The People's Republic of Walmart | Interview with Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
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- Опубліковано 20 сер 2024
- Since the demise of the USSR, the mantle of the largest planned economies in the world has been taken up by the likes of Walmart, Amazon and other multinational corporations.
Aaron sits down with Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski to discuss their new book The People's Republic of Walmart, out now from Verso.
this is good stuff, we need to talk more about planning
Ayyyy, Comrades 😏😎
Lol it's always nice to see you comment on every other video, every now and again. ♥️
A must read book. It gave me a lot of confidence and helped me develop my views
Every time I watch one of your videos, I realize more and more how much I don't know. You folks are fantastic!
What a wonderful trio. Very passionate, very informative.
I think this needs to come back to public attention
Great interview - thank you.
thanks for covering this, fantastic discussion, for sure gonna read both of your guys books
"Stalin" was the revolution, meaning the faction that operated with Stalin as their figurehead were the group that, within the context of the chaos of slow blurning civil war that persisted into the 20s and 30s, balanced between the ultra left and right wing of the party and ensured the existence of socialism. This was when the membership of manual labor within the party was at its height, and before the evidence that tied the the acts of terrorism and sabotage happening across the country to domestic conspiracies and foreign collaboration, and before the head of the NKVD mislead the government on who and what was causing it, it was this "Stalin" faction that wanted to liberalize political and economic decision making. Leaving out that the cause of authoritarianism were credible internal and external threats not just to the Stalin faction, but to Soviet socialism in general, only obfuscates the issue. Authoritarianism isn't a personal fault of psychology or morals. It's a response to existential threats.
The USSR needed industry and it needed agriculture to support self defense against an invasion it knew was coming, and it needed a loyal army to fight it. Plenty of people recruited into the army and state apparatus weren't socialists, but were allowed in for their technical expertise. That's a liability, if those people aren't just not socialist, but anti socialists biding their time, and plenty were.
Remember, if you're a historical materialist, there is no such thing as "stalinism," as Great Man theory is incompatible with Marxism. The point of a concept like "stalinism" is exactly to infect everything associated with the first major socialist country, which formed in uniquely unfavourable circumstances. Central planning, democratic centralism, and dialectical materialism itself ultimately has to be abandoned if we concede to the right wing anti communists' monopoly on describing history, for fear of being called a tankie, stalinist, whatever. That's the point of those words, so why should we them win this fight? It only positions them to better attack us on another issue.
The real counter revolution
The western left is still too scared to incorporate post-cold war scholarship that more accurately depicts the Stalin era, because anything neutral, let alone positive, has been equated to holocaust denial and Hitler apologism.
Terrible things happened at this time, horrible mistakes that cost the lives of millions. The right wants us to think that's inherent to socialism, while the anti communist left wants to pay lip service to materialism while practicing idealism, and neither way has worked for the western left, not in over half a century
hence why I have lost faith in the West. The soil's too dry here. Nothing grows in it
Whats the idealism you described ?
Amazing interview. We are fucked without these kinds of socialists.
here is a technical reason why banks would be against those McDonnell suggestions Aaron mentioned:
1. House prices directly affect the riskiness of banks' balance sheets. A £200k mortgage is far less risky for the bank in a rising market - even if the mortgagee defaults, the bank will be able to cover its costs by selling the house on again at a decent price.
2. Its the same for wages - higher wages reduce the share of revenue available for dividends and debt repayment, thus making the employer's balance-sheet riskier and less attractive.
What about productivity? Surely if productivity increases, the employer's balance sheet looks better? (Though I may have read somewhere the the Bank of England doesn't actually have the power to achieve it)
@@deadfish3789 Yes, I think that would be a policy which would interest a lot of SMEs. But The Bank of England would be expected to achieve the productivity target via "credit guidance", e,g. exerting control over who banks lend to.
I just had a look at the Labour report, and it mentions "stemming the flow of money into speculative real estate". I think real estate is the biggest area of contemporary lending, so Labour will have already made a ton of enemies there. But that's a good thing imo.
@@suntanlo-shun1809 that number 2 is wild. The entire reason salaries dont follow the price of life is because of this.
Hey why don't you people bring in Paul Cockshott and introduce his models on cybernetic communism to your audience?
I've only recently found both _Towards a New Socialism_ and this work, but they certainly seem like the ideas would go hand-in-hand once we get things going.
@@scaper8 absolutely. This seems to be the future. The human nature argument completely destroyed!!
Probably because he's a well known social chauvinist and transphobe.
What’s the difference between Walmart and amazon?
Both are middlemen. Big retailers.
Walmart is not a monopoly. Planned economies demand monopoly power. That monopoly being the government. And as we’ve seen with defense spending most blatantly, the government is shit at buying stuff at good value.
I want to read more about health markets/economics. Recommendations please xx
There’s a book about fraternal societies
But Walmart can have items sit on their shelves at no risk to them as they simply don't buy the product again until they need it. So how is this really planned? How can you have a tooth brush factory just stop if you don't need tooth brushes then start it up when you need them? How would that work?
whenever someone tells you that planned econs don't work tell em that the new deals were planned econs.
that being said, i still don't like centralized planning and would prefer decentralized (aka democratic) planning cause it's harder to corrupt
Have you ever heard of project cybersyn, or Paul cockshott's writings/videos on cybernetic planning.
Plan with AI
The new deal was shit. It was the first time in US history that the government intervened so heavily. And it completely fucked up the market. It starved the market of affordable labor. It set countless price controls. And it stopped liquidation of firms, forcing capital to sit around and not be used productively.
In the entire history of America, every recession/depression/crisis lasted a couple months to 2 years. With the longest downturns following big intensive wars… such as the civil war where Lincoln borrowed money out of thin air.
The new deal gets too much good wrap. Hoover and FDR had practically the exact same policies. There a reason he has a big dam with his name on it. Which is crazy since they built it in the middle of nowhere(LV didn’t exist) so they just wasted taxpayer money, to build a fat fucking dam. For no good reason. People in California and the other regions could fund their own electricity as it came into demand.
Im ashamed of sharing vlads birthday 😢
supply and demand or... demand and supply?
I don't understand this idea that "data" can replace money & the price system. It's one thing to have more and better information about qualities and quantities of things. But you still need a universal equivalent to count the values of all these things. You can't "save" a sum of data that can be redeemed in the future for real goods and services... The idea that "information technology" is making money redundant feels like it ignores the function of money + prices as useful information. The traditional argument is correct: The Soviet Socialist production-consumption system failed because it did not have a proper role for money as a standard of value.
If socialists want to seriously talk about how our ideas are better for human freedom, then it's necessary to recognize the role that money plays in establishing the conditions for freedom. Money is the great leveller. Asides from it's economic function as a universal equivalent, it is a social neutralizer. We all have accounts in the same monetary denomination depending on where we are. If we're not starting from a monetary production economy built on dual-entry accounting (debits and credits all the way down), then we're doing an injustice to our contribution to changing capitalism as it currently exists into something better.
But why? If all money does is show how much demand there is for a product, why do we need money for that? If it serves another purpose, is it a worthwhile purpose? Money in its current form certainly doesn't level anythinga
@@deadfish3789 Money does something much more fundamental. It's what allows us to talk about quantifiable values separate from the things themselves. It's an accounting technology. You cannot simply remove money, income, and capital from the system of production-consumption and replace it with "better data." The authors are disingenuous in comparing distribution firms like Walmart and Amazon to the Soviet Socialist system. These firms exist within capitalist cost and price structures as an organizing principle.
Under what unit of account does all that data get sorted and distributed?
@@OgallalaKnowhow I don't really know what we'd use. Maybe a more direct formula based on demand? You say money assigns stuff a quantifiable value, but I'd argue it doesn't necessarily reflect the actual value of the product
@@OgallalaKnowhow the soviet system had wages but the only thing that was the money was not a store of value because they were only like vouchers for certain consumer goods (food was free).
You don't need a price system because as long as you make production>=an estimated demand based on population you can make it work
Books...? Books?! Yes, that's it. To write a book every night in my sleep. The still. The panicked sweat. Gears inside my skull rolling on and on - enscribing destiny onto the pages! A man. A buffoon!!! On his plinth. His incoherent ramblings. Aimless. Disaster! Garbled retunded mind. A Prime Minister of DOOM!!!!... Is there no exit?! The walls - they close in, suffocate! Like the business suit. And tie. Mock dignity. Barely able to hide the mad man. His mad hair. And mad hands. His mad speech. Madness!
I thought this was a song now I’m disappointed
Soviet Union failed because of its imperial ambitions. The war in Afghanistan was extremely expensive, and as they weren't integrated into the world financial system, they couldn't sustain debt
Not quite true, the main thing was still extremely bad information flow, and department interest instead of real performance towards needed tasks and horrible stupid person at the central gov. while having centralization. I m also interested in modern IT solutions, for real automated system you need AGI, but one day it will be solved.
The peoples republica of China will take your heart away 😊😂😢 2:22 2:23
Show me how removing all prices from Walmart's budget would work.
How do you know which utilizations of resources is too "expensive."
In other words, show me the new relative-scarcity/relative-value indicator that replaces market prices.
Ill be happy to see the detailed blueprint for your new calculation system. I will not accept vague ideas about "oh, future computers and AI - etc."
Disclaimer: I'm not a communist (funny, I have to point that out).
Not sure if it was the book or the commentary by Second Thought on his channel about the People's Republic of Walmart, but it didn't erase the "market" completely. While money wouldnt be used by citizens, depts/commissions would allocate based on requisitions or something (think a teacher filling in a form for more school supplies. No money is exchanged between the end user and the requester).
It’s a false dilemma. Our economy right now has already features of a planned economy. It’s already a broken economy. And you want to break it even more with more state control and planning? Oligo Capitalism vs. planned economy is a false dichotomy. The same as fascism vs. communism. The real decision is between a truly free economy ( in which every individual is a free agent) and a planned economy where the majority is not acting as free agents. Since we don’t have that free economy anyways I see no reason to even hamper economic development even more by going even more into direction of communism. Also, since the left holds free speech in low regards, how can problems be solved in a planned economy if addressing those would get you deplatformed, or worst jailed or even killed. So there goes your Public discourse in planned economies... good luck!
Luke gleave ijebor Trends Set by whom? The trend that communistic dictatorial countries have found a way to become economic powerhouses by exploiting their people? How long would that last without continuous support from the west over decades? And now we should do the same in the west? But who supports us with a constant supply of intellectual property and technology for basically nothing in return? China? Russia? Brazil?
Luke gleave ijebor it’s kind of funny. People theorise about communism an planned economies. But no one seems to address that one issue that all of these regimes had not enjoyed any longevity at all if western nations had not continuously supported them. Just read Anthony Sutton for reference. So if we get totally planned economies in the west, who will keep our soon to be communisms alive?
Worth watching the last video before this. Think they'd argue they're very much not in favour of planned economies. It's about worker coops and employee ownership.
Adam Childs if that’s a strange idea, I do not know. But I do know that it is a fact of history and a well documented one. I never even mentioned socialism. So I could not have confused the two. I share certain criticisms concerning our oligo capitalism in the west. But the solution cannot be to strangle a free economy with even more top down regulation and government planning. This is what actually causes our economy to suffer. Big companies always can afford to address strict regulations. Small ones cannot. If economy and state work together, or are even merged completely it will always hurt those who are supposed to act as free agents in the economy. The individual. State and economy should be kept separate. The merging of the two creates a power monopoly, uncontrollable by the public. The reasons why our capitalism has the problems it has is not the free market itself, but it’s outmanoeuvring by state and companies being in cohorts. Adding more control will only make it worse. Not better... But the left generally has a disregard for freedom of choice hence the concept of free market place of ideas or even goods is alien to them. That’s why the left usually has no qualms about silencing dissenting opinions. So I do not expect much to come of that discussion. Other than attempts of silencing dissent of course... :-)
Rex Remedy lol when are honest ideas not considered by the left? The only real deplatforming you’re talking about is proven bullshit that leads to unneeded harrassment of the vulnerable. In this very video they consider arguments by the right and build upon them?