Libertarian attack (1986)

From the July 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

A great deal of abuse is heaped on the Socialist Party by David McDonagh of the Libertarian Alliance, described by his organisation as a "libertarian writer and lecturer". McDonagh has filled the first issue of The Libertarian Student with stuff about the SPGB.

It consists of an "Address to Birmingham branch of the SPGB on the Virtue of Libertarianism or (Classical) Liberalism" and an article entitled "The Last Socialist Party". The first offering may have been all right as a talk but as a written piece it's disjointed and doesn't have a clear thread. John Rawls's theory of the "Original Position" keeps popping up and may be the key to the whole thing. But the explanation of it lacks clarity and this doesn't help the argument. We might expect better than this, because the Anarcho-Capitalists (or Libertarians) have a genuinely interesting case which can't be lightly dismissed. Unfortunately. McDonagh's piece makes you want to do just that because it's full of silly jibes that spoil and disperse the argument rather than give it weight. There is no need to repeat them but we can stick to the serious points which, with some effort, can be abstracted from the insults.

The basic argument is that you can't have socialism — a world moneyless society of free access without the market and without prices — because such a society would have no way of allocating what will always be scarce resources. "We would not know", says McDonagh "what to do without the market signals". And even "superabundance", he argues, would not solve the problem since the possible lines of production are infinite and "we cannot do all things at once". So, the argument goes on, even if water, for example, can be superabundant, "we could always be doing something else" and only the market can tell us the correct economic thing we should be doing. According to McDonagh, therefore, the practicalities of organisation make free access society impossible and what we should go for instead is a free market system operating throughout the world without states and with a single world currency.

McDonagh 's objection to socialism is one, he says, that the Socialist Party made no effort to answer till 1984 when it published an article in its bi-annual international journal. the World Socialist. The article didn't satisfy McDonagh but, for accuracy's sake, it should be said that a previous article on the topic had appeared in the Socialist Standard (December 1982), that other articles had dealt with it implicitly and that the Socialist Party has, since 1979, been debating with Libertarian opponents publicly and putting on public sale or hire tape recordings of these debates. And if before 1979 the Party had not dealt explicitly with the Libertarian point, this is because only since then has it started to be put to us. It may, as McDonagh tells us, have been around since the 1850s and been argued most strongly by Mises and Hayek in the 1920s. But if we didn't hear it. how could we answer it?

One thing is certain however. The Libertarians do have a serious argument which has to be answered. The best way to answer it would be to set out a blueprint for socialism showing exactly how resources can be efficiently planned and allocated without the market as an economic calculator. But this we cannot do: firstly because it would be quite undemocratic for the small minority we are now to think we can lay down detailed plans for how the majority must organise their democratically established society in the future; and secondly we have no way of knowing what the level of technology and expertise at the time of a socialist majority will allow in terms of planning and organisation. What we can do, however, and what we are doing is to put forward informed suggestions as to how a socialist majority, if it inherited the present level of technology and expertise, might decide to co-operatively organise the world's resources on the basis of production for need. It's probably true, as McDonagh suggests, that we don't have enough data to do this with any accuracy. However, this is not because the data can never be available but because capitalism, working as it does through the market, does not give the impetus for the large social task of assembling that data to be undertaken. A growing conscious majority anxious for socialism will have the impetus to undertake that task and will certainly make detailed democratic plans ahead of taking political power about how socialist society will be organised.

The speculative work we are doing at present on the details of socialist organisation won't of course satisfy the Libertarians' demand for a blueprint. But then it's not meant to be a blueprint. It's meant to be a move towards demonstrating in a practical way that it's well within the skills, the techniques, the intelligence and the powers of organisation of collective humanity to run the planet in its own common interest.

More about this is to be found in the recent pamphlet, From Capitalism to Socialism: How We Live and How We Could Live and in the soon to be published Socialism as a Practical Alternative. All Anarcho-Capitalists should read both.

Howard Moss