Participatory Planning Through Negotiated Coordination

Description

PAT DEVINE:

"Part of a project that is designed to assist in the revival of the movement for socialism by developing a well-defined model of participatory democratic planning. The aim is to take seriously both the negative experience of the Soviet model of administrative command planning and the positive insights of the Austrian school’s recent reworking of the socialist calculation debate. The principal objective of the model of participatory planning through negotiated coordination is to outline a possible architecture for the institutions and processes through which a self-governing society might operate. I understand a self-governing society to be one in which the diverse voluntary associations constituting civil society exercise control over both the state and the economy. In relation to the economy this means that the freely associated citizens, not just producers, decide on the use to be made of society’s productive potential, rather than this being determined by the coercion of the state or the coercion of market forces. A self-governing society is one in which those who are affected by an activity participate equally in the decision making relating to that activity, in proportion to the extent to which they are affected by it. For this to be real, rather than just formal, requires equal access to the resources needed for effective participation. In addition to the abolition of the class division between those who own the means of production and those who don’t, and of the exploitation and oppression arising from that relationship, the abolition of the social division of labor, ªthe antithesis between intellectual and physical labour (Marx, 1974, 347), is also necessary.

...

My model of participatory planning is specifically designed to enable the ex ante coordination of investment to take place through negotiation. It is based on a distinction between market exchange and market forces. Market exchange involves the sale/ purchase of the output of existing productive capacity. The operation of market forces is the process through which changes in the structure of productive capacity brought about by investment and disinvestment are coordinated in capitalism (and market socialism). The model outlined below retains market exchange but replaces market forces by negotiated coordination."

(http://gesd.free.fr/devine.pdf)

Discussion

Critique by David Laibman

"Pat Devine’s conception of negotiated coordination resonates well with the non-market participatory planning model of Albert and Hahnel (summarized and debated elsewhere in this collection). The Austrian-derived conception of local, and tacit, knowledge is important; there undoubtedly are aspects of social and economic activity that cannot be previsioned into a single computable central plan. The emphasis on participation is also at the heart of our common enterprise: socialism is nothing if not social and economic democracy, the extension beyond formal political democracy to the core of human life. In Devine’s model, however, one central element negotiated coordination appears to me to be underdeveloped. The procedure, as described, seems to involve endless dialog, debate, negotiation participation perhaps taken to excessive levels. In my paper for this issue, I raised the question: is participation something to be maximized, or optimized? I believe the question is important; the ªnot enough free eveningsº charge against socialism seems to strike with particular force against a model consisting of myriad ªnegotiated coordination bodies,º and the task remains for us to find a middle ground between regulation of society by a depoliticized automation process, on one side, and a vista of endless and wearying mobilization and discussion, on the other. There is the additional consideration raised in the market socialist literature (drawing upon mainstream free market ideology): one must wonder how much negotiation and coordination would be necessary to replace the fine structure of detail set in place by the spontaneous market. Any doubts about this will feed immediately into the position Devine is most resolutely opposing: ªperhaps the market is the only way to do it after all.º Looking for a source of the problem, I stumble upon this: Devine states repeatedly that his model represents a third way, ªan alternative to state coercion and the coercion of market forces.º The model seeks, we are told, to ªtake seriously both the negative experience of the Soviet model of administrative command planning and the positive insights of the Austrian school’s recent reworking of the socialist calculation debate.º Austrians to one side for the moment, I find this characterization of the Soviet experience (ªadministrative command planningº) to be inadequate. Devine’s programmatic opposition to ªstate coercionº as well as ªmarket coercionº forces him (and many others who think along similar lines) to ignore the inherently political (i.e., state-al) character of the system of negotiated coordination bodies he is proposing, and therefore to undertheorize them. Throughout his discussion, Devine recognizes aspects of this enormous problem: there are enterprises, and negotiated coordination bodies; since negotiation must also be taking place among the diverse interests at the level of the enterprise, we have in effect two levels of coordination bodies. Moreover, at one point Devine speaks also of ªeconomy-wide plan variants,º suggesting that there is in his scheme despite the repeated denunciation of Soviet ªcentralº planning some sort of overall, or central body, which would have to be constituted either via representative electoral principles or by lot (as in the Cockshott-Cottrell proposal). In short, there is a political structure, and it is formally hierarchical (to use an out-of-favor word). Were this not the case, Devine’s model would look very much like that of Albert and Hahnel, stressing horizontal iteration among work and consumption collectives, and problems of atomism, cyclical instability, social isolation of collectives, excessively individuated consciousness, and endless meetings, etc., would re-emerge. We should remember that Marxism became a political force originally in reaction to the confounding of state and class power in the early working-class movement. (Of the two, class is by far the more difficult to grasp.) Devine’s model, like many other present-day socialist projections, collapses the long maturation from lower-phase to higher-phase communism, ignoring the huge literature on the political economy of socialism and the gradual attenuation-via-transformation of state power, as objective conditions (yes, I know, another time-worn phrase) make this possible. Undertheorizing the political constitution of the negotiated coordination bodies goes hand-in-hand with insufficient detailing of the economic coordination problem, in the absence of markets. Devine emphasizes investment and growth decisions as against production decisions; the former are more agreeable to his vision of social ownership and participation. But it is much less clear that ªnegotiated coordinationº will be able to manage the intricate consistent network of activity levels, material flows, etc., characteristic of a modern economy. I think we will need both the Cockshott-Cottrell supercomputer matrix inversions and Devine’s attention to tacit and local knowledge. The key is to develop and extend multilevel iterative coordination, which both entails participatory and partially devolved solution of the equations and derivation of computed prices, and incorporates locally specific knowledge and initiative. The problem, evidently, for many socialists, is that the multilevel (or comprehensive) model (see Laibman, 1992, 2001) has its roots in Soviet practice, for which some simple ªcommand centralº conception was no longer relevant by the mid-1960s, and completely eclipsed by the early 1980s (before Gorbachev, it should be noted). Failure to incorporate the crucial element of vertical iteration what Alfred Zauberman (1967) called the ªdecomposition principleº is keeping my socialism-visualizing comrades from finding the most promising way to synthesize participation with rigorous calculation and efficiency; dynamism and innovation with stability and equality. A final note on ªabolishing the social division of labor.º Like other ideas such as abolishing money and replacing it with ªlabor tokensº (wrongly attributed to Marx, by the way), or abolishing differentiation of pay scales, this replaces a long evolution of social conditions and consciousness with an act of voluntaristic fiat, enshrined in the word ªabolition.º Devine wants each of us to be a) unskilled (to the extent necessary), b) skilled, c) creative, d) caring, and e) managerial, all within the same single lifetime. He does not ask us whether each of us wants to be all of these things, or whether in each case this is going to be possible. In short, he preempts the necessary ongoing dialog about creating the material conditions for attenuating, and finally eliminating, distinctions among categories of work and between work and ªleisure,º and changing long-ingrained cultural attitudes. In relation to this issue, and to the equally important one of the degree of wage equality, we should wait and ask: not only what people as individuals will want, but for a continuing, collective, democratic determination concerning what policies will actually work best in the long run to promote the development of socialist activity and consciousness."

(http://gesd.free.fr/devine.pdf)

Source

* Article: Participatory Planning Through Negotiated Coordination. PAT DEVINE. Science & Society, Vol. 66, No. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 88-91 (special issue on socialist economic organization)

URL = http://gesd.free.fr/devine.pdf

More information

Bibliography:

• Adaman, Fikret, and Pat Devine. 1994.

1. Socialist Renewal: Lessons from the `Calculation Debate’.º Studies in Political Economy, 43. . 1996.
2. The Economic Calculation Debate: Lessons for Socialists.º Cambridge Journal of Economics, 20:5. . 1997.
3. On the Economic Theory of Socialism.º New Left Review, 221. . 2001.
4. Participatory Planning as a Deliberative Democratic Process: A Response to Hodgson’s Critique.º Economy and Society, 30:2 (May), 229239. .
5. Forthcoming. ªA Reconsideration of the Theory of Entrepreneurship: A Participatory Approach.º Review of Political Economy. Albert, Michael, and Robin Hahnel. 1991. The Political Economy of Participatory Economics. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

• Devine, Pat. 1988.

1. Democracy and Economic Planning. Cambridge, England: Polity Press; Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. . 1992.
2. Market Socialism or Participatory Planning?º Review of Radical Political Economics, 24:3 & 4 (FallWinter), 6789. . 1997.
3. Socialism as Social Transformation.º In Michele Cangiani, ed., The Milano Papers: Essays in Societal Alternatives. Montreal, Canada: Black Rose Books. . 2002.
4. The Institutional Context of Entrepreneurial Activity.º In Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine, eds., Economy and Society: Money, Capitalism and Transition. Montreal, Canada: Black Rose Books.