The People's Republic of Walmart

by Leigh Phillips

  We cannot reach this worthy goal without democratic planning and a steady overcoming of the market. The scale of what we must do—the biogeophysical processes we must understand, track, and master in order to prevent dangerous climate change and associated threats—is almost unfathomable in its complexity. We cannot trust the irrational, unplanned market with its perverse incentives to coordinate the earth’s ecosystems.

  Counteracting climate change and planning the economy are projects of comparable ambition: if we can manage the earth system, with its all its variables and myriad processes, we can also manage a global economy. Once the price signal is eliminated, we will have to consciously perform the accounting that, under the market, is implicitly contained in prices. Planning will have to account for the ecosystem services implicitly included in prices—as well as those that the market ignores. Therefore, any democratic planning of the human economy is at the same time a democratic planning of the earth system.

  Global democratic planning is not merely necessary for the good Anthropocene; it is the good Anthropocene.

  11

  CONCLUSION: PLANNING WORKS

  Planning exists all around us, and it clearly works; otherwise capitalists would not make such comprehensive use of it. That’s the simple message of this book and one that strikes at the heart of the dogma that “there is no alternative.” Today, this Thatcherite slogan is already wilting under the pressure of its own success. It has created an anti–social compact: a world of rising inequality and widespread stagnation. But it is under attack from within as well. From Amazon’s warehouses to Foxconn’s factories to all major branches of industry, the capitalist system operates without prices signals and markets. It plans—and it plans well.

  However, if the good news is that planning works, the bad news is precisely that it currently works within the confines of a profit system that restricts what is able to be produced to that which is profitable; and so long as this is profitable, the system allows what is harmful to continue to be produced. Profit pushes capitalist planning to achieve remarkable efficiencies in resource use and human labor. But nothing stops long hours at poverty wages, climate-busting production methods and fossil-fueled transportation from being inputs into plans—in fact, a host of economic incentives encourage just this. Amazon is as much a complex planning mechanism based in human ingenuity as it is an inhuman place to work. Some 150 years later, we have much the same reaction of awe and terror at the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism as had Marx in the face of its Victorian antecedent.

  Our world, of course, is very different than his—one in which a haphazard quest for profit was driven by steam power and colonial expansion. Ours is a time of ubiquitous computing and increasingly sophisticated predictive algorithms, layered on top of centuries of accelerated technological and social change.

  And, here, Thatcher was wrong on another count. She didn’t just say that there was “no alternative,” but went further, claiming, “there is no such thing as society.” Silicon Valley’s slogans about bringing people together may appear corny, but in that corn, there hides a kernel of truth that disproves this second Thatcherite dictum. Capitalism brings us closer together, now more than ever. Our individual actions rely on globe-spanning chains of activities of others. It takes hundreds, if not thousands, of workers to make one gadget and all its components. Many of these links are invisible to us: from the miners in Africa digging up rare earth metals to the workers in Vietnam manufacturing OLED displays to the millions putting phones together in Foxconn’s factories that resemble small cities, much of their labor is performed in conditions little different than those of the mills and mines of nineteenth-century Britain—ones that are dangerous, overcrowded, and demand inhuman pace. And all that work relies on a second, even more hidden economy of household production, whose uncompensated weight is still largely borne by women. All we see is that final anonymous, yet also indispensable, individual, often a retail worker on minimum wage, who hands over a box.

  The accuracy of a Google search result or a recommended product on Amazon is built from the unpaid labor of millions of others across the globe, clicking and liking, sending untold numbers of tiny packets of information—that supposed stumbling block to large-scale planning—around the globe.

  The glimmers of hope for a different way of doing things are foreshadowed in the sophisticated economic planning and intense long-distance cooperation already happening under capitalism. If today’s economic system can plan at the level of a firm larger than many national economies and produce the information that makes such planning ever more efficient, then the task for the future is obvious: we must democratize and expand this realm of planning—that is, spread it to the level of entire economies, even the entire globe.

  The foundations for this alternative mode of production have, in many senses, already been laid; we already carry, in our pockets, access to more information and computing power than could have been dreamed by any of the protagonists of past debates about the possibilities of planning. At the same time, we cannot underestimate the potential for abuse that stems from the vast quantities of information that planning requires and unleashes. Profound challenges to the expansion of both democracy and planning inhere in this technological advance, including the protection of individual freedom and privacy, and it would be dangerous and irresponsible to minimize them.

  It is not enough to say, “Nationalize it!” We have to think hard about how to ensure that the already enormous amounts of information controlled by large, unaccountable corporate bureaucracies do not become the basis for new unaccountable bureaucracies (state-run or otherwise). As the two twins of undemocratic planning, Soviet Union and Walmart, show, planning on its own is no synonym for socialism. It is the precondition, certainly, but it is not a sufficient condition. This means we need to have hard conversations about the state and nationalization. Nationalization decommodifies, but does it democratize? Friedrich Engels, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, warned against the notion that nationalization on its own is the panacea:

  Of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkyism, that without more ado declares all State-ownership, even of the Bismarkian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of Socialism. If the Belgian State, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion, took over for the State the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the Government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes—this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick William III’s reign, the taking over by the State of the brothels.

  In any case, for so many of today’s transnational firms, from Walmart and Amazon to Google and Shell, which state would do the nationalizing? The United Nations? One day, perhaps, but today it is still an intergovernmental talking shop, yet to be a democracy.

  We shouldn’t suggest planning is simply a matter of “taking over the machine”; still less “the government” taking it over and otherwise leaving the machine as it is. Since so much of our social world—our rules and customs, habits and preconceptions, these very systems of planning—have been influenced by the logic of the market, it is not simply a world that must be taken over but one that must be transformed.

  Likewise, we cannot let go of concern for human freedom—from all forms of domination. The capitalist economy is already a
realm of “unfreedom”—a term used by the Marxist economist Gerry Cohen to include the most basic coercions of capitalism, such as the inability of the vast majority to refuse to work for a wage. Without a thorough democratization of any postcapitalist planning apparatus, we risk creating new unfreedoms. Therefore, rather than a society run by technocratic planners, we want a democratized society of citizen-planners.

  How precisely do we build such a democracy, one more thoroughgoing than our current crop of parliaments? That would be another book in itself. For much of the history of the Left, its grand battalions came overwhelmingly from the working classes. However, over the last two generations, a great many progressive thinkers (though certainly not all) have come from the academy, in particular from the humanities—history, law, philosophy, literature—and from the social sciences—sociology, anthropology, economics, political science. Any future Left that takes the question of planning seriously will also have to depend heavily upon talents from computer science, operations research, combinatorics and graph theory, complexity theory, information theory and allied fields. And the transformation needed if it is to be democratic, rather than technocratic, will have to be led by, not on behalf of, workers at Walmart, Amazon, Facebook and other transnationals.

  Humans have long relied on planning, from the simple distribution carried out by the first settled civilizations, to the complex calculations that undergird today’s corporate behemoths, to those rare instances, like war or disaster, when the rules of today’s complex economy are temporarily suspended and planning takes over on the grandest scales. It is our hope that the Left, and indeed society as a whole, can recapture the ambition to make such planning a beacon for its long-term vision. To do so, we need to study how it works today, design transitional demands to expand its reach, and dream of transforming its workings completely to deliver a future realm of true freedom.

  Planning is already everywhere, but rather than functioning as a building block of a rational economy based on need, it is woven into an irrational system of market forces driven by profit.

  Planning works, just not yet for us.