A Third Soul

1. That Marxism mainly conceptualizes economics, and
2. That conceptualizations of the other mentioned realms offer equally central insights and moreover that influences from other domains can centrally contour economic relations, just as vice versa.

That is, Marxists would need to jettison their base/superstructure conceptualization and instead highlight that gender, race, and political dynamics  can impact economics just as powerfully as vice versa. Marxism would need to recognize both directions of causality, not exclusively or even primarily only causality from economics to the rest of society, and would have to refine many of its concepts accordingly. This type critique has in the past propelled feminists to create socialist feminism (to try to merge insights from gender-focused and class-focused analysis) and has led also to variants of anarcho-marxism, Marxist nationalism, and so on regarding other conceptual combinations…right up to frameworks that centrally address economics, polity, culture, and kinship all on a par.

But the above is not the problem of Marxism that I wish to feature in this discussion, nor the one that I think is central to Marxists being, most often, on the “from above” side of Draper’s typology. Indeed, suppose most Marxists have already or will soon achieve the above enrichment and diversification of their concepts, as some certainly have. Would I be satisfied with such a renovated Marxism?

I’d be happy about it, yes, but no, I wouldn’t be satisfied with it because I think Marxism has a second problem, more damning and intractable. That is, Marxism gets the economy wrong.

On the one hand, in orthodox variants, and in almost all its texts, the Labor Theory of Value misunderstands the determination of wages, prices, and profits in capitalist economies and turns activists’ thoughts away from seeing how the dynamics of the workplace and market are largely functions of bargaining power and social control, categories that the labor theory of value largely ignores. Likewise, orthodox Marxist crisis theory, in all its variants, distorts understanding of capitalist economies and anti-capitalist prospects by often seeing intrinsic collapse where no such prospect exists and by often orienting activists away from the importance of their own organizing as a far more promising basis for change. But these ills too, one can imagine Marxists transcending, as indeed many have. So let’s assume these all away, as well.

Far more important than these failures, what I want to focus on is that in virtually every variant of Marxism, Marxist class theory literally denies the existence of what I call the coordinator (professional-managerial or technocratic) class and undercounts its antagonisms with the working class as well as with capital. This particular failing has long obstructed class analysis of the old Soviet, Eastern European, and Third World non-capitalist economies, and of capitalism itself. It is the failing, I think, that leads Marxist thinking and practice, good intentions aside, to so often be “from above” – in the precise sense of being from the stance of the coordinator class.

Marxism rightly reveals that class differences can arise from differences in ownership relations. Capitalists own means of production. Workers own only their labor power which they sell for a wage. The capitalist pursues profit by trying to extract as much work as possible at the least expenditure possible. The worker tries to expand wages, improve conditions, and work as short and little as possible. Class struggle.

So, what’s the problem? This Marxist picture certainly rings plenty true, as far as it goes. The problem is, why should only property relations generate class difference? Why can’t other social relations of work and economic life divide actors into critically important opposed groups with different circumstances, motives, and means?
The answer is that they can. Some waged employees monopolize empowering conditions and tasks and have considerable say over their own work situations and those of other workers below. Other waged employees endure only disempowering conditions and tasks and have virtually no say over their own or anyone else’s conditions. The former try to maintain their monopoly of empowering circumstances and greater income while ruling over the latter. Class struggle.

Within capitalism, in this view we have not only capitalists and workers, but, in between, there is a coordinator class of empowered actors who defend their advantages against workers below and who struggle to enlarge their bargaining power against owners above. But even more, this coordinator class can actually become the ruling class of a new economy that has capitalists removed but also has workers still subordinate. That is, Marxism obscures the existence of a class which not only contends with capitalists and workers within capitalism, but which can become ruler of a new economy, aptly called, I think, coordinatorism.

Finally, the really damning point is that this new economy that I call coordinatorism, is familiar. It has public or state ownership of productive assets and corporate divisions of labor. It remunerates power and/or output. It utilizes central planning and/or markets for allocation. It is typically called by its advocates market socialism or centrally planned socialism. It is celebrated as the goal of struggle in every Marxist text that offers a serious economic vision. It has been adopted by every Marxist party that has ever redefined a society’s economic relations. It is prevalent, that is, yet it is barely conceptualized at all.

Regarding visions of desirable societies, it turns out, therefore, that Marxism is particularly counter-productive in a few ways. First there is Marxism’s general taboo against “utopian” speculation. Second, Marxism tends to presume that if economic relations are desirable other social relations will fall into place. Third, “From each according to ability to each according to need” is utopian and curtails needed information transfer and has in any event never been more than rhetoric for empowered Marxists and their alternative “from each according to work and to each according to contribution to the social product” is not a morally worthy maxim because it would reward productivity, including genetic endowment and differential tools and conditions. And fourth, and most damning, and most relevant here, in practice Marxism advocates hierarchical relations of production plus command planning or markets as means of allocation.

In other words, the heart of the problem that makes me reject Marxism and feel that it ought to have declining relevance among serious leftists seeking a new economy is that due to its underlying concepts and however innocently for a great many Marxist activists, Marxism’s economic goals amount to advocating a coordinator mode of production that elevates administrators, intellectual workers, planners, etc., to ruling status. This is why so many Marxists are advocates, in Draper’s terms, of a strategy that operate “from above.” Marxism seeks to elevate a class that is while under capitalism above workers, though below owners, to ruling status in a new economy. Marxism uses the label socialism, which is meant to imply people controlling their own economic lives, to0 label this goal, of course. But Marxism does not in fact structurally implement these ideals when it gains power to affect societal outcomes, nor does it offer a vision that does so even as an ideal. The situation is analogous, Marx himself would surely point out, to how bourgeois movements use the label democratic to rally support from diverse sectors for their political forms, but do not structurally implement truly democratic ideals.

Finally, what follows is that Leninism is a natural outgrowth of Marxism when employed by people in capitalist societies, and Marxism Leninism, far from being the “theory and strategy for the working class,” is, instead, due to its focus, concepts, values, organizational and tactical commitments, and institutional goals, the theory and strategy of the coordinator class. It employs coordinator class organizational and decision making logic and structure, and seeks coordinator class economic dominance. The from above Draper points to isn’t some aberration, it is a manifestation of coordinator class interests.

It is generally not very effective to rail against an intellectual framework of long standing by adopting a purely critical stance. Something positive must be offered. This is where Draper fell short, it seems to me. And for that reason, I should say that in place of the economic inadequacies of Marxism for greater relevance to our aspirations I think we should utilize a richer conceptual framework emphasizing the broader social relations of production, all the material, human, and social inputs and outputs of economic activity, the social and psychological as well as material dimensions of class division, and particularly the impact of corporate divisions of labor and market and centrally planned allocation on class hierarchy in capitalism and also in coordinatorism.
Having done all that, in addition to of course retaining the lasting insights of Marxism and for that matter all prior frameworks, I think we will reject existent and past market and centrally planned models of a better economy and gravitate instead toward new structures – from the bottom. For myself, I call the new economic goal I favor participatory economics including council self management, remuneration for effort and sacrifice (and remuneration for need for those who can’t work), balanced job complexes, and participatory planning. This is the vision part of what I would like to append to Draper’s insights.

If this model (worked out in full in many works and discussed in detail at www.parecon.org) is worthy and desirable, and if it should replace what has been called socialism (but has actually been coordinatorism) as the goal of movements seeking economic justice and equity, then I think rejecting Marxism and Leninism as ideologies to guide us should be done not simply due to finding fault with various aspects of each, but due to having a preferred alternative to utilize in their place.

Council self management is what the Bolsheviks destroyed, more or less, in the Soviet Union. Remuneration for effort and sacrifice counters rewarding power or output, the typical approach of “socialist” models. Balanced job complexes replace corporate workplace organization to eliminate the workplace basis for coordinator rule, present in all actual Marxist economies and all their substantive accounts of aims. Participatory planning replaces markets and or central planning, also present in virtually all Marxist program and practice, and does so to remove the allocational basis for coordinator rule. Together these features propel solidarity, equity, diversity, and self-management rather than stifling and trampling each. In some sense it might be nice to claim that Marxists have been confused all this time, advocating a mistaken set of institutions that doesn’t, in fact, spring from the logic of their conceptual framework, as Draper wants to argue, but it would be a bit disingenuous, I think. Coordinatorism does have roots in various Marxist and particularly Leninist concepts and commitments, which is why these latter need to be transcended and jettisoned.

Following Draper in finding some guidance in Marx’s work, I note that Marx taught us to look at ideologies or conceptual frameworks, and to ask of them, who do they serve? What are they suited for? What do they include, and what do they exclude, and will their inclusions and exclusions make them suitable or unsuitable for us? Marx was no one’s fool and these are very insightful instructions. Applied to Marxism, however, they reveal that the framework leaves out important economic relations virtually all to the benefit of the coordinator class in its agenda to overcome capitalism and install itself into ruling status. We shouldn’t only tinker with and otherwise refine Marxism, just as we shouldn’t only tinker with and otherwise refine bourgeois economics. These are frameworks bent to serve interests that we oppose. They have insights we can borrow, especially Marxism, of course. But as to the overall conceptual package — following Marx’s advice, we have to transcend that.
Now what about an that economic vision, that might propel and sustain, and emerge from and inform a truly “from below” movement such as Draper envisages and desires? Can we spell that out, at least a bit more?

Capitalist economics revolves around private ownership of the means of production, market allocation, and corporate divisions of labor. Remuneration is for property, power, and to a limited extent contribution to output causing huge differences in wealth and income. Class divisions arise due to property and due to differential access to empowered versus obedient work. Huge differences in decision-making influence and quality of circumstances exist. Buyers and sellers one-up each other and the broader public reaps what self-interested competition sows. Anti-social trajectories of investment and personality development result. Decision-making ignores or exploits ecological decay. Reduced ecological diversity results.

To transcend capitalism, suppose we advocate various common left core values – ones that I think Draper would himself certainly advocate: equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, and ecological balance. What institutions can propel these values in domestic economics, as well as admirably accomplish economic functions?

To start, we might choose to advocate public/social property relations in place of privatized capitalist property relations. In the new system, all citizens own each workplace in equal part. This ownership conveys no special right or income. Bill Gates doesn’t own a massive proportion of the means by which software is produced. We all own it—or symmetrically, if you prefer, no one owns it. At any rate, ownership becomes moot regarding distribution of income, wealth, or power. In this way the ills of private ownership such as personal accrual of profits yielding huge wealth, disappear.
Next, workers and consumers could be organized into democratic councils with the norm for decisions being that methods of dispersing information to decision-makers and at arriving at preferences and tallying them into decisions should convey to each actor about each decision, to the extent possible, influence over the decision in proportion to the degree they will be affected by it.

Councils would be the seat of decision-making power and would exist at many levels, including subunits such as work groups and teams and individuals, and supra units such as workplaces and whole industries. People in councils would be the economy’s decision-makers. Votes could be majority rule, three quarters, two-thirds, consensus, etc. They would be taken at different levels, with fewer or more participants, depending on the particular implications of the decisions in question. Sometimes a team or individual would make a decision pretty much on its own. Sometimes a whole workplace or even industry would be the decision body. Different voting and tallying methods would be employed as needed for different decisions. There is no a priori single correct choice. There is, however, a right norm to try to efficiently and sensibly implement: decision-making input should be in proportion as one is affected by decisions.

Next, we alter the organization of work changing who does what tasks in what combinations. Each actor does a job, of course. Each job is composed of a variety of tasks, of course. What changes from current corporate divisions of labor to a preferred future division of labor is that the variety of tasks each actor does is balanced for its empowerment and quality of life implications.
Every person participating in creating new products is a worker. The combination of tasks and responsibilities you have at work accords you the same empowerment and quality of life as the combination I have accords me, and likewise for each other worker and their balanced job complex.

We do not have some people overwhelmingly monopolizing empowering, fulfilling, and engaging tasks and circumstances. We do not have other people overwhelmingly saddled with only rote, obedient, and dangerous things to do. For reasons of equity and especially to create the conditions of democratic participation and self-management, when we each participate in our workplace and industry (and consumer) decision-making, we each have been comparably prepared by our work with confidence, skills, and knowledge to do so.

The typical situation now is that some people who produce have great confidence, social skills, decision-making skills, and relevant knowledge imbued by their daily work, and other people are only tired, de-skilled, and lacking relevant decision making knowledge due to their daily work. Balanced job complexes do away with this division of circumstances. They complete the task of removing the root basis for class divisions that is begun by eliminating private ownership of capital. They eliminate not only the role of owner/capitalist and its disproportionate power and wealth, but also the role of intellectual/decision making producer who exists over and above all others. They apportion conceptual and empowering and also rote and unempowering responsibilities more equitably and in tune with true democracy and classlessness.

Next comes remuneration. We work. This entitles us to a share of the product of work. But this new vision says that we ought to receive for our labors an amount in tune with how hard we have worked, how long we have worked, and with what sacrifices we have worked. We shouldn’t get more by virtue of being more productive due to having better tools, more skills, or greater inborn talent, much less by virtue of having more power or owning more property.

We should be entitled to more consumption only by virtue of expending more of our effort or otherwise enduring more sacrifice. This is morally appropriate and also provides proper incentives due to rewarding only what we can affect, not what we can’t. With balanced job complexes, for eight hours of normally paced work Sally and Sam receive the same income. This is so if they have the same job, or any job at all. No matter what their particular job may be, no matter what workplaces they are in and how different their mix of tasks is, and no matter how talented they are, if they work at a balanced job complex, their total work load will be similar in its quality of life implications and empowerment effects so the only difference specifically relevant to reward for their labors is going to be length and intensity of work done, and with these equal the share of output earned will be equal. If length of time working or intensity of working differ somewhat, so will share of output earned. Who mediates decisions about the definition of job complexes and about what rates and intensities people are working? Workers do, of course, in their councils and with appropriate decision-making say using information culled by methods consistent with employing balanced job complexes and just remuneration.

There is one very large step remaining, even to offering only a broad outline of economic vision. How are the actions of workers and consumers connected? How do decisions made in workplaces, and by collective consumer councils, as well as by individual consumers, all come into accord? What causes the total produced by workplaces to match the total consumed collectively by neighborhoods and other groups and privately by individuals? For that matter, what determines the relative social valuation of different products and choices? What decides how many workers will be in which industry producing how much? What determines whether some product should be made or not, and how much? What determines what investments in new productive means and methods should be undertaken and which others delayed or rejected? These are all matters of allocation.

Existing options for dealing with allocation are central planning (as was used in the old Soviet Union) and markets (as is used in all capitalist economies with minor or greater variations). In central planning a bureaucracy culls information, formulates instructions, sends these instructions to workers and consumers, gets some feedback, refines the instructions a bit, sends them again, and gets back obedience. In a market each actor in isolation from concern for other actor’s well being competitively pursues its own agenda by buying and selling labor (or the ability to do it) and buying and selling products and resources at prices determined by competitive bidding. Each person seeks to gain more than other parties in their exchanges.

The problem is, each of these two modes of connecting actors and units imposes on the rest of the economy pressures that subvert the values and structures we favor. Markets, even without private capitalization of property, distort valuations to favor private over public benefits and to channel personalities in anti-social directions thereby diminishing and even destroying solidarity. They reward primarily output and power and not only effort and sacrifice. They divide economic actors into a class that is saddled with rote and obedient labor and another that enjoys empowering circumstances and determines economic outcomes, also accruing most income. They isolate buyers and sellers as decision-makers who have no choice but to competitively ignore the wider implications of their choices, including effects on the ecology.

Central planning, in contrast, is authoritarian. It denies self-management and produces the same class division and hierarchy as markets built first around the distinction between planners and those who implement their plans, and then extending outward to incorporate empowered and dis-empowered workers more generally. Both these allocation systems subvert rather than propel the values we hold dear. What is the alternative to markets and central planning?

Suppose in place of top-down imposition of centrally planned choices and in place of competitive market exchange by atomized buyers and sellers, we opt for cooperative, informed choosing by organizationally and socially entwined actors each having a say in proportion as choices impact them and each able to access needed accurate information and valuations and each having appropriate training and confidence to develop and communicate their preferences. That would be consistent with council centered participatory self-management, with remuneration for effort and sacrifice, with balanced job complexes, with proper valuations of collective and ecological impacts, and with classlessness. To these ends, activists might favor participatory planning, a system in which worker and consumer councils propose their work activities and consumer preferences in light of accurate knowledge of local and global implications and true valuations of the full social benefits and costs their choices will impose and garner.

The system utilizes a back and forth cooperative communication of mutually informed preferences via a variety of simple communicative and organizing principles and vehicles including indicative prices, facilitation boards, rounds of accommodation to new information, and so on—all permitting actors to express their desires and to mediate and refine them in light of feedback about other’s desires, arriving at compatible choices consistent with remuneration for effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and participatory self managing influence.
Is the above a full picture of an economic alternative to capitalism? Of course not, it is too brief. But it is hopefully provocative and inspiring.