A good turnout last night for the first night of winter to hear Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor of Jacobin magazine, at Trades Hall in Melbourne. Sunkara is touring Australia to promote socialism in general and his new book, The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, in particular. He’s a fine speaker and well worth listening to, even though I think his main conclusions are untenable.
Discussions of socialism are often plagued by definitional problems: what do we actually mean by “socialism”? Reviewing Sunkara’s previous book, The Socialist Manifesto, Kristian Niemietz at the Institute of Economic Affairs praised him for avoiding ambiguity on that score: “It is perfectly clear what he means by ‘socialism’: it is an economy in which the means of production are collectively owned, and in which wage labour has been eliminated.”
I’ve previously quoted David Friedman’s line that socialism has “become a word with positive connotations and no content.” It certainly has a clear content for Sunkara as an economic program, but it’s also something more like a moral ideal. He sometimes uses “socialism” to describe a general state of human liberation – what the economic program is supposed to achieve rather than the program itself.
Of course he believes that one requires the other. But if he could be convinced that he was wrong, and that a free and humane society could be built without abolishing private capital, it’s not clear how he would conceptualise that: would he say that socialism turned out to be unnecessary, or that we had discovered an alternative route to socialism? Perhaps it’s that equivocation that keeps him comfortable with “Jacobin” as a title, even though the original Jacobins were not socialists.
To his credit, Sunkara has taken on board some of the criticisms made over the years of socialism and of particular socialist (or “socialist”) governments. He has no time for the Soviet model, and not just because of its horrific political consequences: he understands that it failed economically as well, and for fundamental reasons. He accepts, at least in part, the critique of Hayek and von Mises that showed the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism.
He therefore accepts the necessity of markets and pricing for consumer goods and decentralised control of production. But he aims to combine that with the abolition of private ownership of capital, and it’s far from clear that a substitute for market-based allocation of capital can be found. As Steve Horwitz puts it, summarising von Mises’s argument, “Without private property in capital, neither markets nor exchange were possible, and without them, there could be no money prices as the basis for comparisons of value. In a world of collective ownership of the means of production, socialist planners would stumble around in the dark.”
And this is not just a theoretical objection; it’s confirmed by the fact that moves towards centralised ownership (whether by the state or private monopolies) and prevention of capital markets from functioning have historically tended to produce economic failure. Maybe the reason the working class don’t (as he conceded) identify as socialist is because they realise it just can’t produce the abundance that capitalism does.
But Sunkara’s us-and-them model of political conflict predisposes him not to see that. To quote Niemietz again:
In Sunkara’s world, there are no competing ideas, just class interests and class struggle. If a country enacts left-wing policies (such as Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s, or France during the first two years of Francois Mitterand’s government), it is because “labour” is challenging the power of “capital”. If a country reverses left-wing policies (such as Sweden in the 1990s and 2000s, or France after Mitterand’s U-turn), it is because “capital” is reasserting its power again.
The more mundane explanation that sometimes, policies are reversed because they are simply no good, does not occur to him. But it sometimes fits the facts a lot better.
There’s a further issue, too. Once you’ve accepted that central planning doesn’t work, you can’t give socialists what many of them seem to want, namely government control of what gets produced. No doubt some of the crowd last night would have wondered whether Sunkara was a socialist in their terms at all. Letting markets decide who gets what is bound to produce results that the (socialist) authorities might not like.
That’s especially the case because Sunkara is firmly committed to democracy. If it happens that “market socialism” can be improved by upgrading the “market” part and downgrading the “socialist” part, presumably a political movement will be found to advocate that, and if that movement wins elections then there’s not much Sunkara’s socialists can do about it. Let that process continue for a while and you might just find that you’ve reinvented capitalism.
Ultimately the issue is what works to make people prosperous and free, not what we call it. In the piece I quoted at the start, Friedman concludes as follows:
Your property is that which you control the use of. If most things are controlled by individuals, individually or in voluntary association, a society is capitalist. If such control is spread fairly evenly among a large number of people, the society approximates competitive free enterprise—better than ours does. If its members call it socialist, why should I object?
The World is Not Enough 
The Greens here certainly don’t speaj to Australia’s modern working class or to the modern era — notice their bleating that private religious schools that receive government money should not get exemptions from LGBTIQ protects — even though the debate over state aid was decided 60 years ago. And that we should bring back the closed shop and sympathy strikes — abolished decades ago because they are coercive.
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