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Non Market Socialism - What is it?
Non-Market Socialism, The Gift Economy:
What is it? How will it work?
The Socialist and Anarchist Utopias Panel
11.30am, 20 May at the The Great Transition: Setting the Stage for a Post-Capitalist Society International Conference, 17–20 May 2018, Montreal, Canada
Terry Leahy
This talk is to introduce the ‘non-market socialist’ model of a post-capitalist future. To begin with, let us outline our basic departures from the frameworks currently being proposed by other leftists. Most scenarios for post-capitalism envisage the continuation of a monetary economy. They propose a continuation of alienated labour to this extent. The population will depend on incomes earned through their work. This work will either be paid for by the state or be earned through the sale of their production on the market. While the proposal for a guaranteed adequate income (GAI) may seem to contradict this assertion, provision through the GAI is not meant to replace earned employment income, but to supplement that system of provisioning as an enlarged welfare payment, for a minority of the population.
On money, wage labour and markets
We believe that we need to transition past wage labour, money and markets. Non-market socialists believe that the market and money are not ‘neutral implements’. We believe that wage labour is an oppressive alienation of people’s work. We believe that all uses of money imply alienated labour. Alienated labour is also one of the key drivers of over-consumption — the demand for consumer goods as compensation for forced labour.
The usefulness of money and the necessity to earn income are premised on the coercive control of labour in other parts of the economy. Your money can buy things because other people have had to choose an employment that will make them money (regardless of whether it is the employment that they would prefer) and to distribute their production to those who want to pay money for it (even if this is not the distribution of their production that they would prefer). In that way, the usefulness of money, the presence of a market and alienated labour are bound together. Without alienated labour a market could not function.
The functioning of a ‘market’ is never simply the buying and selling of products at a particular price. It always depends upon a hegemonic discourse, which systematically prefers to buy the cheapest products and to sell at the highest price. The hidden hand of the market, the ability of markets to organise production predictably, depend absolutely on the operation of this discourse. The effect of this market process is to sideline other issues in relation to production and consumption as secondary in comparison to exchange value — for example issues of ecology, social justice or worker satisfactions.
In distinction from writers like Gibson-Graham and Olin Wright, we do not believe that alternative cooperative forms of market participation can avoid these consequences or that the market can be a neutral medium for making structural political choices or maintaining deep social and environmental values. All state regulation can do is create floors and ceilings to some of the worst excesses of the market.
The view that cooperatives of workers can overthrow this framework through a cultural decision is naïve. Such a strategy is ultimately impossible in a functioning market economy. As people who depend upon money to live, the members of the cooperative are also impelled, at least for the most part, to operate the discourse of buying cheap and selling dear. The decision of the Mondragon cooperatives to outsource some of their manufacturing work to low wage countries, and to workers who are not part of their collective, is an example of where this kind of politics leads us.
Let us assume that the reader is not convinced by the previous paragraph. Let us conduct a thought experiment in which we have arrived at a social order of which Gibson-Graham and Erik Olin Wright could be proud. Ninety per cent of the economy is the hands of cooperatives. These operate within a market economy, making and selling their production. As ‘ethical’ cooperatives, can they defy market logic if they think it is necessary to do so to pursue ethical goals?
Let us imagine that Firm A is producing and selling steel. They decide to sell this year’s round of production to Firm B, which is going to pay $2,000 despite the fact that firms C, D, E and F are all prepared to pay $10,000. Firm A is doing this because Firm B is located in a rural African village and they really need the steel to make their windmill cooperative work. Firm A is not worried to get such a low price. They intend to use the $2,000 they are getting from the steel to buy guitar amps. They feel sure that Firm X will sell them the guitar amps they want. Firm X makes guitar amps. They have offers from Firms Y, Z and Q. Each of these firms is ready to buy their latest batch of amps for $10,000. However what they have decided to do is to sell the amps to Firm A for $2,000 – the amount that Firm A is able to pay. They are going to do this because the village attached to Firm A is into Heavy Metal, the preferred genre of the workers of Firm X. The workers of Firm X are expressing their creativity by supporting the Heavy Metal musicians associated with Firm A. The workers of Firm X regard this as an ethical imperative.
What could we say about such a scenario? One thing is that it seems like a very random and unpredictable way to run an economy, risking opposition, failure and angst at every turn — an inefficiency that would make the Soviet Union look rational. The other thing is that clearly money and the market is not having much influence on decisions about production and distribution here. What we might suggest is that what these people really need, to make things a bit more predictable, is to negotiate arrangements of distribution and production in advance with other firms, taking into account the various ethical concerns that the parties bring to the table. This would actually be non-market socialism.
In other words, the vision of a market based in ethical cooperatives is an incoherent vision. Any attempt to run such a vision in practice would not actually work — it would be an economic disaster, would end up being just your typical market economy or would in fact propel its participants to non-market socialism.
The effect of the operation of markets is to create winners and losers, even if people start off at the same point — the lesson of the Monopoly game. If this outcome is to be systematically overturned at every point through contra-market decisions, we no longer have a monetary system either — we have play money at most. Better to openly negotiate production and distribution according to use values that take into account consumer needs, worker enjoyments and the environment. This is non-market socialism.
On the role of the state
The state depends on alienated labour to function. The executors of the will of the state, whether the state is democratic or authoritarian, are meant to carry out orders, regardless of their own views about the matter in question. This implies wage labour, in a generalised context of alienated labour in society at large. They need to get a job and do what their state employers tell them to do.
Moreover, state planning is a form of coercion of the population, even if it implements the will of the majority. In their work, members of society are coerced to behave in particular ways at work to carry out these planning directives. If we are to really exercise collective governance over production, we need to replace the state with horizontal forms of collective governance.
Currently, in capitalism, entrepreneurs, the state and the market plan people’s work and we already participate in democratic processes that make the system operate more effectively. There are greater or lesser degrees of workplace consultation and pressure from workers that effectively alter the terrain of work. Nevertheless, and despite all this ‘participation’, this work is still alienated because market structures dominate decision-making in form and content. Ultimate control is elsewhere. In other words, the state depends on money, money is not possible without a state to enforce or delegate monetary processes. The market makes sense by using money and money implies a market. All three — money, market and state — depend on alienated labour.
Non-market socialism
The post-capitalist future envisaged in non-market socialism has no monetary system. There is no money or anything equivalent to it such as a system based on exchange by barter. There is no state. Labour is not performed to get money. Monetary compensation is unnecessary; goods and services are provided free of charge by a network of voluntary collectives, and by self-provisioning households and communities.
Our present conjunction and the alternative
The system of alienated labour is a central cause of environmental damage, partly because the working class strives to increase consumption as a legitimate compensation for forced labour. The solution is non-market socialism or the gift economy, where people choose work that is interesting and useful. ‘Compacts’ are an authoritative promise to deliver products as ‘gifts’.
Chains of production operate through gifts between different kinds of productive units. For example, steel workers provide steel to be given to those who make rails who, in turn, give the rails to those running the train service. Specialist goods are transferred by sustainable transport.
A lot of provisioning and productive decision-making is at the local level because sufficiency and environmental goals can be best achieved by local production. This local production is supplemented by networks at regional, national, and international scale to produce and distribute specialist goods and to exchange cultural products. For instance, members of largely self-sufficient villages might send representatives to a centralised site of production for goods — such as computers, glass and cement — used by the whole bio-region. Alternatively, members of each village may conduct one part of a coordinated plan for a networked production of something such as a computer or train, which is assembled from parts put together in different villages.
No central authority directs the economy. People are not alienated because they have control over their choice of work; they have local control over work practices; they have control over distribution of their product. They do not require compensation in the form of increasing consumption. Instead, they make compacts to ensure everyone’s basic needs are met.
What motivates people to work in such an economy? Within each ‘collective’, village and household, work can be allocated by meetings and rosters which ensure that everyone involved gets to do something interesting as well as contributing to the mundane but necessary tasks.
In terms of the economy taken as a whole, people are motivated by a hegemonic discourse, which acknowledges the necessity of all to play their part to make life comfortable. Status — the appreciation of others and acclaim — play a part in motivating people to achieve and provide useful services for others, as in stateless societies of the past.
Of course, none of this is fool-proof and people who are regarded as ‘lazy’ may be variously treated for some kind of emotional problem or alternatively frowned upon as under-performing. Stateless societies of the past have often coped quite well with strategies that do not expect a uniform degree of productivity but, nevertheless, allocate uniformly according to need. It seems likely that this is ultimately the best way to motivate people who are going through a period of ‘laziness’.
Planning for sustainable outcomes
The question is not: How does a non-market socialist society ‘plan’ to avoid environmentally damaging consequences? But, rather: What is it about current patriarchal capitalist society and other class-based social orders that produces environmental degradation? Just looking at capitalism as a particular case.
• Competition between firms for profit. The growth economy as consequence.
• The market/money determination of production decisions, rather than use values.
• Externalisation of environmental damage unless it impacts on exchange value.
• Alienated labour. Consumption as compensation.
• Punitive childcare regimes. Cutting off demands for feeding, competition over toys, isolation, regimes of punishment.
• A repression of basic desires leading to disgust and rejection of the natural world as messy and out of control.
• Patriarchy as a model of control and hierarchy exported to provide the psychological basis for denial of our dependency on nature.
• Patriarchy as model for and psychological basis for the control of nature and the lower classes as-if-women.
Without all these drivers of environmental damage, local decision-making through chains of overlapping compacts and a genuine respect for nature as the source of our life and regeneration would tend to avoid environmental damage. Decision-making at every point would consider the environment as a use value to be protected, along with people’s pleasure at work and their desires for particular products.
Networks and coordinated meetings would come to agreements on how to manage common resources, where environmental effects were impacting on one region and community but caused by others. These planning devices would mean agreements reached by consultations between communities already connected through a variety of non-market exchange relationships.
Environmental research would take different forms from in capitalism. There would need to be a common culture of love of the natural world. Particular groups would take it as their passion to look after and develop commonly shared knowledge about other species. As in many Indigenous cultures, there would be ceremonies and rituals to link humans to the natural world and to celebrate the environment.
There would be status and acclaim for actions that looked after the natural world. People would avoid production that damaged their local environment, as members of their own community, knowing that others in their community would condemn them for any behaviour of this kind.
Decisions that had international impact — for example seeding the oceans with iron filings to stimulate algae and take up carbon dioxide — would be reached after international consultation and scientific study. They would be implemented locally by voluntary working bodies tasked with particular roles in carrying out such an international plan. The intervention would be tried out and fine-tuned as it proceeded. If particular groups abstained from carrying out their role, conflict resolution and new plans would address these frustrations.
In extreme cases, environmental vandalism would be called out as such; enforcement by voluntary bodies backed by the broader community could be the outcome. The principle of this kind of enforcement would be no different from that lying behind the revolution itself – seizure of the means of production from the ruling class, with the rationale that these people cannot be trusted with this resource.
In conclusion
Labour is alienated for a reason — to enable control, whether through statist processes or through the market and private ownership. It is no accident that societies based in alienated labour have not enabled popular control of production. It is no accident that such societies produce and depend upon competitive hierarchies in which the products of alienated labour are the prizes for which elites compete. These issues have become critical at the present time because alienated labour is always being bought off with promises of increased consumer pleasures. Likewise, the competitive market place is a guarantee of expansion and growth.
We do not think it is any accident that socialist (and anarchist) revolutions of the past have failed. We do not believe that the basic problem has been the failure of these revolutions to be sufficiently democratic in their political structures. We do not think that their failures have come about through insufficient scope being given for competitive market efficiency in their economic structures. Instead we believe that the failure to get rid of monetary and market coercion has burdened these revolutions with the problems of alienated labour, which also weigh down current capitalism.
Non-market socialists are often accused of having no plan. Ironically, our model incorporates planning in a more direct and efficient way than in either capitalism as we know it or what we know of productivist socialist states of the twentieth century. Non-market socialism is a strong model for a post-capitalist future.