Two ex-socialists go funny
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I think I’ve written about it twice, maybe three times, in my whole life
______________________________________Fair enough Stuart but this thread kicked off with a reference to an article that you co-authored with Dan Greenwood some time ago in which you explicitly said and I quote
“As Hayek in particular emphasised, the fundamental problem for a socialist economy concerns knowledge. The highly decentralised market process of exchange and price generation captures and communicates a vast amount of dynamically changing knowledge, responding to highly complex and ever-changing demand and supply levels and reflecting the locally situated goals and decisions of individuals across society. By contrast, state planning, even at a local scale and most certainly at national and international level, necessarily involves an element of centralisation”
Seriously Stuart? You reckon the fundamental problem facing a socialist system “concerns knowledge”? What is that if not an endorsement of Hayek´s own ill-informed take on the subject of socialism? Also, what is this “knowledge” the market is supposed to ever-so-efficiently process? The market responds to price signals. What is the information that prices themselves are supposed to convey? Human needs? Environmentally sustainable ways of disposing of pollution? What?
In your latest piece, you allude to the so-called Hayekian “knowledge problem” yet again:
” The question that came up straight away – as Dan Greenwood, an academic at the University of Westminster, related in a talk given at the launch of his new book, Effective Governance and the Political Economy of Coordination (2023, Palgrave Macmillan) – was, just how is any of that going to be achieved? Through top-down government interventions? Or through decentralised processes of innovation in the market and civil society? ”
I can surely be forgiven for thinking that you have swallowed hook line and sinker the Hayekian take on the feasibility of “socialism”. I appreciate that what you and he mean by “socialism” is what we in the SPGB called state capitalism as in the Soviet Union – although, in fact, the Soviet Union was far more decentralised than the carefully cultivated caricature of it as a “planned economy” suggests
But this is part of the problem. Free market types are forever going on about the false dichotomy of central planning versus the decentralised market as if the only way you can have a polycentric system of decision-making is through the market which is complete nonsense. I have yet to come across a serious critique of a polycentric non-market model of socialism. Perhaps you can be the first to attempt it….
SW – “Intuition”
Genuinely though, how did you know.
Have you spoken to someone in the party that knows about me?
Really the purpose of having a pseudonym 0n line is to keep private information private.
Titled ‘Forest and Factory: the Science and the Fiction of Communism’, here is a new contribution — having appeared just days ago — on the topic of production under socialism. Section headings are these:
Tangibilities
The Fundamental Principles of Communism
Localities
Association and Deliberation
The Ecosystem of Industry
Planned and Planetary Limits
The Motor of History
Construction and Conclusion(Some readers *might* want to start not from the beginning but from section ‘Planned and Planetary Limits’.)
Forest and Factory: the Science and the Fiction of Communism
Well?
(Robbo in particular should comment on it, since this area is his specialty.)
Well?
It’s a very long text. Have you had a chance to look at it properly? Worth spending the time to look at?
I notice it makes reference to Søren Mau’s book “Mute Compulsion” book. This should be reviewed in the Standard; it’s a very popular work right now.
This is the sort of discussion — and the sort of people we should be discussing with — about the feasibility of organising the production and distribution of useful things and services without money or markets and on the basis of common ownership ( ownership by everybody and so by nobody).
I think the article’s criticism of Mau’s blog item is right — of his localism, “democratism” (everybody having to vote on everything instead of leaving many decisions to groups of people who know what they are talking about) and, of course, his retaining of a “private sector” which still uses money.
The same cannot be said of the authors’ assumption that communism will come about as a result of victory in a world-wide civil war in which communists and pro-capitalists fight over control of territory. That would lead to technological regression which would make communism less likely if not impossible. Look at Gaza today if you want to see the consequences of urban warfare with modern weapons.
But this doesn’t affect the technical solution they put forward.
DJP –
Yes, I have read it twice. Once directly before posting the url, and then a second time after a seven day holiday from internet.
With many caveats, I think it is well worth reading, yes; and fully agree with ALB’s: ”This is the sort of discussion — and the sort of people we should be discussing with’ […]’.
My caveats: there much in it that is unnecessary, tedious, pretentiously literary, and even downright foolish (the humor). But these exasperating formal impediments to content-targeted reading are not homogeneous across the article: there are entire paragraphs, even whole sections (say, that between ‘Localities’ to ‘Motor of History’ ) that are unmarred.
As for flavor-of-the-month marxologist Søren Mau, whom you mention: on the basis of what is written about him in this article, I would conclude that he is an idiot, and it is difficult to imagine what useful ‘breakthroughs’ he has arrived at in his the-newest-interpretation of Marx. Still, I might download his book and take a look.
You say the Standard ought to review Mau’s book. If only the SPGB had the same policy that the WSPUS had, non-party members would not be barred from contributing to the party organ, and you could write the review yourself.
But never mind about hot-new-thing Søren Mau for the moment. First and foremost, what the Socialist Standard ought to review is this article itself. (If for no other reason than because this is the way to bring it to the attention of those party members who do not deign to read this forum … or this thread of this forum or whatever.)
PS: Nick Chavez himself has reviewed Mau’s book, positively: https://shorturl.at/tEINW . But from his description I can hardly agree with his concluding sentence, that ‘Every communist should have a copy of this book’.
News and Letters allows everybody to write articles, reviews and commentaries in their newspaper, at the local meetings and congress all members are allowed to make presentations at the meetings.
Mau was interviewed by Jacobin last February. In it he confirms the summary of his argument in the introduction to the interview, headlined “Capitalism Makes Everyone Bend to Its Will, Rich and Poor Alike”:
“In his new book Mute Compulsion, Søren Mau argues that to understand and end capitalism, we need to analyze how it not only subordinates the poor to the rich but in fact exerts economic power over everyone — including capitalists themselves.”
This of course is something we have long said and is in fact the basis of our case that capitalism cannot be reformed to work in the interest of the majority class of wage workers. Not only capitalist firms but governments too are subject to the “logic of capital” enforced through market competition which dictates that priority must be given to profits and the conditions for profit-making. That reformist governments can’t escape this “mute compulsion” has been confirmed time and time again.
Looks as if we should review it.
https://jacobin.com/2023/02/soren-mau-mute-compulsion-marx-capital-economic-power-domination
Mau’s book isn’t about socialism, or how to achieve it, but about how market relations are necessarily a form of domination or ‘mute compulsion’. Listening to him talking about his book here, I don’t think it’s fair to describe him as an idiot (even if he has no clue about how socialism might come about)
https://pod.link/1544487624/episode/c66ba1020402cecd75dcc8af75d30f8c
Edit: Another reason I thought a review would be good is that it could draw a bit of internet traffic from interested parties.
I just listened to that. It confirms that Mau’s basic argument is that what maintains capitalist rule is not just physical force (threatened or actual) and ideology (brainwashing) but also “economic power”. He sees this as an impersonal form of power, an expression of the logic of capital that every market agent (ie not just workers but capitalists too) in capitalism is subjected to through the impersonal operation of market forces.
The book sounds as if it might be heavy going but a reviewer has been found and a review, as well as a comment on his blog about communism, will be appearing in the Socialist Standard.
In 2017 I showed the following to a friend:
1) Buick: ‘No need to compare Apples and Oranges: The Case Against Economic Calculation’
2) Cox: ‘The “Economic Calculation” Controversy: Unravelling of a Myth’
He replied as follows:
‘I imagine that the socialist calculation debate can be relegated to the dustbin of history. Items 1 and 2 on your list seem pretty right, as far as it goes, but the solutions proposed seem mostly no longer relevant, except maybe for a very brief transitional stage.
After the revolution —
Computational devices will have been subject to a multi-year redesign process purging them of functions and modalities that reflect their origins under the reign of Capital. Since fundamental values such as “efficiency”—probably the single most highly-prized value of the likes of Mises and Hayek, and the one capitalist virtue most widely internalized among the populace at large—will have been subject to rigorous critique and reformation—the redesign of I.T. will proceed from very different political foundations. Those elements of capitalist-era I.T. that had anarcho-communist elements in their deeper structures— distributed computing and other decentered modes of coordination, plus the anti-authoritarian possibilities inherent in algorithms themselves—would be greatly advanced. Algorithms which now exist to channel consumer behavior and limit choice would be rebuilt, allowing for an emergence of the kind of systemwide “knowledge” that Hayek et al claimed was only possible through price (although Hayek was open to the possibility that there could theoretically be a form of general systemic knowledge other than price). In the short term, this technology would allow for the kind of organization of production along the lines of item 1 below. In the long-term though, I.T. technology would have been designed to evolve according to the needs of emergent communes/soviets/ as well as planet-scale mutual aid/repair initiatives. There is no coordination/non-coordination problem that isn’t solvable even given current technology and with a different political-economic system that would produce a new and better set of motivations for technological improvements, the nature of “calculation” itself would be completely different. ‘
Re ALB’s ‘Not only capitalist firms but governments too are subject to the “logic of capital” enforced through market competition which dictates that priority must be given to profits and the conditions for profit-making.’ —
here is how the group Chuǎng put the matter some years back:
‘In an attempt to cleave down to the heart of such dynamics, there is always a risk of attributing more agency to presidents, chairmen and assorted billionaires than is deserved. The reality is that decisions made at the helms of states or corporations are always decisions made in response to material limits confronted by complex political and economic systems. The ruling class is a designator for a non-homogenous array of individuals who hold decision-making positions within these citadels of political-economic power, for whom the continuation of the status quo is of the utmost priority. But these individuals sit in highly structured positions, beholden to the built-in demands of shareholders (for higher profit) and political constituencies (for minimal levels stability and prosperity, not so much the requirement that things get better but simply that they don’t get too bad too fast). There is thus no real malicious intent behind such decisions, nor is there the ability for such holders of power to truly transform or break free from the system itself. They are chained to it just as we all are, though they find themselves chained to its top.
The entire process is, therefore, one of contingent adaptations, rather than ruling class conspiracy. Its product is not that of a hidden, scheming council of elites, but simply the result of the continual experimentation through which different factions of the ruling class attempted to resolve the budding crisis and failed, their efforts then replaced by new, untested possibilities put forward by new leaders generating new outcomes that had to be dealt with in turn. The process is one of continual transformation in response to the local manifestations of the global decline in profitability. “Neoliberalism” is therefore not a fully conscious, casually malicious political program, as some authors would have it,[7] but simply a term attributed to a loose consensus that formed around numerous local solutions to the crisis that seemed to overcome short-term limits at the time.’
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