6 - Planning

Summary

ORIGINS OF THE IDEA OF PLANNING

In considering the origins of the idea of planning, it may be noted at the outset that war communism was not a planning system, but a system of economic centralization. The idea of planning took shape within it as a natural outcome of a tendency towards full central control. As far as intellectual sources of the idea of planning are concerned, the Marxian analysis of capitalism is more easily seen as an ideological rather than a theoretical source.

Marx's works did not suggest much about the mechanism which would govern economic relations in a socialist system. Some hints, however, may be derived from the perspective which the Marxian analysis opened with regard to the functioning of competitive capitalism and the perverse effects of competition on the production and distribution of values. The Marxian analysis focused on the anarchy of the competitive market, the inevitability of economic crises within this mode of production and the waste of resources which they entailed. Conversely, Marx attributed to the socialist society a capacity for foresight and initiative in promoting future developments that the market economy would not have, or would ‘necessarily’ ignore. Marx's excursions into future socialist societies were marginal, accidental and scarcely suited to further elaboration. They may, however, have influenced proselytes in their search for certainties as milestones on the dark road to socialism.

Das Kapital offered few suggestions as to the possible organization of a socialist society. Marx underlines the importance of accounting as ‘control and ideal synthesis of a process’, which capitalism needed more than did a society of craftsmen, and socialism more than capitalism.