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The manager’s exercise of central planning over his small province of tyranny is therefore not simply a better means to an end, as Coase thought, but a reflection of how the economy actually works. The adversarial relationship between bosses and workers that capitalism creates is no accident of markets merely introducing transaction costs that are best avoided through planning. Yet for mainstream economists, the confrontation between workers and managers only comes up in the context of “shirking.” The GPS device in the UPS driver’s truck, the call center badge that monitors washroom breaks or the white-collar worker’s app that tracks web browsing history are the sticks requiring one does as one is told; the bonuses are the carrots.
Shirking, however, is a very rational response for someone who has little or no say over their work, often has no deeper sense of collective responsibility and knows that the profit from what they do ends up in someone else’s pocket. Shirking is not an innate tendency toward laziness, but rather the way people are under capitalism. Any complex society will have people with different, sometimes-conflicting interests who need to cooperate toward common goals. Humans have embarked upon and accomplished projects in common, from the mundane to the spectacularly ambitious, long before the advent of capitalism and its subtly coercive labor market—indeed, often involving much more explicit coercion. Across history, however, people have also found ways to plan and act together without bosses to tell them what to do.
[...] Instead of optimizing the satisfaction of our needs and desires, as well as workers’ working conditions and livelihoods, Amazon’s plans are geared toward maximizing profit for its shareholders—or future profit, since Amazon keeps plowing money from sales into research, IT and physical infrastructure to squeeze out competitors. Planning for profit is in fact an example of capitalism’s web of allocation inefficiencies. The planning technologies dreamed up by Amazon’s engineers are a way of meeting a skewed set of social needs—one that ends up enriching a few, misusing substantial free social labor, and degrading workers. A democratized economy for the benefit of all will also need institutions that learn about people’s interests and desires, optimize via IT systems, and plan complex distribution networks; but they will look different, perhaps alien to the systems we have today, and they will strive toward dissimilar goals.
These cycles of boom and bust are not, however, pure anarchy. Capitalism, too, has something akin to an economy-wide central planner: the financial system—the first car in the rollercoaster, managing spirits and rationing investment. Economist J. W. Mason, who has developed the idea of finance as planner in a series of articles in Jacobin magazine, writes: “Surplus is allocated by banks and other financial institutions, whose activities are coordinated by planners, not markets … Banks are, in Schumpeter’s phrase, the private equivalents of Gosplan. Their lending decisions determine what new projects will get a share of society’s resources.” Banks decide whether a firm will get a loan to build a new plant, a household a mortgage, or a student a loan for tuition and living expenses—and the terms on which each is repaid. Each loan is an abstract thing that masks something very concrete: work for workers, a roof over someone’s head or an education.
[...] The financial system’s best guesses of ultimately unknowable future profitability, then, govern how concrete resources are set aside. [...]
The financial managers of the global economy—the vast majority working at private rather than central or other public banks—occupy a class, not a control room. They share much in terms of wealth, positions of power, education, and lunches in Davos. But as individuals they have their own histories, ideological leanings and visions for how best to achieve stability for capital. Large-scale planning is mundane, technocratic and systemic, not conspiratorial. Networks of power and ideology replicate themselves without the need for open scheming. [...]
What kinds of transitional demands could such forces make to hasten future socialization? There are relatively small, but meaningful, steps such as creating a public payments system—to ensure that every time you tap your credit or debit card, it is not a private company getting a cut and setting the terms—or a public credit rating agency—to displace the likes of Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s, which play a key role in determining how investment is distributed among competing projects, most recently helping divert a sizeable chunk of it into junk mortgages that nearly crashed the world economy. Then there are bigger public sector projects, like a massive increase in public housing construction—which places land into common ownership, takes housing off the market and ends its role as an investment asset—and its corollary, expanded public pensions. As for those who hold financial power themselves, what better way to disempower them than directly, through proposals to tax away large concentrations of wealth or diminish the role of shareholders and the stock market over the corporate sector—ultimately empowering the workers that produce the goods and services, and the communities that use them. All of these reforms serve to make planning explicit and public, rather than hidden and private as it is today. To quote J. W. Mason once more,
A society that truly subjected itself to the logic of market exchange would tear itself to pieces, but the conscious planning that confines market outcomes within tolerable bounds has to be hidden from view because if the role of planning was acknowledged, it would undermine the idea of markets as natural and spontaneous and demonstrate the possibility of conscious planning toward other ends.
The question is not whether the economy will be planned as a whole, or not at all. Instead, it is whether the present money managers will continue as the capitalist planners of the twenty-first century, or whether we ordinary people will start to remake our economic institutions, introduce democracy into their hearts, and bring the planning that already exists out into the open.
[...] 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.”
In the eleventh and last of the Theses on Feuerbach, we read: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ [...]
the famous quote
[...] (1) that the conditions of existence of the proletarians (what we would today term social exclusion) are in contradiction with all the principles of that society; (2) that they themselves live by other values than those of private property, profit, patriotism and bourgeois individualism; and (3) that their growing opposition to the State and the dominant class is a necessary effect of the modern social structure, but one which will soon prove lethal for that structure.
Marx on the proletariat
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess, among other things, consciousness, and therefore think.
from German Ideology
Gramsci’s thought cannot be summed up in a few lines. Let us note four closely interrelated themes here: (1) in a manner quite alien to the tradition of ‘dialectical materialism’, Gramsci saw Marxism as a ‘philosophy of praxis’ which he initially interpreted, in the days of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Turin ‘factory councils’ movement, as an affirmation of the will against the fatalism of the socialist organizations and, later, as a ‘science of politics’, Machiavellian in inspiration, the aim of which was to construct the elements of a hegemony of the producers; (2) this theme is linked to a ‘broadening’ of the ‘Marxist theory of the State’, which does not dispense with class determination, but stresses the complementary nature of the ‘balance of forces’ and the ‘consensus’ obtained through cultural institutions; (3) this explains why Gramsci devoted a considerable part of his unfinished research to a history and analysis of the function of the different types of intellectual, with a view to reforming the organic ‘bond’ which unites them to the masses when a new social class is in the ascendant; (4) there is also an ethical dimension to this critical thinking, not only in its quest for a morality or a ‘common sense’ for the workers which could free them from bourgeois hegemony, but in its effort to formulate and implement a regulative principle for political action which would be fundamentally secular and directed against all forms of messianic ideology (‘pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will’).