Note: This text was translated using AI due to time constraints.
This is a review that was originally published in mid-2021 in the magazine “Das Große Thier.” We are republishing it here with slight modifications.
Some Remarks on “The Invisible Hand of the Plan”.
Apparently, a small debate is currently emerging about planned economies and fundamental alternatives to the market economy. For this reason, the following is a commentary on the edited volume “The Invisible Hand of the Plan,” which was published in 2021 by Dietz Verlag.
In this volume, the authors examine planning processes in digital capitalism, with particular attention to new digital and technical possibilities. The observation that companies such as Ikea, Walmart, or Amazon have, on the one hand, become critical infrastructure due to their sheer size, and, on the other hand, have advanced planning processes through machine learning to a degree that allows them to reliably anticipate customer demand, sets socialist imagination in motion. Meanwhile, the Chinese model seems to have succeeded in combining the advantages of central planning with the flexibility of capitalism. The book’s blurb therefore poses the question: “Could these new technologies be used for a future beyond capitalism? And if so, how?“
“The cybernetic machines of capital and their supposed problem-solving potential,” write the editors Timo Daum and Sabine Nuss, “thus provide reason to revisit old questions and, in light of current developments, to relaunch the ‘socialist planning debate.”
The volume indeed contains several interesting analyses and critiques of actually existing planning capitalism and socialism, particularly with regard to the hybrid Chinese model. Timo Daum, to name just one example, writes about “the new planning” in China, noting that this is “by no means a return to the old plan or a dirigiste planned economy, but rather a cybernetic, data-driven real-time regime. Compared to the planned economies of the Soviet Union or Chile during the Cybersyn era, these platform companies operate on a completely different level in terms of both data volume and the granularity of planning. There are also worlds of difference along the temporal axis—between the five-year rhythm of the Soviet Union, the quarterly figures of the traditional economy, and even the daily transmitted operational data in Cybersyn: today, planning-relevant data are updated in millisecond intervals and fed into the creation of a new plan in real time.”
The volume also includes articles on the cyberneticist Georg Klaus, ecological planned economies, Amazon, data cooperatives, the commons, and more.
To be a bit impolite and get straight to the point: it is unfortunately noticeable that, in the roughly 260 pages, one aspect that should play an important—perhaps even central—role in the question of a planned economy is almost entirely absent. I am referring to labor-time accounting, which appears in none of the book’s three sections: neither in “Theory and History,” nor in “Planning in Digital Capitalism,” nor in “Planning Beyond Digital Capitalism.”
The fundamental question of whether money, commodities, and capital can be replaced by a central planning mechanism based on material goods balances (measured in kilograms, liters, meters, etc.), or whether a socialist planned economy should instead possess a unit of account that makes different products comparable through a common standard (labor time), is not addressed in this book. More generally, the caution against painting detailed pictures of future societies prevails over the exploration of a concrete (!) utopia.
The regrettable blind spot of the edited volume becomes apparent already in its historical sections, where scattered references repeatedly appear to the historical planning debate—the so-called “socialist calculation debate.” This debate was conducted from the 1920s onward, among others by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, against proponents of socialist planning.
For instance, the positions of the Group of International Communists (GIC) are not mentioned here, even though they also intervened in this “socialist calculation debate.” In sharp rejection of both Bolshevik and Social Democratic conceptions of the economy—and drawing closely on Marx—they formulated an alternative. Their alternative consisted, to name just a few key ideas, in decentralized communist planning based on workplace autonomy, democratic councils’ congresses, and labor-time accounting. More than other council communists, they emphasized the association of free and equal producers.
This third way of thinking about planning—beyond capitalism and state socialism—was only brought back to attention in 2020 through the republication of a forgotten council communist classic, but (1) it evidently did not reach the authors of the volume.
In the contribution on Marx within the edited volume, the topic of labor-time accounting is treated rather negligently. It is mentioned that Marx held the view that in a socialist transitional society toward communism “labor quanta would have to be compared just as in the capitalist economy,” yet this idea is pursued neither in that essay nor in the others. It seems as if Marx’s own restraint still serves, two centuries later, as an argument for not thinking too precisely about an alternative.
The absence of a concrete utopia also becomes evident in the last and longest part of the book, which deals with “planning beyond digital capitalism.” Apart from the contribution by Jan Groos and, to a lesser extent, by Jens Schröter, there are hardly any attempts to outline even a sketchy conception of a modern planned economy or socialist economic calculation.
Groos rightly points out: “It is simply too much to ask to remain silent on [the economic organization under socialism] while at the same time expecting large masses of people to willingly and gladly leave existing capitalist conditions behind.” Instead, he emphasizes the question that goes beyond the critique of capitalism: “So how do we actually do it?” To answer this question, he essentially draws on the idea developed by Daniel E. Saros of a socialist planned economy that translates the demand for products into use-value production through an internet-based ranking system.
The fact that this model—and not the GIC’s labor-time model—is the most prominent, indeed the only positive example in the book is somewhat regrettable for at least three reasons. First, because Daniel E. Saros publicly declared in September 2020 his turn toward economic liberalism and his departure from radical economic research, promptly removing the materials related to his model
from his website. Second, because one gets the impression that many of the book’s authors somewhat schematically draw on Evgeny Morozov, who, in a 2019 essay, placed the “socialist calculation debate” and Daniel E. Saros at the center of attention. And third, because Saros sought answers to questions very similar to those posed by the GIC, but his answers turned out to be (apparently even for himself) less convincing.
It should also be noted that the neglect of labor-time accounting is all the more remarkable given that it played a central role in more recent classics of “computer” or “cyber socialism.” This is the case with authors such as Cockshott & Cottrell (Towards a New Socialism) or Heinz Dieterich (The Socialism of the 21st Century).
This is not the place to go into the major differences between the council communist model of the GIC and the various cyber-socialist models. It should suffice to note that the cyber-socialist models tend to envision a central, potentially enormously influential (democratic) state that calculates labor-time values and carries out the allocation of products and labor. In contrast, in the GIC’s model, the individual or associated workplace organizations are the (decentralized) economic actors who make largely autonomous decisions and develop production plans. It is fundamentally up to the producers themselves whether and to what extent they join with other enterprises and whether they wish to contribute to budgets for collective public enterprises. Initiative and responsibility lie primarily with the workplaces, which are also directly involved in implementing labor-time accounting. Incidentally, this idea of decentralized production plans coordinated on the common basis of labor-time accounting also distinguishes the GIC model from other council communist models that imagine a centrally enforced “master plan” as the core of the economy.
The GIC model could, following Groos—who is in fact describing E. Saros’ system—aptly be called a “distributed socialism”: “It is a distributed system that serves central goals—the satisfaction of everyone’s needs—but in which the coordination and execution of actual production take place in a decentralized manner across the various workers’ councils.”
El modelo del GCI podría denominarse, siguiendo a Groos —quien en realidad describe el sistema de E. Saros—, como un “socialismo distribuido”: “Es un sistema distribuido que sirve a objetivos centrales —la satisfacción de las necesidades de todos—, pero en el que la coordinación y la ejecución de la producción propiamente dicha se llevan a cabo de manera descentralizada entre los diversos consejos de trabajadores.”
At the end of the book, the (mostly well-founded) concerns about various forms of cybersocialism are emphasized. The points of criticism include, for example: problems of controlling central power, technological solutionism, techno- and cyber-fetishism, and a “managed world 2.0.”
This collected volume reflects the current social experience that, where no concrete utopias are in sight, in the end only negative critique remains—a “green” or otherwise reformed capitalism. (2) This book review may be read as an invitation to take a closer look at the GIC model. It appears to be an unjustly forgotten model of decentralized and democratic communist economic organization—at any rate, no convincing criticism of it has yet been heard.
Daum, Timo / Nuss, Sabine: Die unsichtbare Hand des Plans. Koordination und Kalkül im digitalen Kapitalismus, Dietz Verlag Berlin, 2021, 268 pages.
Group of International Communists (Holland): Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution (Grundprinzipien kommunistischer Produktion und Verteilung), Red & Black Books, Hamburg, 2020, 332 pages.
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1 This refers to the Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution (Grundprinzipien kommunistischer Produktion und Verteilung), published for the first time in German in 2020, by the council-communist Group of International Communists Holland (GIC), in the second edition of 1935. The first edition, originally in German from 1930, had already been republished in the 1970s with a foreword by Paul Mattick.
2 The editor Timo Daum was asked in a podcast by Jan Groos about possible alternatives to capitalism, but could only respond with a meaningful silence. Elsewhere in the interview, he explained that he is rooting for green capitalism.