[After The Oligarchy] Hello everybody, this is After The Oligarchy. Today I’m speaking with Professor Robin Hahnel. Robin Hahnel is a professor of economics in the United States, co-founder with Michael Albert of the post-capitalist model known as Participatory Economics, and author of many books.
Today’s conversation is in association with mέta, the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation. This is the first in a series of interviews with Professor Hahnel about Participatory Economics, and in particular his latest book Democratic Economic Planningpublished in 2021. It’s an advanced discussion of the model proposed in that book, so I recommend you familiarize yourself with Participatory Economics to understand what we’re talking about.
[AO] I finished reading Democratic Economic Planning recently – here it is for viewers – and it’s an outstanding contribution I think. It’s very technical, which for me is a good thing. I really feel that I needed that book, I felt like I was waiting for that book to be published and it came along at exactly the right time. So I’d say if any viewers are similarly inclined, buy the book Democratic Economic Planning,read it. If viewers want a more straightforward and accessible introduction to Participatory Economics, then Of the People, By the People is very good; short, clear, and accessible.
So without further ado, there are something like 60 questions to discuss in total but we won’t go through all of those today, of course. Today, I just want to begin with some questions about consumption in a participatory economy.
[RH] Before you ask me a question, let me congratulate you for actually reading that book. I don’t know how many people have actually managed to do it yet. You are in very select company I can promise you. And it’s because, I mean, it’s long and there are sections that are that are very technical. And I wish there were more people who had managed to take the time and energy to wade through it. I may have to reassess my opinion of economists versus engineers. I understand that you have an engineering background?
[AO] Yes.
[RH] What I thought was, well, economists can read this book but I’m worried about my fellow political activists, where it’s kind of difficult. And actually AK Press is going to come out with a book sometime in about three or four months called A Participatory Economy, and that book is intended for the for the activist audience, you don’t have to be an economist. But I’m going to revise my strategy to think that, well I can address economists and expect them to actually read things carefully. Maybe I should shift over to the engineers and make you my target audience from now on, because at least you’ve demonstrated a willingness to put in the work.
[AO] Yes well I will add one thing, which is that I’ve got a very intense interest in political economy and I’m kind of pursuing an autodidactic course in economics to prepare myself to become an economist. So I’m in a bit of an odd position. However, I will say that in our post-capitalism discussion group in DiEM25 – so I’m a member of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 – there are quite a few engineers, it’s something that tends to crop up. What I will say about engineering and politics is that something I think about is – it has shaped my view a lot – I think one benefit is that you have a technical and numerical, mathematical, training but you’re not necessarily indoctrinated into the same presuppositions about economics. So there’s a potential there to engage with political economy that maybe those who were trained in orthodox economics don’t experience.
[RH] I can tell that engineers are more inclined to matter-of-fact thinking and therefore less interested in ideology. And I think that’s a huge barrier in thinking about alternatives to capitalism, you know, if you’re so wrapped up in the ideology. Because I think a lot of what we have to do in the aftermath of the failures of attempts to build socialist economies in the past is, I mean we have to engage in really some very concrete thinking about procedures and, you know, what the implications of deciding things this way or that way are. Less political grandstanding and more matter-of-fact thinking would stand us all in good stead. I think the answer is we need to recruit some more engineers.
[AO] Well engineers are not I completely agree with you. That’s the whole premise of this channel, the more concrete the better. And I’m completely on your side in terms of the necessity of vision, in that, it’s kind of common sense: whenever we want to do anything in life we really need to think about what exactly we’re trying to do. And there’s no reason that that would be less true in politics or economics than in any other field of life. But a lot of us on the left have managed to convince ourselves that there’s something wrong with this.
The first question is about housing. There are a few questions about this, and I will throw a few of them at you and we’ll move through them and maybe come back. How is housing organized in a participatory economy? Because obviously housing is a very important sector, it has distinct characteristics in terms of houses being assets, they’re durable, they’re large purchases, and so forth. If there’s no private ownership of housing and all housing is socially owned, then what are the rights of use? How does society decide who gets to live where, and for how long? And then, is housing rented? If so, how’s the rent calculated? And so on, but we’ll come to that.
[RH] Actually before starting, let me say that when I looked at your questions the first five are the ones that I am least suitable to answering as fully as we’re going to try and do now.
[AO] Yeah that’s all right.
[RH] Actually as you just mentioned, housing poses some particular problems. But I think what I’ll explain is not really from the production side, that’s not where it’s peculiar, it’s different. It’s from the using and consumption side, because it is such a major … I mean a house in terms of an asset or purchase, if you purchased it, dwarfs everything else you buy. And the other problem is that on a regular income you can’t actually pay for the entire thing, and that’s why we have mortgages. So here’s something that we somehow have to figure out: a way for people with sensible incomes to manage to pay sensible amounts as they go.
Now renting is kind of easy, and so my answer could be well ‘what if we just don’t’? What if all housing units are rentals? Then they would be produced by … if you take a look on the production side, compared to a lot of really, really, large firms, contractors who build housing, these aren’t multinational firms. They’re large, many of them are large companies, many of them actually aren’t. So the idea that you can have worker councils, with carpenters, and electricians, and all of the kinds of people that actually work to build housing, including the engineers that design them – well that could be a workers council and that’s the product that they are selling.
That’s sort of straightforward and easy, but it’s the financing and purchasing of it. and when you’re living in it how do you pay for and what are your rights, etc, that that do pose some special difficulties. And I’m just going to say that this is a subject that one of my collaborators … I accuse him of obsessing over it. This is Anders.
[AO] Ah yes.
[RH] Anders who is a member of the collective in … he’s Swedish and he lives in Stockholm.
[AO] That’s Anders Sandström, is it?
[RH] Yes, it’s Anders Sandström. And he’s published a book called Anarchist Accounting, which I think has the most brilliant title of any book I’ve ever heard. Because who would be the least likely people to have anything to do with each other? It would be anarchists and accountants. And here it is. So I’ve declared him to be the most famous anarchist accountant in the history of the world.
And he also obsesses on matters do come into play particularly heavily in trying to deal with a situation like this. I mean it’s amortization and how do you cost all that out. So I’m just going to say that I’m going to give you my answer, but he took up that challenge in his book Anarchist Accounting in more detail and more seriously than I have in anything I’ve published.
Here would be the short side of it. I think if we just had housing always rented, there’d be a fairly straightforward explanation. And the rent would be, people will be charged the social cost of providing the housing. Whether or not they are paying that to the construction workers council that built it, or whether there’s actually an intermediate workers council which is … I mean usually the builders aren’t the ones that are then managing the property, or the sale of the property, or if it’s rental taking care of the rental. Then there’s another workers council that basically is managing that.
But I think that that people sometimes have a legitimate interest in not just being a renter, where, you know, they might be thrown out at any point. And there I think the idea that comes to mind is well there’s a difference between a lease and being a renter. It’s sort of a halfway ground between ‘I’m the owner of the property’ and ‘I’m merely a renter’, and maybe I sign a one-year contract but basically I’m paying rent month-to-month and the rate can be varied as we’re going along. So as far as I’m concerned, I don’t see any reason that we couldn’t be leasing for people who wanted the lease, and that gives you a long-term contract.
And now you’re thinking ‘okay, we have people who still probably are working on family farms’. And so here’s a family farm and the parents die, and should there be some sort of arrangement? Or just if you grew up in a house, and your parents have been there all that time, you’d grown up, and now you want to stay there. I don’t know why we couldn’t write in something like a first right of …
[AO] Exactly.
So if the person who has the long-term lease – the parents – die, then instead of just putting it up for anybody who wants to now bid on living there, that the children or the descendants who wanted to continue to live there, why wouldn’t we just give them a first right to say, well, at the going rate, at the regular lease, they can take over the lease, essentially? And we wouldn’t basically put them in a situation where somebody else could get the lease out from under them.
My own instinct is all those things are not that difficult to arrange, and don’t look that different from a lot of things that are, sort of, out there. I mean my impression is in Europe there’s a lot more sensible handling of housing, particularly in Germany. But in the United States, we have outfits that are proposing, sort of, communally-owned properties in urban areas. And what they’re trying to deal with is that they don’t want to put people in the situation where there’s an asset that’s the most important asset in your life, and you have to worry about what’s happening to the value of that asset.
So our goal here is to take that out of the equation. We don’t want to make this somehow wealth that you have to carefully manage, the way you have to carefully manage the wealth in your house if you happen to own a house in a capitalist economy. We want to take that out of the equation. And it is a little complicated to do. I don’t think it’s rocket science, I think there are sort of a number of ways that it can be handled. But it is a particularly unique and difficult sort of economic problem that needs to be solved sensibly.
[AO] It is indeed. I haven’t read it yet, I’m going to read Anarchist Accounting and interview Anders Sandström if I can. It looks like a really interesting book. That issue of the first right of rent or leasing was actually a further question, and I think that makes a lot of sense.
I suppose just to ask a couple things more about this. If we break this into a few different components, what we want is to pay worker councils responsible for producing a new building the necessary social costs of doing that. Okay, that much is clear. I suppose the question then is – I’m just trying to make this concrete – it would be perhaps a lease or a rent to the local government? Something like that?
[RH] You know, it could be the local government but it could also be another workers council. That’s where I was saying I don’t see why we couldn’t have two … we basically have the people living in the housing, and there could be two workers councils involved in how it’s provided or supplied. One is a construction outfit that just builds. And then, sometimes builders sell their houses – but we’re not really selling – but often builders don’t sell their houses to the people who live in in them. The builder sells it to another company that then markets those, and/or manages those if they decide to make a rental property. So I think we can do that and that would allow some workers councils to just simply be ‘well, we have our social costs of building, and now what are the social benefits that we are weighing off against that?’. Well, basically, they are they are providing that to this other workers council.
It’s basically like, there are a lot of worker councils who are providing their goods to other worker councils. We usually think of them as intermediate goods. So a steel company doesn’t sell steel to households, it sells it sells steel to automobile companies. So we could essentially set it up that way, where it’s the construction outfit … And so there wouldn’t be a problem with figuring out what are their social benefits that we compare to their social costs. It’s basically an intermediate sale to another workers council and that other workers council, then they have these costs of acquisition. And then they also have the benefits, that their benefits are essentially the rents or the mortgage payments that they are collecting over time.
[AO] I want to think about it as almost the land aspect … I mean I think we can think of housing in terms of … like today, if you buy a house or if you rent you’re paying for the land and you’re paying for the building at the same time.
[RH] Right.
[AO]And so, if I understand you correctly, it’s almost like you’re talking about … well, actually not exactly. But this would be a workers council for, say, a particular region, and they would be responsible for – after the construction worker council had been allocated its resources through the annual planning process, so that’s been accounted for, that’s relatively simple – that this workers council would then take responsibility for that housing unit and that land. A different one not the construction one. And that this worker council would, I suppose … how would they collect rents and things like that? I thought that’s not really the role of worker councils. That would be more the role of a consumer council. Sorry, that was very unclear. But do you see what I’m getting at?
[RH] In that regard I’m imagining there actually is a worker council whose production activity is the activity of actually supplying and managing the housing.
[AO] Ah, yes.
[RH] Now, I mean, the land poses another reason that housing is an extra-complicated situation. Now let’s talk about the land. So, on the one hand, as far as we’re concerned, all land is communal property. On the other hand, if we use land for one purpose it can’t be used for another purpose, and that means using land has an opportunity cost. and we want to include that as the cost to society of making something available.
So part of what you want people paying for, when they are paying for the housing they’re living in, is well first of all it took a lot of work to make this house. And it was all done in like a one- or two-year time period, but it’s a big, big, item so there’s a cost that was the cost of the work and the cost of the materials, etc. We’re going to need to amortize that over a long period of time, one way or another in terms of the payment system.
The second part of the problem is that, well, there’s another cost to that house and that is that there’s an opportunity cost of using that land. And unfortunately that cost is actually going to change over time, over the 30-year time period. So we have a house, let’s say it lasts for 50 years. Well, we know how much it costs to build it, and we can amortize that over 50 years.
But what about the cost of using the land? I mean, what an economist will tell you is as population grows and as situations change the opportunity cost of using that land is going to vary over time. Well, on the one hand we like the people living in housing to know what their mortgage is. I mean part of the reason you want to own something is you like to have a mortgage where you know what your payment is every month, whereas if you’re a renter they can always raise or lower the rent.
And this is sort of a complicated thing. This is one of the reasons that I’m happy that Anders is stretching his mind around it. Because, on the one hand, we have the goal that we would like the people living in houses, we’d like to offer them a situation saying you can count on the fact that with your just income this is what it will cost you to live in the house that you’re in, or the apartment that you’re in, you can you can own a condominium too; this is what it’ll cost you, and we don’t want you to have to worry about ‘is it going to vary over time?’, ‘am I going to get charged more as time goes on?’, etc.
On the other hand, we do want to signal that there are changes in how much it costs society for you to be living in that same place you’ve been living in. My guess is there’s no magic wand we can wave over this and say there’s a perfect solution. We have to find a happy, comfortable, way to resolve that part of the problem. But that’s the only part of the problem that I think is actually sort of a serious problem. I mean, the rest of it we can have workers councils that build things, we can have workers councils that manage and collect the money on a monthly basis. As you said that could be a that could be a role for government. Certainly we’re going to need government doing zoning, that part we know.
[AO] Just to recap, and maybe just a little bit more on land and we can move on to the next question. From my understanding, some things are clear: that there can be a workers council responsible for constructing the buildings. And there is no matter of buying or selling there, it’s really that that worker council will need certain intermediate goods, capital, resources, and labour, to do that which will be allocated through the planning procedure.
[RH] Right. So that’s the cost side. Their proposal says ‘these are our costs, these are what we’re asking for, and we’re going to build so many units or so many houses in this time period that we are going to deliver’.
[AO] Yes, so that’s taken care of. And then there’s another side, which is essentially the role in the capitalist economy of an estate agent and also a property manager. And then you’re saying, about that, possibly collection as well; so being an intermediary between people who want to live in houses …
[RH] And those who actually built them and then want to wash their hands of it from that point on
[AO] Yes and also possibly managing the property if it’s apartments, you know, the water, the security, and whatever else. Okay, so that’s fine.
So then there’s the issue of land and I just want to ask you this and then we can move on. I suppose there are many different ways to approach calculating that opportunity cost. Of course, it’s not going to be perfect. The obvious way to approach it, being used to living in this society, is that there’s a market, okay?
[RH] Right.
[AO] And so I’m just going to throw that out there and see what your response is. So people could bid either for rents or for leases, and whoever proposes the highest bid wins and gets the rights to use that property. And that is one way of approaching calculating the opportunity cost.
[RH] So how would we do it in a participatory economy?
[AO] Yes.
[RH] Okay, you’re absolutely right. So, first of all who are the people who are basically saying ‘I want to use land’? Well, that would be the construction company that wants to use land in an urban area to build housing. So when they put in their proposal, that’s effectively where demand to use that land comes from. And it’s similar in agriculture. Suppose you have either an individual farmer, a farmer family, or you have a group of people who are farming as a worker council. Well, they have to basically ask permission to use the land. They have to say ‘we need to renew our application to have these fields that we’re going to be planting these crops in’. So that’s where, in the planning procedure, that’s where the demand to use land comes from.
Now in a capitalist economy who are the sellers of the land? The people who own it. Ah, but it’s owned by everybody. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not a fixed supply of urban land and there’s a fixed supply of agricultural land. So the charge for that, in a sense they’re paying society. They’re not paying an owner. But we can do the calculation in the same way. We have a scarce supply of, in this case, the natural resource land. It’s owned by everybody. People are asking for permission to use it during the year, and they’re essentially bidding on permission to use it. And we’ll end up with an indicative price, an estimate of the social cost of using that land, and we will have charged people for that. And we want to do that because we want to make sure that that whoever the user of the land is they can make the most socially valuable use of the land. That’s why you want to charge them. But the payment doesn’t have to go to anybody and that’s the difference. I mean, in a socialist economy where the land is not privately owned, the payment essentially goes to any and all people. It doesn’t go to any particular person.
[AO] Yes so you’ve highlighted there something that I didn’t actually think about at the time, that there is that opportunity cost of land which enters into the planning process itself on the production side as well as on the consumption side. There will be those wanting to construct it on land or agricultural workers council who wants to use land, and that the opportunity cost of land will have to enter into their social cost calculations during the planning procedure. But that also on the consumption side those who, say, want to rent an apartment will have to do that.
[RH] They’re demonstrating a desire to live in a particular kind of house but also in a particular location. That location has other uses and so there is a social cost associated. The part that’s easy to wrap your mind around is, well, we can calculate the cost of the construction materials, the labour time to build it, etc. But isn’t there a cost of the fact that you now are living on a particular piece of land and that land was scarce and had an opportunity cost? It could have been used for something else and we want to be sure that it gets used for the most valuable thing.
Now, what zoning basically does is say we don’t let everybody bid on a particular piece of land. If you zone land for residential housing only, then the only people who can bid on using that land are people who are going to put up residential houses there. A business that wants to have a gas station there can’t bid on that. And I think zoning can be very sensible, and I think you’re going to want zoning in a participatory economy. And the zoning is basically part of land planning, land use management. We want our cities to be built in a certain a sensible way, so we’re going to use zoning for that purpose. But what zoning does is it just says not everybody is allowed to enter into the process of asking to use that land during participatory planning. Only people who wanted to use that land to put houses there would be allowed to be making proposals to use that land to build houses there, if the land has been zoned for housing only. And sometimes you might want to zone land only for industrial uses.
[AO] Yes that’s a very good point and a good way to put that. And I’m sure as well there will be social housing as part of allowances for people, say, who can’t work and so forth or …?
[RH] We’re not going to have these huge differences in income in a participatory economy. But still presumably there are significant differences between how much I would like to spend out of my income.
You know, I have a reasonable income, I have a friend who has a reasonable income. I know this friend would use a much higher percentage. I mean, we talk about oh well as soon as your rent or your mortgage gets to be more than 40 percent of your income, then you’re housing stressed. If you have reasonable incomes and reasonable housing costs, there are still going to be significant variations between how much do I want to spend on my housing and how much do you want to spend on your housing. So we want to allow for that. That’s what’s going to generate … some housing has more rooms in it, some housing has fancier appliances in it, some housing is located in places where people on average think that’s a nicer place to live, I’ve got a view or I don’t have a view. So we want to create a situation where people can essentially spend different amounts on housing – what kind how much do they want to spend and where do they want to live, what does it look like – and in general we want to charge people for what the cost of society is. And that cost includes the work that went into it, and the materials that went into it, and the opportunity cost of the land that it happens to be sitting on.
[AO] Just before we move on, a critical thing being: in a participatory economy, not having the opportunity to capture the economic rent arising from the land. And that is something that would sharply distinguish participatory economy – or hopefully any socialist society – from the one that we live in at the moment. Housing policy in Europe versus the United States, on continental Europe perhaps, particularly in Germany, but definitely not in Ireland. Ireland is very much like the U.S, and Britain in that regard. It is to a large extent a housing bubble with people living in it.
[RH] It’s totally financialized and it’s the largest part of an ordinary person’s nightmare of ‘how do I manage my wealth situation?’. I mean, I can just promise you that a large part of the thinking that went into coming up with our answer to this was we want to take all of that out of the equation. We don’t want that to be what’s governing how this or this whole situation is being handled in a participatory economy.
[AO] Absolutely, yeah. I mean, private ownership of land is the foundation of feudalism and all of those kind of dynamics.
[RH] There was a famous economist named Henry George and he was famous for something called the single tax. And he probably was wrong, I mean socialists would not agree with him that you don’t need any other tax if you have a good land tax. But his idea of the land tax was actually brilliant, very socialist. And it was: well nobody actually made the land, the land is just there, so we shouldn’t allow people who are the owners of land to somehow reap an advantage and a reward from the fact that they are the owners of the land. So he basically said what we should basically do is just tax the value of land, because they don’t deserve that. And then if we collect enough taxes that way we don’t have to collect any other, that’s where he went off in a direction that most of us were not willing to follow. But in a sense when we say that land is communally owned, that nature just like oil deposits and land is communally owned, what we’re basically saying is the equivalent of what he said, which is nobody has a right to earn income because they happen to own the title to that.
We don’t entitle nature but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an opportunity cost when anybody uses it. And we want people to take that into account, and it’s fair to take that into account when we’re figuring out how much people are going to pay for different things, including their housing. As we went over already, the dilemma that generates is that that opportunity cost will vary over time, and therefore one of the bad things about being a renter is you’re never sure they’re not going to change your rent. That’s one of the nice things people like about a mortgage. We can’t totally guarantee people that.
Or we could just guarantee people that and say we know it changed over time, but when you settled in there on your income, and your desires for how much you’re paying for your housing, you wanted to be assured that it would stay the same for as long as you were there. We could just suck it up and say ‘fine, and now you’re being a little undercharged, because actually the opportunity cost of using the land that you’re living on is a little higher than you were charged back when you began’. There would little harm done there? I mean I suspect that actually taking that approach would also not be any great harm. As an economist I could say ‘oh you’re paying a little price and efficiency just to give people peace of mind’ and that’s a that’s a reasonable thing for people to do.
[AO] Yeah certainly and it’d be the exact opposite of society today, where I mean in Dublin people are just paying through the teeth for absolute … you wouldn’t believe. I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen similar things where you are. But it’s ridiculous. You know, people paying for apartments – “apartments” – bedsits without doors, and they’re paying half their income for this. So once you take those dynamics out of the way you’re really just getting into questions of preference.
[RH] In the west coast of the United States this is huge. I mean this is probably the single most talked about economics issue in the west coast of the United States. We have the San Francisco housing market where, you know, absolute ruins are selling for millions of dollars. Now they’re going to be torn down and something be put up that they’re going to sell. So we have the San Francisco housing market. The Portland, Oregon, housing market is probably a third of what the San Francisco market is. Seattle is some place in the middle. L.A. is in the stratosphere.
So you have whole situations where people can’t afford to live in certain cities, but if they can sell a house, if they already happen to be lucky enough to own a house in San Francisco, they can sell it in San Francisco and then they can come up to Portland and they are happy to pay way more than any of us would pay and they bid our prices up. We want to eliminate that. That is just complete and total nonsense. And when you think about the amount of mental aggravation that people are going through because of that economic issue and problem that they’re confronting, and this isn’t even talking about the homeless population. But there are perfectly straightforward ways that we don’t even need a participatory economy to eliminate. I think in Germany they’ve done a fairly decent job of eliminating that kind of real estate insanity.
[AO] that’s the end of Part A of my first interview with Professor Robin Hahnel about Participatory Economics and his latest book Democratic Economic Planning. Stay tuned for Part B where we will discuss consumption. And as always I want to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. That’s all for now. The only viable future for humanity is one After The Oligarchy.
In 1993, Paul Cockshott & Allin Cottrell published ‘Towards a New Socialism’, presenting a compelling vision of a democratically planned society which harnessed the best available information technology: cyber-socialism.
In this interview by ‘After the Oligarchy’ and in collaboration with mέta, the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation, Dr. Cockshott talks to ‘After the Oligarchy’ about standardized pay grades, differential pay, and whether worker self-management can be reconciled with central planning.
Paul Cockshott is a computer engineer and economist. He has written several books including How the World Works, Computation and Its Limits, Classical Econophysics, Arguments for Socialism, and Towards a New Socialism.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
[After The Oligarchy] Hello everybody, this is After the Oligarchy speaking to Dr. Paul Cockshott again. Paul Cockshott is a computer engineer working on computer design and teaching computer science at universities in Scotland. Named on 52 patents, his research covers robotics, computer parallelism, 3D TV, foundations of computability, and data compression. His books include Towards a New Socialism, How the World Works, Classical Econophysics, and Computation and Its Limits.
Today’s conversation is in association with mέta | the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation. This is the third in a series of interviews with Dr. Cockshott about Towards a New Socialism. Watch the first and second interview if you haven’t already.
In Towards a New Socialism, published by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell in 1993, the authors present a bold vision of a democratically planned economy using computerized labour time. In this interview we’ll be discussing some more advanced questions about that model, so I recommend you read the book to really understand what we’re talking about.
You can watch some excellent videos on Dr. Cockshott’s YouTube channel.
Dr. Paul Cockshott thank you very much for joining me again.
[Paul Cockshott] Hi.
[AO] Let’s start off with a question about standardized pay grades. So, in Towards a New Socialism you write that ‘the planners would know for instance that a given project requiring 1000 person hours of average labour would only require, say, 800 person hours of grade a labour’ – how would the planners figure this out?
The context for people watching is that in TNS people are paid according to the number of hours that they work. But it’s the idea that there might be pay grades according to how strenuously people want to work, and there might be, say, tier A, tier B, and tier C. So, how would the planners figure out these pay grades?
[PC] It has to be done in terms of physical or realized productivity of individual people. Some people can just work faster than others. However, this is not a property of a trade or profession. It’s not that some trades or professions are higher grade than others, it’s a difference in productivity within any trade. Some people are just faster workers in a trade.
Now, for planning purposes it’s unlikely this would be relevant except in very special circumstances, where for some reason the number of people that could be employed on the project was limited and the project was of high priority and therefore within each trade that was going to be involved they might want to have the best workers working on it. If it was some project of major national importance and you couldn’t just assign more workers to it, then under those circumstances, and they’re very limited circumstances, it might be worth planners knowing these things.
But they would be exceptional really, because in most circumstances, within any work team, you’ll get some people who are more productive and some people who are less productive. And Marx says that once you get around twelve – I think he says it is – in a work team the difference is evened out and work teams above a certain size all count just as average labour. So for it to be significant you’re talking about a circumstance where you you’ve got a small number of people where they can’t add more to them and they need to be highly productive. Like astronauts going to the moon or something like that.
[AO] Is there not another dimension as well to this, in terms of motivational efficiency? There’s a discussion in the book that perhaps it might be required to pay people slightly differently depending on how hard they want to work.
Well it depends on what the method of pay or measuring work is. If you are in some branch of labour where the work can be physically measured in some way, and you can then establish a norm what the average is, then people would get paid more if they exceed the norm, paid less if they fall short of the norm. And this this was standard practice in socialist countries where they had what they called payment according to labour.
I mean I was surprised, I remember, in the late 70s, early 80s, to be visiting Bulgaria and finding that university lecturers were paid according to norms where they got a higher rate of pay according to how many pages of lecture notes they prepared and things like that. Areas which here are not graded in terms of productivity can be graded in terms of productivity, which is not the same thing as what’s done here where people are paid for seniority, prestige, etc.
It was based on actual measured outputs so if it’s reckoned that in a 40-hour week someone can, the average person can, do a certain amount, if somebody is able to do 10 percent more than that in a 40-hour week and another person 10 percent less, then provided across the work team averages out there’s no reason why the person who’s more productive can’t be credited with more and the person who’s less productive can’t be credited with less.
But since what you are trying to measure is two objective things, actual productivity and human time, you have to have a proper conservation principle of human time. You can’t start paying more than the actual number of hours that everyone worked. And since it’s a relative measure of productivity in a particular trade, in a particular branch of that trade, then it has to be something that’s decided by the people collectively in the group that are undertaking the task. that some people are doing more than their fair share and should be rewarded.
But that does depend on it being agreed collectively. And it does depend on the average adding up because you can’t have a situation where your calculation becomes detached from reality. You don’t want to have an inflation of the notional labour credit so that more labour credits are being handed out than actual hours that are working being worked.
[AO] And just further to that I’m curious about, say, cases where it isn’t as easy to measure, where there isn’t a clear output where somebody can say ‘I produce 12 of this, and the average is 10, and this other person produced 8 and of course there are all sorts of occupations where this is the case.
[PC] Well, in that case if those are occupations where you cannot objectively say that one person is doing better than another, there’s no objective basis for saying there should be differential reward.
[AO] Well, there might be a way but it might be more ambiguous or subject to contestation. I’m sure everybody has experienced a workplace, or just a team or a group, regardless of whether the output is some very clear product, you will have the sense that ‘I’m working much harder than other people’ even though you might be working as long. And there’s a question about this in a socialist society, maybe this will be necessary for a time or who knows – I think this is discussed in Towards a New Socialism – having some leeway for people to feel like they’re being appreciated or rewarded sufficiently.
[PC] Yes, but the point I’m making is that insofar as that is done it is always on the basis that one person is doing more and another person is doing less, and therefore it has to be a mutual recognition because otherwise you’ve got inflation there.
[AO] So really, if I can recap, one of the critical things is that this is something that’s determined within a workplace or within a particular sector by the people doing that. It’s not something that’s decided by the planning bureau, where they’re saying ‘there’s tier A, there’s tier B, there’s tier C’ and everybody else fits within that.
[PC] As I said the only circumstances in which someone engaged in planning would be interested in this is the very special ones I was saying where for some reason they could only assign a fixed number of people to a task and they wanted the best possible people on that task.
[AO] Okay, because in ordinary circumstances there would be a certain amount of labour time apportioned to an enterprise and so once that bulk amount has been apportioned it’s up to, put simply, the people within that to distribute it amongst themselves in a relative way. Would that be correct?
[PC] Yes. I mean you would normally expect the law of large numbers to obtain. And if there are 100 people working in a place there’ll be a wide range of skills there, of individual productivities, certainly.
[AO] And just one last thing on that point, can Towards a New Socialism survive or function effectively in a situation where in a substantial number of enterprises workers decide that they want differential pay rates? At what level of differential pay does the system become seriously dysfunctional?
[PC] The system would work provided that within each project the important thing is that you’re trying to plan real resources physical means of production and real people provided the totals of real people allocated to each activity are correct then it doesn’t matter how within that project the actual labour credits are handed out between people.
[AO] Sorry to interrupt I just mean … there’s a certain amount of labour and that needs to actually correspond to what people are being paid for, I think you’ve made that clear, but where I was more coming at this from is in terms of status, equality, etc.
[PC] Well these are political ideological questions, and if you have that overall budgetary constraint then it forces those within a given project or branch of industry to settle it among themselves. That project has been credited with a certain number of workers, if they want to divide up the payments to them differently that is a collective matter for them. Now, certainly you can see this is something that could give rise to or almost certainly will give rise to argument and dispute, but if the number of labour credits they get is equal to the number of people working there then it’s up to the enterprise what they’re doing.
Now the place where you’re most likely to get a risk of gaming the system is if the … well, let’s not call it an enterprise, let’s call it a project, since we assume it’s not necessarily an accounting unit receiving revenue from things it sells. If within the project everyone is supposed to be working a 40-hour week but in fact they all knock off at uh at two o’clock on Friday, how does the outside society know that’s the case?
[AO] Yes exactly. That was actually a question.
[PC] So at one level you can say that is just straightforward fraud and it’s a legal issue like any kind of theft. And if it’s discovered by means of some public inspection that the people are working less, then the whole collective gets the excess hours that they were credited removed.
[AO] That touches on a very big question I want to raise, and we’re not going to have time to cover it fully today but we can begin and take it up on another day. This is the question of worker self-management. I know from listening to you and from reading what you’ve written that this is something that you care about a lot and you definitely strive to put forward a model of a society that is democratic and participatory. So the question is what is the scope of worker self-management or workplace democracy in Towards a New Socialism?
We can begin, actually, with the point that you just raised before. Let’s say in the case of a project where workers are supposed to be working a 40 hour work week but they’re working 10 hours, or something like that, we could say that’s a very clear-cut case. But what if the workers are working let’s say 7 hours in a day rather than eight? To frame it in terms of fraud or investigate in terms of fraud seems to be too harsh – or maybe not – so that raises the question of what is the relation between the project and the centre.
[PC] Let’s take a case of this. Suppose that at the local hospital, the people, the medical staff are deciding they’re going to knock off at four o’clock instead of five. It’s not going to be unnoticed. People who have appointments after four o’clock are going to wonder why they’re not being met. So that, in anything that’s producing a public service like that, there has to be some way for the people who the service is being provided to complain if then the people supposedly doing it are not doing it. Now, how that is established through the system of local government and how such complaints will be made, I’m not proposing a definite solution to. But what I’m saying is it’s no different from what exists if you complain about a public service now.
[AO] Sure, and I think most of us would agree that in the case of very important public services like health that would certainly impose certain more stringent obligations on those working there than it would necessarily for a local cafe or bookshop or something like that. If health workers aren’t treating people people can die, whereas if somebody is not serving enough coffee it’s an inconvenience and we don’t like it but it’s not as important.
But let’s take that latter case, for example, not necessarily a café. But there’s a passage in Towards a New Socialism about inefficient enterprises: ‘so long as there is more than one producer of a given product the planning authorities can compare the calculated labour values of the same product from various different enterprises and unless there is good reason for above average labour value in some cases the high cost produces can be made to shape up’. I don’t really want to get into the issue of monopoly so much here, but the questions we can just discuss are: How would this be done? Between whom are the negotiations? The project in question and whom? Does one have authority over the other?
[PC] Well, ultimately, since all labour is directly social labour, it’s not private labour, the social authorities have authority over it.
If a project is doing something and is using up people’s time to do it, and is not using up people’s time as effectively as some other project, then the obvious answer is to transfer some of the people to one of the better run projects.
An alternative would be to carry out an investigation to see why is it doing worse, and if it’s doing worse because it has less efficient equipment than the other projects then it may be more effective to provide new equipment to that project.
On the other hand, it may be that the equipment is expensive and you can only afford to build a certain number of them, in which case you decide to close down that project and transfer the people. Because ultimately it’s human time that is the precious resource of a an economy and if the human time is being wasted somewhere then it’s not to society’s advantage. But the important point is people would not be employees of a distinct enterprise, they would in a sense be seconded to it but by the community.
[AO] Yes, there’s a fundamental issue here, which I think is a very difficult question for anybody trying to propose a model of post-capitalism, which is that we live in a society where there’s a notion of social ownership, there’s a notion that we’re accountable to each other and that scarce resources shouldn’t be wasted. And there needs to be a way for individuals and sub-sections of the population to be accountable to the rest of the population. That has to be the case. It can’t just be completely atomistic. On the other hand, we do want to have individuals and sub-sections and sub-units of a society to be able to have some kind of meaningful autonomy and control over their own situation.
And so I want to read out a quote here which makes a criticism of Towards a New Socialism so we can get into it. We’ll have to leave this on a cliff-hanger and come back to it. So, I finished reading Democratic Economic Planning (2021) recently which Robin Hahnel brought out, and there’s a discussion of Towards a New Socialism in that, a brief one, and after paying several compliments to yourself and Allin Cottrell about the model he makes a few criticisms. And one of them is that ‘as a consumer and voter, every person has as much say over what any particular group of workers produces and what inputs they will be allocated to produce it as those workers have themselves … [and thus workers] do not get to exercise meaningful self-management. [Hence] we believe it would predictably lead to the kind of worker apathy that plagued centrally planned economies in the 20th century’.
[PC] Well, there’s a question, firstly, was there worker apathy? If there was worker apathy, was it for that reason? And is he right to say that there would be limited ability to meaningfully decide things?
In no society can the producers be entirely autonomous unless they’re producing just for themselves. If they’re producing for the rest of society then in some way, whether it’s through the market or through a planning mechanism, the rest of society will impose its needs on them.
Now I would question whether the worker apathy that he describes was actually there more than in western economies, where there is no pretence that workers have any autonomy. But this complaint about worker apathy tends to be focused on the Soviet example, where when you dig down to what people mean by worker apathy they mean that the workers weren’t obedient servants. They didn’t just do what they were told by managers. So the managers had to at least pay some attention to them.
Now, the important difference there is that they didn’t fear unemployment, whereas in the West people fear unemployment and therefore their ability to resist what the management want to do is limited except under times of low unemployment and strong trade unions.
I think saying Soviet economy was plagued by worker apathy is a questionable claim. I think it’s conflating the criticism made by capitalist economists, that workers there were apathetic because they didn’t feel the fear of being fired and therefore didn’t feel the need to put in an extra effort, with an imputed cause – which Hahnel is saying – which is that it is limited ability to decide things.
Now given that they actually had more ability to decide things than a worker in a western company, why are they supposed to have been more apathetic? What is the standard of apathy? I mean, were the workers at Tupolev apathetic compared to the workers at Lockheed? On what basis did you decide they were apathetic?
[AO] I suppose if I were to play devil’s advocate – or just try to substitute myself for somebody making that point – I’d say that capitalist economies would not serve as any kind of comparison because they failed so abjectly in any kind of economic democracy or worker self-management. So that, as it were, that would be a low bar.
[PC] But what is the high bar? What is his measuring bar that he’s using? I mean, is he saying that the Soviet workers were more apathetic than Yugoslav workers? That might be it.
[AO] I’m not exactly sure. But I think that’ll be more along the lines.
[PC] Possibly, but where’s the evidence?
[AO] Well, I will have to ask him that. I will ask him that because I think it’s a very interesting discussion, and I think you’re right to say that we should concretely establish the basis of the criticism empirically before then proceeding to explain it. So I will ask him.
[PC] If you’re going to make an argument on the basis of a criticism, let’s see that the criticism actually is true.
[AO] Would you be up for another interview sometime soon?
[PC] It’d have to be over a week from now.
[AO] Okay, we’ll leave things on a cliff-hanger. Worker self-management: a huge topic, much more to discuss, and we’ll discuss that again.
So, thank you very much for joining me, it’s a pleasure to talk to you as always, very interesting, and enjoy your holidays.
[PC] I must say, just before I go, that when I reposted the video you’d made the comments were equally complimentary about the acuteness of the questions you asked.
[AO] Well, thank you very much for saying that. I do my research and I try to facilitate a good discussion.
[PC] Okay, bye for now.
[AO] And thank you for watching. As always I want to hear your thoughts in the comments section below about what we were discussing: differential pay and worker self-management and anything else relevant.
Tomorrow I’ll begin a series of interviews with Professor Robin Hahnel about Participatory Economics and his latest book, published in 2021, Democratic Economic Planning.
That’s all for now. The only viable future for humanity is one After the Oligarchy.
Michael Albert
Crises proliferate and intensify. Out comes Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and whoever else. We read and we quote. Elderly left scholars mutter Marx said it, Marx knew it, see Volume whatever. We rummage the hopper of history. We echo dead men’s words. But Marx wrote,
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time honored disguise and borrowed language.”
Some will say I and Marx exaggerate, but I think this problem is again surfacing exactly in accord with Marx’s prescient prediction.
Quoting Marx (or whichever other long gone icon) to make a point about contemporary relations may get an audience to genuflect to Marx. It may demonstrate one’s own allegiance to Marx. But does it get anyone to thoughtfully consider and hopefully act on some observation based on actual evidence and argument? To highlight past words often limits substance to what the past emphasized. Why not use our own words? Why not let “dead generations” rest in peace?
There are deeper issues with Marxism yesterday, today, and tomorrow as well. I often argue that the goal of struggle in every Marxist text that offers a serious economic vision is an economy that elevates about 20% of the population to ruling status. Many Marxists reply that that is utterly false. They say every genuine Marxist’s goal is mass working-class participation, democracy, and freedom. I agree. But I add that despite their personal desires, Marxists don’t offer a vision consistent with mass working-class participation, democracy, and freedom.
Put every Marxist text about economics in a pile. To the very limited extent that anything in that pile provides serious institutional vision, the vision offered includes markets and or central planning, a corporate division of labor, remuneration for output, and authoritative decision making, all of which elevate the above-mentioned 20%.
This problem isn’t about bad people. Yes, of course Stalin was a bad guy, to put it mildly. But the real and lasting problem was the movement dynamics that elevated a thug like Stalin and, one step back, the concepts that elevated those dynamics. The problem isn’t that everybody in Marxist Leninist parties wants to trample workers on the road to ruling them. The problem is that those parties and some of their core concepts, however well meaning most members are, lead to trampled, ruled workers.
Become a Marxist revolutionary, with the very best of motives—the very very best—and the odds are you aren’t going to make a revolution in our modern world at all for lack of diverse focus and especially for lack of true working class appeal. But if you do transcend those problems and help make an economic revolution, odds are your achievement will elevate coordinators to economic rule, not workers.
Some Marxists find this claim personally insulting. I don’t think it should be. It isn’t about particular people or motives. It is about concepts, methods, and institutional allegiances which, even in the hands of wonderful people, lead to results that those people would at the outset reject.
But let’s focus on two substantive issues. First, Marxism’s core concepts overemphasize economics and underemphasize gender/kinship, community/culture, and polity.
This doesn’t mean that all (or even any) Marxists ignore everything other than economics. Nor does it mean that all (or even any) Marxists don’t care greatly about other matters. It means, instead, that when yesterday’s Marxists have addressed the sex life of teenagers, marriage, the nuclear family, religion, racial identity, religion, cultural commitments, sexual preferences, political organization, police behavior, war and peace, and ecology, they have tended to highlight dynamics arising from class struggle and implications for class struggle and to deemphasize concerns rooted in the specific features of race, gender, power, and nature.
This criticism predicts that yesterday’s Marxism’s concepts do not sufficiently counter tendencies imposed by current society, by the circumstances of current struggle, or by tactical choices that generate authoritarian, racist, or sexist trends—even against the best moral and social inclinations of most Marxists.
In other words, these claims about yesterday’s Marxism’s “economism” do not predict monomania about economics or even a universal and inviolable pattern of over attention to economics and under attention to everything else, but, instead, they predict a harmful pattern of narrowness that arises and persists in the way attention is given to extra economic phenomena.
The solution to the above observation would be for Marxists to agree that feminism and anarchism and anti racism have their own insights and that just as advocates of each of those perspectives need to take account of class-focused understanding, so people seeking classlessness need to take account of those other sources of insight and areas of needed change.
And the good news is that I think the majority of today’s Marxists agree with that. A lingering difficulty, however, is that the core intellectual framework, in times of crisis, still tends to hinder the accomplishment.
A second area of concern is that Marxism’s concepts fail to highlight a (coordinator) class between labor and capital. Yesterday’s and today’s Marxism’s focus on only ownership relations. They miss the roots of a third class in the division of labor. This has many implications.
For example, Marxism still fails to see that the economy it positively calls “socialist” or critically calls “state capitalist” or “deformed socialist, elevates neither capitalists nor workers to ruling economic status, but instead elevates a coordinator class of planners, managers, and other empowered actors.
Marxism still typically favors markets or more often central planning for allocation, public or state ownership for control of assets, remuneration for output, power, and sometimes need for distribution of income, and corporate divisions of labor for workplace organization, and these conceptual commitments propel coordinator rule. But this doesn’t say that most (or arguably even any) individual Marxists self-consciously try to advance the interests of managers and other empowered actors over and above workers. It says, instead, that the concepts within Marxism do little to prevent this elevation of the coordinator class and even propel it, so that coordinator economic dominance emerges from successful Marxist movements regardless of the sentiments of the movement’s rank and file.
Marx advised that when judging some intellectual framework one should discount what it says about itself, and, instead, notice what it highlights and obscures. A theory that becomes a tool of a ruling class will obscure that class’s behavior. It will hide that class’s roots in social relations. It will even hide that class’s existence. What happens if we apply this observation to assessing today’s Marxism?
We would look at what it obscures, what it highlights, and what it seeks. We would see that Marxism’s focus on property relations and non attention to other possible economic causes of class division obscures the importance of the distribution of empowering tasks among economic actors. It removes from view the rule exerted by a coordinator class, or about 20% of the population, over the remaining 80%, the working class. We would see that Marxism and certainly Marxism Leninism elevates the coordinator class to rule even as it simultaneously hides their role and even their very existence. Would not Marx call today’s Marxism and especially Marxism Leninism the ideology of the coordinator class?
That doesn’t imply that somehow all Marxists are enemies of classlessness. But it does imply that though marxists overwhelmingly desire classlessness, their institutional allegiances obstruct their desires.
How might Marxists seeking a Marxism for tomorrow correct the two highlighted problems?
Regarding economism, the problem is a conceptual framework that starts from economics and only then examines other realms with the primary intention of seeing their economic implications. The obvious solution is that we ought to instead begin with concepts that simultaneously highlight economics, polity, kinship, and culture. We ought to use concepts that first prioritize understanding each of these four sphere’s own logic and dynamics, and that next prioritize seeing how each sphere influences and even limits and defines the others. As a possible correction to economism within the broad rubric of Marxism, tomorrow’s Marxist might say,
“I am Marxist but I am also feminist, intercommunalist, anarchist, and green. I recognize that dynamics arising from spheres of life other than the economy are critically important and can even define economic possibilities, just as the reverse can occur. Of course, I still think class struggle is important, but I realize gender, race, religious, ethnic, sexual, and anti-authoritarian struggles are also important. I realize that just as we need to understand non-class phenomena in their relation to class struggle, we also have to understand economic phenomena in their relation to gender, race, and political struggle.”
Suppose tomorrow’s Marxist renounces ideas of economic base and extra-economic superstructure, denies that societies arise and transform only due to modes of production, and transcends seeing class struggle as the alone dominant conceptual framework for identifying strategic issues. Will the label “Marxist” still connote what he or she believes? I am not sure, but maybe.
In contrast to the above, however, the class-definition difficulty of yesterday’s and today’s Marxism seems to me less tractable. Capitalists are capitalist by virtue of their private ownership of the means of production. To no longer have capitalists above workers requires, therefore that we eliminate private ownership. So far, so good.
But another class in capitalism resides between labor and capital. Suppose we call it the coordinator class. Coordinators are made and elevated by market or centrally planned allocation and corporate divisions of labor that allot to this third class a virtual monopoly on empowering tasks as well as on the levers and requisites of daily decision making. To no longer have coordinators above workers requires, therefore, that we eliminate those features. Yet Marxist visions advocate either markets or central planning as well as corporate divisions of labor.
Marxists do not see that even when private ownership is eliminated and even when the state remains or becomes democratic, markets, central planning, and corporate divisions of labor nonetheless elevate a new ruling class above labor.
Marxists movingly and sincerely describe the justice, equity, and dignity that “socialism” should usher in. But, if we look at texts by Marxists for their vision, we find vague rhetoric that lacks institutional substance, or, when there is institutional substance, we find institutions that deny the justice, equity, and dignity that Marxists personally favor. And when we look at Marxist practice, we find these same coordinatorist structures universally implemented. Could a Marxist today transcend this problem and yet continue to see him or herself as a Marxist tomorrow?
If a Marxist did follow that path, I think signs that it had occurred would be obvious. For example, such new Marxists would disavow what has been called socialism in countries around the world, not by calling it capitalism or state capitalism, and not by calling it deformed socialism, but by calling it a third mode of production that enshrines a different class above workers.
Such new Marxists would offer a vision that would dispense with markets, central planning, and corporate divisions of labor, as well as with modes of remuneration that reward property, power, or output.
Such new Marxists would propose major defining institutions to seek in place of rejected options. The new institutions that I think might gain support from such updated Marxists would be worker and consumer self managing councils, remuneration for duration and intensity of socially valued labor, jobs balanced for empowerment effects, collective self management, and participatory planning.
In accord, such updated Marxists would also advocate movement organization, methods, and programs that would embody, propel, and actually arrive at these positive aims. If instead strategies for social change embody organizational choices and methods that elevate the coordinator class to authority, such as employing centrist parties and corporate divisions of labor, they will not eliminate coordinator class rule but will instead entrench it. Marxism’s flaws lead to this result regardless of the sincere desires of Marxists to end up someplace much nicer than coordinatorism.
What would be the relation of Marxists who seek to correct the error of ignoring coordinatorism to the heritage that they previously celebrated? Well, I doubt such new Marxists would call themselves Leninist or Trotskyist, but even if they did, they would certainly disavow huge swaths of associated thoughts and actions.
Instead of always quoting Lenin and Trotsky positively, for example, they would aggressively reject Lenin saying: “It is absolutely essential that all authority in the factories should be concentrated in the hands of management.”
And they would reject Lenin saying: “Any direct intervention by the trade unions in the management of enterprises must be regarded as positively harmful and impermissible.”
And would reject Lenin saying: “Large scale machine industry which is the central productive source and foundation of socialism calls for absolute and strict unity of will… How can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one.”
And his saying: “A producer’s congress! What precisely does that mean? It is difficult to find words to describe this folly. I keep asking myself can they be joking? Can one really take these people seriously? While production is always necessary, democracy is not. Democracy of production engenders a series of radically false ideas.”
And they would reject Trotsky saying (about left communists): “They turn democratic principles into a fetish. They put the right of the workers to elect their own representatives above the Party, thus challenging the Party’s right to affirm its own dictatorship, even when this dictatorship comes into conflict with the evanescent mood of the worker’s democracy.”
And would reject Trotsky saying, “We must bear in mind the historical mission of our Party. The Party is forced to maintain its dictatorship, without stopping for these vacillations, nor even the momentary falterings of the working class. This realization is the mortar which cements our unity. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not always have to conform to formal principles of democracy.”
And reject Trotsky saying: “It is a general rule that man will try to get out of work. Man is a lazy animal.”
And reject him saying (with pride): “I consider that if the Civil War had not plundered our economic organs of all that was strongest, most independent, most endowed with initiative, we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management much sooner and much less painfully.”
But, honestly, all of the above is the fare of “dead generations.” More important than arguing about the past, tomorrow’s Marxists would note that utilizing hierarchical structures in economic and/or political or social institutions risk ushering in coordinator rule (as well as creating an environment uncongenial to widespread worker involvement).
If tomorrow’s Marxists wanted to argue that in some difficult contexts such structures have to be employed, they would urge seeing them as a temporarily imposed expedient and in all other respects try to pave the way for classless self managing social relations, now and in the future.
Finally, is there also great wisdom in Marx and subsequent Marxist writers and activists that tomorrow’s Marxists would rightly retain? Of course there is. But people who rightly reject not only capitalist property relations but also a coordinatorist division of labor as well as patriarchy, racism, and authoritarianism would also want to avoid fulfilling Marx’s own commentary that:
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time honored disguise and borrowed language.”
mέta welcomes responses to this text by Michael Albert, which will be published on our website in order for a dialogue on these issues to commence.
The Matrix IV movie imaginatively presents us with three political anthropologies. Firstly – with humans in vats living a dream existence – we are presented with a homo diabolus sub-human and sub-political anthropology of the complete management of our ‘bare life’ necessities by mute and irresistible power. Here humans are the energy sources for a machine intelligence that is the expression of our own reductively instrumental reason. The political is obsolete here as force and necessity entirely define the actual reality that the dreams of normality conceal. Secondly, the same world is portrayed as expressing a homo deus super-human and super-political anthropology of total rational control. Again the freedoms, uncertainties and responsibilities of human politics are obsolete as perfect god-like super-intelligence manages the world of our experience to our (and the machine’s) optimal satisfaction. The machines represent the very human desire for total power through knowledge and mastery; the attainment of our own divinity. Thirdly, there is a homo sapiens anthropology that is wise enough to know that we are more than merely animal (and hence we need language, freedom, transcendence, truth, love, politics) but less than divine (we will never have total mastery or achieve transcendence). In the movie Neo struggles to uphold a theo-political anthropology of human freedom and meaning against the sub and super-human power anthropologies of our own creation. This ‘review’ of the movie explores the question the film asks ‘what does it really mean to be human?’ in the context of techno-state integrated biosecurity controls of citizens in the covid pandemic, in Australia. This ‘review’ argues that – in the name of public health – we are being tempted to treat citizens in sub-human ways and to hubristically aspire to super-human total (technological) solutions to ‘bare life’ problems, governed by both sub and super human ideologies that makes genuinely human politics obsolete. The Matrix IV movie, then, has much to say to us about the risks to human freedoms and political dignity in the context of the post-capitalist merging of technology, transnational corporations and states in our covid afflicted, climate change denying, and geo-financio-politically unstable times.
After Christmas, but before New Year, I had the bizarre experience of going to the movies under a ‘no jab no entry’ government directive (I live in Brisbane, Australia). Just getting into the cinema to watch Matrix IV made it strangely difficult to work out if art was imitating life, or if life was imitating art. The front story to this conceptual review describes how “public safety” works in Queensland, and it may seem a little tedious. However, I found the controlled public safety dynamic in Australia very pertinent to the central themes of the movie itself. So please stay with me for a few paragraphs whilst I talk about Australia’s famous “stay safe” approach to public life in a global pandemic.
Because I am writing a film review and I live in Brisbane, you can tell that I am vaccinated against covid. Public places like cinemas are required, by our government, to deny entry to patrons unless you show proof of vaccination and also log into to a QR-code movement tracing app on your mobile phone. Only then are citizens considered morally and safety virtuous enough to be allowed to go to the movies.
I have three young adult daughters, one of whom does not wish to be vaccinated, so she did not come to see Matrix IV with us. She is concerned about how safe the vaccines really are, particularly for young people. Contrary to relentless state and media endorsed propaganda, my daughter is not ignorant, unreasonable, or immoral. A close friend of my daughter’s went into intensive care with myocarditis, and we have a relative who went into intensive care with thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, both directly induced by the administration of a covid vaccine. My daughter does not have any interest in distant here-say conspiracy phobias; her reasons for not wanting to be vaccinated derive from her direct knowledge, from within her close circle of associations. So either side-effects for certain groups are much higher than we are being told, or my daughter’s circle of association is extremely statistically unlucky. But on a bigger canvas, it is clear that whatever the vaccination side-effects may be, the commercial opportunities for big pharma are very good in our covid times. It is also clear that the political opportunities for strong and protective government are very good in these times. What government would miss the opportunity to show decisive leadership in keeping us safe via effective emergency public health measures that are obviously saving lives for the common good? Yet in this context, the interests of big pharma and our state and federal governments happily coincide, so commercial and political interests are at least as important as health concerns. Trans-national corporate interests and the state’s invasive biosecurity powers grow ever closer together and my daughter quite naturally finds this a disturbing development. My daughter has intelligent reasons to wonder how safe the vaccination actually would be for her, she is distressed that her personal freedoms of movement and association have been removed, she has discovered that her freedom to withhold her consent to invasive state “recommended” public health measures are close to fictitious, and she wonders if the official communications of our governments are as transparently truthful about public health issues as our government insists they are. These are not lunar conspiracy concerns.
Despite concerted state-promoted advice ‘requesting’ citizens take certain actions to “stay safe”, ordinary people – like my daughter – can still be determined not to comply with the government’s vaccination recommendations. To overcome the new social evil of “vaccination hesitancy” (though my daughter is not hesitant at all, she just doesn’t want to be vaccinated), the heavy use of carrots and sticks has been implemented by our governments to ‘encourage’ vaccination. Schools, universities and other ‘public safety’ concerned institutions are following the government’s lead such that as citizens, consumers, and employees, we are heavily incentivized to get vaccinated, and seriously punished (with unemployment and public space exclusion) if we refuse to comply. Such ‘encouragement’ is necessary because vaccination is not actually mandatory; you must choose ‘of your own free will’ to do as the government ‘recommends.’
How much choice, though, do we actually have?
I chose to exercise my personal free will and not to have a mobile phone. Keeping on top of my emails is socially and contemplatively invasive enough for me. But though I am vaccinated, I need a QR-code movement-tracer to go almost everywhere in Queensland (shops, church, cinemas, university). Surveillance tech is now intimately involved in ‘public safety’. Without evidence of full vaccination (fortunately, paper evidence is OK) and without contact tracing marking where I have been (luckily, one of my daughters has a mobile phone and QR-code included me), I would have been bounced out if I had tried to go to the movies to see Matrix IV. But I did get to the movies, and – wearing my mask, QR checked and ticked, and double-jab checked and ticked – I managed to sit down and see my old movie friends Neo and Trinity in action again.
The Matrix IV is an interesting movie for our times. The movie is about spiritual freedom and technological control; it is about love and power. This movie asks us, do we want governments that give us safety through control, and peace with the techno-feudal overlords who rule our lives and make our life-style possible? Or do we want… something else?
In the movie, the Analyst (Neo’s therapist) puts forward the argument for techno peace and safety. He claims that the large majority of people just want a quiet and satisfying life. People want someone else to be in control, they don’t want to be free, and they don’t want to know the truth. This, no doubt, is true. Plato expressed similar observations about our preference for enslavement in a cave of illusions controlled by public impression generators whose projected shadows we all treat like reality itself. This argument for accepting an illusionary world of peace and safety was given quite a sensitive treatment in this movie. And where peace is possible, of course war should be avoided. But then, the central narrative theme of this movie is that ‘… something else’, something more valuable than peace and safety, is essential for our humanity. Perhaps, even, this ‘something else’ is worth fighting for.
Could it be that there really is something distinctive to our very humanity that make us more than cattle, more than batteries powering those who use us, and more than consumption machines (working-spending, working-spending, working-spending)? The ‘something else’ in this movie is love. Actually, it is Love as a transcendent principle, and a principle that requires truth over convenient lies, it requires the anxieties of choice over the certainties of ‘no option’, and it will accept nothing less than the peril and responsibility of freedom over the passive peace and firm control of total safety. If we trust in the total management of our lives by bio-tech-state-corporate powers who carefully choreograph our moral choices (good means following the safe and reasonable recommendations, bad means non-compliance with these ‘recommendations’) then no-one is going to get hurt and we will all be happy and secure. All we need do is give our consent. But would we be human? Would we be adults? Would we be responsible and free citizens?
Interesting questions. Shall we munch our popcorn and watch this (blue pill) movie as a clever and fun bit of entertainment, or shall we take this (red pill) movie as more than simply entertaining? Is this a movie about special effects, last century nostalgia, philosophical games and martial arts, or is it about politics, today? Should we take this movie as a red pill or blue pill?
Take the blue pill and everything stays the same. The trajectory of ‘the same’ since the first Matrix movie in 1999 is pretty clear. Techno-feudal power has expanded exponentially. We had: Facebook arrive in 2004; the i-phone in 2007; a range powerful of internet aps – twitter, snapchat etc.; fabulous advances in facial recognition technology; fabulous legal enhancements of private surveillance and public control powers by our governments since 9/11; the GFC of 2008 resulting in massive state-funded bailouts to (tax minimising and transnational) financial super-corporations; the commercialization (with ‘freely’ chosen consent) of algorithmic data-use surveillance and the ever expanding supercomputer processing of Google; robotics has been literally weaponized with stunning advances in drone technology; and all these developments were topped off in 2021 with Facebook’s transition to Meta – the promise of emersion virtuality getting us uncomfortably close to the original Matrix idea. We are living in what Shoshana Zuboff describes as surveillance capitalism, which is an extremely commercially and culturally powerful ‘machine intelligence’ facilitated world of individually tailored, total reality management. This is the blue pill world we live in. We all seem to know that what we experience as end users of this world is somehow not real – at least, the illusions of personal freedom and unlimited satiation of whatever money can buy are only experienced by the globe’s super elites, not by us – but this is our world, and we cannot imagine that leaving it would be anything other than a tremendous step down into darkness and deprivation.
Since the first Matrix movie, we have been living at peace with ‘the machines’ and they have given us a world that we more or less believe that we like, and unquestioningly believe that we cannot do without. But in this world we have become the pawns of our own incredibly powerful tools. Mobile phone dependency is now endemic. We are switched on and plugged in 24/7. And in this plugged-in world, what if AI does hit a singularity where it so effectively simulates human consciousness that it starts exercising its own ‘will’? Learning, super-fast, volitional machine intelligence (this does not need to be ‘conscious’) is no longer imaginative sci fi. One of two unpleasant outcomes would result should we manage to see AI evolve under its own direction, and continue its gentle movement from being our servant to being our master: the Homo Deus outcome or the Homo Diabolus outcome.
In a Homo Deus technologically realized eschatology, our IT births a benign artificial super-intelligence that governs our world so as to solve all our problems and make us all happy, fed, bread, and comfortable consumers. Clearly we can’t seem to solve world problems under the limitations of our current bio-individual norms – we just can’t crack hunger, poverty, energy, climate change, disease, economic/financial stability, world peace – so putting control systems in the hands of benign computerized super-intelligence, working out the best win-win options for everyone, is a natural step in human evolution that would give us that long-dreamt of man-made utopia. The promise of the technological kingdom of god on earth (where we or our AI off-spring are god) would be realized. This is a theological anthropology, which makes politics as we have previously known it obsolete. Irrational democratic preferences and the short term political necessities of politicians do not give us the optimum outcome; let calculative total rational management take over.
In a Homo Diabolus technologically realized eschatology, the ultimate ‘political realist’ dystopia would come into being. What if machine intelligence – created in our own image after all – is just as dominating, self-interested and prone to malice and power-lust as we are? Or what if some Evil Master Geek got a hold of world controlling AI and just took over our computer located financial, communications, travel, transportation, military, energy, and civil administration systems. Then there would be war, and we would lose, as we are already profoundly dependent on our machines. Then hell on earth, ruled by the devil (where we or our AI off-spring are the devil) would be realized. Here authority would be reduced to power, and politics and law would be obsolete. Sub-human mere force would rule the world.
Under both Homo Deus and Homo Diabolus theological anthropologies, politics and law as we now understand them would become obsolete. In both cases that elusive ‘something else’ – the essentially human, neither sub nor super human – would be expunged from the world. Our political anthropology is, finally, shaped by a distinctly theological idea that we are not simply animals, and that we are not gods. Remove that tacit cultural theology such that we no longer know the distinction between the animal and the human, or between the human and the divine, and politics and law themselves become mere shells, mere outward crusts. On the outside only, there is the fading vision of the meaning of distinctly human life that has shaped the West since at least the Classical Greeks. Inside the shell, there is nothing but sub-human need and total super-human control.
Max Weber called our instrumental technological and bureaucratic intelligence an iron cage for the human spirit. Aldous Huxley warned against socially engineered hedonistic utopia, as this is a spiritual death-wish for human society. The original Matrix movie was in that Weber/Huxley prophetic tradition, warning against getting what we wish for to the exclusion of valuing what we have. Matrix One was a call to human resistance against the loss of our real spiritual essence to utopian dreams (which are dystopian nightmares in reality) of both total control and mere safety and hedonic satiation.
But the fourth Matrix movie is less sure about any intrinsic difference between us and machines than was the first Matrix movie, and the 2021 movie wonders if machines can be spiritual and if, perhaps, people are not essentially different to machines after-all. So maybe we should take the blue pill and hope for the best, hope that machines can be spiritual and that humans will, somehow, not let go of that ‘something else’ that a purely algorithmic and instrumental intelligence never grasps.
Or we could take the red pill.
The red pill is the truth. But, of course, one does not ‘know’ if it is the truth before one takes it; this is a leap of faith. One somewhat ‘feels’ (but this is not the right word) that it is the truth before taking it. Taking the red pill perhaps even creates ‘the truth’, as this taking is a commitment coupled with action (the walk of faith) that follows a spiritual yearning that cannot be explained in terms of material necessities. (The Analyst in the Matrix IV seriously miss-reads ‘feelings’ through the non-spiritual conceptual filters of his uber-intelligent algorithmic mind.) But maybe there is a genuinely divine Giver to this yearning, and so spiritual truth is created not simply by our faith, but out of some sort of active and receptive partnership with that unseen transcendent Reality that we have unexplainable faith in. We are getting more theological than the movie allows now, so I will back down from that frontier. Thinking back within the theological frontiers of the Matrix movies, what would commitment to the ‘truth’ of that ‘something else’ that escapes algorithmic instrumental intelligence look like?
To be clear, the Matrix movies do implicitly draws on some theological and metaphysical sources when seeking to understand the spiritual predicament of modern humanity in the context of the techno-commercial world we have built for ourselves. But this movie draws on more secular and activist sources as well. Because the West’s old theo-political anthropology is not excluded, the political itself remains a medium of the distinctly human in this movie. Here the movie draws on the Western heritage of the ancient Greek city-state democracy, Roman republicanism, the American Revolution, and nineteenth century liberalism.
Let us briefly look at the politics of human freedom, as a spiritual value, that we are in real and immediate danger of entirely losing to the triumphant archons of our own super-human machine and subhuman animal intelligences.
The Greek idea of politics is that what makes us human is meaningful speech. A human is not simply an animal. Animals have needs and desires that are sub-linguistic. We also have needs and desires that are sub-linguistic, sub-rational. The sub-rational is the realm of instinct and mute force; animal needs and the power logic of territorial and sexual domination and subjugation define this realm. Herein reside the aggressive and submissive drivers of animal competition and cooperation. But the animal is not the realm of the political in Greek thinking. Rationality and speech intimately entail each other, and define the domain of the political to the Greeks. The high capacities of human speech reach towards divine truths, and then poetically seek to reformulate the traces of essential and eternal Reality into the existential world of historically contingent politics. But what makes politics genuinely human is this worshipping, desiring reaching towards eternal moral and spiritual realities; Justice, Goodness, Beauty, Truth. We can never master the high truths that politics seeks to implement in a good civic life, for those truths are divine and we are mortal. The truths political life seeks to serve are super-rational and super-linguistic in themselves, such that our cultural constructions of ‘the Common Good’ are never divine in themselves, but neither are they simply animal. Politics is situated between the animal realm of bodily necessity and the divine realm of eternal spiritual realities. This between space is the realm of the truly human, and it is the truly political space.
Treating people in either the purely animal and ‘bare life’ terms of mute force and instinctive satiation, or in purely utopian terms of supposedly ideal perfection, is to deny them their distinctive spiritual humanity as political beings. It is to deny politics as well. The Roman idea of the republic, the idea of not having a king, but of citizens being responsible to decide together what laws and plans the body politic should pursue, again calls citizens to this in-between responsibility of practical needs being discursively tempered not by divine perfection, or simply mandated by irresistible force, but by the common reaching towards the Highest Good, as we construct it together, by speech. The American Revolution cast off the English crown under the theological conviction that human institutions were readily corrupted by power, and readily preserved the privilege of the already powerful, and so a polity based on the political equality of each individual citizen needed to be one nation united under God, rather than under a monarch. That is, the transcendent horizon for Justice would not be defined by the dictates of any human authority, but would be a function of the constantly striving voice of the people – responsible citizens – seeking true freedom and the Highest Good together. Thus each citizen is equal before God, and no citizen is situated beneath the authority of any humanly constructed power, rather human powers draw their authority from the people who decide together, politically, how to pursue a free and spiritually dignified way of life. Nineteenth century liberalism is a secularized adaptation of the American theo-political idea. Modern liberal democratic politics is premised on an inherently spiritual notion of the human dignity of the individual, and if we lose an understanding of ourselves as spiritual beings situated between the animal and the divine, if we lose the political freedom and the responsibility of each citizen to use reasoned speech to participate in the common good, then we lose liberal democracy.
Given the blue pill trajectory of this century, either through the false perfection of technological and scientifically rational solutions to all human problems, or through the false baseness of a life of purely safe and satisfied animal comforts, liberal democratic politics will be destroyed. Would we lose that ‘something else’, that spiritual essence of our humanity, if we continue to take the blue pill, if we allow ourselves to believe either that we are sub or super human?
To conclude where this review started, what would taking the blue or the red pill mean practically in regard to going to the movies in a covid pandemic?
The red pill makes things complicated. In contrast, the blue pill reduces political choice to a sub-political matter of public control and physical necessity at the same time as elevating some ‘inevitable’ state mandated action to the realm of a realized moral ideal. That is, machine thinking reduces choices concerned with necessity and public control to a binary between a totally controlled order and anarchic chaos, and this firmly controlled order is then sheened with a utopian moral gloss as ‘Good’, and the projected unsafety and anarchy, as ‘Bad’ (or, as in the case of refugees ‘illegally’ seeking to claim asylum in Australia, pretty close to ‘Evil’). In Brisbane those who are not vaccinated are considered immoral, selfish, and a risk to public health, and hence not deserving of normal citizen freedoms or responsibilities. State and private media outlets continually push this line, and woe betide any public communicator not prepared to toe the public health line here.
It seems that the reason we have seen the anti-vax movement grow from almost nothing at the turn of the century to quite a sizeable phenomenon now has a lot to do two forces. On the one hand, the enormous alternative-health industry, promoted largely through the echo chamber of Facebook styled social media, thrives on personal health anxieties and on conspiracies about main-stream medical science. Commerce, knowledge, media and politics – particularly around matters of health – are not the same after the social-media info-bubble dynamic. On the one hand, there is a growing and genuine awareness of how mainstream science, big pharma, other powerful multi-national corporations, and political lobbyists have achieved a sort of mutual regulative capture with governments, such that it is becoming increasingly difficult for the average person to know what the credible scientific facts of any new medication or health threat really are. But regardless of why we have this ‘out-group’ of anti-vaxxas and covid vaccine refusers (‘hesitancy’ people typically do not self-identify as anti-vax) we now have an out-group which, in Australia, defies government public health recommendations. So there is a state sanctioned propaganda war being vigorously launched against these outliers to bring them into the ‘voluntary’ fold of mainstream, government endorsed safety. Key to this propaganda war are the blue pill categories of binary necessity (the sub-political) and the perfect certainty of moral absolutism (the super-political). Economic and party-political necessity dictates that covid will be fixed, and it will be fixed by government policy defined by scientific and technological certainty, and that this fixing is a moral and political victory for a wise and proactive government acting in the interests of public safety. Science tells us facts, governments ‘recommend’ and mandate policies in keeping with those facts, complying with the government is Good, non-compliance is morally degenerate, and thus any sanctions that fall on the non-compliant are just. Simple, practical, and appealing to the consumeristic and eagerly moralistic (in Freudian categories) majority; it’s a political winner. What else could our blue pill governments be expected to do but go with this trajectory?
The red pill makes everything more complicated. Covid requires that governments really should develop public health policy responses to our situation, but if citizens are treated as being genuinely free to comply or not with government recommendations, then those who do not comply should not be out-grouped. But this would mean that governments cannot use covid as a means of showing firm leadership. This would mean that the morality of those who comply and those who do not comply would be left open, rather than decided by the policy settings of the government. This would entail a human tension between bare-life safety and political freedom. The Analyst would not doubt tell us that people want safety, certainty and firm material controls, and do not want the primal health risk of the plague, the anxiety of genuine choice, and the spiritual freedoms of responsible citizens. No doubt our governments in Australia agree with the Analyst. If the Australian people also take the blue pill here, then this socio-commercial laboratory may well lead us across an event frontier into a new level of blue pill reality, from which there will be no return. Perhaps more is going on here than a question of whether we can go to the movies or not.
The so-called Postmodernity is essentially the era of economic liberalism, first introduced in Western Europe in the 19th century, disrupted in the mid-20th century, re-generated in the 1970s, and globalised since the 1990s as neo-liberalism. Its purpose was and is the expansion of capitalist territory around the world, and the penetration of market logic in almost every social institution and activity.
Globalisation in this form has been promoted by transnational corporations, international organisations and entities, and nation-states, which together constitute a novel supra-territorial power structure. Transnational corporations, mainly financial, pharmaceutical, and digital technology companies, control the global economy in an overwhelming extent, and many of them now hold more wealth than the GDP of many countries. Between transnational capital and the nation-states, major organisations and bureaucracies operate, through asymmetric power relations between their member states, and, with the loans or the ‘assessment criteria’ they impose, render the nation-states instruments of wealth generation and capital flows. Compliant states legitimise these organisations as ‘neutral’ technocratic advice-givers, and therefore as ‘rational’ and ‘impartial’ agencies, thus legitimising ideologically their policies to national constituencies as necessary to restore or sustain ‘development’.
On a more fundamental level, it is precisely the, even today, little questioned ideologies of ‘development’, ‘growth’, or ‘modernisation’, and their ‘matrix’ idea of ‘progress’, that legitimise capitalist domination within and amongst societies. The notion of ‘progress’ that first prevailed in Western societies and then around the world consists in the perpetual increase of productive forces, techno-scientific achievements, and consumption, and totally devalues the creations of the past and any other political project for the future. Today, ‘progress’ consists mainly in the proliferation of rationalistic and biopolitical controls, the production and consumption of new gadgets, the algorithmisation of human judgment and behaviour, and the conversion of human life into digital data.
Globalisation has led to the emergence of a transnational capitalist class, accumulating unprecedented wealth, competitive and power-obsessed middle classes, and increasingly insecure and fragmented working classes. At the same time, the so-called ‘free market’ creates nomadic existences, in the physical and digital space, and pliable personalities, constantly oriented towards the consumption of new commodities, mainly through debt, which is now the basis of financial capitalism. The social landscape that has been formed is characterised by the unleashing of consumer desires, instincts, and egoisms, the collapse of social bonds and the notion of the citizen as a thinking and acting subject.
Indeed, citizenship is dilapidated by consumer culture, the breakdown of the institutions of ‘representative democracy’, the bureaucratisation of politics, and the marginalisation of truth and critique. The almost complete control of the big media by state and business interests, and the uninterrupted flows of audiovisual spectacle and virtual reality, render the ascertainment of the truth as well as sense making extremely difficult.
No doubt, the advent of the Internet has broken the monopoly of the mono-directional media, given voice to activists and independent journalists, allowed horizontal communication and direct transactions between citizens, and bypassed institutions that traditionally controlled knowledge (e.g. the education and health systems). However, the Internet has been eventually formed largely in accordance to the priorities of globalised capitalism, as a massive de-territorialised market and a gigantic ‘empire of surveillance’, where transnational corporations gather, exploit, and exchange personal data with state agencies, and manipulate users’ choices. 9/11 and now the pandemic are the two decisive events – opportunities for the dramatic expansion of surveillance technologies by transnational companies and bureaucratic mechanisms.
In the last decades, the same mechanisms have been formulating education policy too, the main purpose of which is the subordination of educational systems to the economy, through privatisations or the adoption of business-like criteria, and mainly through the treatment of students as ‘human capital’. Current transnational education policy destroys any tradition of paideia or Bildung created in Europe, in the sense of general culture and the formation of independently thinking and active citizens. It also destroys the tradition of academic autonomy in universities, subjecting knowledge to business interests, and turning universities themselves into businesses. At a time when educational institutions should be, more than ever before, spaces of free research and teaching so that the young study the civilizational condition that threatens their very future on the planet, transnational education policy is reducing them to ‘human resources’, subject to mainly training in professional skills and to conscription in the precariat.
Based on the above remarks, any effort to overcome the current condition should include, in my view, the analysis and understanding:
of the functioning of the supra-territorial power structure generated by capitalist globalisation, without regarding it as consolidated and unchanged (e.g. juxtapose Iceland’s response to the 2009 economic crisis with that of Greece);
of transnational capitalism not only as an economic system, but precisely as a civilizational condition, with broader and deeper socialising functions;
of the central ideas that permeate and legitimise globalised capitalism, and orientate societies towards the maintenance or increase of productivity and consumption, the over-concentration of wealth, and the self-destructive domination over nature, and paralyse any other socio-political project;
of education and its socialising role, its degradation today, and the importance of a true paideia for all, and of academic autonomy as a prerequisite for free research and teaching;
of genuine politics, as a field of open dialogue based on truth, collective action, and full democratisation, and its importance for the re-constitution of societies, against capitalist and any other form of barbarism.
João Romeiro Hermeto
As I’ve heard from many people that I had to watch the movie Don’t Look Up, what finally convinced me to do so was to discover who its director and screenplay’s writer is: Adam McKay.
Oddly enough, the recommendations of this film were accompanied by very different interpretations and perspectives. Only after watching it that I was able to understand the reasons behind the euphoria.
I would claim that for one to understand the true representation of the fiction Don’t Look Up, one must go back to McKay’s previous movies The Big Short and VICE. Why? Because they reveal the key beyond the mere subjective interpretation of each viewer, who may end up projecting his or her worldview into this movie.
The “plurality” of possible interpretations is caused not by a flaw of the movie, but because it brilliantly unveils the totality of our social relations, the totality of capitalist power. Hence, as each individual, in his or her daily life, faces merely some isolated phenomena of capitalism, without having the theoretical awareness of how do they relate to additional phenomena, which only then could form a totality, the movie appears to confirm through the means of fiction what the individual already learned from the reality.
Nevertheless, my claim reads as follow, McKay has shown from both The Big Short and VICE to have learned that capitalist problems are not merely isolated phenomena, nor do they represent the corruption or malevolence of singular individuals, on the contrary, they are social imperatives that cannot be turned off while capitalist logic remains the principal, leading social logic in our societies.
This means, surplus capital, the profit of production by the means of the private control of the social property relations (and not simply by the exchange, trade, or also known as profit by alienation), namely the private property of the means of production, creates the immanent and imperative condition for a bipartisan ruling by the capitalist elites supported by the capitalist state and institutions.
For the organic intellectual of the hegemonic elite, the movie may appear as a parody or, alternatively, a caricature, however, its representation already shows not only the mistake of such view but also some mechanisms of why and how the intellectual becomes part of what he or she ought to criticise but ends up defending.
And although Don’t Look up is supposed to be a fiction, it is as a matter of fact more real than reality. While our reality, pushed through every day by the whole elite hegemonic apparatus, constantly hides the real, Don’t Look Up reveals many of the hidden elements of our everyday life, our narratives of (self-) deception, our seemingly-secular belief-system, in a word, our reality, which prevents us from understanding the real.
The capitalist elite does not tell to many of us directly to Look Down, this is the implicit message, this is the result it wants to achieve, thus the elite says Don’t Look Up. The essence of our capitalist society of the spectacle is to hide the essence, the movement that characterize our social relations, the real process of being; as a result, the spectacle is constantly shaped and reshaped by the negation of the being.
Instead, the irrelevant becomes relevant; the capitalist spectacle focuses, fosters, deifies, and pushes the appearance. Thus, it is not the being, nor even the having or possessing, but the appearing that in capitalism confers reality to the real. The real ceases to be real and appears product of the spectacle’s reality.
Even though Baudrillard thought to have superseded the spectacle Debord’s with his notion of the simulacra, the latter is an immanent moment of the former, they are two moments of the same totality.
Information, knowledge, writing, and communication tools do not carry in themselves an essence, they are neither negative or positive. Historically they have been used both to consolidate cultural practices as well as to manipulate by the means of propaganda.
However obvious and clear this is, the colossal amount of available information, coupled with the rhetoric of freedom of speech, of thinking, and of access to information, etc. – all blatant lies –, convey a narrative that our society would be impervious to and immunized against propaganda and deceitful information from power elites.
The grassroots of political movements beyond professional politics (the mediation of capitalist power) must take back the task for itself of the political education of the masses, of informing them about the real beyond the appearance of the reality. The lack of understanding of Don’t Look Up in a systemic fashion, from not only academics but also journalists, reveals the depth of the problem we find ourselves in as a society. The left movements must emancipate themselves from the grips of the power elites and start acting on behalf of humanity and the planet. The elites push not class struggle but class warfare, meanwhile the left-wing movements believe in the fantasy of governing for all within a society divided in classes
However, before grassroots movements can provide any actual unveiling of the power relations, they must learn how to connect theory to practical reality, because appearance has taken over not only the minds and dreams of the masses but theirs as well. As soon as names, such Lula (Brazil), Boric (Chile), Mujica (Uruguay), etc., come up, promising the illusion of a unified society, left-wing movements start celebrating victory with total disregard to both the historical practices of those candidates as well as the concrete class relations in the countries they claim allegedly to represent.
Insofar the left-wing movements, believing and focusing on the appearances, remain sedated, capitulated, sleeping tight, simply a controlled opposition of the elites, then the masses will continue to sail the winds blown by the capitalist class, having to accept the proponents of false options the system allows them to believe in as if they were real possibilities for change.
In other words, as George Carlin brilliantly said in regards to the power relations ruling the United States: “The owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it”.
supporters holding signs to express support for Julian Assange.
The Courage Foundation announces#WeAreMillions, a massive photo campaign to demonstrate global support for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
We Are Millions features supporters holding signs to express simply and clearly why they are standing up for Julian Assange, whom the US seeks to punish for publishing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and military documents in 2010. Those releases exposed war crimes, uncounted civilian casualties and rampant corruption and abuse. The Trump Administration has brought 17 counts of Espionage against Assange, the first ever such charges for a journalist, threatening a lifetime in prison.
One year since the final deal for Brexit was announced, it remains one of the most divisive political subjects for a generation. Perhaps unknown to most, the incendiary B-word had its genesis in the term “Grexit” — coined during tumultuous years after the 2008 credit crunch when a Greek exit from the EU was speculated, as the nation’s people suffered punitive austerity measures imposed by the “troika” of EU Commission, central bank and IMF.
After subsequent periods of mass civil unrest, rioting and national catastrophe, the democratic socialist party Syriza was elected in 2015, with Yanis Varoufakis serving as finance minister during crucial crisis talks with the deep establishment of the EU, as dramatised in the 2019 movie Adults in the Room.
Varoufakis became a familiar face in British media during the Brexit period and expresses dismay concerning some of the dogma surrounding the debate.
“Undoubtedly, the hard Remainers were as unsophisticated in their narrative as the hard Brexiteers. Mirroring the latter, for whom the EU was the source of all evil, the hard Remainers portrayed the EU as a splendid utopia — and in so doing they did enormous damage to the cause of Remain.
“The case of Greece is, as you imply, a useful case in point: we ended up with the absurd situation where Tory grandees were lambasting the EU for imposing on our people overly harsh austerity and for snuffing out our radical left government, while hard Remainer Labour functionaries were keeping silent.
“Personally speaking, it was utterly confounding to be shunned by social democrats and be embraced by Tories even though I was campaigning against Brexit and in favour, alongside Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, of a radical Remain.”
Many Remain voters perceived EU freedom of movement solely as a beneficial piece of legislature with attractive rights offering work or study abroad, yet this pillar of the single market also enabled unscrupulous British employers to undercut domestic workforces by hiring from poorer EU nations at the lowest possible rates exploitatively, causing social friction and driving wages down.
The “Posted Workers Directive” included one such loophole, belatedly closed in 2018 — two years after the referendum — but Varoufakis agrees that similar mechanisms facilitating wage competition still exist within the EU labour market.
“Under capitalism, of any variety, the legal framework meant to protect waged labour is full of holes that employers use at will. But I must insist that freedom of movement was and remains, on the balance of arguments, a progressive feature of the EU.
“Yes, labour mobility in the short run allows capital to undermine the local trade unions. But, the solution is not electrified fences and impenetrable borders. The solution is the unionisation of immigrant workers.”
A fine solution that would be, hypothetically — but after decades of legislation designed to weaken trade unions in Britain, growth of support to leave the EU was inevitable; and the trade bloc is not unfamiliar with the use of harsh border controls, since waves of migrants attempting to enter it have been tear-gassed and brutalised on the south and eastern flanks of the European continent.
But despite the punishing financial impositions placed upon the people of Greece by the EU, Varoufakis campaigned for Remain in Britain.
“The reason I opposed Brexit was both strategic and ideological — the ideological part [being] a commitment to bringing borders down so as to accelerate capitalism and give workers from different countries the opportunity and the challenge, to forge transnational organisations.
“As for the strategic part: I could see that Brexit’s referendum success would lead to a Johnson-led Tory government. Back in March 2015, in a Guardian Live event at Emmanuel Centre, Tariq Ali and I debated the issue.
“Tariq argued that Brexit would cause a rift in the Tory Party that would, essentially, lead to its final breakup. I counter-argued that the Tories are the epitome of class solidarity and, whatever differences they may have, they know how to bury them in the pursuit of the interests of capital.
“In sharp contrast, I continued, it is the Labour side of politics that will be mortally divided by Brexit. I think that life has delivered its verdict. Personally, I have little doubt that Corbyn might have ended up in 10 Downing Street if Brexit had failed at the referendum.”
However, in an interview last May with UnHerd, Varoufakis reconsidered that Brexit was “probably the right way for Britain” and reiterated his annoyance with hard Remainers who persisted in their attempts to overturn the referendum result.
Meanwhile, left-leaning Leave voters hoped Britain would now be free from EU law that stipulates compulsory privatisation of industries such as transport and energy utilities, preventing full nationalisation to exclude profiteering by private investors at the expense of workers and services provided to the public.
But details of Johnson’s final Brexit deal include a clause, Article 2.1: “The parties acknowledge that anti-competitive business practices may distort the proper functioning of markets and undermine the benefits of trade liberalisation.” Varoufakis is cynical about this.
“These agreements are not worth the paper they are written on. There is nothing binding here since it is up to the British government to interpret as it sees fit the meaning of ‘anti-competitive business practices.’
“In any case, I also believe that a government of the left had considerable degrees of freedom de facto to nationalise key industries even within the EU. Look at what happened, for example, during the pandemic: almost the whole of Germany’s economy was effectively nationalised!
“Moreover, France and Germany took advantage of the pandemic to end, to all intents and purposes, the level-playing field rules, eg by pushing through mergers against the edicts of the European Commission.”
Yet it should be considered that France and Germany are de facto EU leaders — and are thus more able to bend rules (such as the law that eurozone nations must keep deficits within 3 per cent of GDP, for breaking which Greece and Italy were punished.)
Furthermore, they were able to implement nationalisation during the pandemic because EU law permits it in cases of emergency — so it was a temporary measure only, since extending this to a permanent situation would be contrary to other EU laws that mandate privatisation, which the European Court of Justice (ECJ) tends to rule in favour of lest the rights of private investors be curbed. A reminder that freedom of movement does not concern persons only, but goods, services and, crucially, capital.
A distinguished professor and prolific author, Varoufakis theorises that traditional capitalism has been superseded by an economic system he terms “techno-feudalism.”
“Central to the thesis that techno-feudalism is distinct from capitalism is the observation that, following 2008, the rise of digital platforms and more recently the pandemic, the two main drivers of capitalism are no longer central to the economic system: profits and markets.
“Profit-seeking, of course, continues to drive most people. And markets are everywhere. However, the broad system we live in is no longer driven by private profits. Nor is, these days, the market the main mechanism for wealth extraction or creation.
“What has replaced profits and markets? The short answer is: central bank money has replaced capitalist profits as the system’s fuel and big tech’s digital platforms have replaced markets as the mechanism for value extraction.
“Central bank money replaced profits as the system’s driver: profitability no longer drives the system, even though it remains the be-all-and-end-all for individual entrepreneurs. Indisputable evidence that central bank money, not profits, power the economic system is everywhere.
“A great example is what happened in London on August 12, 2020. It was the day markets learned that the British economy shrank disastrously — and by far more than analysts had expected (more than 20 per cent of national income had been lost in the first seven months of 2020). Upon hearing the grim news, financiers thought: ‘Great! The Bank of England, panicking, will print even more pounds and channel them to us to buy shares. Time to buy shares!’
“This is just one of countless manifestations of a new global reality: in the US and all over the West, central banks print money that financiers lend to corporations, which then use it to buy back their shares — whose prices are thus decoupled from profits. The new barons, as a result, expand their fiefs, courtesy of state money, even if they never earn a dime of profit!
“Moreover, they dictate terms to the supposed sovereign — the central banks that keep them ‘liquid.’ While the Fed, for example, prides itself over its power and independence, it is today utterly powerless to stop that which it started in 2008: printing money on behalf of bankers and corporations. Even if the Fed suspects that, in keeping the corporate barons liquid, it is precipitating inflation, it knows that ending the money printing will bring the house down.
“The terror of causing a bad debt and bankruptcy avalanche makes the Fed a hostage of its own decision to print and ensures that it will continue printing to keep the barons liquid.
“This has never happened before. Powerful central banks, that today keep the system going single-handedly, have never wielded so little power. Only under feudalism did the sovereign feel similarly subservient to its barons, while remaining responsible for keeping the whole edifice together.
“Digital platforms are replacing markets: during the 20th century and to this day, workers in large capitalist oligopolistic firms (like General Electric, Exxon-Mobil or General Motors) received approximately 80 per cent of the company’s income. Big tech’s workers do not even collect 1 per cent of their employer’s revenues. This is because paid labour performs only a fraction of the work that big tech benefits from. Who performs the bulk of the work? Most of the rest of us!
“For the first time in history, almost everyone produces for free (often enthusiastically) big tech’s capital stock (that is what it means to upload stuff on Facebook or move around while linked to Google Maps). That has never happened under capitalism.
“Key to understanding our new system is the realisation that digital platforms are not a new form of market. That when one enters Facebook as a user or Google as an employee, one exits the market and enters a new-fangled tech-fief.”
Intriguingly, Varoufakis has recently proposed a universal basic income (UBI) funded via input generated by users of search engines and social media. As with any suggestion of UBI, two key questions that arise are whether this would cause inflation and whether providing every individual with an income regardless of their economic circumstances can be genuinely fairer than one devised on a means-tested basis.
“Whether it is inflationary and fair will depend on how it is financed. Unlike other proponents of UBI, I oppose the idea of paying for it using taxation. If you tell hard-working blue-collar workers, or Deliveroo drivers, that you will take a chunk of their puny income to pay layabouts and rich people, they will laugh in your face — understandably.
Similarly, such a UBI may indeed prove inflationary. However, if it is funded, as I propose, through a combination of redistributing shares (ie returns to capital) and central bank money, UBI will be neither divisive nor inflationary.
“Let me explain. First, redistributing shares.Capital was always produced socially and its returns privatised by the capitalist class. Today, this is much, much more so — as the whole of society is producing big tech’s capital (with every post on Facebook, every Google search etc), while the returns of all that capital are monopolised by capitalists.
“It is high time that we demand that a share, say 10 per cent to begin with, of the corporations’ shares be transferred to a social equity fund. Then the accruing dividends can be one of the two income streams that fund a basic income.
“Secondly, central bank funding. Since 2008, central banks have been printing mountain ranges of cash on behalf of financiers. The money tree is being plucked, in other words, daily — but the money it produces is utterly wasted (as it turns into share price and house price inflation). Here is an idea: instead of financing financiers to do untold harm, use the money tree to fund part of everyone’s basic income.
“To see why this type of UBI, which I prefer to call ‘basic dividend,’ is neither inflationary nor unjust, consider this: yes, everyone collects it without the ignominy of means testing. But, nothing stops us from taxing at the end of the year the basic income of those above a certain income at a very high rate.
“Moreover, the fact that the basic income will not push prices up in response to increasing VAT or personal taxation in order to fund it, means that it will not be inflationary per se. If, however, we do need to keep inflation under control, the central bank can reduce its use of the money tree (ie print less cash) while increasing the percentage of shares corporations must contribute to the social equity fund (ie socialise a larger share of capital).”
On the subject of positive and practical advice for activists, campaigners and supporters of the wider left and labour movement going forwards, Varoufakis mused:
“I have no words of great wisdom to offer those ‘unreasonable’ enough to want to change the world.
“Speaking for myself, life is simply not fun without trying constantly to civilise a hugely irrational world and to boot, without constantly urging our comrades to beware concentrated power (even within our own movements and organisations).”
Learning to appreciate that control is an illusion is hard, especially when we are prepared to sacrifice almost everything, to pay any price, to control others. But if we are to stop others—Mark Zuckerberg, for example—from controlling us, it is a lesson we must learn.
Once upon a time, in the ancient kingdom of Lydia, a shepherd called Gyges found a magic ring, which, when rotated on his finger, made him invisible. So, Gyges walked unseen into the royal palace, seduced the queen, murdered the king, and installed himself as ruler. If you were to discover such a ring or another device that granted you exorbitant power, Socrates asked, would it be wise to use it to do or get whatever you want?
Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement of some fabulous digital metaverse awaiting humanity gives new pertinence to Socrates’ answer: People should renounce excessive power and, in particular, any device capable of granting too many of our wishes.
Was Socrates right? Would reasonable people renounce the ring? Should they?
Socrates’ own disciples were not convinced. Plato reports that they expected almost everyone to succumb to the temptation, pretty much as Gyges had. But could this be because Gyges’ ring was not powerful, and thus not scary, enough? Might a device far more powerful than a ring that merely makes us invisible cause us to shudder at the thought of using it, as Socrates recommended? If so, what would such a device do?
The ring allowed Gyges to overcome rivals physically, thus removing several constraints impeding his desires. But, while invisibility allowed Gyges to murder the King’s guards, it went nowhere near removing all of Gyges’ constraints. What if there were a gadget, let’s call it the Freedom Device, that removed every constraint stopping us from doing whatever we want? What would a constraint-free existence be like once this Freedom Device was activated?
We would be able to fly like birds, travel to other galaxies in an instant, and perform feats experienced within the universes designed by talented video game developers. But that would not be enough. One of the harshest constraints is time: It forces us to forego reading a book while swimming in the sea or watching a play. So, to remove all constraints, our theoretical Freedom Device should also allow for infinite, concurrent experience. Still, one final constraint, perhaps the most perplexing, would remain: other people.
When Jill wants to go mountaineering with Jack, but Jack craves a romantic stroll along the beach, Jack is Jill’s constraint and vice versa. To liberate them from constraints, the Freedom Device should allow Jill to go mountaineering with a willing Jack while he is strolling with a version of her contented self along the beach. It would let us all inhabit the same virtual world but experience our mutual interactions differently. It would fashion not merely a universe of bliss but, in fact, a multiverse of infinite, simultaneous, overlapping pleasures. It would grant us, in other words, freedom not only from scarcity but also from what other people do to us, expect of us, or want from us. With all constraints gone, all dilemmas dissolved, all trade-offs eradicated, boundless satisfaction would be at our fingertips.
It is not hard to imagine Zuckerberg salivating at the thought of such a device. It would be the ultimate version of the “metaverse” into which he has said he wants to immerse Facebook’s two billion-plus users. I can imagine him letting us sample a cornucopia of pleasures for an instant, free of charge, just enough to crave more, at which point he would charge users accordingly. Every nanosecond of immersion in this multiverse would produce enormous multiple pleasures—for which he would charge us again and again. Before long, the capitalization of Meta, the company that now owns Facebook, would dwarf that of all other corporations put together.
The fact that our technologists are far from inventing the Freedom Device is irrelevant, as was the fact that Gyges’ ring was mythical. Socrates’ question, resting on these two science-fiction devices, one ancient and one modern, remains central: Is it wise to deploy exorbitant power over others, and over nature, in pursuit of our desires?
Big Tech and free marketeers think nothing of it: What’s wrong with joy? Why would anyone resist simultaneous experiences that satisfy one’s strongest desires? How is it wrong for Zuckerberg to make money from people who want to pay him for liberation from all constraints?
Socrates’ answer remains as apt today as it was 2,500 years ago: The price you pay for deploying excessive power is a disordered soul—that is, radical unhappiness. Whether you are a client seeking absolute control of your senses within a multiverse created by some device, or Zuckerberg striving to own the digital realm into which billions will soon be immersed, your misery is guaranteed. A successful life requires the capacity to overcome our hunger for power. It presupposes an understanding that power, in the hands of contradictory beings like us, is a dangerous double-edged sword.
Excessive power is counterproductive, even self-defeating, because we crave interaction with other minds that we cannot control, even while craving to control them. When others do what we do not want them to do, we feel disappointed, angry, or sad. But the moment we controlled them fully, their consent would give us no pleasure, and their approval would not boost our self-esteem.
Learning to appreciate that control is an illusion is hard, especially when we are prepared to sacrifice almost everything, to pay any price, to control others. But if we are to stop others—Zuckerberg, for example—from controlling us, it is a lesson we must learn.
Socrates was keen to warn us against yielding to the temptation of the magical ring, pointing to Gyges’ unhappiness. Today, with techno-feudalism and various immersive metaverses in the pipeline, his warning is more relevant than ever. As in ancient Athens, our tricky task is to empower the demos without succumbing to the lure of power.
[After the Oligarchy] Hello everybody, this is After The Oligarchy. Today I’m speaking with Yanis Varoufakis.
Today’s conversation is in association with mέta: the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation. And the topic is Yanis’s latest book Another Now, published in 2020, which presents a vision of a post-capitalist society. It’s an advanced discussion of the model proposed in that book. If you want an introduction, I wrote an essay and made a 40-minute video doing just that. Though I do recommend that you eventually read the book itself, it’s very good.
Yanis Varoufakis thank you for joining me.
[Yanis Varoufakis] Well thank you for doing everything you’ve done, it’s remarkable what you did, thank you.
[AO] Oh yeah my pleasure, my pleasure absolutely.
I have many questions to ask you, including from some viewers, but we can only cover so much in one interview. So we’ll see how we get on.
Q1 – The first question is about nationalization. In Another Now you briefly mentioned that utilities have been nationalized and I was just wondering what is and what is not nationalized? Because ‘utility’ usually refers to things like electricity, gas, sewage, rubbish, and so forth, but … if you want to jump in you can.
[YV] In the book, what I do is I try to tell a story of how we could change the very fabric of the social economic system that we live in by starting from the fact that these were all nationalized utilities, in Ireland, in Britain, Germany, everywhere, they were created by the state primarily because no private business was interested in creating them. Even the BBC was created by the BBC before there was private radio because the fixed costs were too large.
And then in the 1970s with the onslaught of neoliberalism, with Margaret thatcher in Britain, with Ronald Reagan in the United States a bit later in 1980, you have the privatization of all utilities. Effectively the conversion of state monopolies into private monopolies that were presented as marketized, decentralized, but were not really. I mean if you look at the electricity grid and the electricity network in our countries they are still monopolies except that there is an infrastructure of speculation on energy prices. Which is today, given the rise in energy prices and inflation in the post-pandemic world, a clear and present danger to the fabric of society.
So as far as I’m concerned the answer to this is not a re-nationalization but the answer that I propose in the book – and you know this very well because you’ve done a great job at summarizing the blueprint that I’m putting forward – so instead of nationalizing the privatized utilities, I am proposing the socialization of all companies not just the former nationalized utilities or nationally state-owned utilities. Because I’m challenging the very notion of tradable shares. Something we take for granted, that the property rights over companies are segmented in tiny little pieces of paper or digital pieces they call ‘shares’ and that these shares are traded anonymously in markets called ‘share markets’. I challenge that very notion. I think that in the end it’s even antithetical to the mentality, the philosophy, of the original proponents of market societies like Adam Smith.
[AO] I can imagine some people, say, who would read the book would be wondering what of healthcare, for example? Education? There are two angles to this: the first is in terms of collective consumption rights, and the second is that there are natural monopolies and one could say that certain firms are more suitable to being cooperativized than others. For example, should we let healthcare or energy be solely owned by just those workers who work there, or should this be something that is managed by society as a whole? That’s more where I’m coming from with this.
I get it, and you’re quite right. The network, whether this is the electricity network or the national health service or the public school system, must certainly be common property, common property of the whole of society. But the manner in which you run particular units, let’s say the hospital in a village or in a country town, or a particular clinic within a hospital in a city, or the way we manage a particular power plant within the electricity network, that is where I still believe we need to have a cooperative enterprise-like structure. Because those people who actually run it are the ones who are best placed to know how to run it. Now that doesn’t mean that they’re there for life, that they have tenure. But it does mean that they should have a degree of autonomy within a network, a grid, which goes hand-in-hand with the eradication of a commanding class, a class of managers, top-down, who are sitting in Dublin, or they’re sitting in London, they’re sitting in Berlin, and telling everybody else within that network what to do.
[AO] Okay I understand. The thing is nationalization can be many different things to many people. What you’re saying is there are certain sectors which could be thought as having nationalized ownership in one sense but they’re managed by the workers, the people who actually work there, at the same time. Would that be accurate?
[YV] Yes indeed. It is a commons and the question is who is supervising the whole thing? And this is where an idea which is prominent in Another Now comes through. And it is the idea of having councils, governing councils, which comprise members of the public selected by random lot. And they can be stratified, some of them can be randomly drawn from a group of experts and the rest could be just citizens, like jurors. It’s important not to replicate top-down bureaucracies a la Soviet Union without at the same time letting corporate capital run those shows.
[AO] Indeed.
Q2 – We’ll move on to the next question which is about unemployment. As we know – or we’ll see – a market system will not intrinsically create full employment of labour. So how can full employment be ensured in Another Now?
Ah, this is a very important question because I am a very strong believer in the importance of moving away from labourism, from celebrating labour. I believe in the right of humans to be lazy, not to be employed for gain. If you think about it we have conflated, because we’ve lived in capitalism for so long, we’ve conflated two things that are not one and the same thing: work and labour. In the society that I’m trying to describe in Another Now, labour has gone and it’s replaced by creative work that we do because it’s fun doing it.
Now, some jobs will be nasty and somebody will need to be paid to do it, but the rest of us will then have to have a kind of auction where we give lots of money to those people, who actually get also satisfaction. If somebody has to clean the sewers, but if society creates an option by which to decide how much money to give those poor people who could go down the sewers to clean them, and they pay them more than they pay brain surgeons, more than they pay software engineers, because somebody has to do it, now that somebody gets a lot of satisfaction out of, firstly, being recognized and, secondly, receiving a bonus for that.
But at the same time we should always make sure that we do not think in terms of full employment. You see, look, the left traditionally was against exploitation and against alienation, against working for 10 hours down the mine doing mind-shattering work, repetitive work, and in the factory, and so on. But then at some point, maybe because of the great psychological shock of the Great Depression in the 1930s, suddenly for the left the only thing we care about is that everybody should be working down the mine, in the factory, and as long as they’re fully employed, then everything is hunky-dory.
No it’s not. We should aim at a society where we work few hours to do things that need to be done, and then the rest of the time, you know, we write poetry, we play music, we chat with one another, we take care of one another, we educate ourselves. And therefore the combination of the basic income in Another Now with the fact that everything is voluntary in the end. Because if you have a basic income to fall back on the work you do is work you choose to do, so it’s no longer soul destroying, there are no longer bullshit jobs as David Graeber described them.
[AO] Okay let me play devil’s advocate. I can imagine that there will be many left-wing, socialist, listeners hearing that, nodding along, thinking ‘okay I fully agree, unalienated labour, creative work, no bullshit jobs’. But then they would ask, it sounds nice to say that but there will be people in this society who have the basic income (Dividend), they have the Legacy payment, but they’ve also got paid employment in a firm engaged in commodity production, or whatever, receiving a salary. And so for the people who don’t have jobs they’re going to be at a disadvantage in comparison to those people, because they’re only going to be relying on Dividend and the Legacy. So the question is that question of inequality, and also how are these people going to be able to buy the things that they need to be fully included within society? I suppose part of this is a question as well about how large the Dividend is, but it’s not all of it.
[YV] Indeed, whether it gives you enough outside options, options outside the business sector, that is that is the key question. But beyond that, the idea of a job needs to be challenged. Because we live in a world where if you do not submit yourself to being exploited by others then you can’t live. This is the world we live in, this is capitalism.
But in in the world that I’m trying to describe, and in the blueprint that I was putting forward and putting together, that is no longer the case. And remember, people who work in Another Now in corporations under what I call corpo-syndicalism, they don’t work for somebody else, right? They are co-owners of where they are working.
Now, who stops anyone from creating such an enterprise? Everybody has a Legacy, it’s capital, they can put it together and create anything, any outfit that gives social care, that, you know, creates a comedy store, that provides entertainment services, care to their community. So suddenly this idea that either you manage to convince some capitalist to exploit you so as to be able to go and spend money in the high street to buy stuff, and to have a social standing that you wouldn’t you wouldn’t otherwise have, that simply goes away. We need to reconceptualize social status.
[AO] I don’t want to stick on this for too long but, again, playing devil’s advocate I would come back to that and say: yes, but the Legacy will eventually run out and a firm which is selling products must have enough demand, and so forth, and I suppose I’m raising the issue of can a market system actually provide full employment.
[YV] Haha! You’re going back to …
[AO] To put it this way, everybody gets a Legacy of $100,000, a Dividend of, let’s say, $20-30,000, or something like that, per year, and let’s say the average – not wage – return to capital is something like $50-70 000. It would probably be quite large once the capitalist class were eliminated. But the people who don’t have that return to capital from working in a firm have then, say, $20,000 per year plus their Legacy to play with. So I’m just wondering how do they actually buy things? I mean, at a very basic level.
What you’re challenging is the idea that you can have inequality without having deprivation. Now, I’m saying that it is perfectly possible to have inequality without having deprivation. I think that an economist would interrogate me on the productivity of that society as a whole, and that of course is something I cannot answer because unless you try it out, this is an empirical question how productive it would be.
But if you take into consideration the great advances in technology and also the fact that the greatest advances in technology have been conducted outside the market mechanism. If you think about it, the most significant software design these days comes from cooperative enterprises, from Linux for instance, where people are staying at home, they have a computer, they improve software, they put it out there, and they’re not selling it. They are acting collaboratively and the result of this, you know, millions of ants adding their little bit of technological innovation to this open source system, results in a remarkable increase in productivity.
Now the what holds us behind today is that you have Microsoft, you have Amazon, they take the Linux software and they monopolize it and they create huge rents for themselves out of that. So my hope would be that in a society where the Microsofts, and the Amazons, and the Googles, are no longer unicorns, they are no longer gigantic demons like they are today, because they will simply belong to workers now and therefore they will not have the capacity to gain the huge power that central bank money gives them today, then suddenly the whole of society’s productivity is going to be so high that we’re not going to be having the same conditions of scarcity that we have and we take for granted today.
Because scarcity today is a product of capitalism. Capitalism by liberals is presented as the solution, the cure, for scarcity. I reverse that. I claim that scarcity is designed into, baked into, the system today.
[AO] If I were to crudely summarize that into one sentence, I think say the kernel of what you’re saying there in relation to unemployment is that a given income would represent a much larger share of a much larger social product. Would that be fair to say?
That’s right, and there will be plenty of opportunities for people to get become engaged in work that is fun and soul-enhancing as opposed to soul-destroying. And people will not be thinking of it in terms of ‘Do I have a job? Don’t I have a job?’. If you look today at communities, especially during the pandemic, the pandemic made people do a lot of things for one another. Did they have a job? When they were checking on their neighbours during the pandemic, was that a job? It was work. Was it a job? It wasn’t a job it was work.
[AO] You’re envisaging a large social sector, a non-state, non-market sector, as well. Would that be an important part?
[YV] Absolutely, and remember the local communities will have the opportunity to fund social enterprise sectors and zones by auctioning off the commercial zones.
[AO] Indeed.
Q3 – How can a market society overcome climate catastrophe?
[YV] If it’s not capitalist, it can. Because remember in the blueprint that I draw out in Another Now, to begin with nobody has an incentive to bend the will of governments and local authorities in order to destroy the planet for private profit. This is simply not doable. And also companies can be dissolved by the councils that grade the company’s Socialworthiness. So imagine if we could say that BHP or Rio Tinto depended for their survival as companies on voting by members of the public, who create a kind of assembly, an assembly drawn by lot. Then we would have, as a community, the opportunity to say ‘no, this we don’t do’ and to impose rules regarding emissions.
In sharp contrast, the great and the good coalesced in November in Glasgow for COP26, and what did they do? They fell prey to the supreme power of the lobbyists, whose job was to ensure that their companies continue to emit under the pretence of net zero. That would not happen in a world governed according to what’s in Another Now.
[AO] Q4 – Different question, about finance. There are interest payments in Another Now, both from the central bank and accruing to private loans. Is all interest simple interest or is there compound interest too? Because you say that the credit unions would charge a fee for loans, which would appear not to be compound interest.
[YV] It would be a combination of both. But there’s nothing wrong with compound interest as long as it is not predatory lending and if it is lending of money that actually exists. The problem we now have in the financial sector is that banks lend money that doesn’t exist, hoping that it will be created by the capitalist process so that the money will be returned. And then banks break down, you have bailouts, you have political conditions imposed on bailouts, as happened in Ireland famously after 2008.
But the main thing is that if we have savings there must be a way of investing those savings in productive work. Since I’ve ruled out shareholding, because shareholding is a very slippery slope towards monopoly capitalism which is what we have now, then what happens is you get some money, you can enter into a company with me and with others and use this money, and then you get a certain pre-agreed payment, a return to these savings. You don’t get shares because there is one share, one person, one vote. But there can be a contract whereby a certain amount of money, if the company makes it, comes your way, without that increasing the votes that you get in the running of the company, unlike in capitalism, without increasing your capacity to tell others what to do.
[AO] Q5 – Following that vein, what is the role of public lending specifically? There’s a very important role for public finance in Another Now, through the central bank, the public payment system, the Dividend, Accumulation, Legacy, there’s a very important role there. But I’m just wondering what is the role specifically of public lending? Both for personal and investment loans. Public banking rather than private lending.
[YV] Public banking but not public lending. The idea is that the payment system which today – I mean this is a scandal what’s happening today. If you think about it, to make any payment, to buy a cup of coffee with a plastic card, you have to have an account with some private banker. And this private banker, along with all the other private bankers, has a monopoly over the payment system. They can decide to charge you 2%, 3%, 10%, whatever they want, whatever they manage to agree to as a cartel. It is preposterous.
So, in Another Now the payment system is a public utility. It’s a free public good. No one has the monopoly of it. It simply operates like a commons, it’s a digital financial common. And the very simple way of running it is a ledger a public ledger which is sits on the servers of the central bank, which produces the money anyway. No government, no central banker, has power over it. They’re simply running it in the same way that plumbers are you running the plumbing system, they make sure that there are no leaks that, you know, there’s no rust, and the system continues to work. And this is a public system which replaces the banking system.
Then if we all had access to this free digital financial plumbing system, why would we want to start a bank account with a private banker who is going to charge us money? There will be no need for it. If somebody wants to create a bank and offer wonderful services, let them do it, we are a liberal lot. We will allow them to do it. But now we are actually forcing people to open accounts.
So lending on the other hand is peer-to-peer. Those who have savings that they want to lend, they can do it using this public infrastructure.
[AO] Q6 – Okay one last question. Following that, debt is, private debt in particular is, of course, the frame of politics today. I’m a big fan of Michael Hudson and he always says that debt accumulates with its own laws of growth, compound interest is purely mathematical, it’s not related to the productive forces in society, and that in antiquity debt cancellation was a regular feature of society. So it can be expected that where there is interest, particularly compound interest, there will eventually be exponentially accumulating debts. So the question arises then of how will those debts be cancelled? In Another Now how are the debts cancelled? Is this an institutionalized feature of society or is it something that’s approached ad hoc?
[YV] In my more optimistic moments I imagine that a society and an economy like Another Now would simply not have this problem. And the reason why I’m saying that is this. From the antiquity onward, from the Assyrian empire to today, the problem has not been compound interest. The problem has been asymmetrical power over means of production. So the landlord who controlled the land; under capitalism, the capitalist who controls machinery; with the digital information technologies, Google and Facebook who control the flow of information, the vector of information. When you’ve got this asymmetrical ownership of the things that create value, and then those who don’t have access to that are forced to borrow from those who do, that is when compound interest becomes a means of exploitation.
But in Another Now where machinery, land, everything, is commonly owned. And the only degrees of inequality, and therefore difference between the savers and the non-savers, are (1) age, and the older you are the more you have because you have accumulated, your bonuses ,and so on, and (2) a degree of entrepreneurship, which allows a little bit of inequality. The toxic influence of a compound interest would simply never reach anything like what we’ve had in prehistoric, pre-Another Now, forms of social and economic organization.
But a society like the one I’m describing has immense democratic powers to decide, if things get out of hand at some point, to say ‘okay, let’s wipe out debt’. The cooperative, participatory, democratic, councils, and so on, that are the essence of the political framework in Another Now, allow people to do this. Whereas in today’s society, there is no government which can, even if they want, even if they decide they have the absolute majority in parliament to have a debt write down, they don’t have the power to impose it. They will be overthrown because they are in the pockets of the money lenders, they’re in the pockets of the capitalists, of the landlords.
[AO] Well, that is a very nice note to end on, a world without toxic debt. Hardly recognizable from today. And I’d like to thank you very much for joining me. I just want to ask, there are many other interesting questions to ask so I’m just curious …
[YV] Let’s do it again in the new year, Part B.
[AO] Okay, great. I’ll let you go. I think it’s lunchtime where you are so enjoy your lunch …
[YV] No such thing, phonecalls, phonecalls …
[AO] Oh dear, a past life, okay thank you very much, have a good Christmas.
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