Physical or material planning is at the center of all the bourgeois attacks upon socialist planning. Here, we are warned, is the kernel of the entire abomination: the irrationality of a social order that cannot be submitted to the rigors of rational calculation based on the exchange of equivalents. The object is clearly heterogeneous. And indeed, the bourgeois economists have smelled the rat quite correctly. The primacy of the subject over the object is implicitly threatened. As Adorno writes, “[a]bstraction is the subject’s essence. This is why going back to what it is not must impress the subject as external and violent.”[1] Furthermore:

Carried through, the critique of identity is a groping for the preponderance of the object. Identitarian thinking is subjectivistic even when it denies being so. To revise that kind of thinking, to debit identity with untruth, does not bring subject and object into a balance, nor does it raise the concept of function to an exclusively dominant rôle in cognition; even when we merely limit the subject, we put an end to its power. Its own absoluteness is the measure by which the least surplus of nonidentity feels to the subject like an absolute threat. A minimum will do to spoil it as a whole, because it pretends to be a whole.[2]

Physical or material planning is consequently a restitution of immediacy. It signals the collapse of an entire social order based on mediation predicated upon a pretense of symmetry between the subject and the object, where the latter has been reduced to an object of cognition, and ultimately—calculation. Thus Adorno writes:

It is by passing to the object’s preponderance that dialectics is rendered materialistic. The object, the positive expression of nonidentity, is a terminological mask. […] When the categories of subject and object, both insoluble in the critique of knowledge, come to appear false—as not purely opposed to each other—this also means that the object’s objective side, the part of it which cannot be spiritualized, is called “object” only from the viewpoint of a subjectively aimed analysis in which the subject’s primacy seems beyond question.[3]

The argument might be reduced to a vulgar exclamation: “There is no such thing as ’steel’.”[4] Indeed, “steel” is a terminological mask that is most threatening when it is pulled down. And physical or material planning must pull it down if it is to attain reality. Although socialist planning cannot satisfy the criteria of rational calculation, it can still point at the inherent inadequacy of rational calculation as such, that is, rational calculation based upon a hypothesized identity, which permits the exchange of equivalents. In other words, the object can be made homogeneous only by means of the process of abstraction (social process of exchange), which ultimately hides the underlying heterogeneity. The exchange of equivalents is spurious in the last analysis, that is, it is adequate only historically, in an epoch of subject’s preponderance. Nonidentity nevertheless plagues the subject daily with problems that stem precisely from the consistent application of the identity principle. Since there is no such thing as “steel,” something must be posited externally to carry out the task of identification—the price of “steel.” Only thus can “steel” attain reality, only relatively, via the equilibrating subject. The problem has been solved only to the extent that it has been abstracted away. And physical or material planning only exposes this attempt at covering-up, whence the entire abomination springs back to life.

Footnotes

1. Adorno, T.W., Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973 (first published in 1966), p. 181.

2. Op. cit., p. 183.

3. Op. cit., pp. 192-193.

4. Wiles, P.J.D., Communist International Economics, New York and Washington: Praeger, 1969, p. 304.