Plan This!

“The Peoples’ Republic of Wal-Mart – How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism” by Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski, 2019

The tongue-in-cheek title suggests an obvious fact that many, including socialists, overlook.  We are used to thinking of large corporations and banks needing to be ‘broken-up,’ as they are part of the dangers of capital.  This is economics’ nerd Elizabeth Warren’s position, channeling the archaic 1901 politics of Teddy Roosevelt.  Yet if ‘trusts’ needed to be busted around the turn of the century, and now oligopolies need to be ‘busted’ up again more than 100 years later, what does that say about the capitalist system?  It says it produces oligopolies and monopolies like cows produce calves.   Bust ‘em up, they reform again, as capital always consolidates.  This has happened throughout capital’s history.  So the real answer is, don’t go back, go forward.

Tongue only Partly in the Cheek

Phillips/Rozworski use socialist thinking to turn ‘trust-busting’ on its head and ‘go forward.’  What they show is that capital naturally leads to planning inside corporations and even in parts of the economy outside.  Planning is one basis for socialism, the others being democratic control by the working class through councils.  The third is ending the profit motive and private ownership of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy.  The authors do this by carefully looking at how Wal-Mart, Amazon and other large corporations are internally completely-planned entities that span the globe, larger than the economies of many countries. 

This planning has been greatly aided by the advent of digital ‘big data’ – i.e. the computational logistical abilities to know what is happening between cash register and raw materials suppliers on an international basis. They argue against neo-liberals like Mises and Hayek of the Austrian school, who maintained that socialist planners would not be able to ‘know’ what was going on in so complex a process.  Only through the ‘free market’ version of prices would information be understood regarding supply and demand.  This was called the ‘socialist calculation’ debate. The authors argue that computerization, information data and worker-involvement can make that argument even more obsolete – though it was obsolete before, as history has shown.

Phillips/Rozworski borrow a 1950s insight from CLR James, who posited that socialism was already existing in parts of the capitalist system, 'in the egg.’  Many capitalist governments already attempt to plan in certain non-profitable sectors.  So why shouldn’t the 6 largest banks in the U.S. be nationalized?  Why shouldn’t Facebook or Comcast be taken over as a public utilities?  Why shouldn’t the massive logistics entities of Amazon, Wal-Mart, GM and the rest be seized and run by the working-class, which would then allocate the surplus to society, not the billionaire class, instead of being broken up?

Phillips/Rozworski have a section on the history of the British National Health Service and how from 1948 to the 1970s the NHS slowly developed a successful national plan to improve health in the U.K.  Since then there have been constant efforts by neo-liberal Tories and “New” Labour politicians to marketize and un-plan the NHS. Which illustrates the unending poisonous role of the capitalist class, who like undead monsters continually attack social gains.

Cyber-Communism

The authors include an excellent section on planning in the USSR, which allowed it, especially under Khrushchev, to become the 2^nd largest economy in the world – much as China is now.   They track how this ‘planning’ stalled under Brezhnev's bureaucratism.  The early Bolsheviks had no roadmap on how to socialize the economy and so planning developed haphazardly in response to the exigencies of the Civil War under ‘war communism’ and later, the NEP. The authors point out that the violent authoritarianism and caprices of Stalin actually impeded planning and information.  Going beyond the clichés of aging socialists against technology, they cite the progressive work of economic planners and cybernetic experts like Leontiev, Kantorovich, Lange, Bogdanov, Bukharin, Popov, Glushkov, Cockschott and Beers.  What was key to these computational planners was not finding a perfect algebraic algorithm, but a practical one that worked in understanding parts or all of an economy.

The authors include a section on the failure of planning in Yugoslavia, which was based on ‘market socialism’ that had enterprises competing with each other, ultimately leading to a centrifugal flying apart of the regions that made up Yugoslavia. Other books that analyze what happened in workers' states like Poland and the USSR indicate that enterprises and sectors ignored planning too except in relation to themselves, so a similar situation as Yugoslavia. The authors also have an excellent section on the creation of a primitive ‘socialist’ internet in Chile in 1970 under Salvador Allende, which aided in national planning against a capitalist truck strike that sought to bring down Allende. 

An economy is a complex entity, and a world economy is even more complex.  Basic transitional and revolutionary demands about workers control or nationalization only begin the conversation.  The question in the real world becomes HOW. Besides capitalist ideologues, opposition to national, regional or international planning comes from small businessmen and the quaint middle class, who think that only a small-scale solution is possible.  But that ‘solution’ disappears when you consider the scope of economies today.  Pure localism only goes so far in addressing the issue, as it lacks economies of scale and information, so the authors dismiss it.   

Capital, as Phillips/Rozworski point out, creates a situation where ‘what is profitable is not always useful and what is useful is not always profitable.’  This irrationality is not affordable anymore, yet capital itself is setting the stage for its own replacement, weaving its own organizational, robotic and digital rope so to speak.  This is an excellent book that every leftist should read, as it lays out the technical basis for democratic planning, nationalization, workers control, equality, stability and socialism.

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box, upper left:  “To Serve God and Wal-Mart,” “New Dark Age,” “In Letters of Fire and Blood,” “Cyber-Proletariat,” “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “The Courage of Hopelessness,” (Zizek) “From Solidarity to Sellout,” “Facing Reality,” (CLR James); “Cypher Punks,” (Assange); “The Contradictions of Real Socialism," "No Local."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 13, 2019