Post-Capitalist Planning

Discussion

Christoph Sorg:

"Cockshott and Cottrell (1993) propose a centrally planned economy linked to participatory democracy, which could now profit from the technological innovations elaborated above. Their proposals discuss the possibility of accurate planning and solving equations by central planning boards, but less on the need to democratize and decentralize the planning process itself. Decentralized and participatory planning is most famously associated with ‘Participatory Economics’ (‘Parecon’), which brings together worker councils and consumer councils to collectively negotiate economics plans (Albert, 2003; Albert and Hahnel, 1991). Nick Dyer-Witheford (2013) comments that Parecon needs to watch out that it does not turn endless meetings, which is why he suggests complexity reduction via new technologies. ‘Communist software agents’ (p. 11ff) would semi-autonomously develop economic proposals, which are then be discussed, revised, and decided up on social media platforms as digital fora for democratic planning.

Such a form of cybernetic planning would follow less in the footsteps of Soviet top-down planning, but revive heterodox legacies of economic democracy that are rendered illegible in readings of the calculation debate as a binary conflict of Austrian versus Marxist economists (Bockman, 2011; Bockman et al., 2016). The experiments with cybernetics and democratic socialism in Chile’s ‘Project Cybersyn’ are particularly important (Medina, 2011). The administration of Salvador Allende invited British cybernetician Stafford Beer Chile to aid with a socialist transformation of the Chilean economy. Project Cybersyn established a computer network using the limited telecommunications technology of 1970s Chile, which connected factories to a central computer in Santiago via telex machines. When the system detected a problem, it was supposed to be solved on the local firm level and only successively reached higher levels (branch, sector, overall) after a limited timeframe if this was not possible. Eventually, such bottom-up planning was supposed to include consumers as well, but the project abruptly ended with the 1973 military coup before more experience could be gathered. Nonetheless, cybersyn hints at new possibilities of democratic-decentralized planning in an age of digitalization (Morozov, 2019).

One of the most sophisticated and detailed elaborations of such democratic-decentralized-digital planning comes from radical economist Daniel Saros (2014), who was in turn heavily influenced by the work of Parecon. Saros departs from the assumption that in Marx’s time the technological level of development was not sufficient for a genuinely socialist law of motion. By this he does not mean computing power to solve complicated equations, but cybernetic feedback technologies to facilitate democratic-decentralized planning in what could be termed platform socialism. In Saros’s (2014) model, consumers plan by putting the products they want for the next production cycle from a ‘general catalogue’ of use values into their digital ‘needs profile’ (p. 174). In this way, Saros’s socialist laws of motion depart from the needs of the consumers instead of the anarchic production competition of the marketplace. If consumers later want to consume products they didn’t ‘plan’ that’s still possible, just slightly more expensive, thus rewarding participation in planning (Saros, 2014: 175). Consuming less than the average consumer is rewarded as well because it shortens the collective need to work (Saros, 2014: 176).

Depending on which products consumers picked from the general catalog, worker councils receive points and can in turn register their needs for inputs in the catalog (Saros, 2014: 177ff). Predictive analytics may help analyze deviations of communicated needs from actual consumption patterns, while cybernetic management could analyze macro-flows to avoid bottlenecks or regional input shortages. Worker councils are self-managed by all workers in a certain production unit. They have ‘legal guardianship’ over the means of production they use, but don’t own them, which means they cannot just sell them (Saros, 2014: 182). The workers receive a base income, which increases with experience in the same line of work, but is divorced from the performance of the council (Saros, 2014: 185). These ‘credits’ are not money and thus cannot be traded (Saros, 2014: 188f). Instead of seeking profits, workers are motivated to distribute their goods. If demand is lower than expected, they can reduce the price to get rid of surpluses. However, if they don’t use the points they received to satisfy consumer needs, they are less likely to receive the same amount of production points in the next cycle.

Such a platform socialism suggests socialist laws of motion and accordingly abolishes a series of capitalist institutions.

Nancy Fraser (2014: 57ff) sees four interrelated institutions constitutive of a capitalist economy in the Marxist sense:

- private property of the means of production linked to a division between those who live off their labor and those who life off profits (1),

- ‘free’ workers that are both free in a legal sense, but also free to starve if they do not sell their labor (2),

- competition driving the endless accumulation of capital (3),

- and a particular role of markets, which includes both a commodification of input factors and markets determining society’s use of surplus capacities (4).

Saros’s platform socialism gets rid of privatized means of production (1), the endless quest for profit (3), and consumer planning now drives the direction of social production (4). Markets for input goods do not constitute generalized markets in the capitalist sense, since they can only be exchanged for production points and not be traded in general. Workers still have to exchange their labor time for credits to purchase goods (2), a principle that has been criticized by some (Groos, 2021; Sutterlütti, 2021). While Karl Polanyi left open whether goods should be distributed according to ‘work performance except in the area of basic needs’ or according to need (Bockman et al., 2016: 393), Karl Marx suggested that the principle of ‘to each according to their work’ must eventually be surpassed by ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to needs’, a position that Saros (2014: 38, 207) holds as well. So even if accounts differ on concrete trajectories, they at least agree ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to needs’ is a desirable end goal and that some basic needs should not have to be traded against labor time.

The new cybersocialists have much to say on what postcapitalist economic laws of motion could look like and the debate has fortunately continued since the seminal texts elaborated above (e.g. Arboleda, 2021; Fuchs, 2020; Jones, 2020). Unfortunately, however, they are frequently much less clear on what Fraser (2014) would call capitalism’s social, ecological and political background conditions of possibility: social reproduction (5), non-human nature (6), and political institutions (7) (p. 60ff). They all emerged when the emergence of capitalism broke up feudalism’s traditional livelihoods and thus divorced production from reproduction, society from nature, and economy from polity. Capitalist laws of motion render these background conditions invisible and treat them as infinite, but the system at the same time pivotally depends on them. The violence inscribed into them derives not primarily from the exploitation of wage labor via commodity production, but from the oppression, dispossession, and destruction of women and sexual minorities, racialized/colonized groups, and non-human nature (Federici, 2004; Fraser, 2014; Mies, 1986; Patel and Moore, 2017; Robinson, 2000; Virdee, 2019).

Such a perspective expands the question of how to democratize or abolish markets by an additional question of how to make sure such a transformation empowers all groups that never had equal access to the market to begin with—and it adds non-human nature to the equation. There is no reason to assume that a postcapitalist transformation could not abolish some if these institutions, while leaving others intact. Although Soviet state socialism is by no means a model for the new advocates of economic planning, the system’s productivism, Soviet women’s double burden, continued racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism despite proclaimed internationalism may serve as a warning that planned economies are in principle just as compatible with androcentrism, anthropocentrism, and ethnocentrism. A social and democratic postcapitalism that does not wish to perpetuate these capitalist shortcomings by focusing only on capitalism’s economic institutions would thus also need to center on the ‘nurturing of people, the safeguarding of nature, and democratic self-rule as society’s highest priorities’ (Fraser, 2020: 10). Along these lines, the next part will discuss trajectories for postcapitalist forms of reproduction, political ecology and multi-scalar democratization compatible with a transformation to postcapitalist planning."

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08969205221081058)