1. There is no doubt that Marx thought of social planning under socialism as a conscious activity of associated producers, and not as an activity of the state (via the proverbial “planning board”).[1] But he thought of a society in which economic laws (rooted in the Law of Value) are already quite weak, or non-existent, so that the conscious activity of the associated producers had the function of replacing these laws, and not the function of applying them.[2] To the extent that these laws operate (that is, that commodity production is not abolished), planning is not a free activity, regardless of who is the subject of planning (associated producers or the planning board). It may be concluded that in the latter case we may consider as freedom only the regulation of social processes in the context of these laws (where freedom is conceived as the recognition of necessity, that is, in Hegelian fashion).

2. Now, whether we use mathematical models in planning or we design an organization to execute a plan is irrelevant in this respect. The latter possibility implies the “preplanning” of an organizational “computational device” which is thus constrained as much as a planning model, even though it may be politically more viable, since it leaves a semblance of decision-making freedom.[3] Both of these possibilities, however, are often rejected by cyberneticians, who claim that it is impossible to plan in the usual sense of the word, but that in any case planning is not necessary for the regulation of social processes. Their objective can be expressed by the objective formulated by Beer for his Homeostat, “a machine for adapting a system to its environment,”[4] together with his postulate concerning the machine’s independence—”to be in control is to be out of control.”[5] We again have an automatic process which pretends to dissolve any need for societal involvement. Rational control of social processes is reduced to the design and construction of a machine; once this is accomplished there is no place for rational control, that is, there must not exist such a control! Besides, once the adaptation is conceived in terms of exclusion of the “environment” from societal concerns, the “environment” has been effectively swept under the rug.

3. Wiener was partly aware of this problem and of the possible totalitarian misuse of cybernetics. It is interesting to mention here that Wiener recognized “the control of the means of communication” as the most effective and most important of all anti-homeostatic factors in society.[6] However, Wiener’s thinking was locked into the sharp distinction between scientific and non-scientific as rational and non-rational. His intuition that one of the keys to the problem is in the liberation of society’s communication channels was left unexamined.

Habermas exposes these problems in the classical concept of planning and in the cybernetic concepts of regulation and control, and provides fragments of the theoretical basis for what may be called “discursive planning.”[7] The key to the problem is in the freeing-up of societal potentialities for rational discourse, only by means of which we may arrive at truly relevant solutions to social problems, since such solutions are based on consensus, while at the same time provide preconditions for human emancipation.

4. Habermas, however, fails systematically to explore the preconditions for such a discourse. He mentions in passing that “advanced capitalism” puts up strong resistance to unrestricted communication, since it is “structurally dependent on a depoliticized public realm.”[8]

Elsewhere he analyses the inter-personal preconditions for the applicability of the “consensus theory of truth”:

[The] underlying consensus is formed in the reciprocal recognition of at least four claims of validity which speakers announce to each other: the comprehensibility of the utterance, the truth of its propositional component, the correctness and appropriateness of its performatory component, and the authenticity of the speaking subject. The claim to comprehensibility must be realized in actuality, if and to the extent to which reaching an understanding is to be attained in a communication. The claim to authenticity can only be realized in interaction: in the interaction it will be shown in time, whether the other side is “in truth or honestly” participating or is only pretending to engage in communicative action or is in fact only behaving strategically. The case is otherwise with respect to the assertory claim to the truth of utterances and the claim to the correctness of norm for action, or on the other hand, the appropriateness of norms for valuation which we are to follow. These are claims of validity that can be proven only in discourse. The factual recognition of these claims bases itself in every case, even that of error, on the possibility of the discursive validation of the claims made. Discourses are performances, in which we seek to show the grounds of cognitive utterances.[9]

It should be mentioned that it is obvious that the “discursively substantiated theoretical statements (which survive argumentation) can in turn be relevant only to specific contexts of application: statements about phenomenal domain of things and events […] can only be translated back into orientations for goal-directed rational action […].”[10] However, this is not a restriction as far as social planning is concerned, since every planning effort deals with a specific situation, clearly located in space and time.

5. Again, these rather detailed preconditions do not define a socioeconomic system that would satisfy it, but provide only a set of negative criteria. Here I refer primarily to the preconditions which socialist revolutions are supposed to provide. Neither will this note analyze these preconditions systematically. It seems, however, that at least two necessary, but not sufficient, conditions of central importance must be mentioned: first, the abolition of private ownership in the means of production, and second, the institutionalization of socialist self-government, which implies a historical movement toward the social ownership in the means of production and away from intermediary forms, such as state and collective ownership.

As Marcuse has argued, paraphrasing Hegel, “reason cannot govern reality unless reality has become rational in itself.”[11] Rational society is a precondition of rational discourse.

Footnotes

1. This passage from Capital (quoted in Istvan Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation, Harper and Row, 1972, p. 216) is exemplary in this respect:

The realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production that satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins the development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.

2. Economy of time, however, remains the first economic law of socialism. Marx discusses this in the Grundrisse, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973, pp. 172-173:

On the basis of communal production, the determination of time remains, of course, essential. The less time the society requires to produce wheat, cattle, etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or mental. Just as in the case of an individual, the multiplicity of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on economization of time. Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs; just as the individual has to distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Thus, economy of time, along with the planned distribution of labor time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production. It becomes law, there, to an even higher degree.

3. See, e.g., Benjamin N. Ward’s The Socialist Economy: A Study of Organizational Alternatives, New York: Random House, 1967. Ward presents J.M. Montias’ interpretation of the planning process in Soviet-type economies as an administrative procedure “equivalent to the power series expansion solution to a system of linear equations” (p. 45). Ward himself develops a similar scheme in Chapter VI of his book (”Classical Soviet Economic Organization,” pp. 63-101). He concludes:

Perhaps the most striking feature of this procedure is that it produces a complex result with a bare minimum of calculation; indeed the planning bureau has no need for calculating machines more powerful than slide rule and abacus (p. 80).

In other words, an individual member of such an administration is actually reduced to a simple part of a machine, to a manual worker.

4. Beer, S., Cybernetics and Management, New York: Science Editions, 1964 (first published in 1959), p. 142.

5. Op. cit., p. 78.

6. Wiener, N., Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1961 (first published in 1948), p. 160; see also all of Chapter VIII, “Information, Language, and Society.”

7. Habermas, J., Toward a Rational Society, Boston: Beacon Press, 1970; and Theory and Practice, Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.

8. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, op. cit., pp. 120-121.

9. Habermas, Theory and Practice, op. cit., p. 18.

10. Op. cit., p. 20.

11. Marcuse, H., Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, Boston: Beacon Press, 1960 (first published in 1941), p. 7.