No.402173
The central question wasn't if planned economies work, but if solidaristic politics would "work". Economic planning was so essential that no national security state could function without it, and every attempt at privatization was a disaster if it followed the neoliberal rulebook religiously. But privatization was never anything more than controlled demolition, in which the public sector was demolished in a particular way that would hurt targeted populations.
The communist countries were not religiously opposed to using something like money, or planning in monetary terms, when it suited the needs of the plan. The point, however, was to be able to overcome the inherent difficulties of money, when you want to plan something that is actually useful.
This bizarre narrative that was drilled into us required people to take for granted that people are unthinking animals that can be cajoled by a ruling class, in ways difficult to fathom without modern propaganda and a vast impersonal state. In this view, capitalism "just happens" to exist without capitalists, banks, or any central locus of organization that would utilize wealth. It can only make sense if you create a world-system in which people are forbidden from acknowledging any center of power, and this is only possible with extreme mystification and indoctrination into that world view.
Anyway, there is a problem if you want to make a big gigantic central plan for the whole economy, USSR style; but the analysts at CIA knew quite well what Soviet planning meant, and that the system did provide mostly the things people wanted out of it. People weren't going to start a riot because their Ladas were shitty, and that wasn't even what prompted the reactionary element in Russia to rebel. It should also be noted that the thing arch-Porkies like to point to, computer technology, was only possible because the capitalist state pushed computerization HARD as part of its long-term project. The computer revolution was in no way profitable, and had to be pushed with incredible funding from the oligarchs. The oligarchs needed this computerization more than anyone, but ordinary people did not benefit so much until the computer was integrated into the world. Up until the 90s, most Americans didn't own a computer, because they were quite expensive and lacked too much utility. Computers were a higher-end good for the middle class, but the drive for computerization was most felt among the oligarchic firms for their business planning, and with the state for war planning. Anyway, what did capitalism do well? Home appliances? Cars? There are advantages to a profit-driven mechanism in a lot of consumer goods, but all of that is premised on a lot of consumers with money to spend on those goods. That consumer base was only built by deliberate planning and oligarchic capital being identified strongly with the state. "What's good for General Motors is good for America", that sort of thing. Then there was the considerably large state sector, paying for all the bureaucrats and technicians the state needed for its aims, and the elaborate ties between oligarchs and the American state. And then, that consumer economy in America was very meticulously planned to attain certain social engineering goals. Anyone denying this in 2020 is woefully unaware of American history and just what has been built. The only way such a view can be maintained is to again imagine a capitalism without capitalists, animated by spooky action, and to forbid any discussion of the social class system in play or the institutions at work. When you see something like the CIA's hand in mass culture, where the CIA controls the biggest music labels and what you watch on television to a quite large extent, you can't pretend it's all totally organic. There was a lot that was organic or at least just planned to make a buck off the latest craze, but over time the organic culture and American high culture was aggressively abolished, as the standard of discourse in neoliberalism was driven into the toilet and any discussion not amenable to eugenics was viciously attacked. Even high culture that was favorable to the American regime would be attacked, simply because it wasn't eugenic enough and didn't pander to the most base instincts as eugenics must always do.