“He was a lovely boy, my son… I think of him everyday.”

This is what I heard as I tuned in half awake to BBC Breakfast TV this morning. As this mother spoke about her son you saw an old video of them tenderly dancing together in the kitchen. Her son had committed suicide in his twenties as he despaired of ridding himself of a gambling addiction. The BBC was running this story because the Labour government had announced a new statutory levy on the gambling industry that would raise £100m which would be used for addiction prevention and replace NHS funding for treatment. These grieving parents said it was a step forward but a lot more needed to be done. For example, the industry wide gambling body had put out a statement claiming the addiction problem was a tiny percentage but these parents explained how it was using discredited figures.

More serious, comprehensive surveys had shown the industry had wildly underestimated the true number. About 500 people commit suicide as a result of gambling addiction each year. Around half a million to 1.4 million people, depending on different studies, are negatively affected by various degrees of gambling addiction. We were wide awake now and it shook us because we had a close relative whose marriage had been destroyed by the husband’s gambling addiction. Today I was going to start my review of this book. I had found the hook for one of Simon Hannah’s key arguments in the first part of his new book Reclaiming the Future.

Capital does not count externalities

Capitalism separates politics from economics. People have little democratic control over the operations of these big companies. Mass mobilisations and huge shifts in public opinion are needed just for a government to take some moderate measures against a company that is damaging our health and society. Capitalist companies do not include in their costs the external consequences of their functioning, this so the human and economic costs of suicides and addictions just do not feature in their balance sheets. Faced with some negative press or public opinion they will contribute to a gambling addiction charity that they effectively control but these sums are piffling compared to the massive profits they make. Betting companies are some of the biggest contributors to both mainstream parties. Their business model relies on the ease of online betting today and their huge advertising budgets – just watch any Premier League match to see. Free bets and inducements, including tracking their regular punters, is all part of their profit making.

As Hannah argues, these externalities can never really be properly controlled under capitalism to stop the betting plague inflicting so many lives. Socialism is all about ending these nefarious externalities or consequences by workers collectively and democratically discussing what goods should be produced and how they should be controlled. So for example you could limit gambling to small bets and a national lottery and save all the resources wasted on advertising. In some countries the national lotteries and racing betting is under state control. The same arguments we have applied here to gambling is true for other sectors of the economy that directly affect our environment. Historically the fossil fuel industry is the biggest example of capitalism not paying the costs of its externalities – even when their internal research clearly revealed the negative effects on the environment in the 1970s.

John McDonnell MP, in his introduction, points out two reasons why this book is really useful:

• the ecological crisis and global boiling has meant controlling and planning economic activities in order to save humanity and the planet is much more urgent
• activists need the arguments for planning and a knowledge of the experience of previous historical attempts at doing it

In other words we need democratic planning not just to end capitalist profit making which is based on exploitation and huge inequality but also to save ourselves from extinction and the planet from dying. At the same time we are not starting from the viewpoint of the early socialists and Marxists who did not envisage and did not have to deal with the disaster of the degeneration of the socialist experiment into Stalinist bureaucratic repression and inefficiency. An experiment that could not deliver better average outcomes for workers in the Soviet Union compared to the capitalist West.

Workers have led struggles about taking control

The first part of the book gives us a detailed analysis of how capitalism operates as a system and is particularly useful to those readers who have not studied much Marxism. It also shows how capitalism is based on class struggle and always generates resistance and opposition as we experience exploitation and ecological crisis. Examples are given about how people in struggle have attempted to challenge the autocracy of capital and raised the banner of workers control or planning for needs:

• the early years of the Russian revolution from 1917 with the Soviets
• the Turin workers councils in which Gramsci was involved
• May 1968 in France or 69 in Italy saw many examples of workers occupying factories and demanding change beyond wage demands
• the Portuguese revolution of 1974 saw soldiers, peasants and workers self-organising their own factories or taking over the land they worked
• in Iran too there were shura committees in many factories when the Shah was overthrown in 1979

So this is not an abstract, academic debate but connects to the living struggles of the movement. In Britain we have had the example of the UCS shipyard occupation in 1971 in Glasgow or the Lucas Aerospace workers who drew up an alternative plan for their factories in the 1970s. Finally we are witnessing today the exemplary struggle of the ex-GKN workers in Florence who have occupied their factory to prevent its sale to property developers and have drawn up detailed plans for making solar panels and cargo bikes.

Modelling socialist planning

The third section of the first part is a bit more abstract but is necessary for laying out a robust theoretical model of what a society based on socialist planning might look like. The key changes that need to happen in this transitional society are:

• to establish social control over investment and production
• to institute a participatory democracy
• to abolish the social division of labour (mental/manual/gender/race etc)
• to end commodity production (much more free goods and universal basic services)

I liked how the process is not idealised by the writer – he uses the term ‘messy’ and the inevitably of making mistakes. Happiness cannot be guaranteed – people will still get sick, have difficult emotional relationships, not get on with everybody and fear of death won’t go away. But those social and economic relations that currently cause a lot of avoidable unhappiness can be changed. People have to feel materially better off even when they enjoy the beauty of a more communal, caring society that has as little inequality as possible. If a competing capitalist world – since socialism will not come everywhere at once – looks to provide a better life then the transition will always be in danger. Of course socialism is international or it is nothing, you cannot build socialism in one country, this was the opinion of Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxembourg and the Soviet Union experience has borne this out. Inevitably a society in transition to socialism requires a quite different participation in politics that the passive atomisation and shallow spectacle we have today under capitalism.

Someone once told me after getting involved in left politics that they never realised it meant quite so many meetings. Hence the importance of three points the author makes. First, you have to reduce the length of the working week – if we cut out the waste and non-productive sectors of capitalism such as advertising or excessive gambling we could do this. Already there is a trend to a four day week under capitalism. Second, education and training will need super boosting so that people can understand better how things work like the algorithms, AI, economics or other scientific processes. Third, there will have to a combination of representative and direct democracy – permanent assemblies to decide everything is not realistic. The internet and technology gives us a much better opportunity than in the days of the Russian Soviets to manage mass participation.

The second part of the book takes up:

• the arguments people make against socialism,
• goes over the debates between socialists
• focuses on the ecological discussion of the Green New Deal, Ecosocialism and Degrowth.

There are three main arguments that people make against socialism: it sounds a good idea but human nature just cannot be socialist; the theoretical argument about capitalist markets and profit being a better way of organising society to benefit everyone and the reality of how planning failed in post-capitalist societies like the Soviet Union.

It’s human nature isn’t it?

“Human nature is everything that humans do. It is war but also peace. It is caring as well as hating, selfish or cooperative. Everything human is part of our nature, to claim there is an essential part which overrides the others naturally would need to be explained (…) In contrast the reductive view is that we are mere Homo economicus, rational actors motivated by narrow self-interest and competition.” (page 150)

As Hannah says, if all this individualism and competition is so natural why do the state and the ideological apparatuses spend so much money and time reinforcing the ideology? Thatcher made a very perceptive comment on this in 1981 when she said ‘Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul’ (page 150). She knew that for example her council house sell off would strengthen individualist, market ideology, she knew that ideology requires a material underpinning – preaching is just part of it. Elsewhere in the book the author also shows how the material nature of commodity production and market relations embeds this idea of individualism on an everyday basis that looks like common sense.

So people like James Dyson, Elon Musk or Richard Branson are lionised as personalities changing society through their individual entrepreneurship rather than as a consequence of family capital, luck and a determinate system of production. I like the way that the relationship of the individual to socialist planning is posed here. We can argue that it is in the individual’s self-interest to opt in to socialism – their life will be more secure and joyful, their individuality will freely blossom. Socialists do not need to be defensive about individuals realising their potential. A society where everything is fairer will produce many more ‘geniuses’ than we have today. Ask any teacher,they will all tell you that they taught brilliant kids who could have done anything but were stifled or rejected by our system.

Isn’t the market and profit more efficient?

The couple of pages or so summarising the classic anti-socialist ideas of Von Mises and Hayek are really useful. You can only unpick an opponent’s arguments if you take time to understand and lay them out clearly. Von Mises argues that private property and competitions equals rationality because it gives you accurate signals about your production whereas central planners would just have to guess. For Hayek the market is the best way of synthesising all the knowledge you need to make about the economy through the price mechanism. Such a system also is capable of responding quickly to significant disruptions in society or economics. In other words capitalism has a simplicity and efficiency than cannot be rivalled in socialist planning.

What are the counter arguments?

Today’s prices are merely a snapshot of the consequences of past actions…even more irrational is the fact that today’s prices, in determining today’s investments, also determine tomorrow’s prices (economist Richard Day p159)

According to economist Stuart Chase (p160) there are four ways capitalism wastes resources and human potential, labour power is used to:

1. produce vicious or useless goods and services e.g. Xmas tat
2. is not used through unemployment or sickness produced by capitalist society and under resourced health services
3. in unplanned production and distribution e.g. food waste
4. waste and overuse of natural resources e.g. fossil fuels

The market has produced a very unevenly developed world. There are huge inequality and continuing misery for large minorities in the developed West and hunger, malnutrition and failed states in the Global South.

People are motivated to do great things without the motivation of personal enrichment – just think of Tim Berners-Lee (the internet) or Edward Salk (vaccines) who asked a journalist – can you patent the sun? I would add that there are millions of ordinary people who give their free time voluntarily to run charities, to organise sports or youth clubs, to support community hubs or cultural activities. This is a solid basis for building a different society.

It is a myth too that all innovation and development comes from private entrepreneurship. States spend huge amounts on medical, military or other research in universities and other institutes that ends up creating profits for private corporations

Calculation about what and how much to produce can be done under socialist planning. Some consumption patterns are fairly stable and obvious so we do not need price signals to calculate resources. For instance nurses and teachers are recruited on the basis of population size and different area’s needs. Oskar Lange and Frank Taylor’s idea of shadow pricing in the transition could also work, keeping pre socialist prices but gradually refining them.

What about Russia?

Lenin in 1918 said ‘the complete victory of the socialist revolution in one country alone is inconceivable and demands the most active co-operation of at least several advanced countries, which do not include Russia’. Backwardness, the imperialist counteroffensive and the failure of the post First World War revolutionary upsurge in Western Europe meant that the conditions were favourable for Stalin to retreat from the aims of the Bolsheviks and to build an inefficient, bureaucratic command economy with violent repression. Certainly the abolition of the profit motive did allow the Soviet Union to develop a primitive socialist accumulation that enabled it to defeat the Nazis, to compete for some time in the Cold War and the Space race. A lack of democracy made it impossible to improve labour productivity compared to the West. A very narrow layer of society was managing the economy so there was no democratic input – stupidities like measuring productive success by weight of product meant poor quality goods and huge wastage. Low wages led to sluggish performance – they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. Socialist planning in a highly developed economy today with participatory democracy would have a much better chance of success.

Debates within Socialism

Some socialists have argued that the technology and planning already used by big corporations like Amazon or Walmart could be repurposed for democratic socialist planning. These companies already track customers and their preferences as we all know when we see the pop ups or emails we receive. Today’s just in time and live update systems would allow the rigidity of 5 year plans to be overcome. “Computer networks that gauge consumer demand could be connected to actual factories making the goods so that they could be made in the most cost-effective way imaginable, using the least resources required” (page 177). Nevertheless, however sophisticated the planning systems there will always be a political dimension over investments rather than consumer activity. We must also realise that just lifting these arrangements from the capitalist world would mean removing the monitoring and surveillance mechanisms which are often an integral part.

Aaron Bastani in his book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, tends to argue that increasing automation under capitalism is forcing a fundamental change in the economy that will lead to socialism. It is unlikely that there will be some sort of automatic process opening the road to socialism. Do we always want everything to be automated and to rapidly remove jobs? Personally the idea of robots looking after senior citizens in care homes is not a step forward to socialism. Techno fixes like this can also remove the key importance of the class struggle and human agency bringing change. The ecological limits of constant growth are not seriously recognised.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is discussed and as the author stresses it is rather contradictory. “Pilot schemes under capitalism can be used to either promote lives free from waged labour (what the left proposes) or to promote further privatisation (commodifying) of parts of the public sector by libertarians.” (page 186) As Bastani argues correctly we should support UBS – Universal Basic Services, a demand that expands the public sector and does not fit like UBI into a neo-liberal individualistic framework.

The Degrowth Dilemma

Starmer’s Labour governments predicates its whole political strategy on the notion of capitalist growth that will somehow allow it to better the lives of working people through some limited increase in social spending and environmental measures. The final chapter on the Green New Deal, Degrowth and Ecosocialism blows the delusions of this social liberal project out of the water. We need a different measure of economic progress. Toxic and wasteful production such as armaments or fossil fuels should end. Consumer durables that have built in obsolescence and cannot be repaired need to be wound down. Production of infrastructure and consumer goods in the global south will need to increase although skipping the Western phase of everyone owning a car in favour of more communal, public transport. We have to convince people that happy, meaningful lives do not depend on us getting the latest iPhone each couple of years or changing our car every three. There is an interesting discussion here on how we raise such issues in the mass movement. We should focus on approaches like Kate Soper’s idea of a new hedonism rather than drastic restrictions on our lives and a retreat to compulsory allotments.

Hannah’s book helps us to lift our head up above the humdrum activity of our meetings, demonstrations and campaigns. People will not sustain a commitment to socialist change if we cannot link their day to day struggles with a greater vision. As the rebels of May 1968 said – put our imagination in power.

Those fighting for a new world are like Monarch butterflies on their yearly migration from Canada to Mexico. It takes them four generations. Butterflies are born and die, never knowing their destination. Each contributes to the goal, helps the struggle to get closer. Who know what generation we are? We know others came before and took us some of the way. Mistakes were made and lessons learned. But we are compelled by the disaster of the present to press ahead to something better (page 120)

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