A plan to save the future (2023)

Book Review from the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

An increasing flow of books is being published on the necessity of establishing a real socialist society, moneyless, wageless, leaderless and planetary. This would be a society with free access to all goods and services based on voluntary cooperation and the principle of from each according to ability and to each according to need. Many of these books have been reviewed and evaluated in the Socialist Standard. But now going qualitatively further than all the others, we have a new one proposing a detailed plan of how a world non-market society could operate in practical and organisational terms. Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass, Verso, 2022 (see a shorter review in this issue) is founded on profound knowledge of and reflection on the scientific and technological problems that such a society would need to deal with and overcome. As such, it constitutes a thrillingly imaginative leap into the fundamentals of a world organised for the common good of humanity and the natural environment.

What if?

It adopts a novel structure framed by two ‘what if?’ chapters. The first of these is entitled ‘Looking Backwards: 2047’ (à la Edward Bellamy) and describes the ‘dystopian future’ with ‘environmental collapse and feudal levels of inequality’ seen as inevitable if the present system of society, based on the market and ‘price signals’, is allowed to continue. The second of these chapters, entitled ‘News from 2047’ (à la William Morris’), offers a kind of -day-to-day outline of what a future society ‘without money or a market’ could be like and how it could operate once humanity collectively decides to take steps to reverse the decline of the biosphere, to ‘simultaneously create a just society’, and ‘to provide the basis for socialism in our lifetime’. In this the authors consciously eschew Marx’s warning against writing ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’. In fact they attempt to do just that, to describe what they call ‘a total alternative to capitalism’, i.e, how ‘economic co-ordination’ would function in socialism, ‘a society where the economy is consciously and democratically controlled’ – a definition of socialism that we would fully accept. The book offers, as the authors put it, ‘everything from a plan for resource allocation to an outline of what life will feel like’.

Controlling capitalism?

In between these two chapters the authors do a number of other key things. Firstly, they examine some of the major ideas and schemes put forward over the centuries in which capitalism has existed and grown to understand that system and bring it under control. They look at a range of ‘competing philosophies of nature and social and economic developments’: for example Malthus, with his dread of the still commonly held idea of ‘overpopulation’, described here as ‘dangerously exaggerated’; Hegel, with his ‘humanization of nature’ theory; Mises and Hayek who saw the market as the only feasible way to organise an advanced society and as a self-organising system which humans interfere with at their peril; and Marx and Neurath, both of whom see capital as ‘blindly steering the ship of fools towards ecological disaster’ and destroying ‘the world it cannot see’. This part of their analysis leads to the conclusion that what is needed is an end to what they call ‘the capitalization of nature’ and ‘a new relationship between humanity and nature’. Failing this, they see humanity facing a future of ‘ever greater inequality, disease, climatic disaster, and ecological impoverishment’.

They then go on to examine various current solutions on offer, mainly those ‘green’ ones that are presented as ways of stemming the degradation of the environment (eg, geoengineering, carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, biofuels). They reject these as feasible remedies in their own right, since their advocates tend to envision their use only within the context of the market and its production and distribution of goods and services as commodities. As the authors put it: ‘Mainstream environmentalists approach the environment crisis as a set of discrete technical problems, addressable through piecemeal reform, while leaving the capitalist foundation of society untouched’. The authors are particularly hostile to animal husbandry, referred to as ‘the Earth-eating livestock industry’, taking up as it does ’40 per cent of earth’s inhabitable land’ and creating ‘massive mammalian extinction’. Their solution, which they start to outline here, is to practise ‘natural geo-engineering’, drawing down carbon and allowing rewilded ecosystems to occupy half the earth’ (hence the book’s title), and so restore biodiversity and create ‘a fully renewable energy system’. They are also advocates of veganism, considering it capable of satisfying ‘the requirement of feeding everyone with the smallest environmental impact’. All of this, however, they see as impossible under the capitalist system, which by its nature produces goods and services for profit.

Is socialist planning possible?

It is in the following chapter, entitled ‘Planning Half-Earth’, that the proposed solution they have already outlined is fleshed out. Details are given concerning how the earth’s resources can be used in a rational and sustainable way under world-wide arrangements that eschew money, the market and exchange and instead use ‘another kind of global model’ based on ‘integrated assessment models’ (IAMs) and ‘linear programming’. These methods, they tell us, already exist but their real potential can come nowhere near to being properly realised within the market system. Referring to their proposals as ‘scientific utopianism’, after the term coined by early 20th century theorist, Otto Neurath, they claim that such a model needs no universal equivalent such as money but can function effectively via in natura’ (ie, ‘in kind’) world-wide planning. This, they contend, can consistently and in an ongoing way ‘combine multiple goals’, pulling together all the necessary information regarding resources, skills and needs to ensure that production and distribution meet all the reasonable democratically agreed requirements of a cooperative planetary population. In this way humanity can ‘provide a good life for our abundant species and still protect the environment’. This is eminently possible, they go on, given that ‘the data density of the contemporary world, paired with the algorithms climate scientists have designed to handle it, greatly expands planning capacities’. Having explained all this in impressive detail, they do then advise that the precise set-up they advocate for a socialist society should at this stage be considered ‘a thought experiment’, but nevertheless one which will ‘allow us to imagine what socialism might look like in practice’.

There is no doubt, however, that this recipe they dare to write for the cookshop of their future is a highly encouraging one, providing much in the way of effective counter-argument to objections that a society without monetary accounting could not be organised efficiently or that it would quickly degenerate into shortage and social chaos. The insights they provide in the ‘Limits of Planning’ section of their ‘Planning Half-Earth’ chapter, and in the day-in-a-life type ‘News from 2047’ chapter, also give helpful and fascinating food for thought about how ongoing democratic choice could take place within a socialist society among a population free to express that choice.

Setting up socialism

All this adds up to a meticulously researched and documented work, which will, in its broad lines at least, convince any fair-minded reader both of the urgent need for a different kind of society and also of a viable way in which it could be organised if workers throughout the world were to take action to establish it. This would be a kind of society organised without money and without the ‘embedded form of coercion’ that is forced employment. Yet, while the book is also effective in debunking, as the authors put it, ‘the delusions of the political centre and Left’, what it is somewhat short on is much to do with the mechanism of precisely how the society they advocate can come about. Yes, socialism will have to be planned in advance, as the authors make clear, but, as the Socialist Party argues, that can only seriously begin once the majority have begun to espouse the concept and can only work if the plans are fully developed before the change takes place. The authors seem to think that it can be sort of half-planned in advance, but that it will take some time after it has been established for it to be fully operative. Yet, once the necessary spreading of consciousness of the need for socialism has been achieved and plans for it have been made, there seems no reason why a democratic, moneyless, marketless society will not be able to be voted in via democratic political action (ie, the ballot box), and then be set up and be operative virtually immediately. The political control needed to coordinate the change will already be there. Yes, some tweaks, some forms of trial and error, some ongoing revisions are bound to be necessary, but none of this will prevent the basic structures of socialism from operating fully both for the benefit of humanity and of the environment. And, who knows, perhaps it will even be along the lines of the ‘integrated assessment models’ and ‘linear assessment’ envisioned by the authors?

Their main objection to socialism being established in this way via the ballot box seems to be that the capitalist class will not allow it. To support this they paraphrase (rather than quote directly) Engels’ 1886 introduction to the first English translation of Volume I of Marx’s Capital as ‘if a dedicated socialist party were to ever win [elections], the ruling class would unleash a “pro-slavery rebellion” against a “peaceful and legal revolution”’. Yet the main evidence they adduce that this would happen, ie, the toppling of the Allende government in Chile in 1973, is hardly relevant, since that regime was in no way socialist in the sense that they (or) we advocate the idea. And, in fact, Marx’s views on this were far more nuanced than the authors suggest and do not exclude a peaceful, democratic takeover by a majority via the ballot box. In addition, they also seem to show a certain naivety in being prepared to recognise recent or current oppressive state-capitalist regimes (eg, Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba) as somehow being attempts at socialism or on the way to it, when any connection of these regimes to socialism is purely rhetorical. Their unfortunate blind spot in this area even leads to them referring to Trotsky and Stalin as ‘20th century socialists’ and the ANC in South Africa as a party of ‘modern, internationalist socialism’.

Humanity and nature

But these are relatively minor points of contention for us in an important book that packs an enormous amount of knowledge and reflection into little more than 200 pages. It advocates basically what the Socialist Party advocates: a wholly democratic society of meaningful work which frees all humans from the threat of poverty and where the government of people is replaced by the administration of things. It also deals convincingly with the ‘motivation’ argument (part of the frequently heard ‘human nature’ objection), characterising socialism as a society in which ‘motivation’ will be provided by ‘positive incentives’ such as ‘social obligation, personal satisfaction, pride’. And, finally, with its strong focus on the ongoing degradation and possible collapse of the natural environment, it emphasises the need for what it calls ‘a new relationship between humanity and nature’ and looks forward, as we do, to ‘the prospect of a unified humanity … with an economy built around, care, health and unalienated labour’.

Howard Moss

The Costing of The Earth (1994)

Book Review from the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-Being and the Natural World. by John O'Neill (Routledge. £11.99.)

This book is an attack on the philosophical basis of so-called "cost-benefit" analysis as a method for deciding whether or not some project with consequences for the environment should go ahead. Cost-benefit analysis involves giving a monetary value to the costs (e.g. loss of amenities, destruction of wildlife habitats, pollution) and benefits (e.g. some new amenity, more jobs, journey times saved).

What price the market?

The value of a landscape or habitat is calculated as what people would be prepared to pay, either directly or in terms of monetary benefits forgone, to retain it. If, in the end, the monetary value of all the benefits is greater than the monetary value of all the costs, then the project should go ahead. This in fact is how such decisions are made today.

O'Neill argues that such a method does not protect the environment as it takes people's preferences as they have been shaped by capitalism which encourages us to judge everything in terms of how much money it brings or saves us as individuals. Given this, cost-benefit analysis will always reflect the fact that most people prefer to have more money over all other considerations and often have no real choice in the matter. Much of O'Neill's book is written in the technical language of moral philosophy and so will be of interest mainly to students studying that subject. A couple of chapters, however, in respectively, "pluralism, incommensurability, judgement: (Chapter 7) and "market, household and politics" (Chapter 10), will be of wider interest.

In the first of these O'Neill argues that cost-benefit analysis is misconceived in seeking to reduce everything to a single common unit (monetary value). The anti-socialist von Mises even argued that, unless everything had a price tag, it would be impossible to make a rational choice between two alternative projects or methods of production. O'Neill replies that this is nonsense: comparisons and choices can be made on the basis of other considerations than monetary costs, as had been pointed out by the Austrian Marxist (and later logical positivist philosopher) Otto Neurath: 

"For Neurath, a socialist economy, since it was to consider the use-value of goods only, would have to be an 'economy in kind'. In such an economy, while physical statistics about energy use, material use and so on would be required, there would be no need for a single unit of comparison. Thus in 1919 he wrote in a report to the Munich Workers' Council that, in considering alternative projects: 'There are no units that can be used as the basis of a decision, neither units of money nor hours of work. One must directly judge the desirability of the two possibilities.' Such direct comparison will need to appeal to political and ethical judgements, including concern for future generations."

making informed practical judgements on the basis of past experience and general policy considerations will no doubt be what will happen in socialism. Money won't come into it, nor the insane attempt to put a price tag on everything.

In the other, final chapter, O'Neill discusses two alternative ways that have been suggested for making decisions about the environment on a non-market, non-monetary basis. The first is to restrict the operation of the market to a defined sphere, not including environmental matters. The other is to abolish the market altogether. O'Neill opts for the second, rejecting the first on the following grounds:

"within the economic sphere itself to leave the allocation of most resources to the market is incompatible with the realization of environmental goals. The market responds only yo those preferences that can be articulated through acts of buying and selling. Hence the interests of the inarticulate, both those who are contingently so - the poor - and those who are necessarily so - future generations and non-humans - cannot be adequately represented. Moreover, a competitive market economy is necessarily oriented towards growth of capital, and such an orientation is incompatible with a sustainable economy."

In other words, what O'Neill calls a "non-market order" is the only framework within which humans can organize their interaction with the rest of nature in ecologically acceptable ways.

Adam Buick

How Socialism Can Organise Production Without Money (1) (1984)

From the Winter 1984 issue of the World Socialist

Part 1. Labour-Time Accounting Or Calculation In Kind?

In 1920 Ludwig von Mises published an article "Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen", which was translated into English in 1935 as "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" and published in Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism edited by Fron Hayek. His basic argument was that socialism would be impossible because, without money and prices fixed by the market, society would not be able to do economic calculations rationally. Or, as he put it, "where there is no free market there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation".

Von Mises defined socialism to mean any system in which the ownership of means of production by private individuals was entirely abolished. His definition thus covered total State capitalism as well as socialism. This makes some of his arguments, in so far as they were meant to be arguments against socialism, irrelevant, but in arguing against the possibility of a moneyless society he was also arguing against socialism.

Von Mises accepted that socialist society would be able to decide what it wanted but denied that it would be able to work out the most rational way of meeting those wants:

It will be evident, even in a socialist society, that 1,000 hectolitres of wine are better than 800, and it is not difficult to decide whether it desires 1,000 hectolitres of wine rather than 500 litres of oil. There is no need for any system of calculation to establish this fact: the deciding element is the will of the economic subjects involved. But once this decision has been taken, the real task of rational economic direction only commences, ie, economically, to place the means at the service of the end. That can only be done with some kind of economic calculation. The human mind cannot orientate itself properly among the bewildering mass of intermediate products and potentialities of production without such aid. It would simply stand perplexed before the problems of management and location. It is an illusion to imagine that in a socialist state calculation in natura can take the place of monetary calculation. Calculation in natura, in an economy without exchange, can embrace consumption-goods only; it completely fails when it comes to deal with goods of a higher order. And as soon as one gives up the concept of a freely established monetary price for goods of a higher order, rational production becomes impossible. Every step that takes us away from private ownership of the means of production and from the use of money also takes us away from rational economics.

He did not deny that "labour time" could theoretically provide an alternative unit of economic calculation, but argued that in practice it would be impossible to establish an accurate labour-time unit because of the difficulty of measuring the intensity and skill of different people's labour. The only possible unit of economic calculation, he concluded, was therefore money.

This was a powerful criticism which caught the Social Democratic and Bolshevik thinkers — both defenders of a total state capitalism rather than socialism, it is true — unprepared. There were three possible reactions to Von Mises's criticism:

1. To accept that money would have to continue to be the unit of economic calculation in "socialism";
2. To argue that labour-time could be the unit of economic calculation "in an economy where neither money nor exchange were present";
3. To argue that in socialism "calculation in natura [in kind] can take the place of monetary calculation".

The Social Democrats, including the Bolsheviks (who were of course Social Democrat up until 1917), tended to have a technocratic conception of "socialism" which in practice, as we have already remarked, made them advocates of state capitalism rather than of socialism. As a result discussion on what should be the unit of calculation in socialism was largely a discussion of what should be the unit of calculation in state capitalism. This meant in fact that the outcome of the debate was predictable from the start: the partisans of retaining money, as Kautsky advocated in 1922, as "a measure of value for accounting purposes and for calculating exchange ratios" were bound to win since, in the long run, this was the only solution compatible with the operation of the capitalist system which they wanted to continue, even though in a statised form. The partisans of accounting in labour-time and those of accounting in real physical quantities were never more than marginal and by the end of the 1920s had disappeared both amongst the Social Democrat and amongst the Bolsheviks.

A LABOUR-TIME BLUEPRINT

Calculation in labour-time was defended by the Social Democratic writer, Otto Leichter, in his Die Wirtschaftsrechnung in der sozialistischen Gesellschaft ("Economic Calculation in Socialist Society") published in Vienna in 1923, in which he argued that this was perfectly feasible as it was already applied under capitalism by accountants to fix prices and by time-and-motion experts. Money, he argued, could therefore be abolished in socialism (= state capitalism), even for the distribution of consumer goods, which could be distributed directly to consumers in kind in amounts fixed by nutrition and other experts.

Otto Neurath (later prominent as a logical positivist philosopher) argued that even labour-time accounting would be unnecessary in socialism (state capitalism). In an "administrative economy" production plans could be drawn up and executed directly and solely in real physical quantities:

The theory of the socialist economy knows only a single economic agent — society —which without profit-and-loss accounting, without monetary circulation — whether metallic money as now or labour-money — and on the basis of an economic plan, organises production without using a unit of account and distributes the means of subsistence according to socialist principles. (O. Neurath, Wirtschaftsplan und Naturalrechnung, Berlin, 1925, p.84)

As the last part of this passage indicates, Neurath too argued that consumer goods could be directly allocated to people in kind.

An attempt to present an alternative to what they called the "State socialism" of both the Social Democrats and the Bolsheviks was made by a group of Dutch "Council Communists" in their Grundprinzipien kommunistcher Verteilung und Produktion ("Basic principles of communist distribution and production") published in Berlin, in German, in 1930. The "Council Communists" were a group which had supported the Russian Revolution, really believing it to be what, in its propaganda, it said it was, namely a soviet (the Russian word for "council") revolution. Within a few years, however, they realised their error and that Russia was heading rather for state capitalism. They called themselves "Council" Communists to distinguish themselves from "State Communists" such as Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.

The Grundprinzipien outlined a plan for organising the production and distribution of wealth without money but on the basis of accounting in units of labour-time. They followed Otto Leichter here, but totally rejected the technocratic structure in which he had seen labour-time accounting replacing monetary calculation. In its place they proposed a federation of workers' councils.

But when this plan is stripped of its socialist terminology, it turns out to be a scheme for a sort of self-regulating exchange economy in which money as we know it today would be replaced as the currency by a "labour-money"; in other words, the money-prices-wages system would continue to exist but would be run by workers' councils and without exploitation. But to believe that an exchange economy could function in the interests of the workers if labour-money and labour-time accounting were to be used in place of the coins and notes and monetary calculation we know today is to completely misunderstand how capitalism works and to fall into the purest currency-crankism.

CALCULATION IN KIND: THE RIGHT ANSWER

In the end, then, it was Otto Neurath, with his view that socialist society could organise the production and distribution of wealth directly and solely in kind, who was on the right track. The only other personality in the Social Democratic and Bolshevik movements to take this view was Amadeo Bordiga, but not until the 1950s and in a quite different context to the so-called "economic calculation" controversy sparked off by Von Mises in 1920.

Bordiga had been the first leader of the Italian Communist Party but was eased out of this post in 1923 for his leftist views (which had already been denounced by Lenin in his famous pamphlet Left-wing Communism An Infantile Disorder) and was eventually expelled from the Party altogether in 1930. Although he himself dropped out of political activity till the fall of Mussolini in 1943, his particular brand of "leftwing communism" continued to be propagated by a group who came to be called "Bordigists". Bordiga did not begin to reflect seriously on the nature of socialism till he was faced with the problem of explaining, after the war, to his followers why Russia was state capitalist and neither socialist nor a "workers' state". Thus, after commenting that planning in Russia wasn't socialist because the plans there were drawn up in money terms as well as physical quantities and that in fact, just like in the capitalism analysed by Marx, these physical quantities had to be converted into money before the productive cycle could begin again, Bordiga went on:

  If there is accumulation in socialism, it will take the form of an accumulation of objects, of materials useful to human needs, and these will have no need to appear alternatively as money, nor to undergo the application of a "moneymeter" allowing them to be measured and compared according to a "general equivalent". Thus these objects will no longer be commodities and will not longer be defined except by their quantitative physical magnitude and by their qualitative nature, what the economists, and Marx also, for explanatory purposes, express by the term use-value. (A. Bordiga, Structure economique et sociale de la Ftussie d'aujourd'hui, Paris, 1975, pp. 191-2.)

Elsewhere, he pointed out that:

  In post-bourgeois society, therefore, it will not be a question of "measuring value by labour-time", as fools believe, but of finishing altogether with the measurement of value. (Quoted in J. Camette, Capital et Gemeinwesen, Paris, 1976, p.213.)

and,

 The rational relationship between man and nature will be born from the moment when these accounts and these calculations concerning projects are no longer done in money but in physical and human magnitudes. (Quoted in J. Camette, Bordiga et la passion du communisme, Paris, 1975, p. 23.)

This is undoubtedly the correct position. Calculation in socialism can only be done directly in physical quantities without the need for any "general equivalent" or any general accounting unit, certainly not money but not labour-time either.

Basically, socialism does not need any general equivalent. Such a universal unit in which all goods can be expressed is only necessary in an exchange economy where all goods have to be reduced to some common denominator as a means of determining the proportions in which they exchange for one another.

ECONOMIC CALCULATION AND CAPITALISM

Capitalism is in fact not just an exchange economy but an exchange economy where the aim of production is to make a profit. This too requires a general equivalent in order to be calculated and measured. Profit is the monetary expression of the difference between the exchange value of a product and the exchange value of the materials, energy and labour-power used to produce it, or what Marx called "surplus value". Similarly, the cost of production of a good is the exchange value of the other goods (including labour power) used up in its production, while its selling price is the monetary expression of its exchange value.

Since, as the classical economists and Marx showed, the exchange value of a product depends on the amount of socially-necessary labour incorporated in it from start to finish, the question arises of why calculations cannot be done directly in labour-time rather than in money. It is this reflexion that is behind all schemes for labour money and labour-time accounting.

The reason why it is not possible to use labour-time as a general equivalent in place of money is that the exchange-value of a product does not depend on the actual amount of labour incorporated in that product in the course of its production from start to finish but on the amount of socially-necessary labour incorporated in it, which is by no means the same (otherwise an inefficient worker would, because he took more time, produce more value than an efficient worker, but this is not the case).

While the actual amount of labour spent on producing a good could theoretically be measured, what labour is socially-necessary is a social average — taking into account average techniques, average productivity, average intensity of labour, etc — that can only be established through the social process that is the operation of the market whose price changes reflect the changes which are continuously taking place in the various factors we have just mentioned which determine the average. In other words, it is an average that can only be established after a good has been produced.

This is why Von Mises was right to say that — under capitalism of course — the only possible unit of economic calculation is money not labour-time, but this point had already been made by Marx when he discussed, and dismissed, various schemes for labour-money in 1859 in his A Critique of Political Economy.

NO EXCHANGE VALUE TO MEASURE IN SOCIALISM

If calculation in labour-time is impossible under capitalism, it is simply unnecessary in socialism since socialism will have no place for the concept of "exchange value" of which both money and labour-time are proposed as units of measurement. In socialism goods will not be produced for sale, they will not be commodities and so will not have any exchange value or price. They will simply be useful things capable of satisfying some human need, or as Bordiga put it "materials useful to human needs", use-values. While capitalism is only interested in the exchange value of goods — capitalism is in fact an economic mechanism geared to the accumulation of more and more exchange value — socialism will only be interested in their use-value. Socialism will be a society entirely geared, in the field of wealth-production, to turning out the specific useful things which people have indicated they want to live and enjoy life.

Under these circumstances calculations concerning the production and distribution of wealth will of course still be necessary, but these can be done exclusively in units to measure specific amounts and kinds of different goods — units such as kilos, litres, square metres, watts, even hours. There will be no need for any general equivalent by which to measure and compare all goods. In other words, calculation in socialism will not be economic but technical. In socialism calculations will be done directly in physical quantities of real things, in use-values, without any general unit of calculation. Needs will be communicated to productive units as requests for specific useful things, while productive units will communicate their requirements to their suppliers as requests for other useful things.

Adam Buick (Britain)