Question to all leftists

Tomas Peceny

In the system with deformed market: how to recognize what should be produced? (in the sense 'what input data should be used for the purpose?')

    If you intend to answer that it can be recognized by planning, please do argument directly against my evidence based on working as a programmer and analyst of a technical-administrative system. The evidence shows that

by excluding or by heavy deterioration of market its main i.e. informing function fails and all people do then nonsense even with best intentions: they have no possibility how to find what should be done. Planning only shifts the problem to higher levels of organization: It enables yet to complete the list of the needs. (The informatics used for planning in the Czechoslovakia is said to have been very good and nowadays computer technique enables surely a further progress.) But planning does not enable correct evaluating the amount of work necessary to produce any particular thing and therefore optimizing what to be produced; this is fatal. It does not enable it even if all people were so altruistic and so farsighted that they properly estimate the amount of their own work; simply they do not know how much work contained in means of production they spend. An attempt to include such an information into planning, especially for innovation, would fatally waste time of the workers and, according to my opinion, would probably crash due to principal difficulties similar to those of a long-time weather forecast (chaos).

For argumentation therefore please do tell especially, where and how such a system you propose have practically worked for benefit of people.

(Without market it is not possible to set correctly the prices and then e.g. unnecessary things are produced for a stock only and those needed are missing, as we have seen in the socialism. It is also my personal experience from the sixties: As a young senior worker in a research I could influence its direction and I realized that I had no information necessary for good decision making; and moreover that there were many reasons for me to decide for the benefit of my personal career.)