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nsaphra 's review for:
The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Michal Rozworski, Leigh Phillips
The thesis of this book is that "socialism works in practice, just not in theory". Many of the largest economies in the world -- Walmart, Amazon, any other multinational company operating in multiple markets -- rely internally on planning, not on markets. Repeated attempts to leverage "the efficiency of the free market" within corporations has only revealed the inefficiency of markets in comparison to centralized planning.
In short, supply chain management is actually a crypto-socialist tool for centrally planned economies, and there is no reason why we can't apply it in place of capitalist markets more generally. In fact, it's likely the only way to avoid the broken profit incentives that have destroyed the planet and exacerbated social inequality. My favorite part is when they point to libraries as an example of consumer-driven distribution vehicles that don't rely on price signals and still work.
The book is surprisingly readable. A lot of leftist literature assumes that the reader not only has an academic background, but majored in some humanities or social science discipline which used a lot of dry reading assignments to prepare them to to parse intentionally obfuscated manuscripts. Possibly because the authors hope to recruit operations researchers and computer scientists to their cause, they have instead written an entertaining and easy read.
I have one big complaint about their argument. In their chapter on the Soviet Union, the authors try to make the case that not only is authoritarian control unnecessary for planned economies, it is actually harmful to their effective organization. I'm sure we would all like to believe that democracy is inherent to socialism, but the argument they make mostly boils down to: the Soviet Union was authoritarian, the Soviet Union collapsed, therefore authoritarianism makes socialist planning untenable. It's not significantly different from people who say that socialism is untenable because the Soviet Union was socialist and the Soviet Union collapsed. Furthermore, it is fairly directly contradicted by the fact that the planning systems they celebrate come from corporations that have central authoritarian control.
In short, supply chain management is actually a crypto-socialist tool for centrally planned economies, and there is no reason why we can't apply it in place of capitalist markets more generally. In fact, it's likely the only way to avoid the broken profit incentives that have destroyed the planet and exacerbated social inequality. My favorite part is when they point to libraries as an example of consumer-driven distribution vehicles that don't rely on price signals and still work.
The book is surprisingly readable. A lot of leftist literature assumes that the reader not only has an academic background, but majored in some humanities or social science discipline which used a lot of dry reading assignments to prepare them to to parse intentionally obfuscated manuscripts. Possibly because the authors hope to recruit operations researchers and computer scientists to their cause, they have instead written an entertaining and easy read.
I have one big complaint about their argument. In their chapter on the Soviet Union, the authors try to make the case that not only is authoritarian control unnecessary for planned economies, it is actually harmful to their effective organization. I'm sure we would all like to believe that democracy is inherent to socialism, but the argument they make mostly boils down to: the Soviet Union was authoritarian, the Soviet Union collapsed, therefore authoritarianism makes socialist planning untenable. It's not significantly different from people who say that socialism is untenable because the Soviet Union was socialist and the Soviet Union collapsed. Furthermore, it is fairly directly contradicted by the fact that the planning systems they celebrate come from corporations that have central authoritarian control.