Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass wrote a book called “Half-Earth Socialism”. The title is a reference to “Half-Earth” by E.O. Wilson, which I haven’t read but which I gather argues for preserving biodiversity and the environment by dedicating half the Earth to non-human life. E.O. Wilson is a distinguished biologist and you should read his books. Dude knows his ants.
The authors agree that half the Earth should not have any people, and furthermore add that the other half obviously needs to be organized as a unitary socialist command economy, something the “centre-Left Democrat” Wilson just fails to understand.
Obvious or not, one tricky problem with such a plan is that previous large-scale attempts to boot up really-existing socialism have not been entirely awesome. Lenin’s and Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia ended up murdering and starving an awful lot of people, a fact the authors obliquely allude to.
So how does one run a socialist, environmentally-friendly, planned-economy utopia without all the murdering and starving? The solution the authors propose has three components:
Linear programming to maximize or minimize a particular quantity (say carbon emissions) under a set of constraints involving other quantities of resource inputs and consumption over the world economy. In other words, central planning with algorithms.
Supercomputer-assisted world-wide simulations of material resource flows and their environmental impacts to set the production and consumption quotas for the socialist collectives located in Half-Earth so that in aggregate they meet the targets output by the linear programs under dynamically changing conditions.
Democracy
Interesting!
The point of all this is to manage an economy that feeds 10 billion people in an environmentally sustainable way while avoiding anything that looks remotely like a market with a “universal equivalent”, i.e., a currency. Rather, the trade-offs between, say, building a solar farm versus a potato farm need to be done using “in natura” calculation per the philosophical writings of Otto Neurath.
The appeal of using linear programming appears to be threefold:
Because the equations are written using “in natura” units like kilograms of steel, megatons of carbon, etc., you don’t need a currency to intermediate the trade-offs via price levels and supply and demand.
Linear programming was invented by a Soviet mathematician, Leonid Kantorovich.
Linear programming is a “quintessentially Socialist kind of mathematics”, no kidding.
It honestly never occurred to me that the real number line might care about your politics, but here we are. Given how frequently linear programming is used to make business decisions in capitalist enterprises, this is a really weird belief.
The authors concede that linear programming by itself will be too inflexible to plan a global economy with lots of feedback loops. See Red Plenty for a brilliant and sad meditation on the failure of linear programmed central planning in the Soviet system with some cameos by Kantorovich himself.
This is where the supercomputer-driven simulations come in. The simulations will manage short-term adjustments to the top-down plan in terms of what needs to be produced and where. The simulations will also take into account climate effects much like climate simulations are used today to forecast global warming trends. At least that’s how I think it is supposed to work because this part of Half-Earth Socialism is only vaguely sketched out compared to much longer sections about Kantorovich and his invention of linear programming.
What is completely left out is where the supercomputers come from. Supercomputers are powered by advanced semiconductors, the development of which is the apotheosis of market capitalism. See the excellent Chip War by Chris Miller on the history of the semiconductor industry and the attendant increase in computing power and Moore's Law. In Half-Earth Socialism, where do the chips get made, who makes them, and why? Troy and Drew do not say.
Taken together, linear programming and supercomputers are supposed to organize and command the global economy to feed and house around 10 billion people without anybody starving and without cooking the planet, albeit with significantly less material resources available per-capita compared to modern industrial economies.
That takes care of the starving; what about the murdering? Apparently, this is where the democracy part of the plan comes in, but I can only say apparently because even less is said about how that will actually work. The authors take pains to emphasize the practicality of their scheme, but setting up and running a democracy for a single nation has proven to be a consequential task and many such attempts have failed or eventually resulted in back-sliding to authoritarianism or oligarchy.
Setting up a global democracy starting from the current state of the world seems herculean. The authors mention a couple of times that the democracy/linear-programming/simulation scheme happens “after the revolution” but provide no details at all on what sort of revolution it was – did it have a lot of murdering during the revolution but not after? Again, the authors do not say. How we actually get from here to there without the reins of power being seized by bloodthirsty autocratic sociopaths seems like a pretty important detail and its lack is the biggest lacuna in the book.
You might wonder what a resident in the world-democracy will actually be voting for since much of her life will be organized by equations and simulations rather than her own sense of what she might want to do. Will it be what sort of government she wants? Don’t be silly, she wants Socialism, of course. No, the real question for voters is: what is the set of linear programs that should be used for global economic planning?
A democracy where people elect the equations that will rule their lives is certainly a striking idea. We shall all be Cyberneticians in Half-Earth Socialist Utopia.
In the last part of the book, we learn what everyday life in Half-Earth Socialist Utopia will be like through a fictional account using the same trope as News from Nowhere in which the main character, William Guest, falls asleep in the present time and wakes up to experience a day of life in the future.
In the Half-Earth Socialism version, William wakes up in a small-town collective located in the Northeastern part of North America. As William encounters some of the residents, they cheerfully, almost manically, spout on about how awesome everything is compared to the before-times and how much better their lives are while explaining to William the basics of the local economy and social life.
This is off-putting for a couple reasons. First, even if you like your life you generally don’t accost random people to tell them about it. But this behavior makes a lot more sense if you assume that everyone suspects William of being a member of the secret police and are trying to avoid being sent away for reeducation.
The second weird thing is that life in Half-Earth Socialist Utopia doesn’t actually seem all that great. Do you like to go on road trips? Or travel to distant cities or continents? Or go to movies or concerts or restaurants? Or possess a modern cell phone? I sure hope not, because it doesn’t appear you’ll be doing any of that. As best as I can gather from the short story, much of life in a present-day modern city will no longer be available to the citizens of Half-Earth Socialist Utopia.
Mostly, it seems, they are going to be farming and riding around on bicycles. Because there won’t be any manufactured fertilizers, there will need to be a lot of farming, and since there won’t be much in the way of modern farm equipment (or cars for that matter), a lot of that farming will be by hand.
I realize that some people really do like farming so maybe this life would count as utopia for them. That said, at least in the United States, a lot of the people who do appear to like farming don’t appear to be especially enthusiastic about Socialism or bicycles. Evidently Drew and Troy really like all three. I am skeptical, though, that there are enough people so excited about being farmers who rarely leave the town where they live (and need special permission from the authorities to do so) that they are willing to staff the barricades of a successful revolution to force everyone else live that way too.
I did enjoy Half-Earth Socialism. I like most any book that is reasonably well-written and has information and perspectives new to me. I hadn’t heard of Otto Neurath or Leonid Kantorovich and I didn’t know about the abortive Soviet attempt to use linear programming for central planning. This book inspired me to read the (much better) Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.
I don’t think I want to live in a Half-Earth Socialist Utopia, though, and I’m skeptical that the plan for it as sketched out in the book is as practical as the authors claim.
That much of the present-day modern world will get “un-built” in Half-Earth Socialism puts the book firmly in the degrowth movement. My reaction to degrowth is: no thanks. I suspect any such un-building would be accompanied by a horrendous amount of violence and that is why the authors tiptoe around the actual revolution needed to bring their utopia into being.
The premise of substituting equations and simulations for a market with a currency is that a market is fundamentally solving a computational problem and that with sufficiently powerful computers we could solve the problem directly, but with a more equitable outcome than currently produced by market capitalism. But what if markets are really solving a cognitive or knowledge problem that central planning, computational or otherwise, cannot solve because the central planner has no access to the tacit knowledge distributed amongst individual people and situations?
The description of life in Half-Earth Socialist Utopia dovetails curiously with that sketched out for the pioneer communities in the latest installment of Brink Lindsey’s The Permanent Problem, a series of meditations on what Lindsey thinks has gone wrong in modern society that is just now getting around to proposing what we should do to fix things. Given Lindsey’s Libertarian leanings, it’s quite curious that he’s arrived at a somewhat similar solution. It’s only kind of similar because in Lindsey’s scheme people freely choose to establish and live in these self-sufficient communities rather than being forced to, all while a market economy continues to run alongside them and there is no central planning.
Lindsey is also pro-technology in a way that Vettese and Pendergrass clearly aren’t. Half-Earth Socialism only grudgingly accepts supercomputers and solar power as necessary parts of the plan, while insisting that most everything else created in the last several decades needs to go. This conveniently brings the world back to modes of production that Marx and Engels would have recognized.
It’s interesting to think about Libertarians and Socialists agreeing that capitalism has overreached and produced a society operating at scales fundamentally at odds with human thriving and that what we need are smaller, human-sized communities and economies that create and sustain the relationships sundered by globalist market forces.
Some Further Reading
I found these articles useful when thinking and writing about this book.
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/degrowth-neither-left-nor-right-but-backward/
