economy favoring the bureaucracy, as was the case in Stalinist Russia? Obviously. But then the cause does not reside in the centralization itself, it lies. in the absence of workers democrac oliti-
on the national
(e)this obviously does not apply tv cases where raw materials, equipment goods and sometimes even means of consumption are centrally distributed, becoming veritable hotheds for germinating corrupted bureaucrats,
oS dw , wh
cal level.(6) This means that a genuine guarantee against bureaucratization depends on workers management at the enterprise level and workers democracy at the state level. Without this combination, even the autonomy of the enterprises will eliminate none of the authoritarian, bureaucratic and (often) erroneous character of economic decisions: made at the govern- -; ment level of the plan. With this. combination, the. centralization of investments. -~- priorities being democratically established, for example through a national congress of workers councils -= would not encourage bureaucratization, but on the contrary suppress one of its principal sources,
‘The Law of Value and Self-Management
"He ightening material incentives" in the enterprises cannot be «a. "stimulant" in the question of investments, But "heightening material. incentives" in the self-management collectives can actually stimulate continual growth of production and productivity among the enterprises,
_ Certainly, under a regime of genuine socialist democracy, creative enthusiasm, the free development of all the capacities of. invention and: organization of the proletariat, constitute a powerful motor for the growth of production. But it would be a grave idealist and voluntarist error to suppose that in a climate of poverty -- inevitable in an underdeveloped country immediately following the victory of the socialist revo-= lution ~~ this enthusiasm could, last. Tong. without a suffictent material , substructure.
The example. of the Soviet Union, where the proletariat: gave proof of” an enthusiasm and spirit of self-sacrifice without parallel in-the first ' years-after the October Revolution, is instructive in this respect: “a yong period of deprivation ended inevitably in mounting passivity of the workers, daily material concerns. taking precedence over attentiveness to meetings.
It is therefore imperative to link self-management. to the. possibility for the workers to immediately judge the success. of each effort at increasing productive by the elevation of their standard of living. The simplest and most transparent technique is that of distributing a part of the net revenue of the enterprise among the workers in the form of one or more months of bonus wages, the amount increasing or diminishing automatically. with the level of revenue, The hereasing collective material interest of the workers in the management of the enterprises moreover is superior to piece wages, inasmuch as it does not introduce division and conflicts inthe workers collectivity, inasmuch as it corresponds better to contemporary technique, which places less and less importance on individual output. and.
(6)" only: ‘tie “gosordination ‘of these three elements, state planning, the market and Soviet democracy, can assure correct guidance of the. economy. of. thé epoch of transition and assure, not the removal of the imbalances in a few years (this is utopian), but their diminution and by that the simplification of the bases of the dictatorship of the proletariat until the time when new victories of the revolution will widen the arena of socialist planning and reconstruct its system," (Leon Trotsky: "The Soviet Economy in Danger." Available in French in Tome I of Ecrits 1928-1940, p. 127.)
more and more importance on the rational organization of labor,
Self-management (and not mere workers control) seems to be the ideal model for organizing socialist enterprises, But it by no means hinders more or less unlimited competition among enterprises, which flows from their autonomy in-the domain of prices and investments. This autonomy cannot but. reproduce a series of evils inherent to the capitalist regime: monopoly positions exploited in the formation of prices and revenues; . efforts to defend these monopolies by "hiding" discoveries and technical improvements; waste and duplication in the field of investments; high cost of errors in decision, revealed a posteriori on the market (including the shutting down of enterprises); reappearance of unemployment, etc., etc. Useless and detrimental from the economic point of view, it by no means constitutes a sufficient guarantee against bureaucratization, as we have indicated above, . ae
In this connection, the polemic of Lenin and Trotsky against the theses of the "Workers Opposition" is still completely valid, Marxism is not to be confused with the anarchical doctrine of trade-unionism, The genuine guarantee of workers power lies on the political levels it is on the state level that it must be established; any other solution is utopian; that is, unworkable in the long run and a source for the reappearance of a powerful. bureaucracy. oe -
For all these reasons, self-management by no means bars wider recourse to the "law of value" in relation to centralized planning.(7) The fundamental data of the problem.remain the same. It is necessary to carry out strict calculations of production costs to show in the case of each conmmo~ dity- whether its production has béen subsidized or not. But nothing calls for the conclusion that prices must be "determined by the law of valus," that is, by the law of supply and demand, If such a conclusion still has some meaning with regard to the means of.consumption, it is senseless for the means of production which, we repeat, aré not commodities, at least in the great majority of cases, And even means of production which are still commodities -- those produced by the private or co-operative sector for delivery to the state, and those which the state furnishes to private enterprises or co-operatives -~ cannot be "sold at their value" without encourag= ing under. certain conditions private primitive accumulation at the expense of socialist accumulation, But, if the means of production are not sold
_(7)Certain Yugoslav authors take quite correct positions in this respect. ‘See for example Dr, Radivoj Uvalic: "While the open market can be widely utilized, it cannot be the sole or even the principal regulator of the sociomeconomic relations of a socialist country." And. again: "The importance of -the planned guidance of economic development under the conditions of socialism lies first of all in the possibility that is offered of considering profitability from the point of view of the economy as a whole and not from the point of view of each particular unit of the economy. ., This is the case in all branches of high concentration of capital Le], such as the production of the means of production and raw materials, which could never be developed sufficiently on the basis of the accidental play of the. market, with the rate of profit as the sole stimulate." (In: Socialist — Thought and Practice, No. 6, 1962, pp. 47 and 55,)
Nat their value," the "value" of the means of consumption is itself pro=-- | foundly modified.
Prices are, then, - instruments of socialist planning and cannot be anything else in the @poch. of the transition from capitalism to socialisn. if you say instrument of planning you likewise say instrument for determining the. distribution of the national revenue between consumption andinves omens an instrument. for determining the distribution of revenues among the. different classes and layers of the nation. To leave the determination of this distribution to the “law of value," is to leave it in the final analysis to the "laws of the market," to the "law of supply and . demand," that is to economic automatism, And economic automatism would rapidly take us" back to. an economy. of the semicolonial type.
But to say that prices cannot be determined by the law, of value, does. not at all signify that they can be independent — of the latter, Society can never distribute more values than it has created without progressively destroying its, accumulated wealth and impoverishing itself increasingly in the absolute sense’ of the term, The total sum of prices must therefore be equal to the total sum of value of the commodities produced (granting that there has been no monetary: depreciation). The distribution of certain products =~ in goods or vouchers -=- below their value (subsidies!) auto- ~ matically signifies a distribution of other products above their value, Without strict calculation of production costs3; without bookkeeping aided : by an objective criterion; without a kind of double entry system. that. faithfully registers, for each product, alongside the price. fixed by the — state the real cost and the subsidy (or. the: tax),there is: not only-no apa possibility for genuinély scientific planning, - -there is above all no stimalus for the fundamental economic dynamic of the epoch of transition -- the dynamic that progressively elevates one new branch of industry. after another to the point of rendering it "competitive" in relation to prices on. the world market, up to the time socialism announces its. next triumph when socialist industry as a whole operates with a productivity superior bo that of the most advanced capitalist industry. .
At that moment, the ‘Wlaw of value" could theoretically govern the dynamic of the workers state (or more exactly: the workers states as an international whole; because it appears excluded that this situation could be first obtained "in a single country"). But at.the precise moment when. it is on the point of triumphing, its reason for being disappears, The highest level of productivity attained under capitalism in all its branches commodity production withers away. . In the workers state, "the law of value" cannot channel investments except to the precise degree fnat it withers away and to the degree that along with it all the economic categories, products of a relative scarcity of material resources, likewise wither away.’ December 1, 1963 . CO [The end, |
Directeur-Gérant Pierre FRANK,