The reality of Chileans directing a technology rather than the other way round should assuage potential concerns that our hypothesis—that contemporary processing power and telecommunications networks can work to overcome the economic calculation challenge—is a technocratic solution; that we are arguing that we offload the responsibility for constructing the democratic, marketless society to an algorithm. This gets it absolutely backwards.
Meanwhile, Flores’s strategy proved a success, shaving the edges off the shortages. Government data showed food supplies were maintained at between 50 and 70 percent of normal. Distribution of raw materials continued as normal to 95 percent of enterprises crucial to the economy, and fuel distribution at 90 percent of normal. Economic reports now relied on data that had been collected and delivered from across the country just three days earlier, where previously such government assessments had taken up to six months to produce. By the end of the month, the strike was all but broken, and it had clearly failed to achieve its goal of paralyzing the country. Chile still functioned. A minister told Beer that if it had not been for Cybersyn, the government would have collapsed on the night of October 17.
The result inspired Beer to envision still-wider applications of cybernetics to support worker participation. This former international business consultant had moved in an almost anarcho-syndicalist direction (anarcho-syndicalism is the political philosophy arguing for a government-less society coordinated directly by workers through their trade unions): “The basic answer of cybernetics to the question of how the system should be organised is that it ought to organise itself.” Science and technology could be tools used by workers to help democratically coordinate society, from the bottom up, leaping over the centralization/decentralization dichotomy. Instead of having engineers and operations researchers craft the models of factories, programmers would be under the direction of workers, embedding their deep knowledge of production processes into the software. Instead of the Soviet model of sending large quantities of data to a central command point, the network would distribute, vertically and horizontally, only that amount of information that was needed for decision making. For Beer, Medina writes, Cybersyn offered “a new form of decentralised, adaptive control that respected individual freedom without sacrificing the collective good.”
But for us, more than four decades later, we have a few outstanding questions, not least of which is whether a system used in emergency, near–civil war conditions in a single country—covering a limited number of enterprises and, admittedly, only partially ameliorating a dire situation—can be applied in times of peace and at a global scale.
After the strike, the government continued to use the network and had plans for its extension, but we will never know whether it all would have worked. On September 11, 1973, the Chilean armed forces finally initiated the coup against Allende that the United States had long sought. According to most assessments, including a 2000 report on the matter by the US Intelligence Community, the plotters proceeded with an implicit nod from Washington. At seven o’clock that morning, the Chilean navy rebelled, seizing the seaport of Valparaíso. Two hours later, the armed forces controlled most of the country. At noon, the general of the army, Gustavo Leigh, ordered Hawker Hunter jets to bomb the presidential palace, while tanks attacked from the ground. When Allende learned that the first floor of La Moneda had been taken, he ordered all staff out of the building. They formed a queue from the second floor, down the stairs and toward the door that opened to the street. The president moved along the line, shaking hands and thanking everyone personally.
President Salvador Allende then walked to Independence Hall on the northeast side of the palace, sat down, and placed a rifle that had been given to him by Fidel Castro between his legs, setting its muzzle beneath his chin. Two shots tore off the top of his head.
The military regime of General Augusto Pinochet immediately halted work on Project Cybersyn, physically destroying much of what had been constructed, although the most important documentation survived due to the rapid actions of key figures involved. By 1975, in addition to murdering, disappearing and torturing thousands, forcing thousands of others to flee as political refugees to places such as Canada, the junta had also implemented the world’s first experiment in what would come to be known as neoliberalism, prescribed by economists, most of whom had studied at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, who would go on to advise Republican US President Ronald Reagan and Conservative UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The junta followed the recommendations of these “Chicago Boys” to the letter: shock privatization of much of the public sector, slashed public spending, mass civil servant layoffs, wage freezes and economy-wide deregulation.
Variations on this neoliberal theme have since been adopted, with varying degrees of zeal or reluctance, by almost all governments the world over, producing a yawning inequality across much of the West—admittedly not always accompanied by CIA-trained death squads shoving trade unionists out of helicopters mid-flight or cutting off fingers and tongues of left-wing guitar-playing folk singers. Reigniting the dream of planning from the bottom up today means first undoing the harms, including in the world of ideas, of the neoliberal half century.
10
PLANNING THE GOOD
ANTHROPOCENE
What is profitable is not always useful, and what is useful is not always profitable. This, one of the principal themes of this book, applies on scales both granular and grand. As we have seen, no matter how beneficial new classes of antibiotic may be, they are insufficiently profitable, so they will not be produced. Meanwhile, many other commodities, such as fossil fuels, that undermine human flourishing or even threaten our existence, remain profitable, and so without regulatory intervention, companies will continue to be produce them. The market’s profit motive—not growth or industrial civilization, as some environmentalists have argued—caused our climate calamity and the larger bio-crisis. The market is amoral, not immoral. It is directionless, with its own internal logic that is independent of human command.
It would be very useful to wind down our species’ combustion of fossil fuels, responsible as it is for roughly two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions. It would be useful, too, to increase input efficiency in agriculture, which, together with deforestation and land-use change, is responsible for most of the remaining third.
We know how to do this. A vast build-out of dependable baseload electricity from nuclear and hydroelectric plants, supported by more variable renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar, could replace nearly all fossil fuels in short order, cleaning up the grid and delivering enough clean generation to electrify transport, heating, and industry. Decarbonizing agriculture is more complicated, and we still need better technology, but we understand the overall trajectory. Unfortunately, wherever these practices do not create profit, or do not create enough profit, companies will not put them in place.
We hear regular reports claiming that investment in renewable energy is now outpacing investment in fossil fuels. This is good, though it is often the result of subsidies for market actors, themselves typically derived from hikes in the price of electricity that hit working-class communities, rather than from taxes on the wealthy. Even if, in relative terms, more money is going toward wind and solar than toward coal, the absolute increase in combustion from India and China, among other nations, will likely push us past the two-degree-Celsius limit most governments have agreed is necessary to avoid dangerous climate change.
Simply put, the market is not building enough clean electricity, nor abandoning enough dirty energy, nor doing either quickly enough. The relatively simple directive to “clean up the grid and electrify everything” that resolves the fossil fuel part of the equation doesn’t work for agriculture, which will require a far more complex set of solutions. Here too, as long as a particular practice rakes in money, the market will not abandon it without regulation or public sector replacement. Liberals and greens argue that we shoul
d include the negative impacts of fossil fuel combustion (and its agricultural corollaries—some suggest a nitrogen tax) in fuel prices. In their estimation, once these externalities increase the carbon price to $200 or $300 per tonne (or as much as $1000 per tonne, according to the US National Association of Manufacturers), the market—that efficient allocator of all goods and services—will resolve the problem.
Leaving aside the grotesque inequalities that would result from steadily ratcheting up flat taxes, even as working-class and poor people spend a larger proportion of their income on fuel, carbon-tax advocates have forgotten that their solution to climate change—the market—is the very cause of the problem.
Think Bigger
How will a carbon price build a network of electric vehicle fast-charging stations? Tesla only builds them in those areas where it can rely on profits. Like a private bus company or an internet service provider, Elon Musk won’t provide a service where it doesn’t make money (or at least, one that doesn’t convince investors that it will someday make money; Tesla is currently a loss-making black hole for venture capital). The market leaves the public sector to fill the gap.
This is no abstract argument. Norway provides free parking and charging for electric vehicles, allows these cars to use bus lanes, and recently decided to build a nationwide charging network. Thanks to its interventionist policy, electric vehicles in the country as of January 2018 account for over 50 percent of total new sales, more than anywhere else. For comparison, barely 3 percent of cars in eco-friendly but market-enthralled California are electric.
The up-front costs of some of these changes pose one important obstacle. Take, for instance, nuclear power. From a system-wide perspective, conventional nuclear power still represents the cheapest option thanks to its mammoth energy density; it also boasts the fewest deaths per terawatt hour and a low carbon footprint. The only energy source with a lower carbon footprint is onshore wind. But, like large-scale hydroelectric projects, construction costs are considerable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes that while nuclear energy is clean and non-intermittent, and has a tiny land footprint, “without support from governments, investments in new … plants are currently generally not economically attractive within liberalized markets.” Private firms refuse to begin construction without public subsidies or guarantees. This explains why the most rapid decarbonization effort so far occurred before European market liberalization wrapped its fingers around the neck of its member-state economies. The French government spent roughly a decade building out its nuclear fleet, which now covers almost 40 percent of the nation’s energy needs.
Similarly, to integrate intermittent renewables to their maximum potential, we would need to build load-balancing, ultra high-voltage, smart transmission “super-grids” that span continents or even the entire globe so as to shave off as much as possible their volatile swings. While the wind might not be blowing and the sun not shining in one region, there is always somewhere else on the planet where the wind and the sun are doing what we want them to do when we want them to do it. We need to plan this project on the basis of system reliability, i.e, need. A patchwork of private energy companies will only build out what is profitable. And the up-front costs here are immense. China has its eyes set on precisely this through its Global Energy Interconnection initiative. The price tag for a worldwide electricity grid? $50 trillion.
The Regulatory Limit
Many greens call for a retreat from scale, a return to the small and local. But this, too, misdiagnoses the source of the problem. Replacing all multinationals with a billion small businesses would not eliminate the market incentive to disrupt ecosystem services. Indeed, given small businesses’ gross diseconomies of scale, disruption would only intensify.
At a minimum, we need regulation, that toe-dipping exercise in economic planning. A government policy that requires all firms that manufacture a particular commodity to use a nonpolluting production process would undermine the advantages gained by high polluters. This is the social-democratic option, and it has a lot going for it. Indeed, we should remember how fruitful regulation has been since we gained a deeper understanding of our global ecological challenges.
We patched our deteriorating ozone layer; we returned wolf populations and the forests they inhabit to central Europe; we relegated the infamous London fog of Dickens, Holmes and Hitchcock to fiction, although coal particulates still choke Beijing and Shanghai. Indeed, much of the climate challenge we face comes from an underdeveloped global South rightly seeking to catch up.
But regulation only temporarily tames the beast, and it often fails. Capital so easily slips its leash. So long as a market exists, capital will try to capture its regulatory masters. Everyone, from pipeline-blockading bullhorn wielders to Paris Agreement–drafters, recognizes that this fundamental barrier stalls our attempts to curb greenhouse gas emissions: if any one jurisdiction, sector, or company undertakes the level of breakneck decarbonization needed, their goods and services will instantly be priced out of the global market.
Thus, only a global, democratically planned economy can completely starve the beast. But this proposal raises some basic questions: Can we impose global democratic planning all at once, in all countries, and across all sectors? Outside of world revolution, this seems unlikely. But we can, nevertheless, keep that ideal as a lodestar, as something to work toward over generations, steadily extending the dominion of democratic planning over the market. Further, should we fully eliminate the market? Wouldn’t that simply replace the rule of the market with the rule of the bureaucrat? Public ownership is sufficient for neither social justice nor environmental optimization, and the fear of bureaucracy and its close relative—statism—is a rational one.
But democratic planning doesn’t have to entail state ownership. Unless they believe democracy has an upper limit, even classical anarchists should be able to imagine a global, stateless, but nevertheless planned, economy. Whether state-administered or otherwise, we must ensure that any nonmarket mode of global governance adheres to genuinely democratic principles.
We should certainly debate the public sector’s role and size. Could we seize logistics and planning powerhouses—the Walmarts and the Amazons of the world—and repurpose them for an egalitarian, ecologically rational civilization? Could we turn these systems into a global “Cybersyn,” Salvador Allende’s dream of computational, democratic socialism? Let’s first discuss whether that’s possible and desirable—then figure out how to ensure that we rule the algorithms and that they don’t rule us.
Climate change and the wider bio-crisis reveal that multiple local, or regional or continent-wide, decision-making structures are obsolete. No jurisdiction can decarbonize its economy unless others do as well. For even if one country figures out how capture and store carbon, the rest of the world will still face an acidifying ocean. Similar truths hold for nitrogen and phosphorus flows, closing nutrient-input loops, biodiversity loss, and freshwater management.
Moving beyond environmental questions, we could say the same about antibiotic resistance, pandemic diseases, or near-Earth asteroids. Even in less existential policy areas, like manufacturing, trade, and migration, too many interlinked nodes tie our truly planetary society together. One of capitalism’s great contradictions is that it increases the real connections between people at the same time as it encourages us to see each other as monadic individuals.
All this demonstrates both the horror and marvel of the Anthropocene. Humanity so fully commands the resources that surround us that we have transformed the planet in mere decades, on a scale that leviathan biogeophysical processes took millions of years to accomplish. But such awesome capability is being wielded blindly, without intent, in the service of profit, rather than human need.
The Socialist Anthropocene
Climate researchers sometimes talk about a “good Anthropocene” and a “bad Anthropocene.” The latter describes the intensification, and perhaps acceleration, of humanity’s unint
ended disruption of the ecosystems on which we depend. The former, however, names a situation in which we accept our role as collective sovereign of earth and begin influencing and coordinating planetary processes with purpose and direction, furthering human flourishing.
Such an attempt at dominion over the earth system may appear, at first glance, to be the ultimate in anthropocentric hubris; but this is in fact precisely what we argue when we say that we want to stop climate change, even if we don’t realize that’s what we’re saying. Because why would Planet Earth care about the particular temperature that predominated for most of the past few centuries, a highly unusual period of global temperature stability? Life on this rock, since it first emerged four and a half billion years ago, has experienced much-higher average global temperatures than even the worst projections of anthropogenic global warming. The late paleontologist, socialist and committed environmentalist Stephen Jay Gould once pooh-poohed all suggestions that we need to “save the planet.” “We should be so powerful!” he responded. “The earth will be perfectly fine. It is humanity that needs saving!” Even making very simple, unobjectionable statements such as “global warming will increase extreme weather events and so we should try to avoid that,” we are inescapably embracing an anthropocentric stance: that we aim to stabilize an optimum temperature for the sake of humanity.
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