Chapter 1: Subjective Figures of the Crisis ... - Negri in English

miserable death, and as we said earlier, no one should mourn or
seek to resurrect them. The cruelty and ineffectiveness of these
practices were primarily a result of the centralization of the
decision-making power. Socialist bureaucracies served both to
maintain the separation and isolation of those in the center
(blocking the centripetal flow of social forces) and to administer
the directives throughout society (facilitating the centrifugal flow
of command).
Recognizing the brutality of state socialist planning,
though, should not blind us to the injustices of and disasters
created by capitalist planning, which are often hidden and
mystified. The neoliberal and neoconservative revolutions of the
last decades of the twentieth century propagated the myth of a
weak state, claiming to reduce state powers and pull the state out
of the social field—getting government off our backs. State
expenditures for social welfare were indeed reduced, but, in fact,
total state budgets only grew due to increased funding to military',
legal, and business interests. The neoliberal state, despite claims
to the contrary', wields strong planning powers, which it enacts
through close collaboration with corporate and financial
interests. No one should be fooled anymore by the democratic
aura that neoliberals still hope to evoke when they claim that the
market decides. The decision-making market in such statements
is a euphemism, at best, for the forces of wealth, including the
banks and financial powers, that wield formidable instruments of
planning. They determine, for example, what software will be
developed, what dams will be built, w T ho will buy a house, and so
forth. During normal periods finance and banks operate
relatively autonomously from the state, but in the end their
profound connection always surfaces. In fall 2008, at the height
of the financial crisis, the theater of the collaboration of US
government officials and the captains of Wall Street provided a
peek behind the curtain and showed how small the circle of
decision makers actually is. In any case, the current crisis is
another demonstration of the disasters created by capitalist
planning. And thus we can easily sympathize with those w T ho,
recognizing the socialist and capitalist catastrophes, might w T ant
to have nothing to do with planning in any form.
The concept and practices of development are in equal