The great merit of the book is its faithful defense of economic planning against the resilient mold of free-market ideology — a defense that is so greatly needed as neoliberalism has, for decades, corroded what little “opposition” “left” intellectuals ever managed to muster. Unfortunately, however, the authors are not Marxists, so the book  is simultaneously undermined by their infantile politics — not to mention their occasionally cringeworthy prose. Especially in the first couple of chapters, I was left with the impression that the authors are insecure about their subject matter, remarking with belabored “self-awareness” in various places that it is “old,” “musty,” “not sexy,” and as interesting as “an airport business book.” Their self-deprecating tone, meant to ingratiate the authors with an audience they assume will be hostile to, or uninterested in, what they have to say, only insults the reader’s intelligence. Wherever they constrain themselves to discussing the operation of capitalist firms or advancements in information technology, it is my opinion that the authors achieve grace, wit, and humor. Wherever they attempt to interject their own sophomoric social and political commentary, however, the book becomes an unrewarding chore to read. Ultimately, the book’s central thesis — that economic planning not only could work, but, in many ways, is already at work, and working well — can be salvaged from this smoldering wreckage, but it must be coupled with a correct analysis of democracy and social revolution. For developing Marxists with an interest in economic planning, you are in luck. While I provide here a criticism of the text, a mysterious, sexy rogue has uploaded an abridged version of the book freed from its liberal tumors – though you should only download it if you’ve already purchased a copy of the book

The political collapse and economic liberalization of the Eastern Bloc in the late 80s and early 90s, coupled with the rise of neoliberalism throughout the West and its colonies, effectively destroyed the public’s faith in the possibility of economic planning. Left and right opportunists alike continue to join hands with bourgeois economics professors and other ideologists in denouncing Soviet central planning as a failure on the grounds that economies are too complex to plan, and that market prices are indispensable for efficient resource allocation. “New Left” academics like Richard Wolff and Slavoj Žižek, armed with the anti-Soviet intellectual tradition they’ve inherited from their fascist professors, set out on ill-fated quests to discover new “mixed economy” and “market socialist” models, yearning after these impossible “syntheses,” like the alchemists’ misguided search for the philosopher’s stone. It is in this light that People’s Republic of Walmart is so refreshing. With highly accessible style, the authors gracefully defend their thesis that the market system is building the conditions for its own replacement by a system of social planning — by socialism.

One of the book’s more novel contributions is the idea that, contrary to that commonly held cliche, planning works in practice even if it doesn’t work in theory. Setting aside hypothetical and scholastic debates about the “economic calculation problem,” the authors plant their case firmly in reality by asserting that, actually, our advanced capitalist economy has been making use of planning for almost a century. It’s true that the capitalist economy at large isn’t planned, nor could it be — the only way for separate, competing firms to engage with each other is, of course, through market mechanisms. But, within the firm itself (that economic unit so often treated as a black box by bourgeois economists), planning dominates production. Furthermore, two critical developments have come about in the era of finance-capital. The first is that monopolization reigns supreme. Wherever monopolization reaches its highest pitch, whole industries effectively begin to be internally planned, even while externally subservient to the demands of the market. Secondly, finance-capital — capital controlled by banks but employed by industrialists — becomes a mechanism for rational planning of production on the part of the financial–industrial cartels. As Lenin correctly observed over a century ago, the methods of accounting and management developed by the big capitalist banks could be converted to manage production under socialism. Hence, the socialist planned economy is already in embryo within the shell of the modern world; the technology and methods of economic planning have already been developed within the market economy — and eventually this shell must crack, and give way to the more advanced social form growing within it.

The authors provide several compelling and concrete examples of their thesis in action. First, they mention that planning is not new, and that, in fact, certain ancient economies utilized primitive forms of economic planning to great effect. Second, they refer to the public sector, primarily the military, which utilizes planned production for all sorts of things — penicillin, satellites, radios, the internet, cellphones, rockets — all these and more were products of “planned capitalist production.” Most compelling, however, is the book’s comparisons of three unequivocally private firms: Walmart, Amazon, and Sears. 

On the question of what made Soviet central planning inefficient — that is, inefficient with regards to delivering consumer goods — the authors identify data throughput as the essential bottleneck. “Old school” central planning relied on manual reporting by managers and advanced calculations had to be done, and redone, by hand. Besides requiring a small team of highly skilled bureaucrats to form plans in batches based on months or even years old information, this system was also susceptible to inaccurate reporting by managers who were frequently unwilling to report failures to meet quotas. By the time distributed communications networks arrived on the scene, the bureaucratic rot of the post-Stalin Soviet system prevented adoption of these new technologies that could have streamlined planning. Cybernetic planning, by contrast, could have distributed the collection and production of data related to supply and demand while allowing real-time coordination of production and distribution. Unfortunately, the first experiment in cybernetic planning, Chile’s revolutionary Cybersyn system, was quickly dismantled by the fascist Pinochet regime. The great irony is that the closest any efforts have come to replicating Cybersyn since then have come from that infamous capitalist super-giant: Walmart.

I said earlier that separate competing firms can only interact with one another through market mechanisms — and until quite recently, this has (mostly) been true. Essential information about production, supply, and demand has been treated as invaluable proprietary data, locked up deep within each individual firm, creating a “fog of war.” But every firm is reliant on another for its supplies. Without the means to see through this fog, each firm must do its best to predict and prepare for deviations in supply and demand, requiring storage buffers. For each link in the supply chain between raw resource extraction and retailers, the storage needed to compensate for these deviations grows exponentially larger, such that small changes to demand at the end of the supply chain create huge shocks at the front. This phenomenon is known as the bull-whip effect. Walmart, the authors explain, has devised a novel way of compensating for it: complete data transparency with its partners and cross-supply chain coordination. As the authors state: “While there are indeed financial transactions within the supply chain, resource allocation among Walmart’s vast network of global suppliers, warehouses, and retail stores… [behaves] like a single firm.” Walmart was thus able to beat its competitors in the market with superior cooperation and superior planning. Amazon, another titan of modern retailing, followed suit with its “Vendor Flex” program, which allows Amazon to co-manage production of the items it stocks and to set its own quotas based on data it collects on consumers — data which would have otherwise been unavailable to Amazon’s suppliers. This horizontal integration between production and distribution cuts out the uncertainty that normally accumulates between suppliers in the market, minimizing inventory, transportation, and logistics costs. Not altogether unlike Cybersyn, the free distribution of information along sectors of production, combined with the monumental collection of consumer data, allows for efficient planning without relying on price signals to coordinate supply and demand. The authors go into much greater detail, but the bottom line is that economic planning is already here — and it works!

The unfortunate irony, and the source of many of my criticisms, is that these authors are heirs of the same “New Left” tendency that is guilty for perpetuating this free-market revival. Consequently, the book suffers whenever it veers off course from its central topic, crashing head first like Wile E. Coyote into a painted tunnel depicting an illusory “anti-Marxist socialism.” It would be difficult to completely enumerate every error the authors make without writing a book at least as long. As far as the historical sections are concerned, the problem primarily consists in a one sided screed against “Stalinism,” in which the authors desperately beg their imagined audience not to associate them — or the concept of economic planning in general — with any of the 20th century experiments in Communism. If I had to summarize the authors’ biggest theoretical failures, two particular areas come to mind: their horrendously distorted understanding of democracy and distribution.

In the first place, they make the same mistake as the 20th century socialist Karl Kautsky, who Lenin once described as a “renegade” for taking a one-sided view of democracy, never bothering to ask, “democracy, but for which class?” That is to say, they see representational institutions in capitalist society and take for granted that the working class therefore has real, representational power within the bourgeois state. Phillips and Rozworski never seem to notice that all substantive policy decisions are made behind closed doors by the personified avatars of Capital. They therefore repudiate the necessity of revolution in establishing the proletarian democracy that would be necessary for the working class to have real power over the planning of production: “In such volatile times, it cannot be ruled out that a socialist candidate or party might soon form a government in the capitalist heartlands.” It cannot be “ruled out” (despite any positive precedent to the contrary) that a socialist candidate “might” form “a government” — what grand strategic vision! Again, the problem the authors identify is that planning already exists, but it isn’t run democratically; yet they never approach the question of proletarian democracy, and therefore the necessity of dictatorship over, and liquidation of, the exploiting class. They take for granted that the existing bourgeois constitutional republic is a suitable form so long as “our guy” is at its head. The last century unequivocally proved what happens when any socialist gets close to being elected into power in a bourgeois democracy: they are assassinated, or their new government is violently couped, or they do nothing to abolish capitalism, or the bourgeoisie side with fascists to burn the precious republic to the ground, just to keep it out of the hands of the socialists. The vision of a gradual, reformist road to socialism is a facile, utopian fantasy which can only end in failure and greater bloodshed. The successful revolutions of the last century demonstrated that we cannot suffice to take hold of the ready made state machinery. We must smash it, and make our own that will serve as the basis of power for the proletariat in its mission to end class society.

Secondly, the authors follow in the footsteps of another great colossus of revisionism, Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle attempted to abstract the question of distribution from production, as though these two were separable, independent things. That is to say, Phillips and Rozworski seem to mistake socialism itself for merely a different kind of distribution: “Inequality is, in the end, a question of unfair allocation… When we ask whether another world is possible, we are also asking: Is there an alternative method to allocate things?” They begin with the question of distribution, from which every other piece of their analysis flows downstream, as if distribution were a software plugin that could be swapped in and out of the same kind of economic hardware. To be fair, the authors pay some lip service to the question of production, but they don’t really seem to understand it. For example, they further refer to nationalization as synonymous with decommodification (“Nationalization decommodifies, but does it democratize?”), as though wage laborers producing goods for the market are not producing commodities if the industry is owned by the national bourgeoisie collectively. If only they could understand the class character of the state! Most egregiously, the authors maintain that the source of inequality under capitalism is not the extraction of surplus value from the wage laborer, but rather “disparities in the distribution of income” caused by “the market,” which is only “a method of allocation.” The solution to inequality, therefore, is only a matter of a different method of distribution. They are correct that competition in the market causes concentration of wealth by ruining other capitalists, by proletarianising their competition, but this is not the source of disparity between the workers and the capitalists.  Marx proved two urgent facts that these gentlemen miss: firstly, surplus value does not come from the circulation of commodities, nor from exchanges within the market (which are, after all, equal exchanges), it comes from production. That is to say, inequality is decidedly not a question of unfair distribution, but a question of exploitation by those with power over the means of production and subsistence. Once again, the authors pay some minor lip service to this very point, but they don’t actually understand it — it is not reflected within their thesis or analysis. Secondly, the domination of the market is contingent on the dominance of commodity production, which, in turn, is contingent on the social division of labor. The social division of labor, therefore, is the basis for generalized commodity (capitalist) production. For the authors, distribution is the whole problem, the primary issue with capitalism, and hence they are unable to really explain how socialism would be established or how income inequality would be overcome.The consequence of all these errors is a vision of socialism which is, in reality, little more than a utopian vision of a more completely, “democratically” planned capitalism. Like some kind of conservative’s parody of a socialist, these daring radicals and dissidents dare to ask, “what if the entire economy was like the NHS?” By correctly educating against these grave mistakes, we can successfully rescue economic planning from revision and reaction. This book at least demonstrates that capitalists have already prepared for us the technology to plan the economy. Once the workers have seized power and overthrown the exploiters, we need “only” to expand the domain of planning to the entire economy. Of course, we should be clear: proletarian democracy and planned production are not the only two factors necessary for socialist construction. Simultaneously, we must also abolish wage labor, the social division of labor, and commodity production, replacing production for exchange with production for use. We will not merely use computers to slightly improve distribution, calculate “shadow prices,” or replace the money-form of value with the “labor-time” form of value; we seek the abolition of value.

The Cuban Revolution has undeniably taken a monumental step forward toward the total emancipation of the oppressed. As this paper reported, Cuba’s new Family Code “is, in no uncertain terms, the most progressive and comprehensive law in history, anywhere on Earth, with regard to the emancipation of women, LGBT people, children, the elderly, and disabled people.”

But not everyone is celebrating. The Western capitalist press, serving as the propaganda arm of U.S. imperialism, is desperately sputtering and stumbling over itself to drown out any celebration of revolutionary Cuba’s historic victory. To this end, the capitalist press is peddling a multifaceted, deeply incoherent narrative — a cacophony of anti-Communist propaganda, joined by such vaunted outfits as the Associated Press, The New York Times, and Reuters. Various anti-Communist NGOs funded by the imperialists — the usual suspects, like CIVICUS and the NED — have also crawled out of the woodworks.

Most have focused on dampening Cuba’s world-historic victory by oversimpliyfing the new Family Code as “legalizing gay marriage.” At the same time, any hint of faint praise for revolutionary Cuba is carefully qualified by attacking the revolution for a “slow” pace of progress, despite the fact that revolutionary Cuba has already outpaced every country in the Americas, and most countries in the world, in the struggle for LGBT emancipation.

As we reported in the Red Clarion, Cuba’s new Family Code does, in fact, enshrine marriage equality as law — but it does so much more than “just” that.

The new Family Code is a comprehensive legal code, laying out the legal dimensions of families, children and the elderly, women, LGBT people, and disabled people. It is uniquely progressive in the world on every front. We could go on, but we will instead encourage readers to read our full summary of the new Family Code.

Yet, the Family Code has been oversimplified in the capitalist press of the United States and other Western countries as something resembling the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which tenuously legalized same-sex marriage in the U.S. — and which is now on the verge of being overturned by the current Court, dominated by far-right fascist Trump-appointees.

So, why the oversimplifications?

The capitalist press has been forced to acknowledge the most widely known and reported aspect of the Family Code: marriage equality. But the capitalists can still subtly manipulate public perceptions by “failing” to thoroughly report the facts surrounding the popular referendum — to “tell the whole truth.”

The more rabidly anti-Communist outlets accuse the Cuban government of forcing an “unwanted” Code on the people, despite the fact that the Code was passed in a popular referendum. Hardly a single capitalist news outlet, even the “moderates,” can admit that the popular referendum expressed the political will of the people. Instead, the capitalist press explains away the new Family Code’s popularity by denying the political agency of Cuba’s people.

One of the news agencies most obviously guilty of this is Reuters. “Cubans Split over Liberal Family Code as Referendum Nears” — this was the headline of an article, published by Reuters in March 2022, in the lead-up to the popular referendum. The article baselessly asserts that, “Tepid support for the reforms … threatens to hand state-backed supporters a defeat,” citing as its source three so-called “experts.” One of these “experts,” who works for a German state-sponsored think-tank, falsely claimed that the Family Code had been, “compiled by state authorities, rather than being a grassroots movement.” In fact, the Family Code underwent multiple, significant alterations in accordance with suggestions voiced by the public at the nearly 80,000 grassroots community meetings held during the four-month-long public consultation process leading up to the referendum.

We hardly need to point out now that the predictions of Reuters and its “experts,” that the new Family Code would be rejected, were predictably and embarrassingly wrong: The Code was instead ratified by a two-thirds supermajority.

The more conspiracy theory-minded are coping and seething with the assertion that the popular referendum was really a sham effort by the Communist Party of Cuba to “stabilize the regime.” For instance, the Miami Herald cites nameless (likely fictitious) sources to paint the popular referendum as “a smokescreen for a government that is in desperate need of … legitimacy.” The truth, of course, is that the Cuban government enjoys the support of the overwhelming majority of Cubans, and therefore already has “legitimacy” by any truly democratic standard; this is not changed by the fact that an insignificant minority of Cubans oppose the revolution and the Communist Party.

Reuters also indulges in its share of conspiracy theories. In an article headlined “Cuba Uses Media Blitz to Promote ‘Yes’ on New LGBT-Friendly Laws,” published a few days before the vote, Reuters accused the Communist Party of “flooding state-run media with stories and celebratory images” of LGBT people and putting up “roadside billboards touting diversity,” all in order to convince the Cuban public to support the new Family Code’s historically unprecedented expansion of LGBT rights. (How truly evil, those Communists!) The conspiracy theorists at Reuters claimed that the Communist Party’s mass public education campaign on LGBT rights, launched in the months leading up to the referendum vote, was an underhanded effort to dupe the Cuban public and cover up “anger” and “widespread protests” — demonstrations which, in actuality, have at most attracted a few hundred paid activists in Havana.

Reuters only cites “analysts consulted by Reuters” to justify its conspiracy theories. One of these “analysts” is the same German sham “expert” Reuters consulted in the previous article, who makes the truly bizarre claim that, “many people will vote [out of] loyalty to the government, much more than on content” — as if Cubans were incapable of independent thought; as if the Cuban electorate wouldn’t vote “Yes” on the Family Code for the simple and obvious reason that the majority supports the rights of LGBT people, women, children, the elderly, and the disabled. This “expert” assertion that citizens of revolutionary socialist states are mindless robots is a classic anti-Communist smear. Another of these so-called “analysts” is a right-wing fascist “dissident” — the sort who are broadly ignored as irrelevant extremists by the Cuban public, but are beloved by the rabidly anti-Communist Western capitalist press as “pro-democracy activists.” Reuters quotes this “dissident” (who lives not in Cuba, but in Madrid, Spain) as actually advocating against the Family Code — against the expansion of LGBT and other rights — for no other reason than to “punish the regime.” The “dissident” takes off the “pro-democracy” mask and admits that anti-Communists are, in truth, against democracy and emancipation. 

Why the baseless pessimism toward the people of Cuba? Why the sham “experts” stating easily disprovable falsehoods? Why the indulgence in conspiracy theories?

Doesn’t Reuters brand itself as a respected, trustworthy, “value-neutral,” and “objective” news agency?

Among other distortions appearing in the capitalist press is the widely-repeated line that the recent popular referendum was “rare” and “unusual” in Cuba — another easily disprovable falsehood. The Associated Press, for instance, released an article headlined, “Cuba Holds Unusual Vote on Law Allowing Same-Sex Marriage,” in which it characterized the referendum as a “rare” event. In fact, popular referenda are a normal feature of Cuba’s robust participatory democracy, and have been held many times in the past. The most recent such popular referendum was held in 2019, only 3 years ago, when an overwhelming 90.6% (with a voter turnout of 90.15%) of the electorate ratified Cuba’s new Constitution. The only “exceptional” aspect of this year’s popular referendum on Cuba’s new Family Code was the unprecedented level of public grassroots participation: The public consultation leading up to the referendum involved nearly 80,000 mass community meetings across Cuba and among Cubans living abroad, attended by a total of over 6.5 million Cubans (75.93% of the electorate).

Again, why the distortions? Isn’t the Associated Press one of the largest news agencies in the world, and isn’t it meant to be an “objective” source?

The fact is, the capitalist press cannot afford to admit the truth about Cuba. A two-sided pressure compels these agencies and outlets to manipulate, distort, falsify, and lie.

On the one hand, to tell the truth about revolutionary Cuba would force the capitalist press to acknowledge the progressive, democratic, and emancipatory nature of the Cuban Revolution — and, by extension, Communism. The mass media monopolists in the West will never allow this. The capitalists invest untold billions of dollars in their propaganda machines, because demonizing Communism is a crucial pillar of the capitalist class dictatorship. They must, at all costs, convince the oppressed that another world, free of exploitation, war, and all oppression, is impossible.

On the other hand, acknowledging the progressive, democratic, and emancipatory nature of the socialist revolution would expose a sharp contrast between the advancements of revolutionary Cuba and the reactionary backslides of the fascist U.S. Empire.

Let’s look specifically at the rights of LGBT people in the U.S. Empire today, and compare this abysmal situation with the progress of LGBT emancipation in Cuba.

So far this year, nearly 240 anti-LGBT bills have been filed in state governments across the U.S. Empire. In February 2022, Texas instituted a program denying life-saving medical care to transgender children, while threatening parents who accept and affirm their transgender children with prison sentences. Texas has been joined, to greater or lesser degrees, by the states of Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, Utah, Idaho, and California — yes, even “liberal” California — all of which have passed (or are considering) laws banning medical care for transgender children in particular and transgender people generally. The states of Alabama, Minnesota, and Oklahoma are considering or have passed restrictions on the rights of same-sex families. In recent years, many of the same states have instituted laws that prohibit public school teachers from even discussing the existence of LGBT people. Across the country, we’ve seen LGBT pride parades and other events get attacked by cops and civilian-fascist demonstrators. At the center of it all, the current far-right Supreme Court, having overturned Roe v. Wade (the right to an abortion), is threatening to put marriage equality next on the chopping block. And it doesn’t stop there: In addition to entertaining challenges to the Obergefell decision, the far-right fascist wing of the Court has threatened to overturn the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision, which legalized homosexual intimate contact, and the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision, which legalized inter-racial marriages.

This is the awful state of LGBT rights in the U.S. Empire. Meanwhile, only 90 miles away from U.S. shores, Cuba’s electorate has ratified the most progressive, comprehensive law regarding the rights of LGBT people — as well as women, children, the elderly, disabled people — and the nature of the family in world history.

The capitalists can’t allow this hypocrisy to be exposed, but it will be exposed, one defiant voice at a time, all the same. No anti-Communist cacophony can drown out the fact that Cuba is thriving, while the U.S. Empire continues to descend into fascism.

We must proclaim “Death!” to this fascist settler-colonial empire, and, in the same breath, proclaim, “Long live the revolution!”

Viva Cuba! Viva la revolución! Hasta la victoria siempre!