In The Blueprint. How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, published this month, Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin magazine and a leading light in the “Democratic Socialists of America”, and his co-authors Mike Beggs and Ben Burgis lay their cards on the table right from the start. On page 7 they declare their acceptance of Mises’ ‘economic calculation argument’ that a moneyless nonmarket society would not be viable as it would be unable to calculate how to rationally use economic resources to meet society’s needs. So, they are writing as self-styled ‘market socialists’.
Their blueprint is for a society in which all land, industry and finance is nationalized but managed by worker cooperatives which produce commodities for sale on a market with a view to making a profit. The money to invest is loaned them by state banks. If they cover more than their costs (including their wages) and the interest on these loans, the members of the worker cooperatives can share out the remaining profit amongst themselves. So, instead of capitalist enterprises competing to make a profit as today, it will be profit-sharing worker cooperatives. Naturally, this will give rise to the same problems and a large part of the book is taken up with plans of how to deal with these.
What they are proposing is a reformed, democratic version of what used to exist in the old USSR. Hence the opening chapter in which they describe in detail how the economy there functioned, and why it failed. They call that ‘state socialism’ and offer an alternative where instead of state enterprises being told by the state what commodities to produce and how much, this is left to competing profit-seeking worker cooperatives responding to market forces. They call this ‘socialism’ but it is not. Like a square circle “market socialism” is an oxymoron.
They themselves concede in a chapter entitled ‘Is This Even Socialism?’ that some readers ‘will think that what we’re talking about isn’t socialism at all but only a strange sort of collectivized capitalism’. Yes, indeed! Their answer is the weak one that it all depends on what you mean by ‘socialism’. But, to give them their due, in this chapter they do list the objections raised to their blueprint by those they call ‘nonmarket socialists’ such as: ‘real socialism requires the abolition of markets and money’; the economy would still be dominated by ‘the abstract imperatives of economic value’; ‘the imperatives of competition would force worker-managers to engage in a kind of “self-exploitation”; it ‘would collapse back into capitalism’; and (only relevant because they claim to be some sort of Marxists) it’s not what Marx meant by socialism.
Their answers to these criticisms are based on the assumption that nonmarket socialism can only mean either an economy in which the state allocates people a basket of goods in kind or where every economic decision has to be voted on democratically (as in the nightmarish Parecon where people spend all their time voting and even have to submit a list of what they want for public scrutiny and a vote). But these are not the only options. A more realistic one is where the signal as what should be produced is not what people spend money on but by what they take from distribution centres under conditions of free access.
In the end, it’s not a question of whether their blueprint would work but of what’s the point of it. If a majority has decided to make the land and industry the common property of society as a whole, why would they then decide to re-introduce a market economy to produce and distribute goods and services?
