Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine’s “Revisiting the Calculation Debate: A Call for a Multiscale Approach,” is an essay accompanied by commentaries from Aaron Benanav, Hannah Archambault and Luke Pretz, and Ted Burczak, followed by Adaman and Devine’s own response to the commentaries, in a special symposium carefully edited and nurtured by our chief editor, Yahya M. Madra. Adaman and Devine each bring with them two decades of work in the field of political ecology. While Pat Devine connects with his vision of ecological socialism and brings it forward, Fikret Adaman draws on his collaborations on the many different distributional conflicts at the intersection between political economy and the environment in Turkey and beyond. Given the necessity of planned and equitable degrowth in the face of the climate crisis, any socialist proposition worth the name should get its bearings from these concerns, but this most certainly would and does require planning at a larger social scale. So, while the calculation debate might seem like an archaic controversy related to the Soviet Union, the topic is critically relevant today, and therefore the first part especially of Adaman and Devine’s text provides an excellent and succinct primer on the calculation debate, dating back to the 1930s and threading through Oskar Lange, Leonid Kantorovich, Friedrich von Hayek, and Maurice Dobb, among others. The main lessons of this debate have influenced the major contemporary socialist planning models: market-socialist exchange, direct allocation via a state engaged in central planning, and participatory planning (perhaps à la solidarity economy but not only, as Benanav’s response imagines). However, the problem of sustainability, and an adequate way of incorporating this problem as a key axis in the planning process, is a bit questionable across these models, according to Adaman and Devine. They therefore arrive at the necessity for ecosocial planning with both participatory deliberation and negotiated decision making at many levels, with regulatory bodies making decisions about shifting economic sectors, and with degrowth as the guiding principle. Frankly, in this current moment precisely, when large-scale social planning has struck even the most ardent procapitalists as necessary, the discussion raised by Adaman and Devine is grounded in the history of these debates and is absolutely of contemporary relevance. Recall, for instance, how nations have struggled to ensure integral supply chains, only one manifestation of which is the necessity to secure vaccines and medical supplies (prompting CNN anchors and politicians from both sides to openly call for implementing the U.S. Defense Production Act to direct manufacturers to produce PPE).
In the symposium’s first commentary, “Socialist Investment, Dynamic Planning, and the Politics of Human Need,” Aaron Benanav focuses on three items related to Adaman and Devine’s text: the power to form associations, the irreducible nature of conflict in any social decision making, and the role and function of investment. For Benavav, one primary goal of a socialist society is to avoid producing atomized individuals and to instead empower individuals to form a variety of associations around interests based not only in work but also other passions that they would be newly freed to pursue and develop. But this obviously means the increased potential for vocal associations to disrupt provisioning through a refusal to participate. Of course, more generally, utopian and equilibrium-based understandings of planning must contend with the antagonism inherent to any decision related to surplus allocation. And no matter what, any ecosocialist model is going to have to contend with participatory and planned modes of investment, even in a world of degrowth.
Archambault and Pretz’s commentary, “Racial Capitalism, Imperialism, and Negotiated Coordination,” starts from the authors’ belief that the “general outlines of Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine’s socialist and liberatory goals and of Devine’s model of negotiated cooperation are superior overall to the models of solidarity economy, market socialism, central planning, and participatory planning that they critique.” Their agreement ends, however, at the point of ecological constraints and sustainability serving as the exclusive axis around which negotiated decision making should revolve. They add racialization and imperial/colonial extraction as a vital central axis requiring reparation and redistribution, given the disproportionate harms of capitalism’s racialized historical process. They briefly catalog these harms, including the disproportionate death rate from COVID in communities of color, as that which would require redressing and reparation, which would in turn require distributions of social surplus that heretofore have been differentially extracted.
Theodore Burczak’s commentary, “Economic Democracy, Democratic Planning, and Human Autonomy: A Comment on Adaman and Devine,” asserts that large-scale planning already exists in multinational corporations. Just in January of 2022, ExxonMobil announced net-zero emissions by the year 2050, the last of the major oil producers to do so. Of course, critics have zoomed in on the giant loophole that net-zero emissions only concern the production process and not carbon as a product. However, the fact remains that corporations are used to planning across global scales and through time. Burczak points out that we also already live in a world of participatory planning where people in the production process constantly engage in face-to-face exchanges, learning, and evolution, and this information filters up the production chain. The problem is that the top management and ownership of capital usurp the decision-making role (in a top-down extractive manner rather than a bottom-up socialist one). Certainly, given his extensive expertise on Hayek, Burczak adds his own understanding of the contributions of Hayek, Dobb, John Kenneth Galbraith, and, in particular, Victor Vanberg, who helped rescue Hayek from charges of antidemocratism precisely by insisting that some rules limiting behavior (e.g., engaging in environmentally harmful behaviors) are actually democratic.
In their own response, Adaman and Devine approach the gifts of the symposium contributors’ commentaries in a generous and expansive fashion. They agree with Benanav (and highlight their previous work) regarding the importance that should be placed on associations that allow for collective deliberation, and they acknowledge their neglect of other kinds of nonproducer associations in realms such as the arts, culture, and mathematics, which they agree should be encouraged to flourish. They understand Archambault and Pretz’s main point regarding the necessity to account for the reparation of racial and colonial harms in any ecosocialist distribution mechanisms, and they agree that this point is not one they have highlighted, though they support its necessity in any transition from the current world to a future ecosocialist world that does not engage in racialized extraction. And last, they turn to their interlocutor, Ted Burczak, and restate both their agreement on tacit knowledge but also their divergence in terms of the prospect of market socialism.
Next, we have “Utopia against Abstraction: Raymond Williams, Communication, and the Desire of the Common,” by Roberto del Valle Alcalá, in which the author revisits Raymond Williams’s theoretical work by placing it in conversation with his last novel, Border Country. This novel “is where we find his most sustained articulation of the structuring opposition between concreteness and abstraction, work and labor, community (or common life) and society; and, indeed, this is where the terms of his communicative utopia become most readily available even as that utopia’s practical limitations are rendered apparent by effective historical crises.” Alcalá thus identifies in Williams’s early project the seeds of a radical program for utopian community if only the divisions constituted by capitalist abstraction can be overcome.
We next have two Remarx essays in conversation with one another: “Police Power in the Philippines in the Time of the Pandemic,” by Regletto Aldrich Imbong, and “Reflections on the Present Conjuncture,” by Pem Davidson Buck. Both essays belong right in line with the special RM dossier on Pandemic and the Crisis of Capitalism (http://rethinkingmarxism.org/Dossier2020). In his contribution, Regletto Aldrich Imbong turns our attention to the Philippine state’s militarization of its pandemic-related discourse. Imbong examines the public speeches of Rodrigo Duterte, counting the number of mentions allotted to the leader’s most-used words and showing the scant appearance of terms related to democracy or public health compared to the overall dominance of security-related terms. He also briefly compares Duterte’s discourse with that of political leaders who emphasized social and medical terms (doing the same word-cloud analysis of speeches by the prime ministers of Germany and Singapore and the president of South Korea). Imbong ultimately finds useful a concept developed by Banu Bargu in a piece she published in RM (vol. 31, no. 3): the biopolitical state apparatus, by which Imbong analyzes the evolution of the policed response to the pandemic in the Philippines.
Pem Davidson Buck reflects on the January 6th riots in Washington, D.C., the Floyd rebellion, and COVID, all in relation to her 2019 book, The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States. Buck begins with what we have all known: the disposability of the lives of “essential workers” and that, though they may be essential, a widespread and penny-pinching disregard exists for their protection and well-being. Echoing Archambault and Pretz from the symposium, Buck points to a mountain of evidence regarding the racialized effects of this disposability in the United States. She concludes that, to counteract this disposability, we must produce a flourishing of counterhegemonic histories. Her own book is part of that project, and the first review is a review of her book.
RM editorial team-members Boone W. Shear and Vincent Lyon-Callo review The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States by Pem Davidson Buck. This book is a development of U.S. history as a dynamic revolving around dispossession. Weaving in her own family history, she describes an intersectional process of the production of whiteness, which has deep political implications for a state that protects that whiteness, and dispossesses others to do so. Shear and Lyon-Callo ultimately find in this also cause for a politics of possibility though, as she also describes the pluriverse of other worlds displaced that “point to other ways of being, other realities, other worlds.”
Additionally, we have Jude Welburn’s review of Other Englands: Utopia, Capital, and Empire in an Age of Transition, by Sarah Hogan. Hogan’s book starts from Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia, which is conventionally depicted as self-enclosed and ahistorical. Hogan instead argues that early modern English utopian literature captures the contradictory differences emanating from the clash between modes of production during the period of late feudalism and early capitalism.
Next is Aaron Schneider’s review of Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India: Popular Mobilisation in the Long Depression, written by Jörg Nowak. This book focuses our gaze on the mass labor mobilizations that don’t take place through the conventional union organizations of the Global North, by focusing on major mobilizations in the Maruti Suzuki plant in Manesar, India, and the Belo Monte dam in Brazil, which have occurred during the extant fascistic regimes of Modi and Bolsonaro, respectively. While the book was written before the historic Indian farmers’ protest in 2020–1, such struggles are precisely the kind of ‘unconventional’ mobilization requiring our deeper investigation.
The final review, by Samuel J. R. Mercer, of Ana C. Dinerstein and Frederick H. Pitts’s A World beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia, is followed by a rejoinder from the authors themselves. Mercer appreciates the work being done by Dinerstein and Pitts to bring Marxist insights to existing postwork literature (including debates around universal basic income and automation), so much of which cannot adequately understand or break with capitalist social relations. While Dinerstein and Pitts are correct in their critique of postwork discourse not adequately distinguishing concrete from abstract labor, Mercer argues that the authors tend toward a fetishism of concrete labor themselves and that they also rely on a kind of humanism as they advance an alternate progressive version of postwork discourse. In the rejoinder, Dinerstein and Pitts take the opportunity to clarify that they understand abstract and concrete labor dialectically, disagreeing with the charge that they defend one over the other, but they accept the charge of humanism and explain why.