The Socialist Calculation Debate and the Commons

The paper discusses the relation between "The Socialist Calculation Debate" and the "Commons"

Calculation and Conflict

Today, it is often forgotten that the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s was not only about whether market societies were more economically efficient than planned ones; more crucially, Ludwig von Mises and his disciple Friedrich Hayek depicted economic planning as a threat to the moral and political order of “Western civilization.” A planned economy, these early neoliberals argued, would override the “democracy of consumers” through which individuals registered their own preferences on the market and threaten individual freedom and social peace. This article argues that early neoliberal thinkers mobilized a racialized argument against economic planning, which they depicted as a threat from “the East” and a regression to a “primitive” pre-capitalist, egalitarian morality. Against this neoliberal argument, I retrieve the Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath’s argument that a capitalist market economy is inherently violent and requires the suppression of non-market forms of life.

Three Agricultural Revolutions

Attempts to imagine a shift beyond capitalism often tend to fixate on the terms of the old socialist calculation debate: plan versus market. At its deepest level, though, capitalism is not fundamentally a matter of the distribution of goods, for underlying this is the possession of land. In thinking about the end of capitalism it is thus useful to return to the question of its origin as the second agricultural revolution in human history. If capitalism finds its roots in an agrarian transition, we might also locate its supersession at this level—in a third agricultural revolution.

Planning and Anarchy

Debates about planning on both the left and the right tend to misconstrue as problems of calculation what are, in fact, problems of control. The new powers of computing and communication developed in the twenty-first century do not, therefore, render the central planning of the twentieth century newly feasible. Rather, they merely make it possible to see as properly political problems that were once thought to be entirely technical. Restoring missing historical context to the socialist calculation debate, “Planning and Anarchy” discloses the blind spots in contemporary discussions of planning and offers an alternate vision of emancipation and planning, no longer dependent upon the tools of coercion inherited from capitalism.

Talking to Walls: The Socialist Calculation Debate that Never Really Was One

In his book «Socialism, Economic calculation and Entrepreneur-ship» Dr. Jesus Huerta de Soto (2010) gives an account of the his-tory of the socialist calculation debate, in which he shows very clearly why the political left today still believes a socialist econ-omy is possible. The popular wisdom in those circles, namely, is that in 1936, Oskar Lange (Lange, October 1936: 53–71 & February 1937) succeeded in refuting Mises’ claim that central planning could not work because the information that is needed to draw up such plans can only be generated in a free market. This paper wants to show that nothing could be further from the truth: Lange never answered Mises’ fundamental challenge, nor was there any other socialist economist that has been able to refute his central argument. A lot of straw men died, but Mises’ funda-mental argument lives.