The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (Jacobin)
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Are multi-national corporations like Walmart and Amazon laying the groundwork for international socialism? For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before. Read more
Publisher : Verso
Publication date : March 5, 2019
Language : English
Print length : 256 pages
ISBN-10 : 178663516X
ISBN-13 : 67
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
Dimensions : 5.07 x 0.68 x 7.79 inches
Part of series : Jacobin
Best Sellers Rank: #528,766 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #99 in Political Economy #189 in Economic Conditions (Books) #652 in Communism & Socialism (Books)
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Top Amazon Reviews
Books involving explanations of different economic theories tend to be total snoozefests. This book did a great job of explaining why previous attempts at socialist economies failed due to the computing power not existing in order to properly distribute goods in a planned economy. There were a lot of great examples of problems with capitalism with things I definitely didn't know, such as Alexander Fleming getting turned down by pharmaceutical companies to produce Penicillin. a++ would read again. Definitely recommending to friends.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2019 by Maggie K.
If your remotely interested in post-capitalist though this book is a must read. It describes how planning within capitalism is used in my firms and how it can be expanded to a socialist context in an understandable way.
Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2021 by Marley Palmore
An interesting book that covers the history of economic planning and provides a convincing argument that it works. The problems with planning are authoritarianism which leads to corrupt/incorrect information, and lack of computing power once you get to the commodities market (both of which problems caused the Soviet Union to fail). Decentralized economic planning can allow us to guide society in the direction society wants to go, free of the profit motive distortions, as we saw happen briefly during wartime economies (though it was centralized, so had more opportunity for corruption and wasn’t aligned with what people necessarily wanted). Only gave it 4 stars because it didn’t include a good description of how such a system can work in practice. But I have enough terminology I can probably look around so it’s okay.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2020 by Phylliida Dev
The authors dive into the history of modern economic planning from Soviet War Communism to Wal-Mart's black box of logistics. The book really paints a full picture of the centralised planning that is not only possible but needed if we are to progress to true equality and freedom.
Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2021 by Bobby
This is a very enlightening book. If you're interested in understanding our economic and social options better, this is a very educational work. It, luckily, also happens to be written in an entertaining manner. Buy, beg, borrow, or... find one that fell off a truck. It's worth reading.
Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2020 by Emma
This was an interesting idea and the book was quite thought provoking.
Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2022 by Barry
The authors are ineffectual demsocs but they make a good argument for economic planning. Also, Khrushchev was a capitalist roader.
Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2019 by Akhil A. Kalepu
The strongest parts of the book are those where the authors spell out their economic case for socialist economic planning. Here, they review the socialist calculation debates which have been going on for a century. They reiterate the arguments of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek and review the rebuttals to them that have been offered by socialists such as Oskar Lange and Otto Neurath. The authors also derive some interesting insights from the work of Ronald Coase on transaction costs. As Coase put it in his 1937 paper, "The Nature of the Firm": "The main reason why it is profitable to establish a firm would seem to be that there is a cost of using the price mechanism. The most obvious cost of “organising” production through the price mechanism is that of discovering what the relevant prices are. This cost may be reduced but it will not be eliminated by the emergence of specialists who will sell this information. The costs of negotiating and concluding a separate contract for each exchange transaction which takes place on a market must also be taken into account. Again, in certain markets, e.g., produce exchanges, a technique is devised for minimising these contract costs; but they are not eliminated. It is true that contracts are not eliminated when there is a firm but they are greatly reduced." Basically, Coase noticed that reliance upon the price system and on markets for organizing economic activity has its own sets of costs associated with it which people will try to minimize. And one of the chief methods for doing this has been through the creation of firms in which economic activity is organized internally without necessarily relying on the price system. When Coase wrote that paper, he was still a socialist (although later on he would become a Chicago School-style conservative). He was a close friend of the socialist economist, Abba Lerner, and like Lerner, was very much interested in the socialist calculation debate. He was interested in such questions as why was the Soviet economy so successful at that time when the neoclassical economics in he was trained in strongly implied that a centrally planned economy like that of the Soviet Union should have been an utter failure. Coase admitted as much when he delivered his Nobel Prize lecture in 1991. There he stated: "I decided to study vertical and lateral integration of industry in the United States. Plant had described in his lectures the different ways in which various industries were organised, but we seemed to lack any theory which would explain these differences. I set out to find it. There was also another puzzle which, in my mind, needed to be solved and which seemed to be related to my main project. The view of the pricing system as a co-ordinating mechanism was clearly right but there were aspects of the argument which troubled me. Plant was opposed to all schemes, then very fashionable during the Great Depression, for the co-ordination of industrial production by some form of planning. Competition, according to Plant, acting through a system of prices, would do all the co-ordination necessary. And yet we had a factor of production, management, whose function was to co-ordinate. Why was it needed if the pricing system provided all the co-ordination necessary? The same problem presented itself to me at that time in another guise. The Russian Revolution had taken place only fourteen years earlier. We knew then very little about how planning would actually be carried out in a communist system. Lenin had said that the economic system in Russia would be run as one big factory. However, many economists in the West maintained that this was an impossibility. And yet there were factories in the West and some of them were extremely large. How did one reconcile the views expressed by economists on the role of the pricing system and the impossibility of successful central economic planning with the existence of management and of these apparently planned societies, firms, operating within our own economy?" So, I would contend that Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworsk correctly point back to the insights of people like Oskar Lange, Otto Neurath, and Ronald Coase, in making their argument that a planned socialist economy is both feasible and desirable. They make the point that in today’s world, there exist giant corporations like Amazon and Walmart that in effect constitute private economies that are bigger and more complex than the economies of entire countries. These two authors stress the role that modern computer technology plays in enabling these two megacoporations to manage their private economies. And they go on to cite the more recent work of people like Paul Cockshott in stressing the importance of modern computer technology in making socialist economic planning a viable option in today’s world. On the other hand, the weakest parts of the book are where they discuss the social and political aspects of the transition from capitalism to a planned socialist economy. Here, the authors can be accused of falling for the myth of techno-solutionism. The authors always posit the addendum that the task of socialist planning is not purely technical in nature, and will require social organization and political forces. There is also the recognition that the “planning” machinery taken is not politically-neutral and cannot be seized and redeployed in a straightforward manner. And yet, the major social complications that constitute the problem of socialist planning are always mentioned as an after-thought. In scientific theory, as in practical matters, to deal with the difficulties is the crux of success. This constant return to technology, by the authors, poses the problem of socialist economic planning as mainly technological. Despite the authors’ reassurance that they feel a similar ambivalence towards the capitalist tendency to constantly revolutionize technology, like Marx exhibited, (both fear and awe in the Communist Manifesto), I would discern much more awe in the mix. I believe this book might be a good candidate for a work of utopian socialism, and that the authors partake, less sheepishly of course, in a more contemporary Silicon Valley tendency of “technological solutionism” i.e. posing problems in terms of the technology. Indeed, taking The People’s Republic of Walmart as a 21st century exercise in utopian socialism, we might note that the authors’ concept of transition from capitalism to socialism bears some resemblance to some of the notions of 19th century utopian socialists. For example, it bears some resemblance to the portrayal of the transition from capitalism to socialism in Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel, Looking Backwards. There, as Bellamy envisioned things, American capitalism would evolve to the point where just a handful of gigantic trusts had almost complete control over the US economy. When things got to the point where it was just one or two gigantic trusts dominating the economy, the Federal government would step in and take over the trusts, to the relief of people from all social classes. There wasn't much notion of class struggle involved here. And in Edward Bellamy's conception, these trusts had already been doing large scale economic planning for quite some time, so the transition to socialist economic planning was not such a big leap. After the huge trusts were nationalized, the government simply continued on with the economic planning that had been initiated by the trusts, the only difference being that now this planning was made accountable to the public rather than to a small class of big capitalists. The techno-utopianism that was associated with Edward Bellamy and is associated with the authors of The People’s Republic of Walmart, has been widely influential, not just with American socialists, but also with socialists in other countries, including Russia. And of course, techno-utopianism, in its broadest sense, has never been confined just to socialists. It has long been the case that capitalist ideologues have been the greatest purveyors of techno-utopian ideologies. That was true in the nineteenth century and it remains true today, especially in places like Silicon Valley. Techno-utopianism in both its capitalist and socialist forms has always been elitist in character since its basic premise is that major social problems are fundamentally scientific and technical in character and so are resolved by technical specialists with expertise in the relevant scientific or technical disciplines. This has been true for technocratic reformist movements of the past, and it seems to us that Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, despite their own disclaimers manifest a similar technocratic consciousness in their discussions of economic planning. So, in the end, I do find this book worth reading for its spelling out a compelling economic case for socialist economic planning, it stumbles when considering the social and political aspects entailed by a transition to socialism. And that leads the authors into replicating in the 21st century some of the errors of the 19th century utopian socialists.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2023 by Jim Farmelant