Besides the lack of democracy, there was also inadequate information available to economic planners. Only sophisticated computer systems can provide this information. They say, "If we want to get a more objective source of cost data, we need a system of data collection that is independent of the market. This is where computer technology comes in. We need a computerized information system that gives production engineers unbiased estimates of the labor time costs of different technologies." The recent infatuation with market pricing in formerly socialist nations seems oddly placed, given the generally irrational nature of the market itself. Cockshott and Cottrell note that "market prices are used as a cost indicator in capitalist countries, but they have a certain arbitrary character. An artist dies in poverty. A few decades later his pictures change hands for millions. A sudden panic hits the stock markets. In a matter of hours hundreds of billions are wiped of stock prices. Farmers destroy crops because the prices are too low. Walk through the poor areas of a British or American city and you will see the pinched faces and stunted figures of people for whom food is too expensive." If the proper computation of labor values is necessary for economic planning, what is better, according to Cockshott and Cottrell, to perform this function than modern supercomputers. Scientists use them for weather forecasting, atomic weapons design, oil prospecting and nuclear physics. Would it not be reasonable to expect a national planning bureau to make use of them as well? They, like the publishers of cy.Rev, are cyber-optimists but welcome the idea of state management of the economy. They make the case succinctly for a mix of advanced automation and old-fashioned "state socialism": "If detailed plan-balancing is way beyond the reach of the human brain, can the calculations be performed successfully using computers? Our answer will be `yes', but we wish to anticipate some criticisms. During the 1960s, as mainframe computers began to become widely available, many Soviet economic cyberneticians were very optimistic, but since that time the overall impact of the computer on Soviet planning has disappointed those early expectations. Of course it was not just in the USSR that the benefits of computerization were greatly oversold in the 60s. Computerization is no panacea. There are many problems with the economic mechanism in the USSR which would have to be tackled before the application of extra computer-power can be expected to yield much of a dividend. (One example: the irrational and semi-fossilised pricing system, with the prices of many goods stuck at levels which guarantee shortages and queues.) But having said that, the computer and telecommunications technology of the late twentieth century does present striking opportunities for the regulation of the economy. We believe that the more real danger at present is an over-reaction to the `failed promise of the computer'. One should remember that the USSR is somewhat behind the West in computer technology, and the types of computer system available to Soviet planners in the 60s and even 70s were primitive by today's Western standards. They were also very centralised (relatively few big mainframes), while the system we will propose makes use of both massive fast mainframes and widely-distributed PC-type equipment, linked by the national telecommunications system. And a political point is relevant here. Our planning proposals absolutely require a free flow of information and universal access to computer systems, and this was politically impossible in the USSR under Brezhnev. Even access to photocopying equipment was strictly controlled for fear of the dissemination of political dissent. While we are critical of the direction of some of the economic reforms currently underway in the Soviet Union, there is no doubt that the policy of glasnost is a precondition for the type of system we envisage." As opposed to cy.Rev, the approach of Cockshott and Cottrell is much more consistent with the original vision of Marx. Marx embraced the technological advances that capitalism produced but sought to eliminate the private ownership of capital. In the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, there has been a tendency to reject all aspects of Soviet society. The failure of the market to produce a higher standard of living in of the formerly socialist societies has begun to raise questions about the promise of capitalism itself. The problem, however, with cy.Rev and Cockshott-Cottrell alike is that their vision of feasible socialisms rest on utopian foundations. They view computers as the key that can unlock the door to a more just and humane society. What they both fail to take into account is the historical agency that can abolish existing class relations in order to prepare the way for a computer-based socialism. Market socialism and the dialectical opposite put forward by Cockshott-Cottrell view the failure of the former Soviet Union as a product of a deficient formula. It as if architects and engineers were doing a post-mortem on a collapsed structure. An inadequate design could cause a bridge to collapse, if for example wind stress factors were not taken into account. This is a bad way to understand the former Soviet Union however. Socialist societies do not come into existence through blueprints. In every single case they are the products of explosive clashes provoked by war, economic dislocation, repression, and other profound shocks to the system. Furthermore, there is usually a huge gap between the development goals of revolutionaries once they take power and the technical and professional infrastructure required to implement them. When you combine this with the economic blockade or outright warfare imperialism tries to abort embryonic forms of socialism with, it is a miracle that any socialist society can move forward. Cuba remains the one society that seems dedicated to socialist goals even though capitalist pressure continues to extract compromises. There was one other revolutionary society that for a brief period appeared to embody the economic and social justice goals of Cuban society while observing the need for democratic liberties. That society was Sandinista Nicaragua. The general direction of the Sandinista revolution was dictated by the exigencies of the class struggle nationally and internationally, however, and not by any blueprint. If anything, the difficulties faced by the Sandinistas dramatizes the futility of trying to build socialism on the basis of any pre-existing schema. What inspired the Nicaraguan people to make a revolution was not some utopian plan but a sheer need for survival. Ravaged by the plagues of Somoza kleptocracy, earthquake and economic backwardness of a biblical dimension, they fought back for education, health care, jobs and end to repression. The Russian people likewise mobilized for "Bread, Peace and Land" without a clear idea of what would follow. So when the Sandinistas marched into Managua in 1979, they faced a situation similar to the one that Laurent Kabila faces today in the Congo. The masses have high expectations but a new government lacks a detailed plan how to fulfill them. The forms of statehood that the Sandinistas adopted could only be related to the existing objective conditions. They nationalized all of Somoza's properties while leaving most other large and medium sized ranches in private hands. This "mixed economy" was a function not of an ideological commitment to market socialism but rather the recognition that the working class of Nicaragua was too weak to impose its will on the rest of society. Management of state properties was a daunting task. The Nicaraguan state lacked experienced economists, statisticians, managers and clerks to coordinate the activities of state-owned banks, farms, mills and transportation. They did, however, make a commitment to using computer technology to make up for the short-fall of experienced professionals. For example, in the Central Bank an American volunteer working with an organization called Tecnica trained Nicaraguans to use Lotus 123 to convert foreign currency holdings into the Nicaraguan equivalent. A department of six college-educated Nicaraguans laboring with pencil and paper found that it could do the same work with just one person and a computer. In another dramatic example of the power of computer technology, an American volunteer from the same organization created a spare-parts database on a personal computer that major state owned and private manufacturing plants in Managua both took advantage of. This meant that breakdowns on an assembly line were repairable in a matter of hours rather than weeks. American imperialism exhausted the Nicaraguan revolution and American volunteers eventually found themselves replaced by Somocista returnees from Miami eager to make a quick buck in "free" Nicaragua. One of the great tragedies of the defeat of the Nicaraguan revolution is that removes a shining example of what a feasible socialism might look like. This example was not created on the basis of a inspired plan. Instead it issued out of the struggle of ordinary human beings to make a better life for themselves against overwhelming odds and with both the tools and society they inherited. This will be true of any revolution in the future as well.
The home page of cy.Rev is www.cyRev.net The home page of LBO is www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html/ "Towards a New Socialism" (Nottingham, Spokesman, 1993) is available in an electronic, text-only version on the Communications for a Sustainable Future Gopher in Colorado under Economics-Authors. Labor and Community Conferences Held This Summer |
||
WELCOME!
You are visitor number |
Designed
by ByteSized Productions © 2003-2006