Must collapse be inevitable? Imagining a “half-Earth” sustainable economy

It seems vastly easier to imagine the future as a dystopian nightmare than as a time when today’s problems are mostly behind humanity. For every work of optimism, such as Star Trek, there are dozens of works imagining a nightmare world of deprivation, environmental destruction and severe repression amidst a world of people scrambling to survive anyway they can in a war of all against all.

Even if a cultural byproduct rather than an intentional construction, this depressing ratio of future scenarios is the inevitable result of capitalism. From cradle to grave, we are endlessly bombarded with propaganda incessantly telling us that humans are competitive, not cooperative, and that individualism is the highest expression of “freedom.” Cut-throat competition is the natural way of the world, as natural as the tides of the ocean, and that participation in struggles against other human beings is the only possible method of organization in a world in which countries and nations also compete fiercely because the world must be organized into “winners” and “losers” through competition. Greed is not only good, it is the primary characteristic driving human behavior because markets sort who those “winners” and “losers” are.

All in the above paragraph is nothing more than propaganda in the service of capitalist elites, the “ruling class” of any capitalist country. Markets, in a capitalist economy, are not dispassionate entities sitting loftily in the clouds making judgements. In reality, they are nothing more than expressions of the aggregate interests of the most powerful and largest industrialists and financiers. Who is this individualistic “freedom” for? It is “freedom” for industrialists and financiers to rule over, control and exploit the vast majority of humanity. “Justice” becomes the unfettered ability to enjoy this freedom, a justice reflected in legal structures. Those who have the most — obtained at the expense of those with far less — have no responsibility to the society that enabled them to amass such wealth. Working people are “free” to compete in a race to the bottom set up by capitalists.

It can’t be repeated too often that capitalism is just another system created by human beings, and everything of human creation comes to an end. It is simply one more system of exploitation, one more system to advantage a numerically tiny class at the expense of everybody else. Increasing numbers of people do realize that the days of capitalism are numbered, and with the deprivation that capitalism increasingly imposes on people, and the stunting of human potential that goes with that, it is no surprise that multiple polls have shown young people about equally in favor of capitalism and socialism. That half of respondents are able to overcome the bombardment of capitalist propaganda issued through every imaginable channel is a harbinger that the phrase “a better world is possible” is not pie in the sky.

Imagining a concrete future better world, one based on realistic prognosis using some of the bricks of today to build tomorrow because a tabula rasa is not possible, and realistically meeting human needs in a sustainable economy, is an under-appreciated task. Especially given the endless production of dystopian futures churned out by Hollywood and other corporate cultural producers, it is vital that scenarios of better future worlds be conjured and communicated widely.

That future better world will have to be socialist, in some form. It can’t be capitalist — the system that is driving humanity toward catastrophe and shows no ability to deviate from rushing toward a cliff can’t save itself. There will be new technologies in a future better world, but there won’t be magic techno-fixes. A sustainable world will also be a world in which the peoples of the advanced capitalist countries will have to consume less and more sustainably. But limits won’t be imposed by a government, socialist or otherwise; limits will be imposed by nature and the limits to resources it provides. When fossil fuels dwindle, reduced energy usage will be forced upon us. We can begin to adjust and develop renewable alternatives now on a systemic basis, or have it imposed in a more difficult fashion later.

An extraordinary solution for an extraordinary problem

A worthy addition to the literature of a better world of the future is Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics* by environmental historian Troy Vettese and environmental engineer doctoral student Drew Pendergrass. The two authors have produced a lively, interesting book that sketches out a sustainable world that is socialist. The Half-Earth in its title refers to the thesis that 50 percent of Earth’s land surface needs to be “re-wilded” — allowed to return to forests and grasslands — because that is the only way that the majority of the planet’s species can survive.

At first glance, the concept of “re-wilding” half our planet’s land sounds nearly insane. Under present political conditions, it certainly is impossible and unthinkable. Similar to working people flocking to work in oil and gas production, even tar sands and fracking, despite the environmental damage of such work because capitalist economies offer them no alternatives, who today would have any incentive to leave their homes in the service of returning land to nature? Such a concept could only be possible in a people-centric system that would incentivize people to move and do so over a timescale of decades so that those who wished to stay where they are could do so, free of any pressures, and in a time when environmental needs are at the forefront of popular thinking.

Let us acknowledge that a concept such as re-wilding half of Earth is a proposition that seems fantastic to almost all of us, myself included. An extraordinarily drastic solution, even when acknowledging that humanity faces an extraordinary problem. So let’s take a step back for the moment from this idea, and instead allow the authors to build their case and give us a sense of what such a world might look like.

^{Housatonic Meadows State Park in Connecticut (photo by Morrowlong)}

Half-Earth Socialism opens by sketching out what the world might be like in 2047 if present conditions continue unchecked. This is a future in which geo-engineering is unilaterally undertaken by the U.S. government after a catastrophic hurricane devastates the Northeast U.S., and it goes bad, causing a cascade of problems including atmospheric ozone depletion. There is a temporary planetary cooling because of the aerosols thrown into the atmosphere by the geo-engineering project, but in response fossil fuel usages begins to increase again, more climate disruptions cause more problems, ozone depletion becomes worse, agriculture is disrupted and the threat to the prevailing order by social movements peaks and subsides. Capitalist business as usual prevails.

“The problem was that the greens mistook slowing down the pace of the environmental crisis for victory, rather than merely a defeat postponed,” Dr. Vettese and Mr. Pendergrass write in imaging this business-as-usual scenario of 2047. “Despite briefly tasting power, the environmentalists accomplished little because they never elucidated how the various facets of the environmental crisis — climate change, pandemics, and mass extinctions — were interlinked; nor did they articulate what a post-crisis society might actually look like. The ruling class had long been clever and ruthless, but they were also fortunate to face such hapless opponents.”

Does that judgment seem harsh? It shouldn’t. Mainstream environmental groups, who mostly subscribe to liberal ideas and concepts, today do seek piecemeal solutions to systemic problems, staying within the “acceptable” boundaries of capitalist discourse. This is not to suggest that a typical leader of a national environmental group is insincere, but rather that imaginations are often circumscribed and that leaders often seek “practicality” in the sense of staying within accepted parameters, failing to challenge larger capitalist orthodoxies and being mindful of how far their corporate funders would be willing to go. So although a typical leader of a large environmental group likely believes that they are doing what is possible, they nonetheless often lag well behind their rank-and-file, grassroots members. Can we really expect the totalizing ideology of capitalism not to infiltrate environmental thinking?

Why is the environment outsourced to the market?

The dystopia with which Half-Earth Socialism opens is not inevitable, the authors write, saying that they seek to encourage the environmental movement to take seriously the challenge of creating a better society in a stabilized biosphere. A rapid growth of alternative renewable energy sources is not enough if fossil fuel usage doesn’t decline drastically. The authors ask: Why is the environment outsourced to the market? They then lead the reader through a discussion of neoliberalism, as most of the world calls the present stage of capitalism, tracing its birth to a conference led by Friedrich Hayek in 1947. Hayek believed that markets “communicated information” and that neoliberals are committed to “simple and powerful axioms” that enable them to offer prescriptions and act. Neoliberals can be beaten, the authors write, if socialists and environmentalists create a diverse coalition and learn from one another. In the absence of such a coalition, “racist-libertarians” such as the “alt-right,” Brexiteers and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) will be neoliberalism’s only competition.

A crucial point that Half-Earth Socialism repeatedly makes is that nature is unknowable. “Nature is more unknowable than the market” and deserving of awe as unimaginably complex. This idea is backed up by a discussion of Biosphere 2, the 1990s experiment in which a living, sustainable biosphere was created inside a dome but failed badly, with the human “biospherians” left short of food and oxygen while most life and the coral reefs died. The neoliberal goal of “humanizing” nature — in essence, turning all of nature into exploitable capital — is not realistic. The inventor of “cap and trade” carbon and pollution schemes actually believed that clean air and water were “luxury goods”! Thus “the humanization of nature must proceed in conditions of ignorance,” Dr. Vettese and Mr. Pendergrass write; with a continuation of that process, zoonotic diseases (those jumping from animals to humans) and other dangers will continue unabated.

^{Caribbean National Rain Forest of El Yunque, Puerto Rico (photo by Alessandro Cai)}

Readers are also led through a discussion of why mainstream panaceas proposed by environmentalists are not feasible or realistic. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), a favorite scheme often promoted as a way of reversing atmospheric carbon dioxide buildup, is a chimera. The technology to remove carbon dioxide and store it underground sufficient to reverse global warming doesn’t exist and can’t be a solution. To do what it is advertised to do, BECCS would require land bigger than India — so much land would have to be cleared that BECCS would become a net producer of greenhouse gases. This sort of concept is an example of mainstream environmentalists seeing a “set of discrete technical problems” to be tackled through piecemeal reform while leaving capitalist foundations untouched. Nuclear energy is also no solution, despite its promotion by some environmentalists, not only because of radiation and radioactive waste, but because nuclear is more carbon-intensive than renewables. (The authors don’t mention the finances of nuclear power, but the entire industry only exists because of massive subsidies; nuclear is completely uneconomical.)

Such proposals have “almost no chance of being implemented” despite concessions that are made by proponents; BECCS, nuclear power and biofuels will fail due to “lack of utopian imagination” and because the environmental crisis can’t be understood outside the structure of the society causing the crisis.

Any half-Earth coalition “must be a broad one,” the authors stress, and suggest that the wide popularity of anti-nuclear movements would provide a firm pillar of any such coalition. Advocates of BECCS and nuclear power are trying to maintain as much of the status quo as possible. Instead, it is better to be realistic about what lies ahead and the trade-offs that must be made. Half-Earth Socialism acknowledges that giving up meat and energy quotas won’t be popular for many people, but are nonetheless better and more viable than mainstream alternatives.

Balancing human needs with planetary boundaries

So what are the specifics of half-Earth socialism? The goals, Dr. Vettese and Mr. Pendergrass write, are to prevent the sixth mass extinction, “natural geo-engineering” to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and create a fully renewable energy system. Re-wilding means re-forestation, renewed grasslands, restoring wild animals and rebuilding stocks of fish and whales. Likely the only way to accomplish all this and have enough food for 10 billion people would be through “widespread veganism” and energy quotas. A quota of 2,000 watts per person would be a significant reduction for most living in the Global North but a large increase for the Global South. Needless to say, farming would become all organic. Trade-offs are inevitable, and should be addressed honestly rather than “cooking the books” as mainstream environmentalists can do:

“We offer an honest reckoning of Half-Earth socialism because we believe that a feasible utopia is one where its costs are democratically appraised rather than hidden by the pseudorational measure of money.” [page 84]

What is proposed is half-Earth socialism, with heavy stress on socialism. This is to differentiate from reactionary promoters of half-Earth re-wilding that should be rejected. “Half-Earth must be socialist,” Dr. Vettese and Mr. Pendergrass write. That means fully democratic and publicly supported. The proposals of far-thinking economists in the former Soviet Union failed to gain ground due to lack of a democratic movement to support them and the inability of Western climate scientists’ models to be taken with the necessary seriousness follows from the absence of social movements strong enough to put them into practice.

Half-Earth socialism would need to balance human needs with planetary boundaries, working through a myriad of factors. A fully democratically accountable planning organization could offer several scenarios with differing parameters and trade-offs, with decisions made either by elected representatives or a global referendum where everybody is eligible to vote. The authors whimsically call their planning agency “Gosplant,” quickly adding “forgive us” with the introduction. (The name is a play on “Gosplan,” the name of the planning agency in the Soviet Union, but unlike Gosplan, “Gosplant” would be fully democratic and based on public input.)

This wouldn’t be easy at the start, and realistically shouldn’t be expected to be easy. The planning agency would need to determine energy quotas and to balance land use and greenhouse gas emissions. This would be made more challenging by the difficulty of electrifying transport and some industrial processes. Widespread veganism would make this much easier because animal agriculture uses up so much land and is responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions. Trade-offs would be required in every plan or scenario. There would also be some temporary measures that would be phased out when practical.

“Wide-ranging improvements to industrial processes to reduce pollution, fuel use, and waste are undertaken in just about every industry. Large swathes of manufacturing become rationalized when ‘planned obsolescence’ itself is made obsolete. Resources are directed towards building solar panels, wind turbines, super-efficient insulation, and railways. Immediately after the Half-Earth socialist revolution, much of the world’s pasture is converted into biofuel plantations for the short-term decarbonization of transport and industry, while the remainder is rewilded, which in turn requires an expanded cadre of ecologists and foresters trained in both conventional science and traditional Indigenous knowledge.” [pages 110-111]

The planning agency does not dictate what the future should be or how the economy should be run, but rather would provide the public and its representatives with blueprints. Making economics understandable for everyone is a pre-condition for a socialist democracy. The planning agency would educate citizens on how the economy and the biosphere work. “Half-Earth socialism would not be some distant, top-down technocracy but rather a relatively simple democratic system, based on robust public education and involvement. An informed citizenry would be well-equipped to choose among the competing plans devised by the planners.”

Planning would need a balance of flexible local decision-making with some measure of central control, with continual refinement for specific outcomes. The idea here would be that an approved plan, whether approved by a world parliament or by popular referendum, would be “coarse” — it would be a general guide with local and regional economic plans based on it being more detailed and tailored to those local and regional needs. Decisions on plans would occur after copious popular discussion and would be flexible so that changes in raw materials and component allocations could be made as shortages appear in one area and excesses in another.

Building the future with tools we already possess

The technology to make this level of planning a reality already exists, Dr. Vettese and Mr. Pendergrass write:

“Every element of Half-Earth socialism’s ‘vast machine’ of planetary calculation is based on already existing technologies. The central algorithms in the model would take advantage of many of the insights and engineering designs that climate scientists have spent decades developing. Its tiered structure could draw on the nesting pattern found in environmental and atmospheric models, with global and local simulations constantly interacting and updating one another. … All this data does not mean that we fully know nature, only that Half-Earth socialist planners would have access to the vital signs of the planet so they could modify humanity’s interchange with nature when necessary.” [pages 129-130]

Lurking in the background is the experience of the Soviet Union and its Central European satellites, which collapsed. In acknowledging this history, the authors note that those failures must be reckoned with and that people must have a direct say in social and economic decisions.

“Socialism is a society emancipated from the relentless, unconscious, and irrational power of capital. Living in a planned society should feel better and freer, with a sense of solidarity and freedom from the threat of poverty. Democracy and meaningful work are not mere side effects of a socialist economy but central for planning to function.” [page 130]

Accepting limits and trade-offs is also central to such a project. Postulating that socialism leads to shortages just as capitalism leads to surplus production that results in inequality, unemployment and environmental catastrophe, disadvantages must be accepted if we want the benefits. Crucially, the sketches of the book are “starting points for a deeper discussion of how socialism should function in an age of ecological crisis.” The book concludes with a fictional chapter describing a functioning half-Earth socialist democracy in western Massachusetts, written with a nod to William Morris’ utopian novel News From Nowhere. Bicycling is the main transport method here because public transport, as is the case across the U.S., badly lags other countries, something the people of this region are coping with.

^{Downtown Amherst, Massachusetts. Might be difficult to re-wild. (Photo by AlexiusHoratius)}

Half-Earth Socialism is not a utopia, even though the authors have a practical utopian streak in them. They conclude by stating that humanity’s choices are “further humanization of nature through mad [geo-engineering] schemes” or “to plan an economy within planetary boundaries.” Everyone would have the essentials but “occasionally it might be necessary to stand in queue.” As the authors put it, there will be more comfort than what Cubans experienced during the early 1990s “special period” but “less than a typical eco-Yuppie in the Global North who installs solar panels on the roof of their McMansions … and has a $70,000 electric car in the garage.”

As I have said in previous book reviews, the judgment to be made is whether an excellent contribution to the literature has been made, not whether we agree with all the details and theses. I will say here that I do agree with a huge majority of the contents but even if I had more disagreements, I would still recommend Half-Earth Socialism. Dr. Vettese and Mr. Pendergrass have provided us with a marvelous, needed concept for how to organize a realistic better world, one recognizable from the standpoint of today. The one thing missing, however, is substantial — there are no ideas provided on how we might get from today to a half-Earth socialist democracy tomorrow. Also missing is how a transition to re-wilding half the land could be carried out, other than it would be a slow, decades-long transition.

I won’t consider these fatal flaws, for how to ignite and see through a successful revolution is something none of us possess today, nor can we alone. I have long said if I knew the secret, I’d tell everybody and not keep it to myself. What is essential is that we have practical, realistic ideas based on the limits our planet imposes on us if we are ever going to be in a position to create a better world. On that important metric, Half-Earth Socialism should be widely read.

* Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass, Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics [Verso, London and Brooklyn, 2022]

Envisioning a world with no bosses

Many people, especially those with eyes open to the ravages of capitalism, know what they don’t want. Fewer know what they do want. That is understandable, given that the task of building mass movements on so many fronts is daunting. But while what is meant by the creation of a better world can’t be precisely the same for everybody, movements nonetheless have to have some basic concepts of what a better world might look like.

Providing a blueprint is impossible. Having visions is a necessity. Concrete concepts, even if only outlines, need to be part of our toolboxes if we are to overcome “There is no alternative.” There are many outlines that have been sketched, naturally of varying viability. One that has been around for three decades has been the concept of “participatory economics,” often associated with one of its leading proponents, Michael Albert.

In his latest book, No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World, Mr. Albert has organized his decades of work on this project and presented what he terms a “scaffold” as opposed to a blueprint. At 200 pages, this scaffold is perhaps sufficiently detailed to be something beyond that, but however one wishes to classify his vision of participatory economics, No Bosses provides a stimulating contribution to the literature of a better world.

As always, judgment on a book’s merit should be on how well it encourages serious thinking and provides useful material and commentary, not on whether we fully agree with the content. On the former, it is hard to imagine anyone serious about wanting a better world not giving it high marks. The latter, of course, is a much more complicated proposition. So let’s see how viable this vision might be.

Crucially, the author does not declare his presentation a finished project. His intent is to show what is necessary, not provide a blueprint, and repeatedly says the project will need improvement. “We have no other choice,” he writes. “Alone on foot in the desert, we must walk until we reach water. To curse the sun’s heat and bemoan the sand’s seeming endlessness while standing still guarantees death.” [page 16]

Seven guiding principles in a world without capitalists

The guiding values put forth are viable self-management, equity, solidarity, diversity, sustainability, internationalism and participation for all who can participate. There would be no private ownership of productive assets, and thus no capitalists or capitalism. The author emphatically rejects both capitalist markets and central planning. Both, in his view, inevitably lead to small majorities bossing around and dictating to a working majority. Capitalism creates a “coordinator class” that monopolizes empowering tasks. Even if a workplace is democratic, if a corporate division of labor is retained, coordinators dominate, subverting self-management goals. That happened in Argentina’s recovered enterprises, Mr. Albert argues, with the “old crap,” in the words of a disappointed worker, returning in many recovered, self-managed enterprises after the old capitalist bosses were kicked out.

“They were all working class before, but some began to become coordinator class by doing empowering jobs. Those doing empowering jobs began to dominate council meetings. They had the needed information. They had the confidence to develop agendas. Attendance of others began to fall because others didn’t want to attend meetings which ran according to agendas set by the coordinators and dominated by coordinator speeches and proposals. … The coordinators had come to feel they were smarter, more responsible, and more essential. They deserved more. They paid themselves more. And the wages paid the others, the workers, as decided by the coordinator class, started to deteriorate. The upshot was that the old crap didn’t return due to an inexorable outcome of human nature or of the intrinsic requirements of complicated work. The old crap returned due to a social choice that wasn’t even consciously made. The workers had routinely, reflexively, maintained the corporate division of labor. And the corporate division of labor had in turn routinely, reflexively, subverted sought results.” [pages 49-50]

If there was a management that was making basic decisions, including those of wages, rather than all members, then such an enterprise can’t really be said to be self-managed. But even when there is a real self-management in place, the dangers of a division of labor can easily assert themselves. In communist-era Yugoslavia, enterprises were not in private hands and instead run by self-management — an assembly of all workers had to approve all decisions, including setting wages. (I wrote a chapter-length discussion of Yugoslav self-management for my forthcoming book What Do We Need Bosses For? [Autonomedia].) In this system, the workers elected a workers’ council — in effect a management board that made strategic decisions — and an enterprise was headed by a director (chief executive officer) not necessarily picked by the workers. Councilors were limited to two one-year terms and were recallable, enabling large numbers of people to sit on these councils and theoretically making them accountable. But there was a central plan that constrained what enterprises could do, and a pattern began where technicians and managers would present plans to the councils, which would simply rubber-stamp them. Holding the right to veto a plan they didn’t like, as opposed to drawing up plans themselves, was enough for many councils. That the councils were instituted in a top-down fashion, rather than being the organic product of grassroots activity, did not help.

There were many headwinds faced by Yugoslav self-management, including some unique to the country and its decentralized political structures owing to ethnic rivalries, and, ultimately, the forces of capitalism and capitalist competition, which buffeted Yugoslavia ever stronger, would eventually break down the system and tear apart the country itself, although it produced perhaps the world’s fastest growing economy for its first 20 years. The consequences of market forces — of being integrated into the world capitalist system — steadily mounted, and ultimately became unsustainable. Those consequences included debt to foreign banks and institutions, punishing austerity imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, strong sensitivity to the vicissitudes of capitalist cycles, and the discovery that competing in the world market is difficult, all the more so for a medium-sized developing country.

One lesson from here is that no better world can be reliant on market mechanisms — capitalist markets will assert themselves, and as I have often noted, capitalist markets are nothing more than the aggregate interests of the world’s most powerful industrialists and financiers. That a traditional division of labor was retained in the self-management system is another factor that can’t be overlooked.

Workers’ and consumers’ councils as the core

Back to No Bosses. The core institutions of participatory economics are workers’ councils and consumers’ councils. Workers’ councils in this conception are meetings of all enterprise workers that make all decisions, whether by simple majority or a specified super-majority. (Perhaps it would be better to call these “workers’ assemblies” to match generally used terminology.) These bodies of the whole make all decisions and there are no higher bodies. There are no managers or bosses, not even elected ones. Everybody participates in all decisions. Consumers’ councils are collective decision-making bodies that would democratically make decisions on public goods and services, such as “neighborhood pools, county parks, state utilities or national security,” as well as collate individual needs. Although expertise would be listened to, decisions wouldn’t be devolved to experts; rather these councils would seek to raise levels so that all could participate.

Another key conception is a system of “balanced job complexes” to break down the division of labor. Here No Bosses offers one of the most serious proposals I’ve ever encountered to break down the division of labor, an often underappreciated contributor to inequality. Simply put, if there is not a serious effort to break down the division, inequality will remain. The book conceptualizes balanced job complexes not as short-term stints in alternative circumstances but rather having a set of tasks for all jobs that would enable comparable empowerment in all jobs. Balancing would occur not only within a given workplace, but across all workplaces, to give everybody an equal chance of participating in decision-making and provide a “steady social exchange.”

The book cautions that “balancing empowerment across jobs is not the same as balancing the amount of type of intellect required for that job.” There are numerous empowering jobs in any workplace, including how to best satisfy customers, how to plan for the future or determining how best to do other jobs. Along with equalizing job circumstances would be equalizing pay. Income would be based on duration, intensity and onerousness of socially useful work — a point repeatedly stressed. Differentials from an average, however, should be small and limited given that jobs would be balanced. The only way for pay to rise would be for the average to rise — thus, the book argues, mutual aid is built into the proposed system.

How would the average be calculated? The book doesn’t offer an answer to that important question. At one point, a complicated 20-point system is put forth, whereby every task would be assigned a number from 1 to 20 based on difficulty, with jobs being cobbled together based on averaging out the numbers and special bodies assigned with calculating these numbers. But it is then admitted that something so precise is unlikely to be put into actual practice and this detail seems to be offered more as a thought experiment. Indeed, such complications are unnecessary. There could simply be a standard wage and everybody paid it, and if an enterprise elects to allow differentiations, these should be minor (no more than, say, 20 percent) and within parameters established by law or consensus. However an average wage would be determined, having everybody make it or very close to it would uphold the ideals of solidarity and equality, as expressed thusly:

“[I]n a good economy, there should be no way to improve one’s consumption or one’s work life at the expense of others. There should be no opposed classes, nor even opposed individuals, at least in any damaging, persistent, structural sense. This can’t be achieved by market allocation where everybody buys cheap and sells dear and nice guys finish last. This also cannot be achieved by central planning where we do what others decide we must do. Equitable remuneration and solidarity instead point toward needing a new approach to allocation. It will turn out to be that we cooperatively negotiate outcomes to enjoy gains and endure losses together, even as we also seek work and consumption that is best suited to our personal fulfillment.” [pages 94-95]

If something can’t allocate products and services, it doesn’t work

And how would products and services be allocated? The seventh chapter of No Bosses, by far the longest chapter in the book, step by step builds a picture of how participatory economics would work. This is where the vision has to cohere into a workable model. Again, not a model in the sense of “this is how it will be or should be” but rather in the sense of useful ideas that can be seriously debated as we sketch out the basics of a better world. A series of “takes” provide successively more detail. “A new means of allocation that will sustain classlessness” and “foster solidarity/empathy” is the goal.

A new means of allocation would be necessary as the model rejects capitalist markets and central planning. Workers’ and consumers’ councils and federations (councils at the enterprise or neighborhood level would feed up into bodies successively representing larger territories up to the national level) would meet and preliminarily determine productive capacity and consumer needs; a national facilitation board tallies information and supplies information to the negotiators representing the councils and federations. Talks would continue until equilibrium is reached. Presumably that would necessitate multiple rounds. Plans would be done yearly.

The facilitation board would tally mismatches between worker and consumer proposals. Neighborhood consumer councils would make requests for collective goods (such as public pools, an image that repeatedly crops up; Mr. Albert perhaps likes to swim). As part of the negotiation, the facilitation board would adjust prices to reflect supply/demand mismatches to help negotiators reach agreement; the two sides would presumably adjust their proposals based in part on such price changes. There would be strict budgets — to consume more than your budget allows, the consumer council would have to approve, and if a workplace underutilizes its assets, a higher-level workers’ council would intervene and lower the workplace’s payroll. The idea is for enterprises to use their productive capacities fully and efficiently while meeting demand.

Numeric prices are presumed to “generate sufficiently accurate estimates” of costs and benefits of inputs and outputs, as well as account for environmental or other social costs. No Bosses argues that this kind of pricing would be superior to prices obtained in markets or central planning because they would be derived from cooperative social proposals that can be checked, and because aggregate social needs would be built into the system.

How would individuals meet their individual and family needs? Everybody would make a request for the coming plan year to their neighborhood council, with aggregate requests going up to higher consumer councils. Once all consumer requests and productive plans are aggregated, negotiations begin, with the previous plan’s totals as a reference point and using the information supplied by the facilitation board, including preliminary estimates of the coming plan year’s pricing changes. Rounds of talks would continue until a plan is reached; the plan would presumably be “loose” rather than “taut” so that adjustments can be made within the plan year.

A different sort of calculation problem

But here we come to a significant weakness of participatory economics. The plan would require everybody to know exactly what they will need for the coming year — shirts, automobiles, appliances, books, meals at restaurants, even theater tickets. This is impossible! Nobody knows, or can know, all they will consume for the next year, including how many movies they see in theaters. Most of the books I buy are on impulse when I see something interesting in a bookstore; how can I know what I will find ahead of time? Participatory economics presumes that if there are changes, these would cancel each other out and all would be fine in the end. But, note that we saw earlier that people had to stay within a strict budget. Despite the author’s insistence that this system would be freer than capitalist markets or central planning, neither capitalist nor Soviet-style governments constrained consumption into such a straitjacket. Sorry, you said you’d go to three theatrical performances; the neighborhood council doesn’t have excess theater tickets. Better luck next year.

These levels of negotiations would be enormously, and needlessly, complicated. Negotiations would have to begin months before the current plan year ended, so full information would not be available. Talks would have to conclude at the end of the year so it could go into effect at the start of the new plan year; this would be no simple task. There is no reason that a yearly plan couldn’t be worked out and be in place for a new plan year, but with such a complicated negotiation requiring vast sums of information, this simply isn’t realistic. The weakness of Soviet-style central planning shouldn’t be glossed over; one problem was that no group of officials, no matter how dedicated or sincere, could possibly possess all the knowledge necessary to make proper plans.

Planning is necessary to replace markets, but it should be acknowledged that Gosplan (the Soviet planning agency) proved to not be a substitute for markets, although of course central control and the decades-long emphasis (unchecked because of a lack of democratic control) on producer goods with consumer goods getting perpetually short-changed can’t be avoided as significant factors. Democratic, bottom-up planning would inevitably be a central component of any egalitarian future economy designed to meet social and individual needs and enable everybody to reach their potential. (Activists organizing workers’ councils in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring envisioned a democratic planning without Soviet-style hard numeric totals and held a national conference to begin codifying a new system based on workers’ control before the effort was shut down.)

I would argue that planning based on negotiations, and that it be bottom-up and not top-down, is a necessity. On that basic concept, I am in agreement with No Bosses. But it would make more sense, and be more efficient, for producers to get together and make plans, plans that would have input from consumer representatives. Put it this way: If 1.2 million shoes were produced and there was a small shortage, representatives from shoe factories (with possible participation and if not that then meaningful input from consumer representatives) could make an informed judgment and declare they need to produce 1.3 million shoes to meet projected demand. It is not as if sales figures are unavailable, and reports of shortages certainly could be collected easily. Replicating this across all industries would enable the assembly of a plan for the coming year. It would be important to know how many shoes would be needed overall; it is not necessary and not possible for hundreds of millions of people to each know precisely how many shoes or theater tickets they will need.

Moreover, one important factor is missing. How do we ensure that there is no discrimination, and that environmental, health and safety standards are upheld? Presumably, advocates of participatory economics would argue that the system would generate such high levels of egalitarianism and solidarity, and provide full employment so that nobody is stuck in a bad job, that such standards would automatically be upheld universally. Perhaps. But might it make sense to have boards that enforce standards, with real penalties for non-compliance. Participatory economics would reward cooperation rather than greed and anti-social behavior as capitalism does, but it might not hurt to have a bit of insurance.

Public goods and public detriments

Finally, the long seventh chapter circles back to collective goods. How would parks, infrastructure, recreation facilities, etc. be funded? A few ideas are kicked around. One example is if a public pool were requested by a neighborhood consumer council. A higher body would have to okay it, with the cost spread among all the areas that might benefit. If a project had a negative impact, such as causing pollution, then the affected areas would have a say in the project and if approved those affected would be compensated. This is an area of participatory economics that hasn’t been worked out, and in fairness it must be admitted that devising formulae to determine the cost of pollution or other harms would be extraordinarily difficult.

In reading this part of No Bosses, my own admittedly loose thoughts were that the average or aggregate health care costs of everyone who lives or works a specified distance, say 30 miles, downwind from a coal plant, plus the cost of sick days, be calculated against a regional or national average, and charge the plant that differential. But there is an immediate objection: How could multiple pollution sources be disentangled and quantified? So perhaps my loose idea would not be workable. No Bosses offers no plan due to the complexity and difficulty of such calculations. But it does firmly insist, properly, that environmental and health costs must be accounted for, including in pricing. That is something that would have to be worked out much closer to the arrival of a new economic system.

We can’t ask for perfection, and participatory economics is supposed to be a scaffold, not a blueprint. It would be useless to reproach it for not having all possibilities thought out, a task plainly impossible nor even desirable. Maintaining his optimism and enthusiasm, Mr. Albert concludes No Bosses with a series of answers to commonly asked questions. He rejects anarchism, social democracy and Marxism (although a cartoon version of Marxism) while offering participatory economics as “an approach … consistent with the human potential I can imagine.” I think we should employ some caution before simply dismissing all that has come before, however flawed — a tabula rasa is impossible. Nonetheless, what is proposed here certainly is imaginative. “Having vision matters for where we wind up,” he concludes. “Having vision matters for winning a new economy for a better world.”

However much we might quibble with this or that detail, having vision does matter. How could we believe a better world is possible, much less struggle for one, without vision? To restate what was written at the beginning of this review, the judgment to be made isn’t whether we agree with all details, it is whether it has made a needed contribution. No Bosses is a marvelous contribution to the growing and needed literature on the contours of a better world, of what we believe it should do. That participatory economics, or any other currently proposed system, is unlikely to actually come into being isn’t the point; what is is that we think concretely about the future and are prepared to discuss, dream and formulate serious ideas. And put them into action.

The realism and unrealism of the Green New Deals

A problem facing advocates of serious action to deter global warming is that the costs of not acting aren’t quantifiable and remain somewhat abstract. In contrast, calling for a phase-out of fossil fuels understandably leads to fears of job losses, especially since capitalism isn’t going to offer new employment for those displaced.

There will be costs with taking measures to do a portion of what needs to be done, never mind all that needs to be done. To deny this, as liberals frequently do, might backfire when it becomes apparent there won’t be a climatic free lunch. There are two counters to these future costs — first, the benefits, including new jobs, from the industries that will grow dramatically from a real effort to switch to renewable energy as part of a comprehensive tackling of global warming and, second, the massive costs that will come due from continuing business as usual. What will be the costs of a sea-level rise of, say, three meters, the disruption to agriculture and the associated mass migrations that would be triggered?

These costs would be catastrophic, totaling much more in the long run than the shorter-term costs of acting with seriousness.

Terminus of Kangerlugssuup Sermerssua glacier in west Greenland (photo by Denis Felikson, via NASA)

With this context in mind, an analysis is in order of the so-called Green New Deal, both the Green Party’s original and the Democratic Party’s later watered-down version. First, this article will highlight some of the key points in both, then look at some of the critiques (including right-wing ones, since these get the lion’s share of coverage in the corporate media) and, finally, determine what conclusions might be drawn. Inevitably, discussion of economics — and the world economic system — can’t be avoided. Can there truly be a “green capitalism” whereby the same system that has brought humanity and the environment to an existential crisis will magically provide the solution? (I suppose the way that last question is framed previews the answer.)

In other words, can reforms within current parameters prove sufficient to be able to reverse the ongoing massive dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; reduce the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen oxides; and enable a conversion to sustainable agricultural and environmental practices? Or is a new way of organizing the world’s economic activity an unavoidable necessity? To begin to answer these questions, we have to define what needs to be done.

The Green Party’s Green New Deal program

Regardless of our opinions of the Green Party of the United States, the party has produced an ambitious document, one worthy of serious discussion. (Full disclosure: I was once highly active in the party but withdrew because it became too frustrating to continually fight the party majority that had a liberal orientation little different from the Democratic Party; people active in it today tell me that party has since moved in a more socialist direction.) The party’s Green New Deal sets a goal of “a new, sustainable economy that is environmentally sound, economically viable and socially responsible.”

In conjunction with the goal of sustainability is an “Economic Bill of Rights,” defined as the right to single-payer healthcare, a guaranteed job at a living wage, affordable housing and free college education. To achieve its goals, the Green New Deal calls for “a WWII-type mobilization to address the grave threat posed by climate change, transitioning our country to 100% clean energy by 2030.”

Given that humanity is inching closer to the point of no return — the atmosphere is more than halfway to the 2 degree C. global temperature rise from pre-industrial levels that is believed to be the limit before runaway change brings on catastrophic consequences and not far from the 1.5 degree mark that may be the more realistic limit — an accelerated timetable for a full shutdown of fossil-fuel consumption is unavoidably a part of any serious program to stop global warming. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 20 percent of greenhouse gases derive from fossil fuels used for transportation and another 28 percent comes from burning fossil fuels to produce electricity. (Apparently the Trump gang has not gotten around to censoring that report.)

“Bottle Buyology” at the Minnesota State Fair (photo by Tony Webster)

The authors of the Green New Deal certainly see massive benefits from their proposed program. For example, the party says it would “Create 20 million jobs by transitioning to 100% clean renewable energy by 2030, and investing in public transit, sustainable (regenerative) agriculture, conservation and restoration of critical infrastructure, including ecosystems.” The party would “Ensure that any worker displaced by the shift away from fossil fuels will receive full income and benefits as they transition to alternative work.” That employment initiative would be conducted in the context of “energy democracy” — there would be “public, community and worker ownership of our energy system” with access to energy treated as a human right.

All fossil fuel production, and nuclear energy, would be phased out, a carbon tax imposed (but not defined) and a “greenhouse gas tax” would be imposed on polluters to compensate society for damage already caused.

The Green Party’s Green New Deal platform asserts that implementing the program would “revive the economy” and necessitate hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to military spending because there would be no longer a need to control foreign oil supplies and transportation. Moreover, “the Green New Deal largely pays for itself in healthcare savings from the prevention of fossil fuel-related diseases, including asthma, heart attacks, strokes and cancer.”

To help bring about these changes, the Green New Deal proposed to provide “grants and low-interest loans to grow green businesses and cooperatives, with an emphasis on small, locally based companies that keep the wealth created by local labor circulating in the community rather than being drained off to enrich absentee investors.” Current subsidies for fossil fuels would be re-directed toward research efforts to further develop wind, solar and geothermal energy and sustainable environmental and agricultural practices. Natural gas, biomass and nuclear power are ruled out as not constituting clean energy.

Surely an ambitious plan. To the question of how realistic this program is we will return later in this article.

The Democratic Party’s Green New Deal program

For a comparison, let’s now turn to the Democratic Party’s version of a Green New Deal, specifically the plan introduced into Congress by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey. This plan calls for “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” and the creation of “millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States.” This proposal also seeks to “promote justice and equity … and repair historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.”

To achieve these goals, the Democratic Green New Deal calls for “a 10-year national mobilization” that includes investing in community-defined projects to mitigate disasters related to global warming; rebuilding infrastructure; meeting 100 percent of U.S. energy needs through “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources”; removing pollution from manufacturing “as much as is technically feasible”; overhauling agricultural and transportation practices; restoring natural ecosystems to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere; and restoring and protecting ecosystems through “locally appropriate and science-based projects.”

Coral reefs damaged by warming seas in the Maldives (photo by Bruno de Giusti)

Rather than existing as a fully formed program with preconceived details, this Green New Deal would be “developed through transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses.” The investment that comes out of this program would be intended to ensure “the public receives appropriate ownership stakes and returns on investment, adequate capital … technical expertise, supporting policies, and other forms of assistance to communities, organizations, Federal, State, and local government agencies, and businesses working on the Green New Deal mobilization.”

The plan calls for “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States”; protecting the right of workers to organize; “strengthening and enforcing labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards across all employers, industries, and sectors” and “ensuring a commercial environment where every businessperson is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies.” The plan also advocates for “high-quality health care,” affordable housing and “healthy and affordable food.”

This plan is laid out in the form of a resolution introduced into the House of Representatives by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and into the Senate by Sen. Markey. Considering not only the extreme hostility to such ideas in the Republican Party, which continues to control the Senate, but also the Democratic Party leadership, the prospects for congressional adoption would appear to be nil. (In dismissing the Green New Deal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi derisively said, “The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”) Short-term politics aside, the same question as the original Green Party Green New Deal must be asked of the Democratic Party version: How realistic is it?

Koch brothers money helps fund opposition

Before we seriously tackle the contents of these plans, let’s take a quick survey of opposition to them, which naturally is fiercest from the Right and corporate interests with something to lose.

The Institute for Energy Research, for example, slams the Democratic Party’s Green New Deal as “misguided” because the original New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was intended to address the Great Depression, whereas today “we are not currently in the midst of an economic depression.” True enough that we not currently living through another Great Depression, but the economy — for working people — is bad enough. The author of the Institute’s “Flaws With a ‘Green New Deal’ ” diatribe attempts to back up its position by saying “Even textbook Keynesians” oppose running budget deficits at the present time. Evidently, the Institute considers “textbook Keynesians” the outermost fringe of what is imaginable.

The author goes on to claim that FDR’s New Deal actually made the economy worse, despite an accompanying table showing that unemployment fell from an inherited 25 percent to 9.9 percent in 1941. It is true that the New Deal didn’t bring an end to economic depression, but it did make a big difference, and not only for the social programs that were inaugurated. It was the mobilization to fight World War II that truly ended the Depression, but that effort required massive governmental spending and intervention in the economy — in other words, going well beyond the New Deal. The problem with the New Deal was that it didn’t go far enough or spend sufficiently. So the Institute’s right-wing folderol simply doesn’t withstand the most basic scrutiny.

The Institute disingenuously calls itself “impartial and unbiased” on its About web page, but also attributes to “free markets” all manner of progress. SourceWatch reveals that the Institute is founded by the Koch brothers, has a president who was formerly an executive with Enron and is tied to the Koch brothers’ infamous American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that literally writes extreme Right bills for state legislatures.

When you don’t have facts, make up your argument

Next up, we have similar extremist ideology masquerading as “science” from the Heritage Foundation. As with the Institute for Energy Research, this critique is aimed at the Democratic Party version. We get the flavor of the Heritage Foundation’s attack when it leads off with this statement: “[E]ach of these items is so wildly unrealistic that you have to wonder how familiar the authors are with life away from coastal urban centers.” Ah yes, only conservatives in the middle of the country can possibly possess good ideas.

Declaring that “a great deal of costly damage” would result were any of the ideas adopted, Heritage recoils in horror at the thought of more mass transit or electric motor vehicles. To buttress its ideologically driven point of view, Heritage first understates the mileage that can be driven by electric cars, then declares that an electric vehicle charging infrastructure “would necessitate having exponentially more charging stations than the current number of gas stations.”

Heritage claims that electric vehicles can only travel 90 to 125 miles, yet there are at least eight models that can travel at least 200 miles on a charge. Some of these models are very expensive and unaffordable for most people, but as technology improves, charge travel distances will lengthen and more models will become affordable. For those who do drive, how many gas stations do you pass before needing to fill the tank again? Dozens? Hundreds? Moreover, electric-vehicle recharging stations don’t need to have such a level of saturation because they are easily installed at homes and in business and apartment parking lots. Government agencies and public utilities are already executing plans and providing subsidies to encourage home and business-location chargers. So the idea that Heritage insinuates, that we’ll need a charging station on every other corner, doesn’t stand up to rational examination.

The world’s coral reefs are in danger of dying from oceanic absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide (photo by Jim Maragos, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Heritage also shrieks that the Green New Deal calls for an end to air travel, but the plan makes no such statement. In fact, as already noted, it is mostly a set of aspirations with little in the way of concrete proposals as to how to achieve its goals.

The Heritage Foundation of course is peddling far Right ideology. No surprise there, as its founders and funders are some of the most extreme billionaires, including Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife, and notorious operatives such as Paul Weyrich. Heritage strenuously opposes action to combat global warming, little surprise when some of Heritage’s funders, including the Koch brothers, have a vested interest in promoting fossil fuels. The foundation also takes tobacco-company money while opposing any legislation aimed at that industry.

The lack of specifics in the Democratic Green New Deal hasn’t prevented Republicans from issuing preposterous numbers for the supposed cost. Another propaganda mill, this one calling itself the American Action Forum, apparently using a random-number generator, alleged that the Green New Deal would cost between $53 trillion and $91 trillion from 2020 to 2029; Republicans have taken to parroting the uppermost figure as if it was real.

As one example of this legerdemain, the Forum insists that the Green New Deal’s call for high-quality health care to be provided to all United Statesians would cost $36 trillion for the decade of the 2020s. Never mind that lack of health care has a cost — such a concept is simply ignored — and that the U.S. healthcare system is by far the world’s most expensive. (My own calculations estimate that the U.S. spends an extra $1.4 trillion per year on health care than it would if it had universal coverage similar to peer countries.) It is precisely that the privatized U.S. health care system is designed to generate corporate profits rather than health care that it so expensive.

The American Action Forum is legally able to hide the identity of its donors due to tax-law loopholes, but spends millions of dollars to elect hard-line Republicans and is led by prominent Republican politicians and operatives. The Republican politicians citing this dubious source are in effect citing themselves — their mantra is “I say it’s true, so it must be true.”

Under capitalism, we’ll get more business as usual

One is tempted to call the Right-wing attacks comic relief, but unfortunately continuing business as usual, as the above organizations would like, is anything but funny given the seriousness of the challenge. And acknowledging that seriousness compels us to return to the question of feasibility within the current economic system. The Democratic Party version of the Green New Deal is aptly named because it doesn’t go beyond the reformism of the 1930s New Deal. The reforms the Democratic document calls for certainly would be welcome as vast improvements from what we have today. Nonetheless, it is doubtful that such a program could ever come close to being enacted by Democrats — most of the Democratic leadership is opposed to it, and the record of liberals folding as soon as a Republican attacks is too consistent.

A more fundamental problem is that the backers of the Democratic Green New Deal seem to assume that a program challenging corporate interests to such a serious degree can be fully implemented in the current U.S. political and economic system, and that corporate interests will simply sit back and allow such a program not only to be signed into law but to actually be implemented. A massive social movement, bringing together the widest possible array of organizations and resolute in using a multitude of tactics inside and outside the system, could bring about the proposed program, but there is not a word of public involvement in the Democratic program. It is all to be created by congressional action.

If there was a movement so massive and powerful that it forced the implementation of a Green New Deal, shouldn’t it bring about root-and-branch change? Why have such a movement be steered into propping up the capitalist system that brings so much misery to so many people? If it did simply reform capitalism, however welcome such reforms would be, inequality, imperialism, environmental destruction and all the rest of our present-day social ills would be back with us soon enough with the massive social energy that brought the reforms now dissipated.

The biggest problem with the Democratic version is the expectation that an ambitious program significantly expanding social programs, making huge changes to the economy and bringing the fossil fuel industry to heel can be accomplished without any political or economic system change. Other than a passing mention of “the public receiv[ing] appropriate ownership stakes,” there is an implied assumption that the goals will all be accomplished under capitalism and the current system of corporate rule. Capitalism will yet save us! Sorry, no. Not going to happen. Under capitalism, all the incentives are to continue business as usual, no matter the dire future consequences of business as usual.

The capitalist system requires continual growth, which means expansion of production. Its internal logic also means that its incentives are to use more energy and inputs when more efficiency is achieved — the paradox that more energy is consumed instead of less when the cost drops. Because production is for private profit and competition is relentless, growth and cost cutting is necessary to maintain profitability — and continually increasing profitability is the actual goal. If a corporation doesn’t expand, its competitor will and put it out of business. Because of the built-in pressure to maintain profits in the face of relentless competition, corporations continually must reduce costs, employee wages not excepted. Production is moved to low-wage countries with fewer regulations, enabling not only more pollution but driving up energy and carbon-dioxide costs with the need for transportation across greater distances.

Leaving capitalism intact means allowing “markets” to make a wide array of social decisions — and markets are nothing more than the aggregate interests of the most powerful industrialists and financiers. An economy that must expand will do so. Introducing efficiencies can slow down the increase in energy consumption and resource depletion, but an ever expanding economy will ultimately use more energy, more resources. Switching to all renewable energy, although a necessity to reverse global warming, is insufficient by itself. Some forms of renewable energy are not necessarily clean nor without contributions to global warming, and the limits that living on a finite planet with finite resources presents are all the more acute in an economic system that requires endless growth.

Bioenergy requires deforestation, removing carbon sinks, which is counterproductive to the goal of reducing atmospheric greenhouse gases, and can be more polluting than fossil fuels. The turbines used to produce electricity from wind increasingly are built with the “rare earth” element neodymium, which requires a highly toxic process to produce. Increasing rare earth mining means more pollution and toxic waste. There is not a hint of any of this in the Democratic Green New Deal.

Business as usual will cost trillions of dollars

The Green Party’s Green New Deal at least acknowledges that system change is necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change. This platform also doesn’t offer ideas on how it might come to fruition, but at least there is an implicit nod to the need to transcend capitalism by calling for employment for all who are displaced by the phasing out of fossil fuels, by demanding energy production be put in public hands and by advocating for “a new, sustainable economy.” It also doesn’t shy away from the scale of what is needed, and directly connects the present energy policy with U.S. militarism.

What this program doesn’t do, however, is acknowledge the costs of a rapid transition from fossil fuels. In the mirror image of conservatives who see only costs, liberals and Greens see only benefits. Although not comparable to the cartoonishly absurd Right-wing claims of tens of trillions of dollars in costs, the idea of a cost-free transition strains credibility. The 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that concludes the annual reduction in “consumption growth” on a global basis would be only 0.06 percent during the course of the 21st century has only encouraged the idea that “green capitalism” will somehow save the day. The Green version of the Green New Deal is considerably more ambitious than that of the newer Democratic version, and thus all the more out of reach within a capitalist framework.

The Green Party’s Green New Deal also rests on some not necessarily realistic assertions. The platform asserts that having no need to control oil means no more overseas military presence, but that is overly simplistic. Certainly securing oil is a driver of U.S. foreign policy, but hardly the only factor. The U.S. government seeks global dominance for its corporations, keeping the entire planet open for corporate plunder and smashing any and all attempts to escape the U.S. orbit or to challenge the domination of Global North corporations. It will take far more than reducing fossil fuel consumption to bring a halt to imperialism and the closing of 800 U.S. overseas military bases.

The platform then switches to a declaration that the savings from not having to treat diseases arising from fossil fuel use will alone pay for it. There are large savings to be had, but that this one item alone will somehow cover all the costs is unrealistic. In the long run, running an economy on the basis of human need rather than private profit and proving quality preventive health care to cut down on medical spending will be more rational and equitable then what now exists. But that such a transition will be without cost is offering platitudes that can’t be fulfilled. Better to be honest that there will be no cost-free utopia.

Again, none of this an argument against the most rapid possible transition to renewable energy nor that the massive economic changes needed shouldn’t be undertaken. Winning World War II required deficit spending well beyond anything previously seen, but what would the cost of a fascist victory been? Similarly, what would the cost of a rise of several meters in sea level, of massive disruption to weather patterns and agriculture, of hundreds of millions of forced migrations, of massive species extinctions?

Global warming already costs trillions of dollars

That the costs of business as usual can’t easily be quantified does not mean there are not attempts to do so. A 2018 paper in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change by four scientists led by climatologist Katharine Ricke of the University of California, San Diego, estimated that the social cost of carbon — the cumulative economic impact of global warming — amounts to a global total of more than $400 per ton. Based on 2017 carbon dioxide emissions, that is more than US$16 trillion!

The impact varies greatly on a country-by-country basis. Canada and Russia, as of last year, were gaining economic benefits of up to $10 per carbon dioxide ton, while India was already paying $86 per ton. (That is all the more unfair as India is estimated to be responsible for only a cumulative three percent of greenhouse-gas emissions since 1850.) This analysis is based on “a set of climate simulations, rather than a single model.” These costs are “ballpark figures” because of the uncertainty surrounding climate physics, emission trajectories and other factors, but there are additional factors, such as the impact of global warming on international trade and migration, that aren’t necessarily captured in this model.

The gross domestic product for the entire Earth was estimated at $80 trillion for 2017. Thus, if the above calculation is accurate, global warming is already costing humanity one-fifth of its productive output. And we’ve only begun to suffer the effects of the climate spiraling out of control. What will be the cost of, say, a three-meter rise in sea level? That would be more than sufficient to permanently place under water parts of many of the world’s biggest cities.

We are already paying high costs. The cost of ambient air pollution has been estimated at more than four millions deaths per year, and that might be a conservative estimate. An attempt by three economists associated with the International Monetary Fund calculated that worldwide subsidies for the fossil fuel industry is more than US$5 trillion per year when not only direct handouts and other visible monetary subsidies are accounted for, but also adding the environmental costs. Putting millions of people to work building renewable-energy infrastructure will boost the economy, as will ending the subsidies and reducing the health costs of fossil fuels. Those are real benefits. But shutting down entire industries and overhauling the world’s economic system will come at serious cost. It’s not realistic to pretend otherwise. Those of us in the advanced capitalist countries will have to consume less, including using less energy. That, too, is inescapable and both Green New Deals fail to address that.

This is a debate that shouldn’t be reduced to a sterile “revolution or reform” opposition. We need all the reform we can achieve, right now. The balance, nonetheless, is clearly on the side of advocates who push for the fastest possible transition to a new economy, one not dependent on fossil fuels. An economy based on meeting human need and in harmony with the environment, not one made for private profit and that externalizes onto society environmental and other costs. The price of business as usual will be catastrophic environmental damage. Socialism or barbarism remain humanity’s future options.

The Continuation of History: Future Societies in Fiction

As a long-time reader of Ursula K. Le Guin, I was saddened to hear of her passing. The following essay, originally written in 2001 for the literary magazine BigCityLit, examines Ms. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed in conjunction with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. The ideas expressed and implied in these works continue to be highly relevant for activists wishing to find a path toward a better world.

History has proven it hasn’t ended. The concept should have been too laughable to even been contemplated; the very fact that ever shriller cacophonies of propaganda are hurled at us ought to prove the point, if it needed to be proved at all.

No matter how many times Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” is pompously declared; no matter how many times Francis Fukuyama is invoked to declare the end of history — a quote sure to be one of the 21st century’s reliable laugh lines — much of the world persists in refusing its assigned role. Unless we’re paying close attention, most of this is yet under the radar, save for the occasional spectacle when the World Bank or International Monetary Fund or a hemispheric “free trade” conference convenes, and we are shown a backdrop of protesters while a befuddled television talking head scratches his head and says “I don’t get it.” If the talking head is planning on a nice career as a media personality, he’d better not get it.

There is a subset of the “no alternative” grouping. Well, yes, maybe capitalism isn’t all wonderful, but look at how socialism failed. Actually, “socialism” did not fail; one distorted version did. The story of how that distortion, solidifying the incredible twists and turns taken by one country weighed down by the horrors of its absolutist history and further bent out of recognition by a single-minded dictator, is fascinating for those with much patience. That country, if we care to be precise, was never close to achieving socialism. Nonetheless, that country, which also faced relentless pressures from the West, including an invasion by 14 countries as soon as they could stop fighting World War I, had its uses. Western anti-Marxists didn’t want people to think there could be an alternative to capitalism. They still don’t.

We’ve begun the 21st century. Stalinism is dead. It will remain dead. Still, the desire for a better life remains. But what? It’s too easy to say “we don’t know.” We don’t. But whatever is next, it’ll have to be built on top of present-day society. It’ll have to be built, at least in some part, on a critique of capitalist society. We already possess that critique, and so it is bound to be at least a starting point. It is therefore not surprising that when we cross from the real world into the world of fiction, those starting points come with us.

There are as many socialisms, or potential future societies if socialism is too scary a word, as our imagination will allow us. It would be natural for those fiction writers of the future, science fiction specialists, to explore many of these potential futures. Oddly, despite the countless dystopian novels out there, this is actually highly rare. Science fiction is actually a genre that, when we take an overall sampling, is parched for ideas. I say this as a regular reader of science fiction. So much of the genre consists of fetishized military engagements and thinly veiled technology manuals masquerading as stories. Even the dystopias usually consist of the author taking a single idea and seeing how far she can run with it.

The rare exceptions, then, tower above the field. Rarer still are those who attempt to create a truly different society based on recognizable characters. Two of these authors are Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson. Both winningly attempt to work out new worlds, but in very different ways. Ms. Le Guin is an anarchist who sketches out societies either in the far future or someplace far from Earth. Mr. Robinson, who writes from a Marxist perspective, sets his stories on Earth or elsewhere in the solar system and in the near future. Whether or not it is agreed that the societies sketched out are plausible, these stories are the works of authors realistically wrestling with the full range of human emotion and human interaction with huge, impersonal forces, forces that nonetheless are human created. Both do this with a variety of vivid characters and subtle interplay that make much of their body of work flow well outside of the usual confines of science fiction.

Contrary to orthodox Soviet myopia that shrilly proclaimed the creation of a “workers’ paradise,” real life comes fully equipped with contradictions. If it is not a full-blown contradiction it is certainly an irony that an anarchist, Ms. Le Guin, understands this basic Marxist assumption while Soviet political leaders were unable. Ms. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, published in 1974, wears this right on the cover; the novel’s subtitle calls it an “ambiguous utopia.”

An “ambiguous utopia”

The ambiguous utopia is the world of Anarres, the marginally habitable moon of the Earth-like planet Urras. Although Urras is not Earth and is not inhabited by humans (although they are very much like humans), its political, social and economic systems are very recognizable to the humans of present-day Earth. This “coincidence,” however, is quite forgivable. Urras is dominated by two countries, one an United States-style capitalist state consumed by greed and the other a secretive Soviet Union-style state. Urras is a world with technology and environmental awareness far beyond Earth’s 20th century, political development at the level of Earth’s 20th century and a social system of the 18th or early 19th century rooted in profound sexism; it is an utterly male-dominated society.

Urras’ hounded anarchists of the past were allowed to leave Urras and settle on the moon Anarres, used as a mining colony. Life on Anarres is life on the margins. A dry world that is desert except for small areas of moderate rainfall, the anarchists continually are on the verge of disaster. Only by being a completely collective society, by cooperating with each other, can they survive. With resources so limited, a competitive capitalist society would fail quickly — U.S.-style inequities would not simply create poverty, they would create mass starvation and rapidly deplete the limited natural resources. Such a place would shortly descend into hopeless chaos and implode.

Anarres is far from perfect, being an “ambiguous utopia.” It is an anarchist society without government, yet it must ensure resources are used where they are needed, that men and women with the right skills are sent where they are needed and that the basic necessities of life are available for everyone. There are no jails or coercion, yet peer pressure must be sufficient to deter the potentially uncooperative. Freedom of decision and personal life choices are paramount, yet people must be sent to new locations when emergencies occur.

One of the largest contradictions is in how people are to serve this society, in normal times and during crises. This problem is embodied in the main character, Shevek, a brilliant physicist. Can Shevek best serve Anarres by continuing his research? He is so far beyond other scientists that no one on Anarres can fully understand his work. Only a handful of physicists on Urras can, and they are interested in exploiting him for their own (national) interests. Although it is assumed that Shevek’s esoteric work will have applications some day, it has no practical use now. Or, particularly during the crisis of a severe drought that leads to deprivation around Anarres, is it in the dry world’s interest that Shevek drop his research and perform practical work that will help Anarres marshal its meager resources for survival? Can he go back and forth depending on conditions?

It is the very fact that Anarres is a collective society that enables individuals to flourish in a difficult physical environment. Yet can those individuals do what they want, or must that individuality be set aside for the greater good? There is no easy answer, or even single answer, to this question. Neither Shevek nor his society can formulate a solution. Yet the struggle over this question on Anarres is vastly different than the contradictions inherent on Urras, where the two dominant countries still regularly fight proxy wars in other countries against each other and where the “free” United States-style nation proves to be much less free than it appears. The tenuous relationship between Anarres and Urras has its own set of contradictions.

The society of Anarres, based on cooperation without even the concept of money, is so different from the modern neoliberal state built on pitiless competition with power rooted in economics as to be seemingly an impossible transition. And, indeed, Anarres is not the transformation of any society, even if it was conceived on Urras. The Anarres anarchist society is constructed in a place that was empty, except for a couple of mining settlements where nobody lived permanently. It is created out of nothing, not out of a pre-existing society. On Urras, from where the original Anarres settlers escaped, the traditional nation-state forms still exist, intact, two centuries after new Anarres settlement is closed.

Can a radically new society, based on values far different from existing society, be created in the same country? Are pre-existing societal pressures too powerful to be overcome? Can a radically new society only be created on a blank slate? Is a radically new society needed to be created somewhere else before it can supplant the existing order? And if so, does the lag period have to be decades, even centuries? Now we’ve leaped from contradictions on a personal scale to contradictions on a national or even global scale. The Dispossessed does not purport to attempt an answer to these questions and for the most part does not even ask these questions. But it does stimulate thinking about these questions, and this alone raises it into very select company.

How to organize in the absence of a state?

If we dig down into Anarres society, it is, theoretically, a world of “pure” anarchism, although some Marxists would argue that such a society would be the end result of communist development. Anarres is a world of true common ownership — there is no state, not even a government, to own productive property in the name of the people. The only global organization is a bureau that links people with jobs that need to be filled.

The bureau has no coercive powers; any man or woman is free to accept or decline a posting. But in times of crisis, such as the long drought Anarres goes through, peer pressure is very strong to accept a post, even if it is in a remote location and it requires the acceptee to be away from his/her partner for a long period of time. Housing, cafeterias and other needs are always available, wherever a posting takes a person. This also makes Anarres a mobile society, as there is no private property to be left behind, freeing men and women to move around the moon as they like. It is also a society totally without hierarchy, class distinctions or gender roles. Puritanism is also erased; a full sexual freedom exists with the elimination of sexism and gender roles.

These liberating social conditions are inseparable from the economic freedom of Anarres. It is, again, a place with true common ownership, different from an anarcho-syndicalist economy, in which the members of small collectives would together own their workshop or production facility. It is also distinct from the concept of the state owning property in the name of society as developed in Soviet Union. But even this concept is, in theory, a stage of development in which the end result is a withering away of the state which, again in theory, might result in an economic design not much different than the concepts of the anarchist society of Anarres.

Anarres is able to maintain its society through isolation. There is no contact between it and Urras, except for freight ships that mostly transport minerals to Urras, but also carry other goods, even books, in both directions. Anarres is completely closed to Urras, with nobody from the freight ships allowed to leave the small port. It is unthinkable for any Anarres citizen to go to Urras. Governments on Urras ruthlessly suppress any groups that wish to implement Anarres ideas, but the countries of Urras make no attempt to interfere with Anarres itself; Anarres continues to ship minerals to Urras and, from the Urras point of view, remains a mining colony.

The people of Anarres, who deeply believe in their project, are allowed to continue to develop their society with no interference thanks to the hundreds of thousands of miles that separate it from the warring nation-states of Urras. But what if there was no such separation; what if the capitalists of Urras saw a threat in Anarres? Would Anarres have the freedom to develop its egalitarian society? Can a radically new and different society exist next to or nearby societies that continue to use traditional, hierarchal forms? These questions do get raised in The Dispossessed, and of course asking these questions brings us back to Earth.

In our solar system, Earth’s moon is not capable of sustaining life; alternative societies will need to take root here on Earth. But is it possible for a radical society — an egalitarian society that provides an adequate standard of living, materially and in all the other ways — that, by its very existence, provides a superior alternative to capitalist society, to have the time to create itself? Is it even possible for such a society to take root with more powerful neighbors ready to suppress it?

Revolution when there is the (physical) space for it

Ursula Le Guin, the creator of an “ambiguous anarchist utopia,” is not optimistic on these questions. Neither is Kim Stanley Robinson, the creator of a Marxist-inspired revolution on Mars that succeeds against great odds. Unlike the anarchists of Anarres, who have a world essentially handed to them — authorities on Urras apparently decided this would be a way of getting rid of their troublemakers — the Martians of Mr. Robinson’s Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars) have to overthrow oppressive colonial rule to create their better society.

But just as Anarres benefited from its distance from Urras, Mars’ distance from Earth is what gives the revolutionaries the space to create their new society. And the Martians, too, must compromise. Anarres must continue to supply Urras with minerals or face the possibility of an invasion; the revolutionary Martian government must continue to accept a continuous stream of colonists from Earth and maneuver its way around the colossal economic power of Earth’s biggest corporations and the puppet political institutions the corporations control.

In the years of the 21st and 22nd centuries, capitalism continues to develop; that is, economic power is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. About 20 corporations have a stranglehold on the world’s economy and dominate Earth. The economies of all countries except the 11 comprising the G-11 grouping (expanded from the present-day G-7) are dwarfed by those 20 corporations; indeed, most countries of the world are directly controlled by one of the top corporations. The United Nations is the gendarme of this corporate domination. The UN organizes the colonization of Mars on behalf of its corporate masters; the intention is to exploit the resources of the Red Planet and to, over time, export some of Earth’s overpopulation.

Some colonists are willing to go along with this program; many others want to create a better world than what they left behind on Earth. This increasingly bitter divide is complicated by an environmental divide between “Reds” (those who wish to leave Mars as it is) and “Greens” (those who wish to terraform Mars into an Earth-like environment). The divide between willing colonists and independent-minded social builders does not coincide with the environmental divide; although there is wide support to break free of Earth’s grip and build a better society, there are more “Greens” than “Reds” on the environmental question. At any rate, during the colonial era, the decision is out of the Martians’ hands as the UN and the corporations behind it seek to create an Earth-like Mars. Terraforming begins with the first colonists and there is far too much economic muscle applied from Earth for the process to be slowed, much less stopped.

A further fracture in the developing Martian society, which ultimately adds to political tensions, is the huge social gap between the younger men and women who are born on Mars and the waves of colonists who continue to flood the planet. The intention of the independence-minded colonists is to create a better society, not only in terms of dispensing with the rapacious economic determinism of Earth, but in other realms as well. These colonists want to create a non-hierarchal society free not only of class distinctions but of ills such as sexism, racism, nationalism and cultural arrogance.

To the men and women who are born on Mars, this is not only natural, but easy to express because to them the hideous stratifications and exploitation of Earth are revolting and unimaginable. Counter-pressures come on economic and colonial questions from the colonists who see Mars as a natural colony of Earth and from the large number of colonists who come from more repressive cultures and seek to replicate the backwardness they left behind.

Creating the future when so much of the past is present

On this fictional Mars created by Mr. Robinson, we have something of a hybrid between a society trying to create itself next to existing, hostile societies and a society free to create itself out of nothing in isolation from hostile counter-pressures. Mars is of course barren of life before the arrival of the first trickle of colonists — the Martian population starts in the hundreds and rises to the tens of millions — so it has the potential to create itself out of nothing. But in reality, it is a colony controlled by Earth, regularly sent new colonists who don’t share the lofty ideals of the independence-minded or “native” Martians, and who act as forces to create a replication of Earth. Here we have a different contradiction, that between the huge distance between the planets that should provide the space for a new society to create itself and the very powerful forces that bind the new, and still developing, society to the old.

For a long time, those powerful forces overpower the native energy that seeks to create a new Martian society; a society that would be different and more advanced than what can currently exist on Mars. The Martians don’t have the option to isolate themselves — even if they could reach a consensus on that issue — because they aren’t strong enough to stop the UN from following whatever policies the UN wishes to follow. Gradually, repression is strengthened until the movement for independence is forced underground. During this time, underground resistors can create small hidden pockets where new societies can be created, but they are politically impotent.

Mars, still red (Image created by NASA via Hubble Space Telescope)

Unlike the “ambiguous utopia” of Anarres, where there was freedom to create something entirely new in a political vacuum, the Mars of Mr. Robinson’s Mars trilogy has real pressures acting on it, external and internal. Far from political, social or environment unity, this Mars has wide ranges of opinion on all questions, and vastly different, even irreconcilable, cultural experiences. It has to find a way to juggle and allow expression to all these forces, assuming it can even find a way out of its colonial status.

None of the other issues can be tackled until the first issue of independence can be solved. Even then, Mars will not have full freedom of action. A well-timed revolution, launched just as Earth enters into a sudden global environmental crisis, enables the Martians to overthrow the direct rule of the UN and Earth’s corporations, but does not remove the power that still exists on Earth. There are those on Mars opposed to the revolution; they are politically neutered now but won’t necessarily remain so. There are socially backward elements who can only cling to what they left behind on Earth. Among the majority pro-revolution opinion, there are a variety of conflicting interests and differing political ideas. The environmental split between “Reds” and “Greens” still exists; the Reds are losing that battle and know it, but still seek to at least slow down or somehow halt progress on terraforming.

At the start of a revolutionary period, all things are possible. How will the possibilities be sorted? How can all reasonable opinions be represented? How and who can decide what a reasonable opinion is? During this period of tremendous change, which will eventually come to a close, how radical a break from the old society can there be? How fast and how far can the revolution go in building a new society? Can an accommodation be made with many conflicting areas of opinion while retaining the revolutionary impulse to create a new society? Can competing interests co-exist long enough to build lasting institutions, or must one group begin to dominate other groups? Can the unique circumstance of tens of millions of miles of space between the planets allow a radical break from the past that would not be possible on Earth?

Other than the last question, these questions apply to all revolutionary situations. The uniqueness of revolting on a separate planet does give the Martian revolutionaries the space to create lasting institutions locking in a radically new society; but even here, Earth’s need to deal with its environmental catastrophe keeps it occupied. Otherwise, any attempt at revolution likely would have been doomed. Indeed, a first attempt is mercilessly crushed by the UN.

Freedom from economic coercion at the base

The political institutions the new Martian government creates are not necessarily a vast departure from previous government styles; but it is different enough to allow radical changes in other spheres of life, especially social and economic. The government is nominally a multi-party parliamentary system on a global scale; but government exists only at the city and global levels. There are no countries or subdivisions. Economic freedom and equality is enshrined in the new Martian constitution; all workplaces are collectively owned by the people who work there. The new society is stripped of inequality and all hierarchy; with full equality among all citizens, a full and exuberant sexual freedom for all genders blossoms with the elimination of sexism. Anything less is incomprehensible to those born on Mars free of the horrors of Earth.

Perhaps all this happens rather too easily, but the buildup to the revolution and the pre-revolutionary work of creating a new world lasts several decades and involves three generations, so it by no means is a sudden change. Unlike the “ambiguous utopia” of Anarres — rather conveniently allowed to happen on an empty moon — Mr. Robinson’s Mars trilogy takes the realistic approach that old hierarchies can only be removed with considerable effort. Along the way, the characters struggle with the weight of history, and argue history’s lessons.

There is no doubt that further lessons need to be learned from history, and it is clear that both Ms. Le Guin and Mr. Robinson have not only studied, but learned, history. Their fictional worlds, and the very real and interesting characters who inhabit them, are all the richer for this. But can these worlds — the stateless anarchism of Anarres and the Marxist egalitarianism governed through parliamentary consensus of Mars — be brought into existence on Earth? Would we want to, or would a better world be different that these ideals? Can a truly egalitarian society, allowing a full scope of economic as well as other freedoms, come into being, or would hostile capital-dominated countries inevitably overwhelm it, as the 20th century’s socialist experiments were overwhelmed?

What the planets created in these fictions have in common is that the inhabitants have full freedom — starting with economic freedom, without which most other freedoms are illusions. (Unless your idea of democracy is choosing what cola you can drink.) Whatever the future has in store for humanity, it will certainly be different from the future societies sketched in this review. But the future will have to include a full range of freedoms similar to that enjoyed by the books’ characters. That won’t happen under capitalism — by definition, it can’t — and it won’t happen under a monolithic party that doesn’t understand its own doctrine. It won’t come under an ephemeral “third way” that is just capitalism with a thin veneer of sweetener layered on the top.

Humanity will have to find a way forward, somehow, or face catastrophe. I won’t pretend to have the answer. But it is nice to have stimulating fiction that works not only as a fine read, but allows us to think about the possibilities along the way.

The revolt that shook the world

History does not travel in a straight line. I won’t argue against that sentence being a cliché. Yet it is still true. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be still debating the meaning of the October Revolution on its centenary, and more than a quarter-century after its demise.

Neither the Bolsheviks or any other party had played a direct role in the February revolution that toppled the tsar, for leaders of those organizations were in exile abroad or in Siberia, or in jail. Nonetheless the tireless work of activists laid the groundwork. The Bolsheviks were a minority even among the active workers of Russia’s cities then, but later in the year, their candidates steadily gained majorities in all the working class organizations — factory committees, unions and soviets. The slogan of “peace, bread, land” resonated powerfully.

The time had come for the working class to take power. Should they really do it? How could backward Russia with a vast rural population still largely illiterate possibly leap all the way to a socialist revolution? The answer was in the West — the Bolsheviks were convinced that socialist revolutions would soon sweep Europe, after which advanced industrial countries would lend ample helping hands. The October Revolution was staked on European revolution, particularly in Germany.

The beginning of the October Revolution in Nizhny Novgorod on the Annunciation Square

We can’t replay the past and counterfactuals are generally sterile exercises. History is what it is. It would be easy, and overly simplistic, to see European revolution as romantic dreaming, as many historians would like us to believe. Germany came close to a successful revolution, and likely would have done so with better leadership and without the treachery of the Social Democrats who suppressed their own rank and file in alliance with the profoundly undemocratic Germany army. That alone would have profoundly changed the 20th century. And provided impetus to the uprisings sparking off across the continent.

Consider the words of British prime minister David Lloyd George in 1919 as he discussed his fears with Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister: “The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt among the workmen against prewar conditions. The whole existing order, in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other.”

What country goes first?

Russia was the weak link in European capitalism and the stresses of World War I added to the conditions for a revolution. Not an inevitability. Leon Trotsky’s analogy of a steam engine comes to life here: “Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.”

The October Revolution wouldn’t have happened without a lot of steam; without masses of people in motion working toward a goal. The revolution faced enormous problems, assuming it could withstand the counter-assault of a capitalist world determined to destroy it. The revolution was a beacon for millions around the world as strikes and uprisings, inspired by the example of Russians, touched off across Europe and North America. Dock and rail workers in Britain, France, Italy and the United States showed solidarity through refusing to load ships intended to be sent to support the counterrevolutionary White Armies that massacred without pity. Armies, assisted by 14 invading countries, that sought to drown the revolution in blood.

The revolution survived. But the revolutionaries inherited a country in ruins, subjected to embargoes that allowed famines and epidemics to rage. The cities emptied of the new government’s working class base, the country surrounded by hostile capitalist governments. There was one thing the Bolshevik leaders had agreed on: Revolutionary Russia could not survive without revolutions in at least some countries of Europe, both to lend helping hands and to create a socialist bloc sufficiently large enough to survive. The October Revolution would go under if European revolution failed.

Meeting at the Putilov Factory (1917)

Yet here they were. What to do? With no road map, shattered industry, depopulated cities and infrastructure systematically destroyed by all armies hostile to the revolution — having endured seven years of world war and civil war — the Bolsheviks had no alternative to falling back on Russia’s own resources. Those resources included workers and peasants. For it was from them that the capital needed to rebuild the country and then begin to build an infrastructure that could put Russia on a path toward actual socialism, as opposed to an aspirational goal well into the future, would come.

The debates on this, centering on tempo and how much living standards could be short-changed to develop industry, raged through the 1920s. Russia’s isolation, the dispersal of the working class, the inability of a new working class assembled from the peasantry to assert its interests and the centralization necessary to survive a hostile world — all compounded by ever tightening grasps on political power by ever narrowing groups that flowed from the country’s isolation — would culminate in the dictatorship of Stalin.

Privatization ends chance of democratic control

Stalin would one day be gone and the terror he used to maintain power gone with him. But the political superstructure remained — the single party controlling economic, political and cultural life, and the overcentralized economic system that steadily became a more significant fetter on development. The Soviet system was overdue for large-scale reforms, including giving the workers in whose name the party ruled much more say in how the factories (and the country itself) were run. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, and the country’s enterprises were put in private hands at minuscule fractions of the value of those enterprises, the chance to build a real democracy vanished.

A real democracy? Yes. For without economic democracy, there can be no political democracy. The capitalist world we currently inhabit testifies to that. What if the people of the Soviet Union had rallied to their own cause? What if the enterprises of that vast country had become democratized — some combination of cooperatives and state property with democratic control? That could have happened because the economy was already in state hands. That could have happened because a large majority of the Soviet people wanted just that. Not capitalism.

They were unable to intervene during perestroika. Nor did they realize what was in store for them once the Soviet Union was disbanded, and Boris Yeltsin could impose shock therapy that threw tens of millions into poverty and would eventually cause a 45 percent reduction in gross domestic product — much deeper than the U.S. contraction during the Great Depression.

A revolution that began with three words — peace, bread, land — and a struggle to fulfill that program ended with imposed “shock therapy” — a term denoting the forced privatization and destruction of social safety nets coined by neoliberal godfather Milton Friedman as he provided guidance to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Millions brought that revolution to life; three people (the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus) put an end to it in a private meeting. With the financial weapons of the capitalist powers looming in the background, ready to pounce.

The Soviet model won’t be recreated. That does not mean we have nothing to learn from it. One important lesson from revolutions that promised socialism (such as the October Revolution) and revolutions that promised a better life through a mixed economy (such as the Sandinista Revolution) is that a democratic economy and thus a stable political democracy has to rest on popular control of the economy — or, to use the old-fashioned term, the means of production.

Leaving most of the economy in the hands of capitalists gives them the power to destroy the economy, as Nicaragua found out in the 1980s and Venezuela is finding out today. Putting all of the enterprises in the hands of a centralized state and its bureaucracy reproduces alienation on the part of those whose work makes it run. It also puts into motion distortions and inefficiencies because no small group of people, no matter how dedicated, can master all the knowledge necessary to make the vast array of decisions that make it work smoothly.

The world of 2017 is different from the world of 1917; for one, the looming environmental and global-warming crisis of today gives us additional impetus to transcend the capitalist system. We need to produce and consume less, not more, unlike those of a century ago. We need the participation of everyone, not bureaucracy. Planning from below with flexibility, not rigid planning imposed from above. But we need also learn from the many advancements of the 20th century’s revolutions — the ideals of full employment, culture available for everyone, affordable housing and health care as human rights, dignified retirements, and that human beings exploiting and stunting the development of other human beings for personal gain is an affront.

The march forward of human history is not a gift from gods above nor presents handed us from benevolent rulers, governments, institutions or markets — it is the product of collective human struggle on the ground. If revolutions fall short, or fail, that simply means the time has come again to try again and do it better next time.

This article originally ran in the Indypendent newspaper of New York.

Working collectively beats working for a boss

Cooperative enterprises are more stable than conventional capitalist enterprises, are more productive and create jobs that are more sustainable. And although the temptation to see coops as a magical solution to the ills of capitalism should be resisted, that they are better for workers than top-down enterprises shouldn’t be any surprise.

The better performance of cooperative enterprises, and the better results for workers, than that of traditionally run capitalist enterprises was recently summarized by the organization Co-operatives UK in its report, “What do we really know about worker co-operatives?” Written by Virginie Pérotin, the report analyzed international data on worker-owned and -run businesses in Europe, the U.S. and Latin America and compared the results with conventional businesses.

Moreover, the report said, conventional enterprises have something to learn from cooperatives: “in several industries, conventional companies would produce more with their current levels of employment and capital if they behaved like employee-owned firms.” Setting aside the unlikelihood of capitalists suddenly deciding to cede control and/or share profits, the preceding quote only makes sense. Why wouldn’t we be more productive if we were working for ourselves and had a say in the running of the business rather than toiling within the traditional concept of having to accept orders from above by people who have no interest other than squeezing as much out of you as possible?

Les Mees Cereal Food Cooperative PAD in France (photo by JPS68)

The Co-operatives UK report defined a worker co-operative as an enterprise in which all or most of the capital is owned by employees (members) whether individually and/or collectively; all categories of employees can become members; most employees are members; in accordance with international co-operative principles, members each have one vote, regardless of the amount of capital they have invested in the business; and members vote on strategic issues in annual general meetings and elect the chief executive officer. Law firms were excluded because only some lawyers can be partners nor can any support staff.

The main findings of the report are:

• Worker co-operatives are larger than conventional businesses and not necessarily less capital-intensive.
• Worker co-operatives survive at least as long as other businesses and have more stable employment.
• Worker cooperatives are more productive than conventional businesses, with staff working “better and smarter” and production organized more efficiently.
• Worker co-operatives retain a larger share of their profits than other business models.
• Executive and non-executive pay differentials are much narrower in worker co-operatives than in other firms.

More productive and more stable

There are benefits not only for the workers of the cooperative, but also for the local community:

“Labour-managed firms are probably more productive and may preserve jobs better in recessions than conventional firms, creating more sustainable jobs. Promoting worker co-operatives could therefore improve local communities’ employment, and therefore health and social expenditure and tax revenue. …

Employee control is thought to increase productivity, and in a labour-managed firm adjusting pay to preserve jobs makes sense for the employee-owners. Worker-members make the decision to adjust pay and they get the future profits (whereas it is more difficult for a conventional firm to elicit employees’ agreement for pay cuts in exchange for job preservation, since the firm’s owners have an incentive not to increase pay when business recovers).”

And certainly no cooperative is going to vote to ship itself thousands of miles away to a low-wage haven!

Interestingly, perhaps because the example of the factory takeovers in Argentina come readily to mind, cooperatives are more commonly formed from scratch, rather than as rescues of failing enterprises. In France, for example, 84 percent of worker cooperatives started from scratch with only seven percent a rescue of a failing conventional firm during the years 1997 to 2001, whereas in the same period, 64 percent of all firms started from scratch and 20 percent as a rescue of a failing conventional firm.

A significant reason for that is undoubtedly government support. The French and Italian governments provide support for cooperatives and this accounts for the relatively higher number of coops in those two countries. The Co-operatives UK report estimates Italy has at least 25,000 coops, France has 2,600 and Spain has 17,000, compared to only 500 to 600 in Britain.

Government support for coops in France and Italy

During the last years of the 2000s, about 200 new enterprises joined France’s national federation of cooperatives (Société coopérative et participative, or SCOP) annually, and the numbers continue to grow. According to Co-operative News, three-quarters of French coops remain in business after three years, while only two-thirds of French businesses overall last that long. The French government directly provides assistance:

“[W]orker co-operatives receive tax benefits from the French government. SCOPs do not have to pay the professional tax, which is 1.5% to 2.5% of revenues and income on worker shares is exempt from income taxes. There are also financial mechanisms for workers to use redundancy payments as part of wider financing package to buy-out and provide cash-flow for the business once they take it over.”

The federation also provides financing for capital needs through its own financial institution. Financing is also available for cooperatives in Italy.

The taken-over Zanón ceramics factory, now known as FaSinPat, or Factory Without a Boss (photo by Guglielmo Celata)

The formation and sustainability of cooperatives in Italy are facilitated by the country’s Marcora Law. One aspect of this law is that laid-off workers can elect to have their unemployment paid in a lump sum to be used toward the formation of a cooperative, in conjunction with a minimum number of similarly situated workers. Cooperative members have technical assistance and financing available to them through a mutual fund run by cooperatives, to which all coops in turn contribute 3 percent of their net income. There are also banks that specialize in servicing cooperatives on advantageous terms.

The stability of coops in turn provides stability to the communities in which they operate, notes Co-operative News in a report on Italy’s Marcora Law:

“But beyond the economic and employment policies, the social dimension should not be underestimated: co-operation, by nature, is inextricably linked to geographical territory and, therefore, the re-launch of a business is almost always the re-launch of an important contribution to the economic regeneration of the area in which the enterprise operates; the assets of the business continues to be indivisible and inter-generational, which helps link the co-operative with its social reality.”

Continued survival in Uruguay

In Uruguay, mutual aid cooperatives have a long history — housing cooperatives began to be formed in 1966, with a rapid increase in them after the passage of the National Housing Act in 1968. These were suppressed during the years of military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s.

Worker-run cooperative enterprises constitute a tiny percentage of the economy in Uruguay. There was, however, a significant expansion in their numbers following a deep economic downturn there in 2002 and they have since gained some government support from the Frente Amplio government. These are often successful. A study finds that cooperatives have survival rates one-third above other enterprises. The study’s author, Gabriel Burdín, writes:

“[S]urvey evidence … in Uruguay indicates that [worker-managed firms] employ less supervisors compared with [conventional firms], rely more on mutual monitoring among co-workers and are more likely to introduce organizational innovations such as team work, quality groups, job rotation and consultation mechanisms.”

In Argentina, workers’ cooperatives were formed as acts of survival.

An organizer at the Zanón factory that is often seen as an exemplary model, Raúl Godoy, speaking at a Left Forum panel organized by Left Voice, told the audience of the long years of organizing necessary to have made the takeover possible. Even after the fall of Argentina’s military dictatorship, blacklists were maintained by employers during the era of formal democracy, and the Zanón factory had a “very harsh regime” for workers. Mr. Godoy reported that organizing had to be done “in almost conspiratorial fashion” outside the factory.

The Zanón activists built relationships with workers fighting in other places; sought to defend the rights of workers; built relationships with “picateros” (organized unemployed people who frequently use direct-action tactics), Mapuches, women and other workers; and did “important militant work that involved building confidence.” Thus when the factory was to be closed and the workers had to occupy it, and physically defend themselves from expulsion, they were able to be cohesive and to count on the assistance of the surrounding community.

The limits of the possible in Argentina

Although forming a cooperative was not necessarily their desired outcome, it represented what was possible at the time. Mr. Godoy told the Left Voice panel:

“There is no individual escape from the capitalist situation. We did not have the power to go beyond the cooperative form. It was the way we could maintain what we had accomplished.”

Argentine authorities have never been supportive of the recovered factories, and the new neoliberal government of Mauricio Macri has quickly slowed itself openly hostile to them. Thus Argentina’s cooperatives face a challenging future. “There is no solution within the capitalist system,” Mr. Godoy said.

Nonetheless, Argentine cooperatives have provided a demonstration of worker-run enterprises forging strong links with their communities, with mutual benefit to the enterprise and the community that supports the enterprise. The employees doing so first had to overcome their own doubts about themselves, but were able to draw on the experience of those who went first and created national organizations to represent the cooperatives and enable coordination among them.

It is no so simple matter for working people to acquire the confidence to run businesses themselves; pervasive capitalist ideology insists the businesses can only be run by a small elite, who are therefore entitled to collect hundreds or even thousands of times more in compensation than their employees. Yet how could any business function without the know-how and cooperation of its workforce?

That the working conditions within cooperatives are superior to traditional top-down enterprises is simply common sense. But cooperatives are small islands in a vast sea of capitalism, and can’t escape the pull of capitalist markets, no matter how humane an internal culture might be. Cooperatives in themselves don’t necessarily herald a coming socialist dawn; they are quite compatible with capitalism.

Cooperating with cooperatives

Even if cooperatives were to become the dominant enterprise model, that by itself would not eliminate competition. To create a truly new, better system, in an economy based on cooperatives, the cooperatives would have to cooperate with each other in a system with democratic accountability. (This does not preclude that certain key industries, such as banking, would be in state hands under democratic control.)

An alternative to capitalist markets would have to be devised — such an alternative would have to be based on local input with all interested parties involved. Such an alternative would have to be able to determine demand, ensure sufficient supply, allow for fair pricing throughout the supply chain, and be flexible enough to enable changes in the conditions of any factor, or multiple factors, to be accounted for in a reasonably timely and appropriate fashion.

For now, however, cooperatives must compete with capitalist enterprises with all the rigors of capitalist markets. Not even the world’s most successful cooperative, Mondragon, is exempt from this. That cooperatives tend to cut wages rather or dip into reserves rather than lay off workers, with an eye toward future better times in which pay cuts can be made up, may be more humane, but it also reflects that a cooperative enterprise that must compete is eventually forced to treat its own wages as a commodity.

If an economy is based on cooperatives, but those cooperatives compete against each other, the cooperative members will become their own capitalists and be forced to cut their wages to survive competition.

The intention here isn’t to pour cold water on the idea of cooperatives — they have tremendous value in demonstrating that working people don’t need bosses and that it is not necessary to work long hours for little pay so that a few people at the top can amass fortunes. The profits divided between industrialists and financiers derive from the difference in the value of what you produce from what you are paid.

Shouldn’t the people who do the work earn the benefits? Shouldn’t communities have stability instead of being subjected to the whims of far-off corporate bosses? In a better world, they would be.

The forgotten workers’ control movement of Prague Spring

At the time of the [August 1968] Soviet invasion [of Czechoslovakia], two months after the first workers’ councils were formed, there were perhaps fewer than two dozen of them, although these were concentrated in the largest enterprises and therefore represented a large number of employees. But the movement took off, and by January 1969 there were councils in about 120 enterprises, representing more than 800,000 employees, or about one-sixth of the country’s workers. This occurred despite a new mood of discouragement from the government from October 1968.

From the beginning, this was a grassroots movement from below that forced party, government, and enterprise managements to react. The councils designed their own statutes and implemented them from the start. The draft statutes for the Wilhelm Pieck Factory in Prague (one of the first, created in June 1968) provide a good example. “The workers of the W. Pieck factory (CKD Prague) wish to fulfill one of the fundamental rights of socialist democracy, namely the right of the workers to manage their own factory,” the introduction to the statutes stated. “They also desire a closer bond between the interests of the whole society and the interests of each individual. To this end, they have decided to establish workers’ self-management.”

Prague (photo by Beentree)

All employees working for at least three months, except the director, were eligible to participate, and the employees as a whole, called the “workers’ assembly,” was the highest body and would make all fundamental decisions. In turn, the assembly would elect the workers’ council to carry out the decisions of the whole, manage the plant and hire the director. Council members would serve in staggered terms, be elected in secret balloting and be recallable. The director was to be chosen after an examination of each candidate conducted by a body composed of a majority of employees and a minority from outside organizations.

A director is the top manager, equivalent to the chief executive officer of a capitalist corporation. The workers’ council would be the equivalent of a board of directors in a capitalist corporation that has shares traded on a stock market. This supervisory role, however, would be radically different: The workers’ council would be made up of workers acting in the interest of their fellow workers and, in theory, with the greater good of society in mind as well.

By contrast, in a capitalist corporation listed on a stock market, the board of directors is made up of top executives of the company, the chief executive officer’s cronies, executives from other corporations in which there is an alignment of interests, and perhaps a celebrity or two, and the board of directors has a duty only to the holders of the corporation’s stock. Although this duty to stockholders is strong enough in some countries to be written into legal statutes, the ownership of the stock is spread among so many that the board will often act in the interest of that top management, which translates to the least possible unencumbered transfer of wealth upward. But in cases where the board of directors does uphold its legal duty and governs in the interest of the holders of the stock, this duty simply means maximizing the price of the stock by any means necessary, not excepting mass layoffs, wage reductions and the taking away of employee benefits. Either way, the capitalist company is governed against the interests of its workforce (whose collective efforts are the source of the profits), and by law must be.

National meeting sought to codify statutes

The Wilhelm Pieck Factory statutes were similar to statutes produced in other enterprises that were creating workers’ councils. It was only logical for a national federation of councils to be formed to coordinate their work and for economic activity to have a relation to the larger societal interest. Ahead of a government deadline to produce national legislation codifying the councils, a general meeting of workers’ councils took place on 9 and 10 January 1969 in Plzeň, one of the most important industrial cities in Czechoslovakia (perhaps best known internationally for its famous beers). A 104-page report left behind a good record of the meeting (it was also tape-recorded); representatives from across the Czech Lands and Slovakia convened to provide the views of the councils to assist in the preparation of the national law.

Trade union leaders were among the participants in the meeting, and backed the complementary roles of the unions and the councils. (Trade unions, as noted earlier, convened two-thirds of the councils.) One of the first speakers, an engineer who was the chair of his trade union local in Plzeň, said a division of tasks was a natural development: “For us, the establishment of workers’ councils implies that we will be able to achieve a status of relative independence for the enterprise, that the decision-making power will be separated from executive powers, that the trade unions will have a free hand to carry out their own specific policies, that progress is made towards a solution of the problem of the producers’ relationship to their production, i.e., we are beginning to solve the problem of alienation.”

Some 190 enterprises were represented at this meeting, including 101 workers’ councils and 61 preparatory committees for the creation of councils; the remainder were trade union or other types of committees. The meeting concluded with the unanimous passage of a six-point resolution, including “the right to self-management as an inalienable right of the socialist producer.”

The resolution declared,

“We are convinced that workers’ councils can help to humanize both the work and relationships within the enterprise, and give to each producer a proper feeling that he is not just an employee, a mere working element in the production process, but also the organizer and joint creator of this process. This is why we wish to re-emphasize here and now that the councils must always preserve their democratic character and their vital links with their electors, thus preventing a special caste of ‘professional self-management executives’ from forming.”

That democratic character, and the popularity of the concept, is demonstrated in the mass participation—a survey of 95 councils found that 83 percent of employees had participated in council elections. A considerable study was undertaken of these 95 councils, representing manufacturing and other sectors, and an interesting trend emerged from the data in the high level of experience embodied in elected council members. About three-quarters of those elected to councils had been in their workplaces for more than ten years, and mostly more than 15 years. More than 70 percent of council members were technicians or engineers, about one-quarter were manual workers and only 5 percent were from administrative staffs. These results represent a strong degree of voting for the perceived best candidates rather than employees simply voting for their friends or for candidates like themselves—because the council movement was particularly strong in manufacturing sectors, most of those voting for council members were manual workers.

These results demonstrated a high level of political maturity on the part of Czechoslovak workers. Another clue to this seriousness is that 29 percent of those elected to councils had a university education, possibly a higher average level of education than was then possessed by directors. Many directors in the past had been put into their positions through political connections, and a desire to revolt against sometimes amateurish management played a part in the council movement. Interesting, too, is that about half the council members were also Communist Party members. Czechoslovak workers continued to believe in socialism while rejecting the imposed Soviet-style system.

Government sought to water down workers’ control

The government did write a legislative bill, copies of which circulated in January 1969, but the bill was never introduced as Soviet pressure on the Czechoslovak party leadership intensified and hard-liners began to assert themselves. The bill would have changed the name of workers’ councils to enterprise councils and watered down some of the statutes that had been codified by the councils themselves. These pullbacks included a proposed state veto on the selection of enterprise directors, that one-fifth of enterprise councils be made up of unelected outside specialists, and that the councils of what the bill refers to as “state enterprises” (banks, railroads and other entities that would remain directly controlled by the government) could have only a minority of members elected by employees and allow a government veto of council decisions.

This proposed backtracking was met with opposition. The trade union daily newspaper, Práce, in a February commentary, and a federal trade union congress, in March, both called the government bill “the minimum acceptable.” In a Práce commentary, an engineer and council activist, Rudolf Slánský Jr. (son of the executed party leader), put the council movement in the context of the question of enterprise ownership.

“The management of our nation’s economy is one of the crucial problems,” Slánský wrote.

“The basic economic principle on which the bureaucratic-centralist management mechanism rests is the direct exercise of the ownership functions of nationalized industry. The state, or more precisely various central organs of the state, assume this task. It is almost unnecessary to remind the reader of one of the principal lessons of Marxism, namely he who has property has power…The only possible method of transforming the bureaucratic-administrative model of our socialist society into a democratic model is to abolish the monopoly of the state administration over the exercise of ownership functions, and to decentralize it towards those whose interest lies in the functioning of the socialist enterprise, i.e. the collectives of enterprise workers.”

Addressing bureaucrats who objected to a lessening of central control, Slánský wrote,

“[T]hese people like to confuse certain concepts. They say, for example, that this law would mean transforming social property as a whole into group property, even though it is clearly not a question of property, but rather one of knowing who is exercising property rights in the name of the whole society, whether it is the state apparatus or the socialist producers directly, i.e. the enterprise collectives.”

Nonetheless, there is tension between the tasks of oversight and of day-to-day management. A different commentator, a law professor, declared,

“We must not…set up democracy and technical competence as opposites, but search for a harmonious balance between these two components…It would perhaps be better not to talk of a transfer of functions but rather a transfer of tasks. It will then be necessary for the appropriate transfer to be dictated by needs, rather than by reasons of dogma or prestige.”

These discussions had no opportunity to develop. In April 1969, Alexander Dubček was forced out as party first secretary, replaced by Gustáv Husák, who wasted little time before inaugurating repression. The legislative bill was shelved in May, and government and party officials began a campaign against councils. The government formally banned workers’ councils in July 1970, but by then they were already disappearing.

This is an excerpt from It’s Not Over: Learning From the Socialist Experiment, published by Zero Books. Citations omitted. The omitted sources cited in this excerpt are: Robert Vitak, “Workers Control: The Czechoslovak Experience,” Socialist Register, 1971; Oldřich Kyn, “The Rise and Fall of the Economic Reform in Czechoslovakia,” American Economic Review, May 1970; and several articles anthologized in Vladimir Fišera, Workers’ Councils in Czechoslovakia: Documents and Essays 1968-69 [St. Martin’s Press, 1978]