Page 162 - Culture Society and Economy

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ALTERNATIVES

ex ante, and not simply be at the mercy of market outcomes, post hoc.
What this will certainly mean, as all experience confirms, is great power
for the central planners. In the past, this has meant bureaucratic socialism,
one party dictatorship, Stalinism – a political, economic and human dis-
aster. I doubt that measures such as ‘participatory planning’ are really
likely to make any real impact on this profound dilemma. This is because
the problem of centralization inheres in the scale on which the division of
labor has been developed. Only when and as this division is overcome, can
one foresee an elimination of the need for some centralization.
Yet, as implied above and by the general structure of the argument of
this book, this centralization which cannot be wholly avoided, must be
minimized. The old libertarian traditions of socialism which foregrounded
the withering away of the state, must be restored. This is essential if one
envisages a socialism which enhances and does not suppress the liberties
of the individual which bourgeois society has undoubtedly developed,
albeit more at the formal level and for the rich, than in reality for all. This
political principle, as much as the economic arguments, is the reason why
detailed planning of the Soviet type must never be established. It is the
reason why planning should take an indicative form and the form of macro-
economic management, and why the market, far from being eliminated
in any alternative, must be regulated and utilized.

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