If planning is a conscious activity of the associated producers, whose objective is to govern the affairs of the community in general, then we must consider the fact that social consciousness is not equally distributed over a population. This has far-reaching organizational consequences.[1]

Addendum I (October 10, 1987)

This argument has a distinctly Austrian flavor. It would not be surprising to discover that von Mises or von Hayek advanced it in one of their pamphlets against collectivist planning. One of the organizational consequences I must have had in mind when I wrote this note is the very phenomenon of the communist party—the clandestine repository and the harsh arbiter of social consciousness. Now I see another far-reaching consequence lurking behind Lukács (and Gramsci, of course): the party boss. Behold, the old bastard emerges from the background as if by miracle!

Addendum II (May 8, 1990)

What we must ask the reader to keep constantly in mind throughout this book, then, is the fact of the necessary and irremediable ignorance on everyone’s part of most of the particular facts that determine the actions of all the several members of human society. This may at first seem to be a fact so obvious and incontestable as hardly to deserve mention, and still less to require proof. Yet the result of not constantly stressing it is that it is only too readily forgotten. This is so mainly because it is a very inconvenient fact which makes both our attempts to explain and our attempts to influence intelligently the processes of society very much more difficult, and which places severe limits on what we can say or do about them. There exists therefore a great temptation, as a first approximation, to begin with the assumption that we know everything needed for full explanation and control. This provisional assumption is often treated as something of little consequence that can later be dropped without much effect on the conclusions. Yet this necessary ignorance of most of the particulars which enter the order of a Great Society is the source of the central problem of all social order and the false assumption by which it is provisionally put aside is mostly never explicitly abandoned but merely conveniently forgotten. The argument than proceeds as if that ignorance did not matter.

From Friedrich A. Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. I, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973, p. 12.

Footnote

1. Cf. Lukács’ “Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization,” in History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971 (first published in 1922), pp. 295-342; also Lukács’ Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971 (first published in 1924).