Democratically Planned Postcapitalism

* Article: Sorg, C. (2022). Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail: Toward an Expanded Notion of Democratically Planned Postcapitalism. Critical Sociology, 49(3), 475-493. doi

URL = https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08969205221081058

Abstract

"With the advent of digitalization, the more techno-optimist among critics of capitalism have articulated new calls for post-work and post-scarcity economics made possible by new advances in information and communication technology. Quite recently, some of this debate shifted for calls for digital-democratic planning to replace market-based allocation. This article will trace the lineages of this shift and present these new calls for digitally enabled and democratic planning. I will then argue that much of the discussion focuses on capitalism’s laws of economic motion, while rendering less visible capitalism’s social, political, and ecological ‘conditions of possibility’. To remedy this shortcoming I will ask how these fit into the recent debate and suggest avenues to extend the discussion of democratic planning in that way. Concretely, I will discuss features of a postcapitalist mode of reproduction that abolishes capital’s subordination of non-waged and waged care work. The following part will focus on both planning’s need to calculate ecological externalities and consequently determine sustainable and egalitarian paths for social and technological development on a world scale. The last section will elaborate on the ‘democratic’ in ‘democratic planning’ in terms of planning’s decision-making, multi-scalar politics, and politics of cultural recognition."

Excerpts

Cybernetic ‘feedback technologies’ for new forms of economic planning

Christoph Sorg:

"A series of authors have started to discuss the possibilities of such cybernetic ‘feedback technologies’ (Morozov, 2019) for new forms of economic planning in the 21st century (e.g. Phillips and Rozworski, 2019; Saros, 2014). The assumption is that big data, predictive analytics, and digital communication technologies may produce better data than market-based exchanges. These debates are by no means limited to obscure progressive circles or academic journals, with Alibaba founder Jack Ma assuming that with big data ‘we may be able to find the invisible hand of the market’ (Durand and Keucheyan, 2019) and newspapers from Financial Times (Thornhill, 2017) to Washington Post (Xiang, 2018) responding to the idea. To reconstruct the argument it is helpful to return to 20th-century socialist calculation debate, as many of the participants of this discussion do (e.g. Morozov, 2019; Phillips and Rozworski, 2019; Saros, 2014). The socialist calculation debate took place in several waves from the 1920s and 1930s up until after WWII and centered on the question whether economic calculation at scale was feasible (later: effective) in a socialist economy (Bockman et al., 2016; Chaloupek, 1990; Foss, 1993). Conventional historiography goes somewhat like this: Marxist economists such as Otto Neurath proposed moneyless socialist economies based on public ownership of the means of production and central planning of quantities of goods (Neurath et al., 1973: 123ff). Austrian economists such as Ludwig von Mises (2014) and later Friedrich von Hayek (1945) responded that central planning boards are not equipped to know where to produce which products and how much of them, let alone at the scale of an entire economy. In a market economy, Austrian authors argued, the price mechanism allocates a myriad of local information by producers and consumers, which cannot be replicated by central planners.

Already in 1979 the late neoclassical socialist Oskar Lange (1979) remarked that computers solve the complicated and numerous equations of his own method of socialist accounting ‘in less than a second’ and that the market may thus ‘be considered as a computing device of the preelectronic age’. Along similar lines, the Marxist computer scientists Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell later argued that in addition to other shortcomings of the Soviet Union ‘the material conditions (computational technology) for effective socialist planning of a complex peacetime economy were not realized before, say, the mid-1980s’ (Cottrell and Cockshott 1993). In a similar vein, Phillips and Rozworski (2019) argue that while the Soviet Union suffered from several fatal flaws, one of the more pivotal ones was that contemporary planning technology could not handle the myriad information required for a transition from the limited products of heavy industry to mass consumer products (p. 47ff).

With the advent of new computing and communication technologies, however, such considerations seem obsolete. Indeed Phillips and Rozworksi find that large multinationals already illustrate how non-market planning via new digital technologies can work in practice. They argue that if Hayek was ever correct that only a market with all its information and price signals can precipitate large-scale economic action, then enormous multinational corporations such as Walmart and Amazon should not exist. These companies and parts of their global supply chains internally engage in non-market, large-scale economic planning and nonetheless work pretty efficiently. Phillips and Rozworksi thus consider planning to be one of capitalism’s dirty little secrets.

However, any project toward a postcapitalist social order that seeks to appropriate capital’s technologies needs to keep in mind that ‘technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral’ (Kranzberg, 1986) and evade the misguided belief that every problem can be overcome via technology (Morozov, 2013; Rendueles et al., 2017). Amazon does not generate the data we need for postcapitalism (Phillips and Rozworski, 2019) and any contrary assumption thus mirrors Lenin’s misguided admiration of Fordism and the German postal service, which supposedly could just be appropriated after chasing away capitalist managers (p. 95ff). Instead, transformative movements will need to push for the construction of alternative socio-technical infrastructures. A series of authors have made some preliminary suggestions of what alternative futures based on these could look like."

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

Postcapitalist Planning

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)

Expanded Notions of Postcapitalist Planning

Universal Care-Giver

Christoph Sorg:

"Fraser (2013: 134ff) elsewhere suggests the ideal of a ‘universal care-giver’ to replace the ‘male breadwinner’ at the heart of capitalist patriarchy. Transformative approaches should not idealize the masculinized model of wage work and encourage care-givers to seek freedom in wage labor, thus extending principles of capitalist productivism (Fraser, 2013: 123ff), which in reality is subsidized by racialized global care chains in the first place. Neither should they be happy with mere social subsidies for care-givers, which might upgrade reproductive work, but, at the same time, further cement the gendered division of labor (Fraser, 2013: 128ff). Instead, they should encourage cis-men to take on more reproductive tasks, take paternity leave, work part-time and so on, thus converging masculinized breadwinner and feminized care-giver into universal care-giver (Fraser, 2013: 133ff)."

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

Post-work perspectives on reproduction

Christoph Sorg:

"Hester and Srnicek (2018) expand on these ideas by suggesting a post-work perspective on reproduction (p. 363ff). This includes a ‘critical technopolitics of the home and other places of social reproduction’, which neither uncritically celebrates the ‘roboticization of social reproduction’ nor romanticizes care work as ‘an expression of the (gendered) self or a personally rewarding pastime’ (Hester and Srnicek, 2018: 364). In other words: access to dishwashers and washing machines for everyone and an economic turn to plan for technological devices that actually reduce overall reproductive workload (and are ecologically sustainable, one should add). Second, Srnicek and Hester suggest to lower domestic standards. They argue that the development of labor-saving household devices has not increased leisure time, but instead raised social expectations of how much time should be dedicated to cleaning the home, preparing or socializing one’s children, and so on (Hester and Srnicek, 2018, 365). The third and final proposal is to transform living arrangements currently centered on the assumed nuclear family. Larger communities could profit from reproductive economies of scale and profit from collective kitchens or workshops (Hester and Srnicek, 2018: 366).

Srnicek and Hester stress that they wish to leave open space for different ways of life, since some see work on the household as a source of personal fulfillment whereas others do not. Along similar lines, Saros (2014: 187) suggests that in his model ‘household labor and child rearing services may be registered as a need’ or families may ‘prefer to perform this work themselves’. While he does not further elaborate how this would work in practice, Parecon advocates Bohmer et al., (2020) develop a far more detailed set of related suggestions. They distinguish universal access to education and healthcare provided by the public, reproductive services provided by self-managed worker councils, and household care and socialization work. People have a right to choose between doing reproductive tasks themselves in their households or having it done by others, with the notable exception of mandatory primary and secondary education provided by the public (Bohmer et al., 2020: 12). If household member choose to provide infant, pre-K, disabled, and elder care themselves, they should be treated as ‘off-site’ workers of the education or healthcare system and remunerated according to a democratically decided standard payment. The quality of care is a delicate issue and should be monitored by a public social service agency."

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

Balanced Job Complexes

Christoph Sorg:

"the Parecon principle of ‘balanced job complexes’ overlaps with Fraser’s universal care-giver, as it advocates workers taking on different tasks to combat hierarchies arising from divisions of labor. The authors also suggest caucuses for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersexed community, people of color, and people with disabilities to tackle other forms of discrimination. Unequal distribution of reproductive tasks within households is harder to confront and at the same time, needs to be balanced with concerns for privacy. However, women’s caucuses in neighborhood councils could provide moral support for women, cooking and cleaning classes for men and combat gender biases in consumption decisions."

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