John, can you show us something in the writing of Marx or his immediate disciples which insists upon a centrally planned economy? I do not think it exists.
I don't think Marx wrote specifically about the economy needing to be centrally planned. But he did write about the need for there to be a strong central government, which implies a centrally planned economy, and which explains Lenin's creating a centrally planned economy. The Communist Party of China embraces Marx's notion that capitalism is progressive until it fetters the means of production, and on this basis promotes capitalism that is not (at least not totally) centrally planned.
Communists call for a centralized state to increase economic production "as rapidly as possible" in the Communist Manifesto (by Marx and Engels) as follows:
"We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible."
Marx advocated a strong central government unambiguously. In the "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" by Marx and Engels, written in 1850, they declare:
"In opposition to this plan the workers must not only strive for one and indivisible German republic, but also, within this republic, for the most decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state authority. They should not let themselves be led astray by empty democratic talk about the freedom of the municipalities, self-government, etc."
Subsequently, Engels edited this paragraph with this note:
"It must be recalled today that this passage is based on a misunderstanding. At that time – thanks to the Bonapartist and liberal falsifiers of history – it was considered as established that the French centralised machine of administration had been introduced by the Great Revolution and in particular that it had been used by the Convention as an indispensable and decisive weapon for defeating the royalist and federalist reaction and the external enemy. It is now, however, a well-known fact that throughout the revolution up to the eighteenth Brumaire c the whole administration of the départements, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by, the respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted with complete freedom within the general state laws; that precisely this provincial and local self-government, similar to the American, became the most powerful lever of the revolution and indeed to such an extent that Napoleon, immediately after his coup d’état of the eighteenth Brumaire, hastened to replace it by the still existing administration by prefects, which, therefore, was a pure instrument of reaction from the beginning. But no more than local and provincial self-government is in contradiction to political, national centralisation, is it necessarily bound up with that narrow-minded cantonal or communal self-seeking which strikes us as so repulsive in Switzerland, and which all the South German federal republicans wanted to make the rule in Germany in 1849." – Note by Engels to the 1885 edition.
Engles's point is simply that a strong central government ("political, national centralisation") is indeed required but that this is not in contradiction to also having local and provincial self-governments that act "within the general state laws" "similar the the American" system. Thus even Engels argues that there should be a strong central government the laws of which must be obeyed by everyone. The fact that Marx wrote the original paragraph clearly demonstrates that he advocated a strong central government.
These aren't essentials, neener, but they certainly are powerful tendencies, unless checked by structural constraints. I really don't see any in Spritzler's scheme.
I'm reminded of Hawthorne's satire of Brooke Farm. The Transcendentalists who lived there needed a heavy dose of what Melville and Hawthorne had to offer--the fact that sin and selfishness are a problem that must be dealt with, not just wished away in a giant Kumbaya!
This is the kind of sleight of hand I have come to expect from John Spritzler: an anti-Marxist who makes at least part of his living from his diatribes against a doctrine of which he continually displays very little understanding. Then again, understanding it, and coming to agree with it, might diminish many of his, anti-communist, readers from continuing to take out paid subscriptions to his substack account.
And we wouldn't want that, now would we, Spritzler?
The title of this article, and especially the subtitle, does not match its content.
While the title and subtitle prepare the reader for an article to refute the Marxist thesis that any successful post capitalist, democratic economy must be planned, there is only a single paragraph devoted to a rather poor attempt to refute this thesis.
Spritzler doesn't even answer the objections Marxists would certainly raise that his freewheeling, decentralized voluntary sovereign local community can fulfill the needs of its population without devolving into anarchy as each community is thrown into effective competition with other communities for resources, and uses the local resources available to it, as bargaining chips, to gain competitive advantage, at the expense of the people of other communities, and, as wealth concentrates through corruption of the leaders of the wealthier community, the people of that community itself, who will experience a plunge into the lower strata of an increasingly stratified society.
See the writings of Malinowski and Wilhelm Reich about how this process developed among the Trobriand Islanders.
Spritzler's only answer to such a Marxist critique, is to concede that his scheme is not perfect, yet no such scheme ever is. That is rather paltry an excuse to create a system bound intrinsically toward economic chaos and stratification, indeed!
The only point where Spritzler actually engages the Marxist critique, is to--wrongly--concedes the argument of Hayek and other free market advocates that, and I quote, "The problem with a centrally planned economy, according to this view, is that it is impossible for any central body to possess all of the vast information required to make all of the zillions of decisions that must be made in operating the economy of a nation rationally. This criticism of centrally planned economies is perfectly valid."
This has been soundly refuted by Ernest Mandel, writing in the New Left Review in the 1980s: "In Defence of Socialist Planning" at https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1986/09/planning.html This is definitely worth a read. It soundly refutes Hayek, and Spritzler's notion. The information required to run a centrally planned socialist economy, is not too vast for us mere mortals--armed with our now highly advanced computer technology--to master, while still opening up vast vistas of greater freedom for every member of the social republic.
Seems conceivable that there could exist collaborations of both local and more “centralized” bodies, the former based perhaps upon local watersheds (as proposed by Kirkpatrick Sale in various texts). Along with individuals who might rotate through both. This does require however the elimination of Capital and the profit motive as prime movers and motivators.
Computer networked communications make this additionally conceivable. Plus the development of “free energy” technologies to render the fossil fuel age obsolete. I would invite those skeptics of the latter possibility to visit the Substack of Wade Frazier.
There is certainly a need within a genuine communist system for decentralization as well as centralization. Local organizations are more appreciative of local circumstances and problems. The local should be permitted to make the decisions that directly affect the local citizens. Democratically delegated higher, more central bodies must, however, make decisions that affect their broader constituencies.
The local can be the locus of resistance to tyranny at and corruption of the non-local, more central bodies, when they threaten to arise. Within the structure of democratic centralism within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, Lenin demanded "local party autonomy" and attacked the Menshevik national leadership for suppressing it. (Lenin, Freedom to Criticize and Unity of Action, 1906, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/may/20c.htm)
But the confederal approach is one of absolute independence of each locale from others, and from more central, delegated bodies. This is a recipe for chaos, based purely on idealist sentiment that everybody will get along because of an ethos of "sharing". That's ridiculous. That's not enough to counter our human tendency toward greed, selfishness, hot dogging, lone rangering, authoritarian compliance with demagoguery, etc. "Things [will inevitably] fall apart [when] the center cannot hold!" I have observed plenty of this dysfunction locally and nationally, in the medical freedom movement itself: in GACR, and the NYC Medical Freedom Alliance/Party.
The ideal democratic communist system, preserves local relative AUTONOMY. There's a balance between the prerogatives enjoyed by the more central bodies to make the decisions, including the centrally planned economic decisions, and the more local bodies which both carry out the plan, make decisions appropriate to the locale, and give feedback for the central's decisions--including banding together with other locales if the Center gets too big for its britches, and starts becoming corrupt and tyrannical
Here I am reminded of some of the words from Hamlet's first soliloquy:
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
This in turn reminds me of the great book by another Marx-Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden.
Nature--and that includes our own inner individual and group psychological (See Freud's paper on the subject of the latter) nature, with its potential for both the angelic, and the demonic, and everything in between--must not be allowed just to take its own course, otherwise we have a regression to the howling wilderness. But neither must we permit the machine, the big city, the Party Center, the Single Party State, the vaxx crazy medical establishment, etc.,--governed themselves by these "natural" demonic, selfish, power hungry tendencies--to suppress our internal and external nature.
The ideal, as L. Marx pointed out--the ideal which originally motivated celebrants of the newly "discovered" country of America--was a WEEDED garden. Where our conscious reason reins supreme, to bring out the BEST in our nature, but not allow nature to run roughshod.
The democratic communist system makes such conscious, yet sensitive and liberatory application of human reason to our own nature, external nature, and to our own society.
What John is proposing instead is in fact a nostalgic fantasy. His motto really should be "Let Nature Reign Supreme--as in the Middle Ages, or even further back, in Tribal Society"
Here I'm reminded of one of Peggy Lee's songs from the film Tom Thumb. "Tura lura lu!" We'll all just "share", and be happy, in our own little hobbit towns.
And didn't John say that we could still enjoy "private property"?
That'll make all the petite bourgeoisie, those champions still of the Single Tax, ebullient!
What "paid subscriptions" are you talking about? Have you even bothered to look and notice that I accept no paid subscriptions? So much for the nefarious motives you ascribe to me, uh?
Sorry, I didn't know that. But certainly it's nice to continually bask in all that popularity. And what would happen if you started sounding like you actually were a Marxist, John? If you actually educated your readership, at whatever the cost, rather than pandered to their McCarthyite conditioning? Probably all, to borrow a line from John Lennon, "vanish, in the haze!,"
No, no, no! Better to spout Hayek-ism, as you do in this article, rather than actually consider what Marxism has to offer!
What you're trying to do here is to reinstitute primitive communism--otherwise known as the tribal mode of production--on a purely IDEALISTIC basis, the basis of a sentiment for "sharing". Certainly that is modern, as well as tribal, but what Marx believed is that we must use the technological advances--like computers--to base modern communism on. Not touchy feelly, hippy dippy anarcho-communalism. That's just not going to work. Tribal society had a sentiment of sharing too. Again, look at Malinowski and Reich for an account of how this broke down, how the contradictions of this set the stage for the dawning of class society, beginning with the Asian bureaucratic mode of production.
But once again, Spritzler, you place abstractions like local community sovereignty over and above realistic, practical concerns about how this will actually work, and the problems involved--which, as I've indicated, would not just make the situation imperfect. It would make it impossible, a disaster of stratification and competition. But God forbid you should give this idealist abstraction up, and employ the technology we moderns have developed to solve these problems. No, that would involve "communist tyranny"! Horrors!
John, can you show us something in the writing of Marx or his immediate disciples which insists upon a centrally planned economy? I do not think it exists.
I don't think Marx wrote specifically about the economy needing to be centrally planned. But he did write about the need for there to be a strong central government, which implies a centrally planned economy, and which explains Lenin's creating a centrally planned economy. The Communist Party of China embraces Marx's notion that capitalism is progressive until it fetters the means of production, and on this basis promotes capitalism that is not (at least not totally) centrally planned.
Regarding Marx on centralization (the following is extracted from my article at https://www.pdrboston.org/communism-no-socialism-no ):
Communists call for a centralized state to increase economic production "as rapidly as possible" in the Communist Manifesto (by Marx and Engels) as follows:
"We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible."
Marx advocated a strong central government unambiguously. In the "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" by Marx and Engels, written in 1850, they declare:
"In opposition to this plan the workers must not only strive for one and indivisible German republic, but also, within this republic, for the most decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state authority. They should not let themselves be led astray by empty democratic talk about the freedom of the municipalities, self-government, etc."
Subsequently, Engels edited this paragraph with this note:
"It must be recalled today that this passage is based on a misunderstanding. At that time – thanks to the Bonapartist and liberal falsifiers of history – it was considered as established that the French centralised machine of administration had been introduced by the Great Revolution and in particular that it had been used by the Convention as an indispensable and decisive weapon for defeating the royalist and federalist reaction and the external enemy. It is now, however, a well-known fact that throughout the revolution up to the eighteenth Brumaire c the whole administration of the départements, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by, the respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted with complete freedom within the general state laws; that precisely this provincial and local self-government, similar to the American, became the most powerful lever of the revolution and indeed to such an extent that Napoleon, immediately after his coup d’état of the eighteenth Brumaire, hastened to replace it by the still existing administration by prefects, which, therefore, was a pure instrument of reaction from the beginning. But no more than local and provincial self-government is in contradiction to political, national centralisation, is it necessarily bound up with that narrow-minded cantonal or communal self-seeking which strikes us as so repulsive in Switzerland, and which all the South German federal republicans wanted to make the rule in Germany in 1849." – Note by Engels to the 1885 edition.
Engles's point is simply that a strong central government ("political, national centralisation") is indeed required but that this is not in contradiction to also having local and provincial self-governments that act "within the general state laws" "similar the the American" system. Thus even Engels argues that there should be a strong central government the laws of which must be obeyed by everyone. The fact that Marx wrote the original paragraph clearly demonstrates that he advocated a strong central government.
Sir, you are in total denial about the essentials of human nature- Sin and selfishness.
These aren't essentials, neener, but they certainly are powerful tendencies, unless checked by structural constraints. I really don't see any in Spritzler's scheme.
I'm reminded of Hawthorne's satire of Brooke Farm. The Transcendentalists who lived there needed a heavy dose of what Melville and Hawthorne had to offer--the fact that sin and selfishness are a problem that must be dealt with, not just wished away in a giant Kumbaya!
This is the kind of sleight of hand I have come to expect from John Spritzler: an anti-Marxist who makes at least part of his living from his diatribes against a doctrine of which he continually displays very little understanding. Then again, understanding it, and coming to agree with it, might diminish many of his, anti-communist, readers from continuing to take out paid subscriptions to his substack account.
And we wouldn't want that, now would we, Spritzler?
The title of this article, and especially the subtitle, does not match its content.
While the title and subtitle prepare the reader for an article to refute the Marxist thesis that any successful post capitalist, democratic economy must be planned, there is only a single paragraph devoted to a rather poor attempt to refute this thesis.
Spritzler doesn't even answer the objections Marxists would certainly raise that his freewheeling, decentralized voluntary sovereign local community can fulfill the needs of its population without devolving into anarchy as each community is thrown into effective competition with other communities for resources, and uses the local resources available to it, as bargaining chips, to gain competitive advantage, at the expense of the people of other communities, and, as wealth concentrates through corruption of the leaders of the wealthier community, the people of that community itself, who will experience a plunge into the lower strata of an increasingly stratified society.
See the writings of Malinowski and Wilhelm Reich about how this process developed among the Trobriand Islanders.
Spritzler's only answer to such a Marxist critique, is to concede that his scheme is not perfect, yet no such scheme ever is. That is rather paltry an excuse to create a system bound intrinsically toward economic chaos and stratification, indeed!
The only point where Spritzler actually engages the Marxist critique, is to--wrongly--concedes the argument of Hayek and other free market advocates that, and I quote, "The problem with a centrally planned economy, according to this view, is that it is impossible for any central body to possess all of the vast information required to make all of the zillions of decisions that must be made in operating the economy of a nation rationally. This criticism of centrally planned economies is perfectly valid."
This has been soundly refuted by Ernest Mandel, writing in the New Left Review in the 1980s: "In Defence of Socialist Planning" at https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1986/09/planning.html This is definitely worth a read. It soundly refutes Hayek, and Spritzler's notion. The information required to run a centrally planned socialist economy, is not too vast for us mere mortals--armed with our now highly advanced computer technology--to master, while still opening up vast vistas of greater freedom for every member of the social republic.
Seems conceivable that there could exist collaborations of both local and more “centralized” bodies, the former based perhaps upon local watersheds (as proposed by Kirkpatrick Sale in various texts). Along with individuals who might rotate through both. This does require however the elimination of Capital and the profit motive as prime movers and motivators.
Computer networked communications make this additionally conceivable. Plus the development of “free energy” technologies to render the fossil fuel age obsolete. I would invite those skeptics of the latter possibility to visit the Substack of Wade Frazier.
Yes. Voluntary federation can be global in scope. The currently existing global postal organization is based on voluntary federation.
There is certainly a need within a genuine communist system for decentralization as well as centralization. Local organizations are more appreciative of local circumstances and problems. The local should be permitted to make the decisions that directly affect the local citizens. Democratically delegated higher, more central bodies must, however, make decisions that affect their broader constituencies.
The local can be the locus of resistance to tyranny at and corruption of the non-local, more central bodies, when they threaten to arise. Within the structure of democratic centralism within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, Lenin demanded "local party autonomy" and attacked the Menshevik national leadership for suppressing it. (Lenin, Freedom to Criticize and Unity of Action, 1906, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/may/20c.htm)
But the confederal approach is one of absolute independence of each locale from others, and from more central, delegated bodies. This is a recipe for chaos, based purely on idealist sentiment that everybody will get along because of an ethos of "sharing". That's ridiculous. That's not enough to counter our human tendency toward greed, selfishness, hot dogging, lone rangering, authoritarian compliance with demagoguery, etc. "Things [will inevitably] fall apart [when] the center cannot hold!" I have observed plenty of this dysfunction locally and nationally, in the medical freedom movement itself: in GACR, and the NYC Medical Freedom Alliance/Party.
The ideal democratic communist system, preserves local relative AUTONOMY. There's a balance between the prerogatives enjoyed by the more central bodies to make the decisions, including the centrally planned economic decisions, and the more local bodies which both carry out the plan, make decisions appropriate to the locale, and give feedback for the central's decisions--including banding together with other locales if the Center gets too big for its britches, and starts becoming corrupt and tyrannical
Here I am reminded of some of the words from Hamlet's first soliloquy:
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
This in turn reminds me of the great book by another Marx-Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden.
Nature--and that includes our own inner individual and group psychological (See Freud's paper on the subject of the latter) nature, with its potential for both the angelic, and the demonic, and everything in between--must not be allowed just to take its own course, otherwise we have a regression to the howling wilderness. But neither must we permit the machine, the big city, the Party Center, the Single Party State, the vaxx crazy medical establishment, etc.,--governed themselves by these "natural" demonic, selfish, power hungry tendencies--to suppress our internal and external nature.
The ideal, as L. Marx pointed out--the ideal which originally motivated celebrants of the newly "discovered" country of America--was a WEEDED garden. Where our conscious reason reins supreme, to bring out the BEST in our nature, but not allow nature to run roughshod.
The democratic communist system makes such conscious, yet sensitive and liberatory application of human reason to our own nature, external nature, and to our own society.
What John is proposing instead is in fact a nostalgic fantasy. His motto really should be "Let Nature Reign Supreme--as in the Middle Ages, or even further back, in Tribal Society"
Here I'm reminded of one of Peggy Lee's songs from the film Tom Thumb. "Tura lura lu!" We'll all just "share", and be happy, in our own little hobbit towns.
And didn't John say that we could still enjoy "private property"?
That'll make all the petite bourgeoisie, those champions still of the Single Tax, ebullient!
What "paid subscriptions" are you talking about? Have you even bothered to look and notice that I accept no paid subscriptions? So much for the nefarious motives you ascribe to me, uh?
Sorry, I didn't know that. But certainly it's nice to continually bask in all that popularity. And what would happen if you started sounding like you actually were a Marxist, John? If you actually educated your readership, at whatever the cost, rather than pandered to their McCarthyite conditioning? Probably all, to borrow a line from John Lennon, "vanish, in the haze!,"
No, no, no! Better to spout Hayek-ism, as you do in this article, rather than actually consider what Marxism has to offer!
What you're trying to do here is to reinstitute primitive communism--otherwise known as the tribal mode of production--on a purely IDEALISTIC basis, the basis of a sentiment for "sharing". Certainly that is modern, as well as tribal, but what Marx believed is that we must use the technological advances--like computers--to base modern communism on. Not touchy feelly, hippy dippy anarcho-communalism. That's just not going to work. Tribal society had a sentiment of sharing too. Again, look at Malinowski and Reich for an account of how this broke down, how the contradictions of this set the stage for the dawning of class society, beginning with the Asian bureaucratic mode of production.
But once again, Spritzler, you place abstractions like local community sovereignty over and above realistic, practical concerns about how this will actually work, and the problems involved--which, as I've indicated, would not just make the situation imperfect. It would make it impossible, a disaster of stratification and competition. But God forbid you should give this idealist abstraction up, and employ the technology we moderns have developed to solve these problems. No, that would involve "communist tyranny"! Horrors!