Critique from the Left

As supporters of Market Socialism we usually must battle capitalist arguments to prove that our system is morally superior (and convenient, efficient and more). It is repetitive and tiring, but we are doing grunt work for the better cause. Sometimes the person confronting us is not a pro-Jeff Bezos embarrassed millionaire. Sometimes he or she will be a progressive, even a socialist. Sometimes we get run from the left.

In "Market socialism as a form of life", Tully Rector sustains that market practices are opposed to the principle of community, thus making our system fundamentally inestable. Tully's basic thesis is that "socialism cannot endure as the political logic of a market society, in which subjection to market dynamics is the principal experience of most agents’ lives as individual producers and consumers". If this is true, then market socialism is an oxymoron. Is it necessarily so? 

Tully writes beautiful intellectual prose, and he is way more intelligent than myself. His preferred system seems to be "Council Democracy'' (Vrousalis, Wollner) where control over capital is realized by the workers but ownership is public, managed by councils in layers of authority, from the workplace to the highest level. I think that systems with central weak points as this one should be avoided. Any system that allows the creation of an encroached central elitist bureaucracy will in time have to deal with one. 

Tully's ideas of a market are taken from the perfect curves of the marginalist world. In reality workers experience the market as a series of oligopolies, a small number of companies offering dissimilar products and segmented markets for the same kind of articles. The level of worker autonomy that I support needs an economy not planned by a higher authority. I'm pushing for full worker ownership of their means of production. Only then will we get the benefits of workers' autonomy. Reading Polanyi (the usual influence is this kind of articles) one could be tempted to dismiss any system containing "Market Society" elements; however Polanyi wrote that human motives were mostly social (security, status) instead of economic. And one of the advantages of Free Market Socialism is that it protects workers from long-term unemployment and elevates their social position inside and outside the workplace. 

For a workplace to be democratic, ownership and control are paramount. Following orders can be liberating if the conditions are right, but more often than not it results in alienation. And this includes following planners' orders in a "socialist" state. "Free" market (or at least the illusion of one) is an essential part of life as play, as long as the game doesn't result in a spiral of quality degradation (a recent example is the "Boeing 737 Max Disaster", provoked by capitalists trying to maximise share value while competing with Airbus). 

The most common attacks from the left side are represented in the superb "Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialist", with Schweickart and Lawler on the side of the Market Socialists against Ticktin and Ollman as the Marxist "orthodoxy". Schweickart is the only practical of the four and explains his usual Economic Democracy system while berating the opposition for not presenting actual applications of their theories. The other three discuss proximity with what Marx really meant and for how long a temporary market socialist situation would or could exist in the process towards full communism. Sometimes it feels like a light version of Marx himself debating about the future with John Stuart Mill. 

The orthodox have a problem with the market mechanism itself. Ollman thinks that "market socialists don't realize just how much of capitalism, of its practises and ways of thinking and feeling, and of its problems, are contained in its market relations, and, consequently, how much retaining a market, any market, will interfere with the building of socialism." They have a problem with competition incentives, with workers deciding to not work or to work too much, with them becoming little capitalists of their own, or copying their logic. 

Luckily they also express in the same book that their academic privilege seeps into their opinions. They just don't know how the working daily life of the proletarian is. They don't. It is perfectly possible to theorize about it, as with anything subject to scientific inquiry, but absorbing the practice would certainly change their views. It has mine. Market Socialism would fundamentally alter for the better the reality of everyday toil. Work conditions are everything. They're the majority of the waking hours of most people. Market Socialism gives them a vote in the matter. 

Critics say that Market Socialism is fried ice, thus impossible. Well, fried ice cream actually exists, and it is delicious. 

RECTOR, Tully (2021): Market socialism as a form of life, Review of Social Economy, DOI: 10.1080/00346764.2021.1886319

OLLMAN, Bertell, SCHWEICKART, David, LAWLER, James, TICKTIN, Hillel (1997): "Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialist". Routledge; 1st edition. 

This week in "mom I discovered cooperatives-based market socialism and this is my review of the literature":

JERVIS, Robin (2022): Co-operatives and Socialism: The Promises and Contradictions of a System of Worker Ownership; in book "Thinking Beyond Neoliberalism" (2022), ed: Neal Harris & Onur Acaroğlu, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, Palgrave MacMillan. 

Added to Accumulated Bibliography: (press to access)