Half and Half (2023)

Book Review from the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics. By Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass, Verso £14.99.

The point of the first half of the title is the idea of rewilding half of the planet in order to preserve biodiversity and the likely massive loss of species in the Sixth Extinction (compare the COP15 target of protecting 30% by 2030).This would help to remove atmospheric carbon and prevent the emergence of new diseases transmitted from animals to humans. The concept originated with the entomologist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (see www.half-earthproject.org) but, as Vettese and Pendergrass point out, it could hardly be introduced, in the face of entrenched economic interests, without a big change in how society is organised.

Their solution is ‘Half-Earth Socialism’, involving ‘natural geo-engineering’, a fully renewable energy system, and widespread veganism (which implies much less land use and emission of carbon). However, their ideas on this are not fully consistent. They refer to Cuba and Chile under Allende, as if these had anything to do with socialism, and appear to think that Eastern Europe pre-1989 was socialist. The last chapter, though, is a kind of homage to Morris’s News from Nowhere, transferred to Massachusetts in 2047. As in the original, William Guest ‘wakes’ in a dream in a new kind of society, the inhabitants of which explain it to him. People’s basic needs (housing, food etc) are all covered, but there are still credits and such perks as priority housing and transport and extra vacation time for those who undertake less pleasant work. There are vague references to ‘a bit of a market socialist system’ involving prices.

A crucial part of the proposed solution consists of a way to plan production without prices, in response to the calculation argument of von Mises. This makes use of linear programming, a method proposed by Leonid Kantorovich in the 1930s; the fact that this was in the context of state-capitalist planning in the USSR does not in itself invalidate it. The 2047 vision has a central planning bureau housing massive supercomputers, which ‘make a series of global plans simulating snapshots of the future’. This supposedly combines ‘the strengths of both democratic and flexible centralised planning’. Regional and local planning offices produce more specific plans, and then people choose: ‘An informed citizenry would be well equipped to choose among the competing plans devised by the planners.’ This is all interesting, and a socialist world would also need plans of various kinds, but we cannot say now whether something along the lines envisaged here would be adopted, other perhaps than to note that this approach seems overly centralised. The Socialist Party pamphlet Socialism as a Practical Alternative offers some ideas on how to plan and organise a world based on production for use.

So a thought-provoking book which contains some misleading ideas about what constitutes socialism and overly-prescriptive ideas about the future society. There is an associated planning game you can play on-line at https://play.half.earth.

Paul Bennett

A more detailed discussion of the authors’ plan can be found in this issue.