The experience of the so-called socialist countries has led to an association in people's minds of planning, bureaucratic centralism, nationalization and absence of democracy. One can identify three main arguments advanced in favour of the market as a means of realizing democracy: the virtues of the "invisible hand", the struggle against bureaucracy, and self-management. But social relations, the property relations which emerge from the market, will imprint their own logic on the effects of that market, on who benefits from it, on who determines what is efficient and what is
It is clearly true that in the field of consumption as of production, freedom of choice and initiative were stifled by bureaucratic constraint. And it is true that, with the suppression of commodity mechanisms, the consumers found themselves up against bureaucratic monopolies which imposed their production with all its defects.
Whether it concerned the consumer or the enterprise which must provide itself with equipment or raw materials, the absence of choice was linked to the absence of competition, and to the "passive role" of money (prices do not reflect relations of supply and demand and are not capable of influencing investments). One cannot deny one of the real virtues of money and of the market: to permit decentralized choices, making it possible for the judgement of the consumer and the diversity of tastes to express themselves and influence what is produced. Those who dispose of sufficient capital can, eventually, satisfy at the same time in which the producers shape the market
(in their technical choices, in their pres sures on the models of consumption, and
There is, secondly, the type of needs which are taken into account: it is necessary to be able to pay a sufficient amount to be able to attract the investor. The agricultural overproduction that the GATT
(General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade) negotiations are attempting to limit takes place alongside famines and growing poverty in the world. What democracy of choice is there for the excluded and the marginalized, and for all those who, among the equals, are a little less equal than the others?
### Radical needs
But above all, in a world which wishes to be more humane and more respectful of the environment, how is it possible to ignore the breadth of the needs which cannot be adequately expressed by money (ethical, ecological, collective, and cultural needs, the need to live and to produce in new ways, the need for security and the full development of capabilities)?
But, it might be argued, if the market is rejected as an overall response, the only alternative is bureaucracy and centralism which, as we have seen, leads to worst catastrophes. This is indeed possible, but not inevitable. Planning does not necessarily entail control by a bureaucratic centre over every detail. The technological and informational means exist today to make very wide decentralization compatible with some strategic central choices.
The need to ensure democracy as much as the efficiency of these choices means that they should be limited to the most important priorities. Beyond this, decentralization does not necessarily imply the market, any more than the market necessarily means less state bureaucracy. The withering away of the state and the struggle against bureaucracy mean first and foremost the democratization of institutions, their transparency and their control by those affected by their decisions; it means therefore the extension of direct relations of a non-market nature between consumers and producers which can ensure qualitative judgements about what is produced, the search for forms of local and regional participative democracy, and so on. It has by no means been proved that this is utopian, whereas one can find
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PLAN, MARKET, DEMOCRACY From one dogma to another
many examples of such a need and such a potential in today's world.
Symmetrically, the capitalist experience, but also that of Yugoslavia, have demonstrated that market decentralization is compatible with the bureaucratic cancer. Nor does the break up of the empires imply a greater democracy, given the existence of local regimes capable of exploiting nationalism to reinforce their own powers with methods similar to those of the former masters, at the same time as extending market relations.
Finally, the bureaucracy can attach itself parasitically to the market as it can to the plan. It can attempt to make money work for its own benefit, or to put itself at the service of new capitalist masters who desire, not a less powerful state and more democracy, but a strong state under their
Certainly, it might be argued that self-management combined with the market could provide the necessary antidote to
The argument appears reasonable. And during whole historic phases, in Yugoslavia, then in Poland, self-management demands have been summed up in the "three selfs": self-management, self-determination. amounts to a model of self-management at the level of separate enterprises, linked by the market. This latter appears as an emancipator in contrast to a plan (and a state) previously omnipresent and coun-
And it is certainly true that the taking of responsibility for management should mean the rejection of obligatory suppliers and administrative orders. But the Yugoslav experience shows that self-management linked by the market is compatible with the absence of democracy: one could even say that in many respects the market prolonged the rule of the sin-
From this point of view it could be said that the initial goal of Gorbachev's perestroika was to incorporate commodity mechanisms, considered efficient and compatible with a degree of liberalization, into the rule of the party. When the market operates, responsibilities are more diluted and economic questions are less directly political. Thus the question of democracy is avoided by shifting responsibility to the "experts" on the one hand and the "laws of the market" on the other. The delegation of powers, passivity and the behaviour of the wage-earners then tend to develop to the detriment of the responsibility of self-management.
In substance, this is what happened in Yugoslavia, although there the extension of the market was accompanied by an extension of self-management rights (and thus a certain level of enterprise democracy). In practice, the workers abandoned everything that seemed to do with the more obscure monetary or "financial"
Billay questions (all the more obscure in that the "experts" presented by them without great clarity and without alternative choices). Defence of jobs and incomes
They concentrated on the sole "congoal which was left to them: defence of jobs, incomes and collective consumption, without any overall vision of economic interdependence, whether at the enterprise, locality or branch level and without any overall coherence of the atomized choices. Consequently, the know-how of the workers was not really management had an effect on working conditions and the organization of production and of distribution.
But what was needed was for self-management to be applied to "concrete
, the producer of use values consumed and realized by human beings. It needed to function all the way up from the workshop to the enterprise, from the enterprise to the locality and to the region, or again to the branch. In other words what was needed was to allow the organization of production and distribution to be a part of everyday life, so that exercised at the level of the enterprise and so that criteria other than those of the market would be used to determine efficient and just reorganizations.
That is why it is necessary to start from (human) goals to redefine the means. These could combine plan, market and property relations, with no general recipe on the best combination, but with a central thread: social and political democracy as preconditions for making any decision. The market which was linked to self-management in Yugoslavia was not really controlled by the freely associated collectives of workers and consumers; it was not subordinate to
PLAN, MARKET, DEMOCRACY democratically determined objectives.
But neither did it have all the attributes of a capitalist market: competition for profit was not the regulator of investments. The legal definition of the workers as managers (whatever the reality) was combined with a critique of capitalist exploitation or enrichment on the back of the work of others. Capitalist private property was strictly limited and no capital market existed. In the same way, self-management rights would have had no sense for the workers if they had meant redundancies. But there was thus a problem of overall coherence: capitalist mechanisms were introduced and rejected at the same time; there existed no non-capitalist regulator to reabsorb wastage and disequilibriums (disequilibriums between branches, foreign trade deficit, inflation, unemployment through insufficient creation of jobs, regional inequalities).
Market combined with bureaucracy
The market had replaced the plan without being capable of resolving these problems; moreover, it was combined with bureaucratic choices (prestige investments by local regimes). Above all losses were never sanctioned by restructurings and the closures of enterprises; the reciprocal indebtedness between enterprises and the trade imbalance, financed by massive credits in the course of the 1970s, sounded the death-knell for the system.
Self-management was inefficient faced with the market. But one could deduce from this that self-management needed other regulators to develop its potential for progress. However, instead of locating the cause of the crisis in the lack of democracy behind the commodity relations, self-management has been held responsible for the inefficiency of the market. skidamose in Poland had also demand. 15 March 2, 1992 • #223 International Viewpoint
PLAN, MARKET, DEMOCRACY ed more market relations and more self-management in opposition to a plan dominated by the party/state. At first this did not mean privatization but a call for the socialization of state property (putting it under the control of society).
Until recently, the USSR was still in a phase where the demand for self-management was associated with increased market decentralization (in the miners strike for example. But the decrees of Yeltsin after the failed coup d'état brought the ex-USSR into line with the other countries of Eastern Europe.
It is not only, nor even primarily, the bureaucrats of the exnomenklatura who have been expelled from the enterprises with the dissolution of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). They know how to reconvert themselves in line with the new dogma of privatization and to benefit from it. It is the right of organization in the enterprises which is under attack, as will soon be any form of workers' self-management.
As in Poland, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, popular or workers' shareholdings will eventually be proposed on condition that they remain dispersed and compatible with the logic of the right of dismissal according to market criteria and mechanisms. Experts on privatization like Jeffrey Sachs repeat it often enough: for the market to function as the regulator of investments, "clear" property relations are needed, adapted to the demands of market competition.
This requires at least a hard core of "true proprietors" functioning on the basis of the profit criteria. It is necessary to suppress any illusion of self-management disconnected from the rules of capitalism. The programme is clear, even if it is far from being proved that a market, without self-management, will assure the resolution of the crisis and economic development.
It is hardly necessary to point out the extent to which democracy itself is threatened: the fiercest partisans of market liberalism have now abandoned the initial discourse linking market and democracy. Pinochet has become the model and the so-called liberal press does not shrink from saying that the market can never be imposed without a strong state.
Conflicts certainly exist on the nature of this state itself: should it be federal Or republican in countries like the USSR or Yugoslavia? But this amounts to a question of power, not democracy.
Differences also exist on alternative strategies to "sweeten the pill". But the 16 substance is clear. Democracy is totally subordinate to the choice already made by International Viewpoint #223 • March 2, 1992 the few — "market democracy". On the one hand, the programmes and changes advanced by the new ruling teams have never been the object of democratic debate.
On the other hand, "democracy" is in any case limited to electoral pluralism. Democracy in everyday life, in the workplaces, in making the big choices for society, is out of the question. Worse: we have passed from the reign of the arbitrary bureaucrat, of censorship, of corruption, and the dogma of an apologetic pseudo-Marxism, to the same evils put in the service of a neo-liberalism which harks back to the 19th century.
The new intellectual terrorism
There are increasing signs of a new intellectual terrorism against any critical approach towards the market and capitalism. Instead of making an analysis of actually existing systems, instead of assessing the already visible effects of the remedies proposed, it is enough to invert the colours of that which was yesterday black or white into a new official propa-
As is now well known, universalist recipes and "models" lead to dead ends. If certain "socialist" words have been devalued, the hollow new "capitalist" formulae have not aided an understanding of what is at stake.
Returning to our point of departure, the market economy means in reality a generalized market economy, with labour and capital markets, a market in the means of commodity based on profit. This objective should be rejected not out of dogmatism but because it will lead the countries concerned, in the context of their crisis and of the world capitalist market, to colossal
This does not mean the rejection of all market mechanisms or the rejection of a certain use of money, including a recourse to private capital and to the world market. The notion of a "mixed economy" is not really any more clear than that of the market economy, for, in a certain sense, all existing economies mix diverse forms of property, different mechanisms of management, features borrowed from diverse modes of production.
The real question is: who decides? What is the dominant logic? Or again: private investment, exchanges, the market or the plan, in order to do what? The essential question is that of control by the interestThere is no political economy above systems, societies and the human beings who compose This truism needs to be repeated today, when, in the name of universal pseudo-economic laws, the intention is to suppress all choices of society. But who are the "interested parties"? Individuals, classes, sexes, national, regional, international communities? As each human being is endowed with multiple facets, the full satisfaction of their needs cannot be realized through one simple method of taking decisions and of control: citizens are at the same time producers and consumers, inserted in collective relations at various levels, affected in their lives by problems of a different nature, in variable spatial and temporal conditions.
One of the main issues in the coming debate on the modalities of a democracy adequate to this complexity is to determine what is the right "place" and the right, efficient, mechanism for decision making and control, according to the problem which is to be resolved.
The suppression of private property does not automatically lead to socialism. But the "forced privatization" currently underway will be an adventure as disastrous as the "forced collectivization" of sad memory.
If it is necessary to get rid of the illusion of planners supposedly able in advance to know the totality of needs and respond to them in a centralized fashion, free commodity competition in an unequal world would have no more success. It is just as capable of producing "totalitarianism" and concealing relations of social and national oppression as cruel as those of the bureaucratic dictatorship.
To invent a radical, economic, social and political democracy, capable of subordinating the economy to human ends, is not a simple task, in the face of an increasingly globalized economy and mounting barbarism. *