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jakeyjake '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
Walmart and Amazon are extremely good at planning and logistics. They've gotten great (especially with the help of ML and leveraging computing) at figuring out what people throughout huge parts of the world want and setting up systems for connecting with manufacturing and distribution. This book gives an easy-to-follow accounting of economic planning as experimented with by authoritarian socialist governments. The authors here make an interesting argument that contra the popular belief that large-scale economic planning LEADS to authoritarianism, authoritarianism actually leads to a failure of effective large-scale economic planning.
They aren't proposing we're on the cusp of a democratically-led form of nation-wide economic planning, but seem to be trying to break down connotations between economic planning and authoritarianism, which is what we mostly think of when we think about historical attempts at economic planning. This is an exposé of sorts: "Look, Walmart and Amazon are planning at the scale of nation-states with computing and logistical techniques cribbed DIRECTLY from the Soviet system!" These systems could unlock a brighter future in which democratic socialism is the prevailing practice and economic planning allows for people to get what they want when they want it without all the icky baggage of capitalism and private firms running the show.
Beyond this main point, I thought the best part of the book was the section giving a fairly clear and concise history of planning from the Russian Revolution through to the break up of the USSR. This isn't something I've read much about so I reread that section a couple of times.
They aren't proposing we're on the cusp of a democratically-led form of nation-wide economic planning, but seem to be trying to break down connotations between economic planning and authoritarianism, which is what we mostly think of when we think about historical attempts at economic planning. This is an exposé of sorts: "Look, Walmart and Amazon are planning at the scale of nation-states with computing and logistical techniques cribbed DIRECTLY from the Soviet system!" These systems could unlock a brighter future in which democratic socialism is the prevailing practice and economic planning allows for people to get what they want when they want it without all the icky baggage of capitalism and private firms running the show.
Beyond this main point, I thought the best part of the book was the section giving a fairly clear and concise history of planning from the Russian Revolution through to the break up of the USSR. This isn't something I've read much about so I reread that section a couple of times.