We need central economic planning in order to create a democratic, egalitarian society:
a reply to John Spritzler
In one of his recent substack articles, former Harvard Senior Researcher John Spritzler, has argued that “What Replaces the "Free Market" in an Egalitarian Sharing Economy? It's NOT a Centrally Planned Economy!”
Spritzler makes two claims to back up this assertion, as follows:
I. Contrary to the socialist view, central planning just doesn’t work
II. For the ideal society Spritzler envisions, central planning will simply not be needed.
To support his first claim, Spritzler cites the authority of pro-capitalist, anti-communist Friedrich Hayek:
The problem with a centrally planned economy, according to this [i.e., Hayek’s] view, is that it is impossible for any central body to possess all of the vast information required to make all of the zillions of decisions that must be made in operating the economy of a nation rationally. This criticism of centrally planned economies is perfectly valid.
However, there are problems with this theory. What Hayek, and Spritzler, ignore, is the truth of what Karl Marx argues in the “Meaning of Human Requirements” chapter of his Economic and Philosophic Mss of 1844: that many of our “needs” are actually false needs, planted in us by capitalism, to get us to buy stuff we don’t need: stuff that as often as not, is really bad for us.
Along similar lines, Ernest Mandel refuted this thesis in 1986, in an article he had published in The New Left Review, entitled “In Defense of Socialist Planning”. In a nutshell, Mandel argues that the veritable supermarket range of choices that consumers are faced with under corporate capitalism, is only apparent. For example, we get a “choice” of different toothpastes. But the difference between them is pretty much insignificant. Moreover, most if not all of them on the market shelves containing the toxin fluoride.
In a socialist society, the citizens would collectively come to understand the bogus and often toxic nature of the choices formerly offered to them by corporate capitalism. Intelligent collective decision making, aided by computer technology, would not only replace profit-based encouragement to impulse buying. It would also and thereby slim down the range of choices, to a range of choices that are meaningful. Thus central planning could work, if given a chance.[i]
To substantiate Claim #2, that central planning is, contrary to the socialist view, not necessary, Spritzler argues along the same lines as his argument as he has in the past: that his “egalitarian” society can be run purely on the basis of a “voluntary federation” of local self-governing communities: by local assemblies participated in directly by the local citizens themselves. While Spritzler includes in his utopia more centralized assemblies of delegates elected by ordinary citizens, local direct participatory assemblies would feel no compulsion to obey the directives of these more centralized, delegated bodies.
However, I foresee the same sort of problems I outlined in my article on the political and social problems with this “voluntary communal” scheme.[ii] In a nutshell, the force that Spritzler envisions will keep the whole of any society cohesive, would merely be the sentiment of “sharing”. I do not believe, however, that this sentiment would be sufficient to overcome the anarchy that will result when each local community is permitted to go its own way.
Tribal society, another name for which was given by Marx as “primitive communism”, also had an ethos of sharing. But this ethos coincided with a martial ethos, a militant, warrior attitude taken by one tribe against all others. This is the basis for Thomas Hobbes description of the primeval human society as conditioned by a state of war, a bellum omnium contra omnes: a war of all against all. This is why anti-woke pundits describe the condition into which neo-liberal identity politics is plunging our society today as a new tribal society.
Spritzler might object to this as follows: “well, that was then, this is now. We are not primitive any longer. The ethos of sharing that we modern egalitarians have evolved, will not lead to a state of war.”
If he did so, I would say he is blindly accepting the ideology that mere scientific and technological progress—without looking to hard at whether or not we are actually employing the science and technology we have developed in the meantime—is a panacea.
I would draw an analogy to the modern cult of vaccine idolatry. Vaccine critics who have a knowledge of history, like myself, argue that nothing much has changed since the time when doctors used bloodletting.”
“Oh,” the vaccine idolators might say, “but there is a big difference. We have science now.”
To this I would rejoin, “Yes, we have a more advanced science than that enjoyed by the bloodletters. The question is, ‘do we actually use the scientific method. Have we used it to prove that vaccines, esp. these new mRNA “vaccines”, are safe and effective. The answer, as the book Turtles All the Way Down and many others have shown, is a definitive ‘NO!’ Therefore, there is no more reason to believe in the vaccines of today, than to believe in the bloodletting of yesteryear.”
Let’s return to the topic of whether we modern believers in the ethos of sharing can transcend the militaristic violence of tribal society, which also had such an ethos, at least for the members of our tribe, vs. theirs. What’s the actual technical mechanism we might use to avoid this militarism, to strip the kernel of sharing from the old tribal ethos, from its militaristic husk?
That mechanism must be the science and the systems of organization, economic, technological social, and political, which we have developed, that can override the human tendency toward selfishness and war with our fellows on the other side of the valley. And besides our modern systems of communication, these must also involve mechanisms of centralized (along with decentralized), albeit firmly democratic, economic, social, and political planning and direction.
The complete independence for local communities from each other and from more centralized bodies is ill advisable, to say the least, for the members of any social and economic relationship. To paraphrase John Donne, no local community is an island, either. Nor are they Liebnizian monads, even in, if you will excuse the pun, “the best of all possible, egalitarian worlds”. Different communities have different material resources, which they must share if they are to enjoy the fruits of a modern, technologically advanced industrial economy. Permitting each to go their own way, is a recipe for one community to use the monopoly it holds on its resources, to bargain up the price of those resources, vis a vis other communities. Chaos will inevitably result, and our society will look like the post-apocalyptic nightmare shown to “Grudge” by the Ghost of Christmas Future, in Rod Serling’s Carol for Another Christmas[iii]
A big part of the Marxist program for building a socialist society is the Urban Decentrist program later developed by Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, and Lewis Mumford. This entails that in order to heal the rift between humanity and nature, a rift exacerbated tremendously by the split between “rural idiocy” and big city congestion, clean, eco-friendly “garden cities” be built in the countryside, and those who live in the big cities, initially the most impoverished, should be invited to live in them. This will enable the big cities themselves to be “greened” and made liveable again.
How in the world would Spritzler’s “voluntary federation” of local communities, all of them going their own way, be able to accomplish this fundamental task of Decentrism. It can’t.
These are my principle objections.
[i]https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1986/09/planning.html
The problem with any governement including the Marxist control option is that it is based on the assumption that those chose to run the world are not as humanly frail weak and deluded as the lumpen proletariat. History teaches us that this is a lie. John offers an alternative which may be aspirational but fulfils the true needs of most responsible adults.