 Hello, my name is Aaron Mustani Today, I have the great pleasure of being joined by the two authors of this fantastic book the People's Republic of Walmart Lee Phillips and Mikal Rosfarski. Good to have you both on. Great to be here I've got a bunch of questions to ask you but for anybody unacquainted with the book. It is a fantastic book I think it's one of the most important books on the left this year I think that's not just some I am prone to hyper hyperbole, but I think this is the year we're seeing Lots and lots of books on the left addressing really big Propositional issues if we want to actually have that government And I think it's an expression of the fact that the radical left is now engaging with state power and What does 21st century socialism look like so very practically oriented discussion ahead of us today? um People's Republic of Walmart For the audience they'll be thinking what's Walmart got to do with What a socialist economy might look like or more socially just economy might look like can we start I'll start with you Mikal To what extent are modern-day free market economies actually free? Yeah, that's a good question. Um, I mean they're free for some I think is the is the answer to that right? When most of us go into And unfree for a lot of others I should add that's the sort of you know, that's the other side of that I think when most of us go into work We experience that as a huge realm of unfreedom for the vast majority of us who uh, who do work for living once we enter You know the the shop the factory the whatever the hospital school Um, it's what the boss says goes um The boss on the other hand has a lot of freedom. I mean the argument we're uh, we're making in the book is that um A lot of the world's biggest or not not a lot most of the world's biggest corporations are huge spheres of economic planning That sort of old bogeyman, um of the right that the right has used as a cudgel against the left, you know, this is uh If you try to consciously control the economy, it'll never work and we'll probably get into that Get into that later. Well, it turns out that once you enter the sort of four walls of the of the firm of the corporation It's a giant plan plan system where the managers and that's what where I think, you know, that division in freedom exists that there's Uh, a lot of freedom for managers and bosses to set plans within certain that obviously the market imposes some Some limits on that but there's a lot of sort of Rational planning but for the vast majority of people for workers It's a realm of of unfreedom where you know are sort of shared human capacity for decision making Is completely not even underutilized but largely unutilized and I think that's Something that we set out to challenge To challenge in the book. Uh, yeah Lee, um So to what extent do we live in a planned economy? To what extent is the idea of the free market just a mystification then building on that? Well, it the uh The economy as a whole it's not a planned economy, but within uh these very very large Entities as as miha was saying they are entirely planned. This is fascinating for us because The argument that we have from uh from the right is the market is always consistently the the optimum way of allocating goods and services but internally As as miha said they're entirely planned. What's fascinating with with walmart is it's the largest corporation in the world Um, it has the largest number of employees. It would be the it's the third largest enterprise after the people's liberation army And the pentagon if it were an economy It would be not in the g20, but on the size of a sweden or Wow, I have no idea. Is that me switzerland? Wow. Um, it you know, it's it's on the on the scale of You know slightly smaller, but on the scale of the subunit the height of its um, you know in the 1970s uh before sort of you know stagnation sets in So that's really interesting because if the you know, the one of the best arguments that the right ever mounted against the left against socialism was that um, the price signal in the market um, basically captures An infinitude of information, uh within supply chains Uh, not just that but also discovers as a mechanism of discovery of information And that if uh, we want to avoid all of the problems with market exchange in terms of the any growth of inequality irrational production and so on and so forth and replace it with um, with planning, uh, you would have to have this army of bureaucrats That uh, would not be anywhere near as good as capturing all that information. Um And uh, that would lead to a mismatch between supply and demand On a gross scale that would produce, uh significant shortages Intern chaos the only way that you could sort of, um grapple with that chaos would be some sort of authoritarianism and then Better being better boom you have the Soviet Union. That was sort of the historical argument. Um, It's it's a really bloody good argument The trick is that if that were true Then one more shouldn't work one more shouldn't exist Because if it is a an uh an internally an entirely planned economy I guess it exists with the sea of prices, but internally it's entirely planned Um, what makes it work? Um, uh compared to the Soviet Union um, so yeah, it's But we we should take some lessons from this in that Uh, basically it shows that planning works. However, it's authoritarian planning rather than democratic planning Maybe we can get into that in a little bit. Yeah, so we we're obviously talking about the firm to an extent We're talking about coast is it coast's theorem? Yeah, yeah, we're on the coast wrong coast. Um, and he sort of Stumbles upon this really in the 20s the 30s I was talking about this a few weeks ago to a gentleman who writes the economist he came on Right, um, and he was talking about you know, just intervention in free markets And obviously it's the paradigmatic example and it it's really striking how few people actually on the left Engage with this issue where you know, we have this mystification any intervention in free markets will Create a mismatch of resources create this equilibrium, etc Like you say the absolute heartbeat of modern economies are firms which don't operate like that Now, is there any is there any countervailing account that could come from Somebody who's defending the status quo who might say well, so what that's irrelevant. We already know about coast, right? Yeah, I mean, I think The traditional argument has always been but ultimately They still rely on prices, right, right. So it doesn't matter how big They get they're still existing like we said in this sort of sea of prices and that's and that's the bit that delivers sort of useful Information or crucial crucially useful information to them And I think the counter argument there is that We see increasingly and this is where sort of I think today differs from the 1930s when Which was the last time when the left and the right were sort of hashing hashing this out is that we do have an increase in information technology that Basically, you know produces this total surface Of information of various kinds of useful information and it's I just think it's, you know, it's a sort of poverty of imagination to think that This is the one method of finding a way to basically align, you know, sort of social goals with Individual or lower level goals. That's ultimately the rights argument That you need some sort of mechanism that'll align, you know What do we want to do as a society with what do individuals or individuals for the units like firms do? And I think throughout history you've seen that there's different ways of doing that and especially now when we have information, you know, again high One very small thing Hayek had this sort of semi Mystical quote where at one point he calls prices action at a distance and I I'll kind of find it funny reading that today You know in 2019 when each of us has a or most of us have a smartphone in our pockets And you know this idea that this like g whiz action at a distance Happens through the price system. It just seems kind of quaint I mean is it fair to say actually that the idea of a Markets functioning through prices like that isn't itself a form of machine control Because you've got poor mason recently in his book, you know clear bright future And he says we have all these existential Quadries about oh, would we ever allow an AI to run society? Well, we already delegate a vast amount of sort of ethical decision making to well actually this Computer says no except it's not the computer. It's the market so is that is that a fair is that a fair sort of Assessment and then I want to ask you about the socialist calculation debate Uh, I'll be I'll be quick. I think that's Overall generally fair. I mean, I think there's I think there's maybe a bit more to it But generally yes, this is something this is a mechanism And a lot of the a lot of the austrians did in a way refer to it as a computer But one that's able to deal sort of with indeterminacy So that's the one thing that I would add that the the right really sees this As a specific kind of computer that doesn't take, you know, like a set program But is one that's able to Uh deal very well in a dynamic environment But overall I think I think that's a very good way of looking at it And of again demystifying some of that Some of this, you know, ideology ideology around the around the free market and around sort of freedom So the socialist calculation debate, which you explicitly talk about in the book We've already sort of really touched upon it is this idea that it's only really through the price mechanism that you can have This optimal allocation of resources and it feeds into sort of every day Off-the-shelf ideology for just capitalist realism, right? You don't even need to think that you're defending capitalism It's just that's how prices work. That's what they've always worked And what Hayek and Friedman and people like this say is that this will always be superior to Centrally command economies, but essentially command economies because they are acting with limited information Now we we can debate whether or that was ever true or not. Let's say it was true. Let's say it's historically Contingent it was limited to a certain period of time What you guys are saying is that technology now makes that general debate quite moot And furthermore if anything big data gives us far greater information than prices do. Yes, that's correct Yeah, absolutely. I mean you could also say that If if that were the case if uh, what you you know, you require some sort of External prices For that then you could say the same thing about the Soviet Union Soviet Union traded with the rest of the world So that doesn't really work. So you have to have some other explanation as to why The Soviet Union Did not work rather than simply planning because if planning is if if a command economy Is the reason that the Soviet Union didn't work then neither should Walmart neither should amazon. I should any of these and just serve I'm saying. Oh, well, we know about coast. I mean that's sort of that's that's their sort of um Get out of jail free card and they basically what we're doing. This is we're looking at that a little bit more seriously investigating that And really thinking about it more deep and the reason that this is this is absolutely necessary for us Associates why we need to take we need to return to the the socialist calculation debate Is because it is hard To if we are going to replace The market and all of the inequalities that that come in the irrationalities that accompany that It is not just enough for us through the force of will and our optimism and Um and and and sense of injustice to to write the the wrongs. We actually do have to think very seriously about Uh about the challenges of calculation and what's fascinating about the the The socialist calculation debate from the 30s to the 50s Was and why the Hayek and so on so forth made such really good arguments was because they in some respects were on the back foot um with uh the existence of of of socialism social democracy militant trade unions They were responding to uh an ascendant So intellectually confident left and they had to be as good and now what we say and it's really we were talking about this Just before we we started here the the rights response were booked already and I think uh to yours As well is that it's sort of off the shelf arguments. They're not really responding to this um and I find it it's it's very interesting and exciting to be in a moment of Where the left once again is beginning to be intellectually confident. Um, and uh Yeah, that they're having to respond to us once again, which is nice. Yeah, I mean, I went off in a bit of no It's good. I mean just because obviously my book was launched yesterday Congratulations congratulations. Yeah, congratulations to you happy to be joining this uvra of you know, uh quite inflammatory opinion on the left that the right feel they have to respond to And yeah, the the responses were or even the responses in the reviews prior to the publication Danny Finkelstein The Times And it's just chelish undergrad facebook post really pros and it's like, okay climate change demographic aging um automation the collapse of the neoliberal model since 2007 eight Whatever your politics we can all agree. This is a thing and they're not even talking about that They're not talking about for instance, this book as an intervention to those debates. They're just saying Do you apologize for 1917? Well any sort of effort to make society better result in you know, the russian civil war mark too or You know, uh the ukraine famines and so on I'm like, it's it's an off-the-shelf debate. Is there any smarter people on the right? There must be people for instance, my book got positive reviews I know you have as well in in certain publications one might not expect the financial times for instance Are there not people in those circles who look at this and go there's something really here that's quite interesting Have you have you encountered any reviews like that? The anarcho-capitalists Of all people the the anarcho-capitalists who are willing to take it Um, so you know a fringe, but again, you know someone like Hayek was a fringe figure In his time, but there are there's definitely people on the right who are who are willing to take it seriously There's the reinventing capitalism book. Uh shin burger this I think he was like a Victor martian burger. Yeah consultant management sort of, you know management consultant who's written kind of the Definitive kind of pop book on big data and now has a second one about how big data is going You know, he's basically making some of our arguments In you know the usual type of thing of kind of you know saving capitalism from the from the right But he's even willing to say that this, you know, maybe this new System enabled by information technology will not really be capitalism, but something else But we'll still have the higher, you know higher keys and all and all of that But yeah, so there's definitely people on the right thinking through this stuff And I think there's a big contrast between them. Yeah, and the people who are just, you know, like making these off the off the shelf off the shelf arguments and you know Laugh or curve, you know writing on a napkin level of intellectual curiosity Meyer Schoenberger, I think is very very interesting and because As you say, he's many respects making some of the similar arguments that we make but from the opposite point of view He's a nakedly, you know pro-capitalist and he's just finding fascinating that that more and more Transactions already Are taking place where the price signal is playing a smaller and smaller role now that we have So machine learning big data allowing for multi-dimensional comparison of different different factors He uses the example sometimes of Airline ticket Recommendation engines where you as a human might find it actually quite difficult to like, okay So I want to fly in this state or possibly these other dates and I don't want to fly out of this This this airport, but I could if it were and but I won il seat and my wife wants a window and But I don't I don't want any stop all those different things And we actually find it very difficult as humans to to have that multi-dimensional comparison But the recommendation engines knows Having seen how we've purchased things in the past begins to actually Know you better than you know yourself is able to make these recommendations The price is just one smaller aspect of this What's fascinating? I think there with him is that you can sort of see As serve there's you know, there's a challenge to neoliberalism since 2008 They are they haven't really grappled with the they haven't fully resolved that the crisis and there are interesting figures on horrifying figures on the right that are like people like Marco Rubio who are making arguments that there needs to be more state planning More intervention more industrial policy For the united states to be able to compete against against china Right and you could imagine a world where serve after neoliberalism where The right fully recognizes once again the necessity of planning but hierarchical Authoritarian planning and return to that and never being any sort of like final reckoning between the classes and so our argument is is is it is the sort of the flip side of that which is Planning is is possible. It's everywhere already It's hierarchical and what we need to be doing is making work for us. We need to make sure that it's democratic Yeah, I mean in a way where you know, it's the reverse of kind of of what you said where every the sort of Stock response on the right is to tar everyone with that brush of 1917 in a way our book is sort of you know Tarring walmart with the same brush as the soviet union. Here's this. Here's another case of authoritarian planning And it also, you know, it also works for for now, but it's also deeply authoritarian I mean, I think and I think the rights responses are largely to see this as a sort of technocratic problem And how they deal with you know, the surrises of information technology in a technocratic way whereas We're trying to come at it from the, you know, typical perspective of of the left of socialist Which is what does this mean for human freedom for human liberation for all that? Where's the you know, where's the human being? Where's where's the worker in this and and what does that mean for For for us as people who who might be able to decide over destiny Yeah, because I look at big data and I look at all the tendencies you're talking about in the book And I basically see two potential futures So one is data-driven public services universal basic services Which are freely available to all on the back of the client cost of information energy labor, etc I think that's one highly plausible future So permanent cheaper the question is how cheap, right? and then A big variable and all of that will be big data. So if you've got universal basic service of Public buses free public buses for everybody everywhere Obviously predictive modeling about who's going to go where for how long etc would be very good in allocating resources for public Transport network. So that's one future Another is China. Yeah, where you have we chat which is not just a social network But also a payment system You have smart cities which have facial recognition around them and people will be fined for jaywalking or so on Something like that a minor infraction And they'll be immediately fined it'll be through their mobile phone. Is that is that a fair is that a fair conclusion say that? Planning of a considerably Increased kind is kind of inevitable. The question is in whose interests is that you fit in the island head. Absolutely the This Marco Rubu report that came out a couple of months ago Made in china 2025 where he makes this call for you know more planning to be So the united states can stay ahead in robotics a i biotech number of other Years then intel came out with a similar white paper making an argument for And more interventionist industrial policy and one can absolutely imagine a sort of convergence of these the these ideas and the dystopia is gen is genuinely that inability to I think to say make a distinction between the sort of surveillance capitalism of amazon and facebook's of the world and the surveillance communism of the the people's republic of china and and yeah social credit and all these these A convergence of those i'd i'm not Predicting that that's going to happen. But I do think that the the key at the moment for the left is In the in face of both of these sort of tendencies is to remain as the guardians of freedom that we whatever path that they go down along this more sort of Definitely surveillance Planned market economy Our responsibility is to be the you know the champions of freedom and democracy in that in those situations And we already see how my silicon valley cooperates with you know with the u.s. government with the surveillance state with The national security state all that we also see i mean the The upside is we also see tech workers starting to rebel against that And some you know very nascent forms of of organizing there They're partly driven by working conditions But partly driven by these sort of you know deeply political pressures where people see what See these possible futures and again not you know not making really super dystopian predictions But even today there's enough there that you know people don't want to be involved in In whatever projects whether at home or or abroad we saw that with with microsoft and some of the facial recognition stuff And other things and yeah, and in terms of the in terms of The sort of smart city thing we're already seeing that there's sidewalk labs Which is run by google setting up shop in actually toronto canada And trying to create these sort of model the first sort of model neighborhood that would take This sort of capital capitalist road of big data and planning marrying urban planning with economic planning with with a host of other things and enabling the kinds of You know the kinds of fairly again authoritarian technocratic solutions that That deeply critical of here I mean, it's one of the things I really agree with in the kind of account of marcus gruneris by antonio negri And there's lots of things to disagree with antonio negri But the idea of the real subsumption of society the gradual expansion of the surveillance of the factory Superimposed on to society at large. I think that's a that's a that's quite a clear and prescient account Of what google wants to do for instance with smart cities. It seems to me They want to gather and collect as much data as possible about every iterative act every movement And somehow subordinate it to a you know the profit motive. Yeah Yeah, and I think that I think the challenge for the left is to come up with And I don't think we even pretend to do that here, but to start to come up with ideas for These kinds of coordinated coordinating functions to be done democratically to be done in a way that you know somehow walks that tightrope between centralization and decentralization between decision making at the individual level and and freedom and control As well as sort of those big broad social goals that we'd want to achieve together In a way that you know that avoids Exactly this kind of this kind of subsumption And I mean, I think yeah, I think that that observation is happening the one we we call in the book is that also famous quote from marks where I won't get it right, but it's something about you know how we learn About society at the fact you're like, you know the factory in his time teaches us just how Reliant we are on other people just how social beings we are where you know production under feudalism or under other social systems would not have taught that And I think this is you know sort of like The next logical step if that's already implicit in Capitalism is this sort of reliance on others and this common building of a world? Why don't we actually you know Actualize that which is sort of trying to trying to show us where we actually socially decide on what we want to be doing Well question on central banks. All right, so you both say quite provocatively That the Federal Reserve is effectively a form of central planning Or the Bank of England is a form of central planning and it strikes me especially in a world of 10 10 years almost zero percent interest rates That clearly there's a measure of planning going on with credit allocation in our societies But ideology veils that as planning and this is still the free market Can you go into how central banks specifically or more so in the last 10 years are expressions of central planning? Yeah, and that's an argument. We actually I'll make a plug for jw mason uh an economist at the us who at in the us um works for John j college and um and the result institute has been helpful in making this argument for for quite some time um In a in a provocative way, and I think he's one of the people who Again who we looked at and who's building sort of left ecosystem of people taking these issues seriously um I mean, I think it's it hasn't been even since just since the financial crisis we have a sort of quote here from Notes from the Federal Reserve from their rate setting meetings, uh, even dating back to the fifties where They're going into great detail about the state of like contract negotiations between The auto unions and the auto companies And taking all this input from From the economy and using you know and and thinking about Some really big social goals like we don't want you know wages to rise too fast We don't want work, you know, we want to clamp down expectations or things like that where they're they are As you say, you know, it's not explicit plan. It's not like you will do that, but it's setting the bounds within which Economic subjects and especially now right with where we have we've had various kinds of um of policy for guidance, uh, you know qe all of that which create Create these quite tight bounds within which economic actors Actors will act so, you know, like even if you don't care about the central bank, right? If you're if you think you're an auto worker, something like that the central bank really cares about you Um, and it's yeah, and it's basic, you know And that filters down then to uh to the commercial banks and investment banks And so the very basic things about life like will I have a place to live? Will I get a mortgage? Will I will I be able to get an education? Will I get a student loan? Right all of these the rationing of credit is basically the rationing of sort of like life opportunities to to a large degree, especially for the people who don't have Capital already, right? So I think I mean it has a deep impact Even by by setting these bounds so it was always the case Let's say it was always the case that central banks were effectively operating as some kind of central planning Yeah, was that elevated however with the move to debt fuel growth rise of personal credit, etc Because obviously personal consumption became the backbone of the economy Often leveraged off inflated assets like home ownership often leveraged off debt You have securitized student debt securitized debt of all kind I mean, so is there do you think a substantially changed role for central banks As planners in the last 30 40 years or is it just all the way back to the early 20th century with the federal reserve? So if you look at like inflation busting for instance And that's quite a new agenda that the federal reserve or the bank of England central banks generally have had And and for me, that's a paradigmatic example of Central planning we do not want people the wealthy people's assets Um to you know really move about we certainly don't want the debt of poor people to suddenly Be lost to inflation. So it does seem to me quite a Structural role that has to play a near liberalism or generally. Yeah, but I think I think that's the I think that's the key there I think it's a shift in objectives Rather than a shift in the degree of planning. I mean, right. There's a really fascinating book that I there's too many things to read There's a great book by a french scholar eric mone and economist That goes into the role of actually the french central bank in the 1950s and 60s in really driving industrial policy through credit allocation and What's the name of the book? I need to read that. What do you say? Yeah, I need to I Controlling credit controlling credit. Who's controlling eric mone. M-o-n-n-e-t. Yeah. Oh, wow And it's it's an academic study, but it's it's fascinating. I've just read the introduction So there's not you know, there's not obviously there but it but it's a case study again like Going back again to that same time that I was talking about with the federal reserve in the 50s Where the objectives were different and some of the tools were different where there was Like much more sort of direct allocation credit and different kinds and different kinds of tools I mean remember we had like wage and price controls even in In the u.s. And lots of other countries in the in the 70s as one of the first initial responses to We certainly had them in canada in the 70s to To the initial sort of stagflation crisis. So I think banks central banks have always had this role. It just will be different tools and different And different objectives But I think they've had a really a really central role sort of at the heart of the economy So, okay, so I've got I'll come I'll come I'll come back to the central bank stuff in a second I guess I mean, it's an it's an interesting um empirical question as to whether there has been any sort of uh increase in inter interventionism, but I yeah, I would definitely agree that it's um It's just a change in um in the objectives rather than the in kind But that's interesting for us because then we can then set the uh a different set of objectives Yes, so I wonder if what's happened with central banking like so much of neoliberalism is Basically the objectives change, but it's masked as Retrenchment and it's not really retrenchment. It's just you're doing something you weren't previously doing and you know We can talk about a lot of things, but that's relevant I mean What john mcdonnell labors are saying in this country in regards to the central bank having some oversight And keeping house prices down improving productivity improving wages and you're getting lots of kickback from the financial establishment And you're thinking don't you want higher productivity? I mean, but is that to what extent is that quick answer because I want to move on to the soviet union But to what extent is that just an outgrowth of ideology or or or or Surely it's it favors them to have higher rates of productivity. I don't get it. Yeah, no I don't know. I think I don't get it. I mean, yeah, they're too they're too comfortable And there's too much sort of cat, you know, there's they it's it's in a way It's too good that the redistribution of so has sort of swamp, right? They're like the massive redistribution is to a certain degree swamp this need for higher productivity because they're able to Uh, to get larger parts of the surplus or larger parts of social needs, but I think that's a good I mean, I think that's a good question and even the u.s. Federal Reserve To this day has a dual mandate of fighting inflation and and aiming at full employment It's just again, it's ideology and it's and it's and it's you know, priority setting and it's A flexible approach to policy by those who are actually setting it to where you can see that again Those sort of rational and very human directed sort of kernels. Okay Question of you. Why did the soviet union fail? We've got to turn the the argument on its head the Within the socialist calculation debate the as I sort of discussed before which is now As we're saying the sort of off the shelf argument from the right since You know 1991 which is well any attempt to to plan an economy you will inevitably have the shortages That will result in chaos resolve the chaos with with authoritarianism That argument actually gets it backwards If you if you read the history the sort of economic history of the the soviet union what you find is that planning Comes in fits and starts It's many years and before planning really takes off The the state begins to take over large sections of the economy not because they had to serve Plan to well, okay, if we're going to replace the market with something else We will have to take over the the sectors. It was more that so, you know Huge swathes of the economy during the civil war were just collapsing and so the state was just sort of moving in and Trying to resolve those those bottlenecks and and so on and so forth with the the It's the authoritarianism that undermines the the quality of quality the information in the in the planning rather than planning leading to a deterioration of Information leading to the authoritarianism if you with the the Stalin counter-revolution by you know the late 1920s um You In that in those situations you had if you're in a on the shot floor and you are in charge of um, you know Counting how many widgets that have been produced and you haven't met your target You'll lie about that because you are scared of being sent to the gulag or be even being shot or So there's a that leads to a deterioration of information in the system or alternatively you will say um You'll under uh report what you're capable of doing and then showing oh fantastically magically we we beat our our target Um, I still don't have to go off to the gulag or or be shot It's the authoritarianism that undermines the planning now What's what's fascinating about this with I use the word fascinating too many times enough What's very very interesting with respect to the authoritarianism within the walmarts of the world is that Those are authoritarian too But they're not authoritarian the same The same sort of pain of death level You'll You know, you don't meet your target. You might be demoted or you might be fired It's not great, but it's it's certainly not being shot um, and so there's uh, there's a there's there's less of a deterioration of information in the system there but what's what's tantalizing about that is that um, if the degree, uh, if there's a If there's a correlation between the scale of authoritarianism and the the inferiority of the the information in in in the system Then therefore the lower the level of authoritarianism the greater the fidelity of the information in the system is to Should be to reality So I guess to sum up for me the book's kind of composed of three parts The first is how imminent within contemporary capitalism we see forms of planning which could be the basis for a new social society We engage with these sort of century long debates really about the role of planning and the role of prices in allocating resources And then the final bit is a review of the legacy of the ussr but also looking at some understudied individuals who Engaged with these problems, but because of political oppression and so on like cancel ravitch and so on They weren't given the role they mother otherwise might have had and it's quite interesting that it's clear You know, I don't think explicitly say you you touch on it though about there's clear parallels in the 1930s Between a move to state planning in the u.s. The rise of gdp with kuznets and so on and more or less the soviets are doing quite similar stuff And there's a problem that's waiting to be solved about how do you measure national output? How do you measure the economy and its sort of Multi multifarious ways and what's interesting for me is they say capitalist realists will say Oh, the economy is kind of too complex to grasp etc etc But then like reading the football schools at the end of every week You go to the back of the economy gdp quarterly growth and so if that's such an easily understandable non mystified metric Why should the rest of the economy not be like that? I guess finally Regarding states and markets, what can socialists do in the here and now what sort of Yeah, what sort of demands can be made If you're a bernie supporter or aoc follower on twitter or a labor party member here in the uk or anywhere else in the world And you're a socialist you engage in electoral democratic politics or even non electoral democratic politics What what could you learn from this book and then say to people the whole public office? We should be doing this I think a lot of the things that At least when I think of for example, bernie in the u.s A lot of things that they're doing are already on the lines of this for example I think the medicare for all demanding the u.s as sort of In a way absurd it seems say from candor the or the uk where you've had socialist health care For for 50 years Even though it's not perfectly even though it's not democratic even though it is sort of, you know It's kind of paternalistic nationalization at times at least it is sort of a decommodified democratically in some way decided over sector I think that demand Is is a really good one and then for example in the uk or other countries I think looking at big sectors of the economy that could be demock decommodified Where there are already existing movements to to start to do this Pharmacare is another one and looking at actually the production of pharmaceuticals which We don't have time to go into but there's huge huge, you know problems with with markets Allocating resources for for what gets produced especially in terms of antibiotic resistance all this kind of stuff Childcare transit you mentioned already So I think on that sort of Very very high level social scale like here's a sector of the economy that we could Run democratically in in the sort of very abstract overarching way, but I think at the same time and I hope that comes through in the book Looking at, you know, that sort of low level of democracy. How can we democratize Workplaces and I think that's where uk labor Is doing a really good job under Corbin at looking at at both of those right? What are alternative models of ownership for particular? Enterprises particular projects and ones that give people more of a say More of a capacity to participate in that planning at the sort of shop, you know factory, whatever Whatever level and hope, you know, and then you kind of you have those those Pinchers that that are moving in in in both directions from the bottom up and from the and from the top down and I mean and We talked about central banks a lot. I think doing that job of demystifying these big institutions repoliticizing them and Cutting against that really strong Uh, new level argument that I think is falling apart slowly that these are just like outside the realm of politics That this is just like pure dry economics kind of working itself out. I think Being being really brave and forward about saying no, we can have different social goals, you know Right at the heart of monetary policy or at the heart of these like large Institutions that already have a coordinating function, but that have been effectively depoliticized So I think there's a whole host in short There's a whole host of things because I think we as we try to show the planning is really everywhere in our economy It's just making it explicit and making it Participatory making us actually be the agents of it rather than small groups of people the two examples I would give Concretely, yeah, would be one. Yes. I do really want to underscore the the scale of the threat that we face from anti-microbial resistance It was fascinating a few weeks ago to see the uk's anti-microbial resistance czar Moot sorry to discuss the idea of potentially nationalizing a big pharma in order to resolve this problem You viewers might not be aware, but you basically 30 35 years ago the major pharmaceutical companies got out of the business of any sort of research and development or even commercialization of new classes of antibiotic research continues to happen, but Public universities or government labs, which do not have the money to to to engage in clinical trials And so fast this the uk anti-microbial resistance czar happens to be a former executive with golden sacks, I mean um, and his his argument is that they might need to be nationalized because the antibiotics are simply insufficiently profitable if you You know take a course of antibiotics for five six weeks at the end of that you want the infection gone You don't you're not going to be taking a drug every day for the rest of your life as you would with some sort of chronic disease Which is where the real money is um and that The scale of the threat there is Is sort of undermining modern medicine. It is probably Even more of an existential threat to our modern way of life throwing back to victorian sort of types of medicine Most of modern medicine depends upon a background of anti-microbial protection Even the diagnostics sometimes do that. So it really is Very accidentally threatening Um, and that would be I would add that as a sort of number one In fact, I kind of wish that there was as much of a left movement Around anti-microbial resistance as there is around climate change. It is And it's it's happening much faster With the green deal. I'm very excited about that framing because for It is about planning now. It's talking about infrastructure state-led development um A full employment It's and it leaps over the the two sort of main frames Framings of the of the climate threat that we've had so far, which are both forms of capitalist realism. One is sort of like Market mechanisms of carbon taxation or cap and trade or Feed in tariffs, um, which end up, you know Nick more negatively impacting working working people on the other side. There's a sort of like personal Individual, what, you know, what can I do? Can I, you know travel, you know fly less or whatever and again? It's this sort of individualized capitalist realist conception of of of responsibility for this The green new deal framing for the very first time Locates the real source of the problem of Of market failure of who is responsible not as individuals, but a system the market system Some of the particular demands within it. I would like to see a little bit more robust I think some so I have some minor criticism there. I'd like to see more engagement with trade unions from the get-go where Green New Deal activists have from the start worked with trade unions They've had much more success than the ones where those areas where sort of activists Or environmentalists have come up with their series of demands and never spoke to trade unions And and now there's some you know, there's a number of trade unions who've actually been protesting the green new deal in california and elsewhere in the united states some some even some quite radical unions like that the electrical workers so There needs to be a sort of finessing of that but overall The framing is absolutely an example of what we're talking about in terms of planning as a solution to climate change and raft of other environmental issues rather than degrowth or individual consumption or market mechanisms cap and trade or whatever it's interesting you mentioned the the pharmaceutical stuff because In my book I talk about a great disorder and all these crises. I don't talk about that one But most people aren't aware of this in 1900 the global causes like leading cause of death globally pneumonia Infections influenza. Yeah, exactly. There's all infections And we just take it for granted that increasingly causes of death will be dementia cancer stroke age related conditions But the always one of the greatest humanitarian developments It's it is such a precious thing. It did, you know a price above rubies antibiotics and and they weren't patented Fleming didn't pay to penicillin Which is interesting. Oh, it is. Yeah, absolutely. There's all sorts of lovely Fleming all sorts of lovely stories of decommod of sort of socialist ethos of Associates values within the history of modern medicine But you know revival of that is absolutely necessary On that note, thank you gentlemen. The book is available in all good book shops and some bad ones as well um Very much worth reading. How much is it? Uh, priceless priceless. Um, you know the canadian dollars. I think it's about 10 or 11 quid in the uk 10 for they think 99 We don't we don't like to talk about the price of our book, you know, well, this is the thing Oh, how can it be a communist book because it's not free? It's a book. It's not a mode of production. They're two different things If only it was that easy. Thank you very much again It's available on the verso website and bookstores don't get it from amazon But do give them a review on amazon give them a good one Thanks for joining us. Cheers. Thanks so much, man