Bread and Robots

Vivek Chibber is one of the American Left’s sharpest thinkers, but I disagree in comradely fashion here that technological advance cannot enhance our planning capability. @michalrozworski and I showed in our book, People’s Republic of Walmart, how the vast internal planning apparatus of firms like Walmart and Amazon, has absolutely benefited from/been enabled by information technology developments. Another example: one should very easily see how AI is already making planning easier within public healthcare (one of the most complex set of calculations, with multiple objective functions, that society engages in). Following on from the AI-in-healthcare example, one should also be able to easily imagine how AI might be able to assist with both calculation and approaching the discovery function of markets (I.e., knowing preferences better than markets). How AI assists with the economic calculation problem—the single greatest technical challenge to socialist development—should really be obvious to socialists. This is one of the key reasons why socialists should be supporting (well-regulated, humanist-oriented) AI development rather than opposing it. Socialism does not only face political obstacles, but technical ones as well. One of the frustrating things that kept coming up during our book tour for People’s Republic of Walmart was at book readings, some people thought we were saying that planning is easy. No! Hayek and Mises were correct that it is very hard. They were only wrong in confusing hard with impossible. Just as we do not want society to be governed by unelected kings, bishops or lords, or by unaccountable bureaucrats, technocrats or dictators, we should also not want society to be governed by an amoral, unaligned, unconscious algorithm (ie market incentive). Planning is simply the steadily improving extension of democratic human rationality and sovereignty over ever more of what has dominated us, just as science and medicine steadily extends human rationality and sovereignty over biology and disease. And just like medicine, planning is not something that establishes complete human democratic rational sovereignty all at once. We win gains over time. Saying tech development assists with planning is not the same as saying tech resolves the economic calculation problem in favour of planning: it means instead that planning is not a binary of feasible/infeasible, but rather, alongside challenges from the political objections of those who have an interest in the economic calculation problem not being solved, planning is *a capacity that expands in concert with the development of the productive forces*. Economic planning, market socialism and the mixed economy of social democracy are thus not competing approaches to socialism, but complementary, and their roles relate to how developed the productive forces are. There is a Grand Unified Theory of these various socialisms waiting to be written…