Page 155 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

The reality of this international division of labor developed by global
monopoly capitalism places some real constraints on the development of
credible anti-globalization alternatives. What it suggests is that those who
go another route – seeking international solutions to global problems – are
the ones heading in the direction that we need to go. This approach – the
development of a ‘global’ instead of a ‘local’ alternative to globalization –
will not be easy, for many of the reasons alluded to above. But this is the
challenge presented which has to be met.
Critical work in this area has been done by the well-known studies by
Eastern European scholars and of seminal texts such as Nove’s – whose
9
ideas have played a central role in my conceptions. More recently, authors
such as Schweickart and Lawler have debated Ollman and Ticktin on
10
the critical issues. The general conclusion which I draw from this body
of work is that neither self-managed market socialism of the Yugoslavian
variety nor centrally planned socialism of the Soviet type is feasible or
desirable. What is needed is some (difficult to specify) combination of
‘plan’ and ‘market’. In this connection, it is important to recall that, as
mentioned before, important scholars and policy-makers such as Brus
and Kornai have moved from an earlier reluctant endorsement of this
‘plan and market’ model to a firm conviction that it is unviable and that
only a free market economy is capable of operating efficiently. 11
Nonetheless, most of these authors, especially Schweickart, put forward
the alternative of a market socialism comprised of self-managed, worker-
controlled enterprises. This alternative, heavily influenced by a perhaps
too positive assessment of the Yugoslavian self-management experience as
well as of the Mondragon cooperative conglomerate in the Basque region
of Spain, is a useful point of entry into a brief exploration of the features
which constitute a realistic alternative to global monopoly capitalism.
What follows is an outline of an alternative to monopoly capitalist glob-
alization without discussing the many detailed and complex problems
which any such alternative raises.
The first point to make clear is that a fully centrally planned economy
will not work for both economic and political reasons. On the political
side, it should be obvious that such an economy, in which all outputs of
goods, services and investment are specified in detail in a single compre-
hensive plan which is then administered by a set of central planners,
requires political centralization as well. One cannot have democracy under
such circumstances. The objections on the economic side are equally for-
midable. The number of prices and outputs in any modern economy run
into the millions and even if these were specifiable by computerized
routines, there is no way for consumer preferences (price, quality, variety,

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