Socialist Laws of Motion

Discussion

Matthew Thompson and Yousaf Nishat-Botero:

"One of the most ‘sophisticated and detailed elaborations’ (Sorg 2022) of democratic economic planning is a framework for ‘socialist laws of motion’ envisioned by Saros (2014) which inverts the production cycles of capitalism by putting consumers in charge of production by choosing what they wish to consume from a ‘general catalogue’ of use-values uploaded to their digital ‘needs profile’ – therefore ‘planning’ production (see also Groos 2021). Organized through self-managed worker councils, workers receive ‘credits’ for consumption – explicitly not money, as they cannot be traded and are not based on performance or productivity. As Sorg (2022) notes, drawing on Fraser’s (2014) quadripartite definition of capitalism, this schema successfully manages to abolish three of its four conditions – private property dividing society by class; competition driving endless accumulation; market mechanisms regulating production and allocation – but leaves one, arguably the most significant, altered but fundamentally intact: the ‘double’ freedom of workers, freed from feudal subsistence to sell their labour power on the market and to starve if they fail to do so – a ‘freedom’ underpinning the wage-relation and abstract labour time. In Saros’ (2014) programme, therefore, workers still exchange their labour time in some form or another for credits to access goods."

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231210980)