(2019-03-30) Miroslav Review The Peoples Republic Of Walmart

Frank Miroslav Review: The People’s Republic of Walmart. Let me begin by saying that I’m glad this book exists. Phillips and Rozworski are upfront about their book not containing any radical new insights into questions of economic planning, but instead they compile arguments made by others in a highly readable format, something that those on the left who argue for economic planning have needed for some time.

despite disagreeing profoundly with the claims made in the book, I would still love to see further research done into the question of planned economies and voluntary attempts at a planned economy.

Unfortunately, they break no new ground. Market anarchist critiques of the currently existing economy are incredibly potent at also knocking down this form of socialism. The insistence that Amazon and Walmart are successful islands of planned order within the chaotic market completely ignores larger questions of how our current institutional arrangement allows them to exist.

Let us start with the most erroneous claim. The supposed economies of scale that they champion as proof of planning winning out in the capitalist marketplace are in fact the result of deliberate state investment. Kevin Carson’s award-winning article on the subject of transportation subsidies makes clear the ludicrous degree to which the transportation network that firms like Amazon and Walmart rely on require the socialization of costs to the rest of society

Phillips and Rozworski also stumble in trying to demonstrate the inefficiency of free markets

*I want a deeper analysis that gets to the roots of the debate. Thankfully, the authors link to a text that does exactly this.

Paul Cockshott and Allen Cottrell’s Towards a New Socialism (1993) is what they ultimately turn to when it comes to explaining how a planned economy will work, which explores the question in detail. To be fair, they don’t accept the claims in that book at face value and call for further investigation into the subject (a line of research that I 100% support despite my skepticism when it comes to planning).*

As long as we have human labor, we need some way to evaluate the worth of that labor so calculation can occur. But the key question here is how does one differentiate between different forms of labor?

Such a scheme reads like a libertarian parody of a socialist society.

Despite many socialists claiming to have banished them, FA Hayek’s arguments about subjectivity and tacit knowledge haunt these arguments around planning.

there’s the problem of negotiating between the preferences of everyone taking part in the economy. Cosma Shazili’s excellent article In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You! describes this problem perfectly. (see Red Plenty)

to be fair, it’s likely that if such a social order was achieved, it would actually see a massive jump in terms of productivity and the reduction of externalities simply because our current system is so inefficient and broken. As Kevin Carson likes to point out, our modern economy is the equivalent of a horribly complicated Rube Goldberg machine which exists largely for the purpose of extracting rents and maintaining power imbalances

Of course the real problem isn’t making the world a better place once we’ve won, but instead getting there. And again the knowledge/calculation problems that undermine planning also apply to basically every other aspect of social organization

expanding individual agency is synonymous with increasing complexity, information flow, feedback, etc and as such there are good prefigurative reasons to investigate such questions so as to prepare for the world that we want.

just as many socialists as other economists came to the conclusion that free markets and socialism were in fact synonymous because of their capacity to enable decentralized networked organization.

This reveals blind spots in the thought of radical intellectuals on the subject of organization and cybernetics, like Stafford Beer of CyberSyn fame. Calls for decentralization and autonomy are all well and good, but individuals quickly run into the problem of expressing preferences in a timely manner.

this is where currency proves itself to be incredibly useful.

Prices let us compress the complexity of our subjectivity and knowledge into a single number that helps us interact with others

The capacity for prices to enable autonomous positive-sum relations between individuals is what has made capitalism capable of overcoming hurdles and challenges that would have destroyed any other system.

if Phillips and Rozowski can defend planning with an appeal to the corporate form by saying that it can be turned to good, then I can certainly defend currency just the same.

I think it’s highly likely we’ll see the reactionaries advocating for economic planning within a couple of years

After all, planning requires a highly legible economic sphere. (legibility)

The capacity for such systems to be used towards reactionary ends is pretty obvious once one realizes their obsession with strict social roles and castes.

Now such a shift does not necessarily mean that they’ll embrace planning. But there’s a long history of once marginal figures on the right adopting left-wing ideas towards their own ends.

obviously none of this is to imply that Phillips or Rozworski or any of the left-wing thinkers they cite in defense of planning are reactionaries. What I am doing however is pointing out that economic planning, no matter how democratic, contains within it the possibility of drifting in unpleasant directions

The fact such issues are left unaddressed is bad enough, but what’s worse is that it took until 2019 for someone to publish a comprehensive defense of economic planning in the age of ubiquitous computing.