Thoughts on Techno-optimistic Socialism

Image by DALL-E 2.

In my last essay, I discussed some currents of opinion on the contemporary political right that offer important insights into the nature of our present predicament. Now I’ll turn my gaze leftward and look at some socialist writers whom I regard, notwithstanding my deep disagreements with them on fundamental issues, as helping to shed light on where we should go from here.

In my lifetime, the political left’s attitude toward technological progress has been decisively shaped by the anti-Promethean backlash. The environmental consciousness that exploded onto the scene in the 1960s, with its strong anti-capitalist animus and romantic embrace of the primitive, quickly took hold of the post-mass-affluence New Left and from there proceeded to become progressive orthodoxy. As I’ve tried to explain it, the advent of mass prosperity shifted the egalitarian focus of the left from economic have-nots, whose plight outside of isolated pockets of poverty no longer seemed as pressing in the go-go 1960s, toward social and cultural “belong-nots” — historically marginalized groups that now sought acceptance in a new, more inclusive mainstream. Solicitude for the ultimate “other” — non-human life — slotted easily into the new commitment to wider moral horizons. (Ayn Rand had a less charitable interpretation, which I’ve always suspected played some role as well. By the 60s and 70s, it had become undeniably clear that capitalism was massively outperforming actually existing socialism when it came to material betterment for ordinary people. Accordingly, it was an especially convenient time for people hanging onto the socialist dream to call sour grapes on materialism.)

Of course, the Old Left wore its materialism proudly. As Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor, put it, “We do want more, and when it becomes more, we shall still want more.” Or recall Harry Truman’s line: “If you want to live like a Republican, you’ve got to vote for a Democrat.”

As to the socialism of the radical left, materialism was of course central to the thought of that creed’s greatest prophet. It is striking how Marx and Engels’ rhapsodic recitation of the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary accomplishments in The Communist Manifesto offers a more stirring tribute than capitalism’s most ardent defenders have ever managed. Here’s just a taste:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

In the Marxist vision, the bourgeoisie’s fatal flaw wasn’t their Promethean ambition. On the contrary, it was that their attachment to private property and the resulting “anarchy of production” stifled the full release of productive forces that would be possible under the conscious planning of economic life.

Under the pressure of dramatically changed circumstances, the center-left is now in the midst of a wrenching reappraisal of its knee-jerk antipathy toward moving atoms around at large scale. The gathering climate crisis, along with deepening problems of housing affordability plaguing metro areas across the United States and other advanced democracies, have revealed the pressing need for (in Ezra Klein’s words) “a liberalism that builds.” The inertia of older attitudes, though, remains formidable: yard signs proclaiming “in this house, we welcome all people” in neighborhoods zoned to exclude all but the rich have become a running joke, while environmental groups can regularly be found among the opponents of badly needed new clean energy projects. In my day job at the Niskanen Center, I am proud to be involved in the effort to fight this inertia and advance a transpartisan “abundance agenda” that both progressives and conservatives can embrace on their own terms.

Here, though, I’m interested in exploring more radical ideas on the left: those of a small circle of contemporary socialist writers who seek to reclaim and reimagine the left’s Promethean heritage. I’ll look in particular at three books from the past few years: Four Futures by Peter Frase; Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani; and The People’s Republic of Walmart by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski.

Frase’s book plays things closest to the vest, offering vignettes of four possible futures that might result from the intersection of two major contemporary developments: climate change and AI-driven automation. For purposes of creating his scenarios, Frase assumes that we are heading toward a highly automated future in which most work now done by people is handled by computers and robots, and that this will end capitalism as we know it. So what comes next? To create his four scenarios, Frase throws in a pair of variables: climate change and the politics of inequality. Will we achieve rapid decarbonization and enjoy the benefits of clean, abundant energy for all, or will collective action fall short and leave us in a world hemmed in by scarcity and environmental ruin? And secondly, will we devise rules that ensure that the productivity gains unlocked by widespread automation are widely shared, or will we see another upward spiral of inequality as a plutocratic elite manages to siphon off most of the benefits for itself?

Frase draws up a two-by-two matrix, with abundance versus scarcity as one dimension, and equality versus hierarchy as the other. The four resulting possibilities he labels as “communism” (abundance and equality), “rentism” (abundance and hierarchy), “socialism” (scarcity and equality), and “exterminism” (scarcity and hierarchy). It’s clear enough from the label that exterminism is a hellscape of mass suffering that no person with any humanitarian leanings would knowingly choose, and it’s equally clear that any book authored by an editor at Jacobin is going to favor equality over hierarchy. What’s distinctive about this book, though, at least in our present era, is that Frase distinguishes between socialist shared scarcity and communist shared abundance and unequivocally favors the latter.

Following the Marxist conception of communist abundance as a “realm of freedom” liberated from the need to work for extrinsic rewards, Frase agrees with Marx’s dictum that “the shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.” Much of Frase’s discussion is devoted to simply making the case that this is a worthy ideal – that paid work is not necessary to a flourishing life. (Yes, the unemployed in capitalist societies are miserable, but that is because work is the norm; retired people who aren’t expected to work are happy enough.) Establishing the long-term goal then sets the agenda for intermediate reforms: partially “decommoditizing” labor through universal basic income and expanded public services.  

In the delightfully titled Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani goes into considerably more detail in fleshing out the vision of a post-scarcity egalitarian utopia and the path from here to there. With exuberant techno-optimism, he sketches out the prospects for breakthroughs that can radically reduce the cost of living in sector after sector: automation and robotics that can do much of what humans now do but much more cheaply and effectively; clean energy that can carry us past the dangers of climate change to the expanded possibilities of cheap energy abundance (though he curiously neglects to mention either nuclear or geothermal options); asteroid mining, made possible by plummeting launch costs, that can render scarcity of key mineral resources a distant memory; gene editing, anti-aging therapies, and AI diagnostics that can greatly extend lifespans while reorienting medicine toward relatively cheaper prevention and cures and away from the expensive management of chronic conditions; and cultured meat to ensure that feeding ourselves no longer threatens the rest of life on this planet with loss of habitat.

Bastani refers to this dazzling set of possibilities as the “Third Disruption” (the invention of agriculture was the first, industrialization the second). Its defining characteristic is a “tendency to extreme supply”: given the dramatic and ongoing fall in the cost of information, and the centrality of information to all technological and organizational innovation (which consists of new recipes for rearranging matter and combining the work of people), the effect is to render not only new knowledge but also labor, energy, and material resources ever cheaper to produce.

These disruptions, meanwhile, are occurring at the same time that capitalism is undergoing a series of crises: climate change; broader problems of environmental degradation and resource depletion; falling birth rates and an aging population; a growing “unnecessariat” of marginalized workers; and the looming prospect of mass technological unemployment.

Bastani sees this juxtaposition of events as the birth pangs of a new social order emerging out of the wreckage of the old. The new order, fully automated luxury communism, is the world Marx dreamed of: a post-work world of plenty where the distinction between labor and leisure has all but dissolved. “Amid the changes of the Third Disruption the ‘fact’ of scarcity is moving from one of inevitable scarcity to political imposition.”

To midwife the transition to the realm of freedom, Bastani proposes a three-part program: re-localizing production through municipal investment and protectionism; socializing finance through local and regional investment banks; and free state provision of housing, transport, education, healthcare, and information as universal basic services. (Bastiani prefers UBS to UBI, which he sees as vulnerable to being perverted into an excuse for rolling back public provision elsewhere.) “While automation will eliminate as much work as possible,” Bastani explains, “those jobs which remain … will increasingly be performed by worker-owned businesses, completely transforming how we relate to society, work, and one another.”

The third book I want to discuss here is The People’s Republic of Walmart by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski. Phillips, a well-known science writer and ardent techno-optimist, is the author of Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff; for shorter samples of his work and worldview, check out this celebration of the human population reaching 8 billion, this argument that an ideal society would not ban private jets but instead provide them for everybody, and this fun interview with conservative techno-optimist Jim Pethokoukis.

Here, though, Phillips and his coauthor resurrect and reexamine the century-old “economic calculation debate” over the feasibility of socialist central planning. The book’s argument is that Marx’s vision of a planned economy was ahead of its time: a bold imaginative leap into the future that was simply unrealizable given the still-primitive state of overall technological development. According to Phillips and Rozworksi, the world has now caught up with Marx’s genius, as evidenced by corporate giants like Walmart and Amazon, which use advanced computer technology to centrally plan sprawling production and distribution operations whose size and complexity rival that of national economies. Whatever one makes of the merits of their thesis, along the way the authors offer lucid and entertaining discussions of the original calculation debate, the logistical complexities of Walmart’s and Amazon’s business operations, the development of linear programming as a Soviet planning tool, the crucial role of the Pentagon in promoting postwar U.S. innovation, the abortive Project Cybersyn under Salvador Allende in 1970s Chile, and much more.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that I have my differences with these authors, but let me start with what I think they get right. First and foremost is their recovery of Promethean ambition: they understand that scientific and technological progress is essential to ongoing human flourishing, and they embrace with gusto the potential of new technologies now under development to catapult humanity to a higher level of wellbeing. The most basic criterion for judging members of any social movement is whether they seek to move in the right direction. With their understanding of the inextricable connection between technological and social progress, these socialist radicals score better on that test than many conventional progressives and conservatives.

More specifically, I believe that Frase and Bastani in particular are correct in focusing on moving toward a post-work world — or at least a world in which lives and livelihoods are much more independent from the labor market than they are today. Their “communism” bears more than a passing resemblance to my “economic independence.” As I have written about extensively, for most of its participants the mass labor market no longer functions reliably as a vehicle for human flourishing and is unlikely to regain that function. My search for an alternative pathway for flourishing outside the workaday world has led me to focus on the possibility of creating largely self-sufficient local communities whose advanced technology allows them to achieve abundance at human scale. There are important overlaps between this idea and the communist dream of ending the distinction between labor and leisure.

Like Frase and Bastani, I see progress toward a post-mass-labor-market world as driven by both push and pull factors. On the one hand, the widespread failure of labor market participation to guarantee access to a rewarding and fulfilling life pushes us to look for alternative arrangements; at the same time, though, emerging technologies’ “tendency to extreme supply” holds out the prospects for dramatically reduced costs of living — and therefore a reduced need to sell labor services to cover those costs.

And I agree further that the technologies of the “Third Disruption” cannot by themselves guarantee widespread abundance and flourishing. New tools can create potential for progress, but whether that potential is realized depends on politics and the resulting rules that structure how the benefits from innovation are shared. And Frase zeroes in on what I regard as one of the decisive arenas of conflict: setting the rules for intellectual property. I haven’t yet written about the subject on this blog, but I’ve written plenty for my day job — see here, here, and here.

Bundling the temporary monopoly privileges of patents and copyrights into the concept of “intellectual property” has to be regarded as one of the great lobbying triumphs of all time, allowing patent and copyright interests to argue that they’re only trying to stop “theft” and “piracy.” But as I’ve written, so-called intellectual property rights and rights in physical property are fundamentally dissimilar: the latter serve to allocate natural scarcity by assigning exclusive rights to rivalrous physical objects (rivalrous in that consumption by one person or group precludes consumption by anybody else), whereas the former create artificial scarcity by giving patent and copyright holders the power to stop others from using nonrivalrous ideas without their permission.  

There is a reasonable idea behind this creation of artificial scarcity — namely, that it is needed to address a market failure arising out of the nonrivalrous nature of ideal objects (in other words, the fact that one person’s use of an idea in no way limits anyone else’s use). If some invention is very costly to develop in the first place but easy to copy, the original inventor may be unable to recoup his investment before imitators swoop in and swamp the market. Extending temporary monopoly privileges to inventors and artists, by raising the return they earn from developing new ideas, thus promises to increase the overall stock of useful ideas.

The reasoning is valid to a point, but it’s important to recognize that patents and copyrights correct market failures only to the extent that they allow original investments to be covered: beyond that point, they are generating windfall rents. Given the massive expansion in patent and copyright protections over the past several decades, intellectual property law is now creating rents on a massive scale. It has degenerated into a vehicle for upward redistribution of wealth and income that actually worsens the climate for innovation by making protected ideas less accessible to downstream innovators.

Intellectual property law already causes serious economic distortions, but the situation could get far worse. As ideas continue to displace land and capital as the economy’s most important assets, whether those assets are broadly or narrowly held will have increasingly large implications for the overall structure of the economy. In a future where AI and robots have automated a great deal of the work people now do, whether that future is one of mass prosperity or mass pauperization will turn to a considerable extent on whether the ideas that underlie the technology have been set free or privatized.

Frase sees things in similar fashion. In his two-by-two matrix of possible futures, the distinction between post-work abundance and “rentism” (abundance and hierarchy) turns on intellectual property rules:

“Who owns the robots,” says Harvard University labor economist Richard Freeman, “owns the world.” Hence the alternative to the communist society of our last chapter is one where the techniques to produce abundance are monopolized by a small elite…. When we talk about “owning the robots,” we’re not just talking about having control over a physical bundle of metal and wires. Rather, the phrase metaphorically describes control over things like computer software, algorithms, blueprints, and other kinds of information that are needed to produce and reproduce the world we live in. In order to maintain control over the economy, then, the rich increasingly need to control that information, and not just physical objects.

Finally, I agree with Phillips and Rozworski that certain forms of government planning are needed to reach a brighter future, and the need is probably increasing over time. The coauthors make and remake this basic point repeatedly in their book: “What is profitable is not always useful, and what is useful is not always profitable.” It is an important point, and its relative importance is edging steadily upward. When the world was poor, and most people were scrambling just to cover their basic material needs, the overlap between profitable and useful was considerably higher than today. Now, absent efforts by government to push forward scientific knowledge and technological capacity, thereby opening up new spaces for entrepreneurial exploration and commercialization, capitalist profit-seeking tends to settle disproportionately into the comfortable and relatively unproductive ruts of real estate development and financial speculation.

A further point: if, as looks likely, we are facing a future with both declining populations and gradually falling labor force participation, governments will need to compensate by appropriating relatively larger shares of the economic pie to fund ongoing innovation. While I hope for a future where large numbers of people live in considerable independence from the capitalist system, the other side of that coin is likely to be an organized capitalist system that relies more heavily on public investment.

That said, Phillips and Rozworski are utterly misguided in trying to revive the socialist idea of replacing the entire price system with central planning. The fact that computer technology has made enormous strides since Soviet days is completely irrelevant. Advocates of central planning imagine that the fundamental challenge in guiding economic production is one of computation, and therefore that much faster computers and much bigger databases make the problem more tractable. But in fact, the real fundamental challenge is one of discovering information not known already — how producers will react to changes in input prices, how consumers will react to changes in price or quality or product features, and whether new products are useful and desirable. There is simply no way to incentivize this ongoing, incessant, massive-scale discovery process without actually playing the specialization and exchange game with real money.

Of course, from the standpoint of the overlap between economic efficiency and human wellbeing, it’s important to recognize two important shortcomings of the private property and price system: (1) the market takes account of consumer preferences only to the extent that they are backed by dollars, and thus overprioritizes the preferences of the rich; and (2) the existence of external costs and benefits not accounted for by market actors further reduces the overlap between the useful and the profitable. Both of these market failures, though, are remediable: redistribution can make producers more responsive to people with lower market incomes, while regulation can better align profit-seeking with advancing wellbeing. Modifying the price system in this way isn’t easy to get right, but it’s doable; replacing the price system altogether, on the other hand, is a will-o’-the-wisp.

Phillips and Rozworski make a game effort, but there’s no hiding the gaping holes in their argument. Yes, companies like Walmart and Amazon do a lot of central planning – within the larger context of a market order in which every “make or buy” decision is informed by external market data. And yes, governments do play an important role in planning the economic future by opening up new spaces for economic activity — but the job of exploring, settling, and commercializing those spaces is then managed by profit-seeking private businesses. Capitalism may need rebalancing, but it remains indispensable for both current prosperity and future progress.

Frase and Bastani steer clear of the central planning distraction and instead see paths to post-work abundance in a universal basic income or universal basic services, respectively. Although I think a UBI is worth experimenting with (I can see some grounds for expansion of direct public provision of particular services, but an aggressive move in that direction seems unlikely to end well), the prospect of mass societies with the bulk of the population dependent on state provision of basic needs – whether by cutting a check or actually delivering services – fills me with foreboding. As I wrote about earlier, that state of deep dependence is fundamentally inconsistent with the classical republican conception of human freedom as non-domination — a conception I now see as indispensable to a proper understanding of what makes a free society. True freedom in this sense requires not just freedom from interference, but sufficient independence to confer immunity from interference. People dependent on the central power for their daily bread may have benevolent masters, but the essential point is that they have masters. And in a world where AI is giving states ever greater powers to track, control, and manipulate their populations, keeping the masters benevolent over the long run strikes me as a dicey proposition for humanity as a whole (even if particular polities can pull it off).

Ironically, then, the new school of techno-optimistic socialists errs not only by being too radical, but by being not radical enough. First, they seek to replace capitalism in toto with a new economic order of post-work abundance, but large-scale, market-mediated specialization and exchange (appropriately regulated) will remain an irreplaceable social technology at least until Star Trek-style replicators come online. Second, they focus their radicalism on achieving freedom from the market, when the radical change that is really needed is greater freedom from the system as a whole — not just from the market, but from the state as well.