THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF WALMART (Original by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski. Revised Edition by Comrade Milly Graha)
THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF WALMART | |
|---|---|
| Author | Original by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski. Revised Edition by Comrade Milly Graha |
| Written in | 5, March, 2019. Revised 3, August, 2023 |
| Publisher | Verso Books. Revised by USU |
| Type | Book |
| Source | https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/peoples-republic-of-walmart-a-salvageable-trainwreck/ |
Foreword by ProleWiki
Below is an abridged version of "The People's Republic of Walmart" referred to as "The Abridged People's Republic of Walmart". Prolewiki will add original the book in time but have added the Abridged version so that people can disern the essential points of the book without needing to be bogged down in the Liberalism of the original authors, of whom, Leigh Phillips is a Zionist.
Included here also is a critique of the original book by Rachel Nagant.
https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/peoples-republic-of-walmart-a-salvageable-trainwreck/
AN INTRODUCTION to ECONOMIC PLANNING, HOLD THE LIBERALISM.
By Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Revised by Comrade Milly Graham
Note From the Editor
The People’s Republic of Walmart, as originally published by Jakkkobin and Verso Books, was a text rife with internal contradiction. The information about the use of planning in capitalist firms — planning as a subordinate social form within a market economy — is well researched, highly enlightening, and, I believe, imminently important for contemporary revolutionaries to understand. At the same time, however, I could not in good conscience recommend the book to anyone as it was, because its social and political commentary was — pardon my language — quite shit. Kautskyism, Bernsteinism, Lassalleanism, Narodnikism, Proudhonism — the book had it all like a bingo card of revisionism. Writing an entirely new book would be a waste of effort (and a missed opportunity to annoy the authors), so, instead, I have liberated what I believe to be a worthwhile read, particularly for developing Marxists or for a Marxist study group. I won’t claim to have perfectly picked clean every morsel off the bones of the original text, but I think you’ll find this revised edition much more valuable nonetheless. For the most part, edits of the remaining text are stylistic rather than changes to the content, but for the sake of transparency, any sections I have added or substantively altered will be marked with a red asterisk: *
Hugs and kisses,
- Comrade Milly Graham
WHY PLANNING?
There is certainly overlap between the set of all goods and services that are useful to humanity, on the one hand, and the set of all goods and services that are profitable, on the other. You likely find underwear to be a useful product (though for commandos, this is no certainty); The Gap, meanwhile, finds it profitable to produce such a product—a happy coincidence, of which there are many. But the set of all useful things and the set of all profitable things are not in perfect correspondence. If something is profitable, even if it is not useful or is even harmful, someone will continue producing it so long as the market is left to its own devices.
Fossil fuels are a contemporary example of this irremediable, critical flaw. Wonderful though they have been due to their energy density and portability, we now know that the greenhouse gasses emitted by fossil fuel combustion will rapidly shift the planet away from an average temperature that has remained optimal for human flourishing since the last ice age. Yet, so long as governments do not intervene to curtail the use of fossil fuels and build out the clean electricity infrastructure needed to replace them, the market will continue to produce them. Likewise, it was not the market that ended production of the chlorofluorocarbons that were destroying the ozone layer; instead it was regulatory intervention—planning of a sort—that forced us to use other chemicals for our fridges and cans of hairspray, allowing that part of the stratosphere that is home to high concentrations of ultraviolet ray—deflecting tripartite oxygen molecules to largely mend itself. We could recount similar tales about how the problems of urban air pollution in most Western cities or of acid rain over the Great Lakes were solved, or how car accident mortality rates or airline crashes have declined: through active state intervention in the market to curb or transform the production of harmful—but profitable—goods and services. The impressive health and safety standards of most modern mining operations in Western countries were achieved not as a result of any noblesse oblige on the part of the owners of the companies, but rather begrudgingly, as a concession following their defeat by militant trade unions.
Conversely, if something is useful but unprofitable, it will not be produced. In the United States, for instance, there is no universal public healthcare system, though healthcare for all would certainly be wonderfully useful. But because it is not profitable, it is not produced. High-speed internet in rural areas is also not profitable, so private telecommunications companies are loath to provide it there, preferring instead to cherry-pick profitable population-dense neighborhoods. And amid a growing global crisis of antimicrobial resistance, in which microbial evolution is defeating antibiotic after antibiotic and patients are increasingly dying from routine infections, pharmaceutical companies have all but given up research into new families of the life-saving drugs, simply because they are not profitable enough.
That amputation or surgery to scrape out infected areas might return as common medical responses is not a pleasant thought. But this course of action was the only one left to the doctors of nineteen-year-old David Ricci of Seattle when they surgically removed part of his leg, following repeated infections from drug-resistant bacteria—acquired in a train accident in India—that could not be treated, even with highly toxic last resort antibiotics. Each time the infection returned, more and more of the leg had to be cut off. Although Ricci has since recovered, he has lived in perpetual fear of the reappearance of the bugs that can’t be fought. As a 2008 “call to arms” paper from the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) put it, “[Antibiotics] are less desirable to drug companies and venture capitalists because they are more successful than other drugs.” Antibiotics are successful if they kill off an infection, at which point—days or weeks, or at most months, later—the patient stops taking the drug. For chronic diseases, however, patients may have to take their medicine every day, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Thus, the paper concluded, it is long-term therapy—not cures—that drives interest in drug development. Policy proposals from the likes of the IDSA, the World Health Organization and the European Union amount to begging and bribing the pharmaceutical companies to lift a finger; but even here, however unambitious the approach, it is still external to the market. (Nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry would be cheaper, and a much more rapid and effective approach, but most pundits deem it too “radical,” giving off too much of a whiff of socialism).
Beyond this one sector, we might note that basic blue-sky research in any field simply cannot be done by the private sector, because it is extremely expensive but makes no guarantee of any return on investment. Thus research is almost entirely a phenomenon characteristic of public institutions (or at least public funding). Similarly, it was not the market that got us to the moon, but rather a little ol’ public sector enterprise called NASA. Maybe you’ve heard of it?
*Besides determining what kinds of things are produced, there is another irresolvable, fundamental problem with the market: the propensity towards crisis. The “anarchy of production,” that is, the market system, compels every capitalist, as a compulsory law, to improve his means of production, to drive down the price of his commodities with the development of labor-saving technologies. But the expansion of production inevitably grows faster than the market which must absorb its products for the capitalist to realize his investment. Try as the capitalist might to expand his markets, to expand the sphere of circulation or to drive up consumption with advertising, he will forever be stuck in a tragic “boom and bust” cycle. The forces of production created by society thus overwhelm the form of exchange of society, creating a crisis, not of scarcity, but, absurdly, of overproduction. For the biggest of capitalists, these crises are merely another opportunity to improve their accumulated horde of wealth, to buy out the failing businesses. For the rest of us in society, crisis means losing one's business, one’s job, one’s home, and all the other elements of one’s means of subsistence. It means the destruction of the means of production, or the surplus commodities, resetting the cycle back to the start. This contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production — the systems of exchange and ownership — cannot be resolved without social revolution, without abolishing the market!
In general, criticisms of the current way of doing things propose that the market be replaced, or at least reined in. But if allocation does not proceed via the market, then it will occur via economic planning, also known as “direct allocation”—made not by the “invisible hand” but by very visible humans. Indeed, this form of planned allocation already takes place widely in our current system, on the part of elected and unelected individuals alike, by both states and private enterprises, and in centralized and decentralized forms. Even arch-capitalist America is home not only to Walmart and Amazon, but also to the Pentagon: in spite of being incredibly destructive, the US Department of Defense is the single-largest employer in the world, and a centrally planned public sector operation. In fact, almost all countries are, to varying degrees, “mixed” economies, making use of both markets and planning.
Indeed, planning has accompanied human societies as long as they have existed. Thousands of years ago, the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia created a nexus of economic institutions that connected the workshops and temples of the cities to peasant agricultural production in the countryside. The Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III), which flourished around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers near the end of the third millennium BCE, was among the first to make the breakthrough to widespread permanent record keeping. Clay tablets from Ur III include predictions of crop yields based on averages of soil quality, themselves derived from years of record keeping. Even though the economy was still at the mercy of uncontrollable weather, it could be managed at a rudimentary level. With the advent of detailed accounts, expectations and approximations—both crucial to planning— became features of economic life. Unlike the localized gift-exchange economy of prehistory, ancient Mesopotamia saw systems of centralized redistribution that mimic today’s welfare states: taxes and levies in, transfers of goods and services out.
Increasingly complex economic record-keeping, accounting and social institutions all point to early ancient civilizations producing something that cannot but be described as economic calculation and planning. This is not to say there was some Arcadia of central planning at this time, any more than it is accurate to describe hunter-gatherer society as some peaceful egalitarian Eden. The planning of the ancients was not only rudimentary and partial; it was also far from being a rational way of securing the shared benefit of all. Indeed, ancient planning was at the service of an economic system created for the benefit of a small coterie of elites who were motivated to maintain their wealth and power. Sound familiar?
There is not only a crying need for us to talk about what an alternative to the market would be, but also a great deal of confusion about what planning is and its history. To take one example: China appears to be the last man standing in the global economy; its growth rates, even if they have declined recently from eye popping to merely gobsmacking, have been achieved through an admixture of free market mechanisms and very heavy shepherding by central planners and party-state managers. It seems even some members of the ascendant bourgeoisie in that country believe that Mao’s economic planning was less mistaken than premature. A 2018 Financial Times feature describes Jack Ma, founder of the Chinese e-commerce colossus Alibaba Group, as part of a growing movement in the People’s Republic who argue that “the fatal flaw of state planning was simply that planners did not have enough information to make good decisions.” He and his co-thinkers believe that “big data” can solve this problem. Could he be right?
In such volatile times, it cannot be ruled out that a socialist revolution might, within our lifetimes, burst forth even within the capitalist heartlands, within the belly of world imperialism. If we do not take pains to sketch out ahead of time what an alternative to the market might look like, those involved will inevitably fall back on versions of what they already know. The capitalist-realist earworm, like the Ceti eel in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, remains wrapped around our cerebral cortex, foreclosing the possibility of transformation even at the moment of its realization.
The time, then, is as ripe as browning avocados on toast to uncover a very old conversation: a long-standing but largely forgotten argument over the question of planning. Our aim is not to offer a comprehensive, definitive survey of this almost century-long discussion, which economists refer to as the “economic calculation debate” (or “socialist calculation debate”)—whether it is mathematically and physically possible to plan an economy, and whether this is desirable—but to provide a plain-language, hopefully even enjoyable, introduction for the uninitiated. In the main, we aim here to bring together and make more easily comprehensible ideas and findings that have been forgotten or are otherwise jargon filled, mathematical, or computer science-oriented, or which lie buried in the pages of little-read operations research or business-management journals. Thus, we lean heavily on the work of economic historians, computer scientists and scholars of commerce. In writing a primer on planning, and on the challenge of logistics and economic calculation, we hope to take this vital debate down from moldering academy shelves and reintroduce it into the field of live political combat.
Above all, our goal with this brief text is simply to flag a rarely recognized, yet obvious, fact that in some sense makes the “calculation debate” anachronistic: it is already the case that great swaths of the global economy are planned. Walmart is a prime example. Thus the question as to whether planning can exist at large scales without crippling economic inefficiencies could be moot. There might be no single machine that we can simply take over, run them with new operators but otherwise leave them unchanged; but there is a foundation of planning that a more just society could surely take up and make its own.
This is not so much a book about a future society, but one about our own. We plan. And it works.