To market, to market … or not?

The tedious thing about being a book reviewer is your obligation to be fair, thorough, and concise. You’re supposed to keep in mind that, quite possibly, all your readers will ever know about the book you’re reviewing is what you say in the review, so the poor author, who may have spent years writing the book, is to that extent at your mercy. You’re supposed to give a reasonably complete idea what’s in the book, not just what you found interesting about it, since you don’t know that what interests you will interest others. You’re supposed to put the author’s case in the most persuasive and plausible form, since she won’t get to reply in more than a few, inevitably inadequate paragraphs. You can’t just blather on, mentioning all the (often irrelevant) things the book made you think about and, in particular, dropping the names of other (often remotely) related books, just to demonstrate your cosmopolitan interests and vast erudition.

For all these reasons, a symposium like this is something of a holiday. There are lots of other people writing about the book, and one or another of them is bound to cover whatever you’ve left out. So much for thoroughness. The author gets to reply at great length, and commenters at moderate length, and someone will certainly seize the opportunity to correct anything you’ve misunderstood or misrepresented. So no need to worry overmuch about being scrupulously fair. And it’s the Internet – concision is unheard of, and blathering/showing off is practically the name of the game. Ha, ha — screw all those tiresome reviewerly obligations!

A couple of observations arising directly from Red Plenty, though, before wandering off into matters only indirectly related. If anyone out there knows of any writing remotely comparable to the astonishing description strung across pages 329-340 of the genesis of a lung cancer tumor, please share. Once every few years, this grizzled and jaded book critic comes across a few pages that cause the pupils to widen, the pulse to quicken, the amygdala to flutter. This was one of those occasions. There is plenty of extremely good writing in the book – the immediately preceding chapter, about giving birth, for example; or the little fixer Chekuskin’s venture into the banya, or bathhouse, where the local criminals are playing cards, in order to buy scavenged copper pipe from them; or the visit of a Komsomol delegation to an American exhibition in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park in 1959. But the cellular mini-epic compressed between the sad, quotidian events of a chapter called “The Unified System, 1970” is way beyond extremely good. I would be willing to follow up any number of recommendations from commenters on the long chance of encountering a few pages that gave me anything like as much pleasure.

Another thing you’re not supposed to do in book reviews is plug your friends. Well, screw that too. Because Red Plenty is about so many things – economic reform, the culture of academe, bureaucracy, Russian history – the portrayal of everyday life and character, though skillful, is episodic and will leave some readers unsatisfied. To those readers I recommend the stories of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, one of the foremost fictional chroniclers of Soviet life in the decades covered by Red Plenty. Petrushevskaya’s stories are being translated into English by my good friend Anna Summers, and one of them appears in Baffler 19.

Red Plenty doesn’t have a plot, exactly, but the narrative thread with the most continuity and the highest dramatic tension concerns the efforts of mathematical economists to rationalize the vast, ramshackle contraption that was the USSR’s central plan. Once Khrushchev had publicly repudiated the worst excesses of Stalinist ultra-orthodoxy and police-state repression, the economists began speaking to Party leaders about ideas they had formerly only whispered about among themselves: in particular, “objectively determined valuations,” “shadow prices,” and even “enterprise profits.” They promised plenty, and plausibly, but at a cost: less Party control. At the climactic moment, while First Secretary Kosygin looks on, “tapping one set of dry fingertips against the other,” his aide challenges the economists’ spokesman: isn’t what’s being proposed essentially a market economy – the negation of Communism?

“No!” said Emil. “This would be an alternative to a market economy. The prices would represent genuine social utility. And calculating them would be well within the powers of existing technology. We have the software ready!

History seems to hang in the balance, but really, rejection is preordained. The First Bureaucrat taps his fingers a while longer and then speaks: “It’s a very pretty idea. Very clever. But not practical. Not a serious proposition.”

Whether it was a serious proposition – whether market and central plan could have been combined in roughly the way envisioned by the book’s protagonists – I leave to my fellow symposiasts. I would like instead to turn to a more recent and less historically significant debate, though one more relevant (I hope) to the American future: about the market vs. decentralized planning. David Schweickart, a mathematician and philosophy professor, is the author of Against Capitalism, After Capitalism, Market Socialism, and Capitalism or Worker Control? Michael Albert, co-founder of South End Press and ZNet, is the author (with Robin Hahnel) of Looking Forward, The Political Economy of Participatory Economics, and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. The latter book (full text available online: http://www.zcommunications.org/zparecon/pareconlac.htm), published by Verso, has had surprising success. It has been translated into 15 or 20 languages and  is the subject of numerous dedicated websites.

In 2006 Schweickart wrote a long, harsh review of Parecon. Albert, who evidently loves a good argument, posted Schweickart’s review on the ZNet website with a lengthy reply and invited a rejoinder from Schweickart, to which he again replied at length. The full exchange is at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/zdebatealbertvsschweickart.htm. (I’ve only read scattered pages of Parecon, but I reviewed the two earlier Albert/Hahnel volumes at some length)

It’s a lengthy exchange, and it gets down to cases. In fact, Schweickart immediately gets down to a very extended case: he attempts to apply the Parecon model of “balanced job complexes” and “consumption bundles” to his own workplace, Loyola University, and his own everyday consumption. The necessary calculations – imagined in real-life detail, over many pages – are staggeringly complex. And this does not exhaust the difficulties. Wages, prices, and investments must also be decided on. Even if the deliberations involved were not prohibitively time-consuming, Schweickart claims, it is impossible to make such decisions in a non-arbitrary way without some measure of efficiency, like that provided by the results of market competition.

Albert concedes the difficulty, but not the impossibility. As he reasonably points out, doing anything for the second or fifth time is easier than doing it for the first time. After all, the costs of transition from craft production to industrial production were horrendous; the process was only accomplished through massive and prolonged coercion of the population by capitalists, managers, and the state. The costs of a voluntary transformation by a self-directing populace would be far easier to bear. If we can look past the difficulties, Albert urges, we will see a necessary egalitarian future that can be attained no other way:

Transition involves experimentation in job definition. It involves a flow of changes that give those doing only cushy and empowering work steadily more of the socially necessary but rote tasks, while giving some of their cushy and empowering labor over to those who were previously excluded. …

The point is, if you look down the road some years from when serious redesign in pursuit of balanced job complexes begins, balanced job complexes can be attained and, moreover, the people who work at the new Loyola can have had enriching education in their youth – rather than about 80% of them being taught mostly to endure boredom and take orders, and 20% being taught productive skills and also to feel superior. In the new Loyola, all who work there are equipped to participate cooperatively and equitably in balanced jobs, and a few will not dominate the rest. And the same goes for other workplaces. We don’t all do everything, of course. None of us do things beyond our capacities, naturally. We all, however, do some activity that is empowering and some that is not, in a socially balanced mix.

Albert’s egalitarianism is unyielding and deeply admirable. Schweickart is an egalitarian too – it would be a far less worthwhile debate if he weren’t. But, he counters, there are equally important values: privacy, most obviously, and the spirit of enterprise. Even more fundamentally, Albert’s “strict egalitarianism is morally problematic. It undercuts the generosity of spirit a socialist ethic should provide.”

Schweickart’s favored alternative, expounded in After Capitalism, is “Economic Democracy.” It has three elements:

• Worker Self-Management: Each productive enterprise is controlled democratically by its workers.
• The market: These enterprises interact with one another and with consumers in an environment largely free of government price controls. Raw materials, instruments of production, and consumer goods are all bought and sold at prices largely determined by the forces of supply and demand.
• Social control of investment. Funds for new investment are generated by a capital assets tax and are returned to the economy through a network of public investment banks.

It all comes down to one’s view of markets. Schweickart and Albert agree that private financial markets must go; investment must be democratically decided on. But Schweickart insists that a market in goods and services is not a mere necessary evil, it is a positive good. Albert is implacable:

Markets aren’t a little bad, or even just very bad in some contexts. Instead, in all contexts, markets instill anti-social motivations in buyers and sellers, misprice items that are exchanged, misdirect aims regarding what to produce in what quantities and by what means, mis-remunerates producers, introduces class divisions and class rule, and embody an imperial logic that spreads itself throughout economic life.

Schweickart’s reply is eloquent:

Markets indeed have defects, but they have virtues as well. We need to think dialectically about markets. Markets are democratic (in that they respond to consumer preferences), and they are undemocratic (since they tend to exacerbate income inequality). Markets enhance the space of individual freedom (since consumer choices are not subject to the approval of others), and they contract the space of individual freedom (since market choices often have third-party effects). Markets provide incentives for constructive behavior (efficient use of resources, innovation) and for destructive behavior (consumer manipulation, disregard of ecological consequences). Neither market fundamentalism nor market rejectionism is an appropriate response to the reality of economic complexity.

This was also the conclusion of the late Alec Nove, a leading scholar of Soviet economic history, whose witty, incisive, altogether invaluable The Economics of Feasible Socialism is a book anyone interested in the themes of Red Plenty will want to read. Nove quotes a “doubtless sarcastic Soviet author” on the shortcomings of planning: “Mathematicians have calculated that in order to draft an accurate and fully integrated plan for material supply just for the Ukraine for one year will require the labour of the entire world’s population for 10 million years.” Nove then asks, unsarcastically:

 Is there then no possibility for democratic control over the processes of production and circulation? There most certainly is such a possibility, even a necessity … But first one must make clear that the democratic process will not be relevant to a wide category of microeconomic decision-making. Those responsible for making pumps will not vote about where they should go. The elected assembly at the center which will adopt a general plan for society will, of course, have neither the time nor the knowledge to concern itself with such a detail as pumps, let alone where any particular consignment should be sent (unless some scandalous situation arises which is brought to their attention). Otherwise, as Antonov wrote, next year’s plan will be ready in several million years.

Perfection, whether conceived as “optimization” or “equilibrium,” is a chimera. “All institutional arrangements carry with them advantages and disadvantages. … Competition has certain positive features: it is a consequence and pre-condition of choice; it also provides a stimulus, to the successful and laggards alike. … Similarly, central planning enables the planners to see the total picture, but at the cost of a loss of vision of detail. Decentralization means clarity at micro level, but at the cost that wider effects may remain unperceived. The best solution is bound to be a compromise.” This is Schweickart’s “neither market fundamentalism nor market rejectionism.”

Nove’s model of “feasible socialism” closely resembles Schweickart’s, with five levels of economic activity:

1)    State enterprises, centrally controlled and administered;

2)    Publicly owned (or socially owned) enterprises with full autonomy and a management responsible to the workforce;

3)    Enterprises owned and/or administered by the workforce (e.g., cooperatives, and other variants, employee shareholding, long leases, and so on);

4)    Private enterprise (subject to limits);

5)    Individuals (e.g., freelance journalists, plumbers, artists).

Investment would in general be publicly, democratically decided, though with a few more exceptions than Schweickart would allow. But unfettered private financial markets are out; to both writers it is obvious, as it must be to any thoughtful adult – there is some excuse, I suppose, for a thoughtful adolescent libertarian – that predominantly private control of investment is incompatible with a rational, humane society. To Albert’s ferocious hostility to hierarchy, Nove would reply that “it does seem likely that most human beings will continue to prefer to avoid responsibility and be glad to accept (appoint, elect) others to carry it,” but that there is all the difference in the world between accountable and unaccountable authority. As long as management in most enterprises is responsible to the workforce, there is no need to abolish professional managers.

By “feasible,” Nove explained in his introduction, he meant “a state of affairs which could exist in some major part of the developed world within the lifetime of a child already conceived.” No doubt Nove’s model, as well as Schweickart’s and even Albert’s, are technically feasible in that sense. But are they politically, psychologically, and morally feasible? Nove was writing in 1983, shortly after hundreds of millions of people had cast votes for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Not many of those people, or their children, seem to have learned much in the three decades since. The debates surveyed above will probably not be of practical relevance for quite a while: it will be a century or two, I fear, before the last Republican politician is hanged in the entrails of the last evangelical preacher.

So why are they worth having? Well, as Shelley wrote, the great instrument of moral good is the imagination. And imagination feeds on argument. Bellamy and Morris fed on Marx and Henry George; Ernest Callenbach fed on Paul Goodman and Lewis Mumford. Someone reading these arguments on ZNet or Crooked Timber may even now be meditating a utopian novel of a scope and beauty equal to theirs – or a semi-utopian fairy tale like Red Plenty. Perhaps we will feed her imagination.