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By: Chris Brady

BOSTON – Healthcare is in a private-equity induced freefall. But after a historic strike and ongoing negotiations, including a lock-out confrontation with the bosses, nurses at Brigham Women’s Hospital stand in between the Commonwealth’s healthcare unions and coordinated management destruction.

On Wednesday, July 8, 4,700 Mass General Brigham (MGB) nurses and home care clinicians at Brigham Women’s Hospital went on a 24-hour strike after 99.6 percent of Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) members at MGB voted in favor of the largest nurses’ strike in state history. The work stoppage comes after 23 failed negotiation attempts since November and after the nurses’ contract expired in early April. 

Hospital management responded to the strike with a five-day lockout so they could justify shipping in 1,300 travel nurses, understood by union nurses as scabs for management. Management also retained a notorious union-busting law firm at the heart of many employers’ anti-labor inventory.

Mnagement still hasn’t conceded any demands and nurses are back working for patients, in spite of the historic action, but the workplace issues and the war associated with them remain — now louder than ever before.

Wages, Safety, and PTSD

Nurses point to a long list of grievances, including but not limited to pay.

Kelly Morgan, chair of the Massachusetts Nurses Association bargaining unit at Brigham Women’s Hospital and a labor and delivery nurse, told Working Mass that the strike came after months of stonewalling from hospital management.

Nurses were offered a laughable 0 percent cost-of-living increase for almost all nurses. MGB is one of the best hospitals in the country, and nurses deal with patients with some of the most complex conditions in the world. Brigham’s prestige requires high-level skill, but nurses said that their compensation doesn’t come close to meeting the job’s demands.

“We deal with the sickest of the sick,” Jim McCarthy said, a PACU nurse and vice chair of the bargaining committee. “We want to make sure the nurses that we have stay skilled, but also that they want to stay here.” 

Despite Brigham’s assurance that their nurses are the best in the country, Dana Farber Cancer Institute nurses are paid more than MGB. The union is seeking pay parity with Dana Farber and compensation commensurate with their experience, McCarthy indicated. Morgan added that MGB is located in Boston’s affluent Longwood Medical area, subjecting nurses to significant commuting and cost-of-living concerns, each another brick in their walls. Nurses are demanding a reasonable wage adjustment for the growing expenses of living in Greater Boston.

“To live in the city of Boston, you need as a single person to make $120,000 a year at a minimum,” she argued. On June 15, MGB Anesthesiology posted a CNA job application which advertises $18.50 to $27.50 an hour.

Another chief concern was healthcare costs, an almost ironic fact not lost on strike organizers.

This demand had some historical context, Morgan said, as hospital management had bungled a 2024 health insurance plan offered to nurses. The resulting benefit put some nurses at risk to pay Massachusetts tax for technically having inadequate coverage. The hospital consequently renegotiated and raised worker deductibles to cover themselves from their own error.

“That really put a sour taste in our mouth,” Morgan said.

In a remarkable demonstration of shamelessness, hospital management attempted to force yet another increase in nurses’ premiums. The 0 percent cost-of-living increase is causing MGB nurses to be pushed to accept an effective across-the-board pay cut due to the increased premiums.

Beyond this, McCarthy outlined that nurses are fighting for fair nurse-to-patient staffing ratios, one of the most common bargaining issues in healthcare. Management prefers to stretch nurses as thin as possible in order to save on labor costs. Consequently, nurses are often forced to work in overwhelming conditions and patient care suffers as a result, he said.

“They don’t hire enough staff,” McCarthy continued, adding that management prefers to rely on travel nurses or frantic ‘please come in’ messages blasted to staff before busy periods. 

This status-quo is preferable for management than hiring union nurses. But travelers, in particular, are another point of significant contention. McCarthy believes that sometimes up to 30 to 40 percent of nurses at the hospital are non-benefitted, non-union travel nurses. Travel nurses typically constitute 8 to 10 percent of total nurses in any given hospital on average. He contested that relying on travelers is problematic because they take away from what should be union jobs, and given a general lack of experience, put patient lives at risk.

“It’ll turn your hair gray. They’re like mercenaries,” he said.

When the scabs take over — this is so scary — but the death rate in the hospital goes up.

Working Mass could not independently verify this claim.

The most pressing issue, though, is safety. Morgan outlined truly concerning instances of systemic violence nurses face:

The violence in the workplace is ridiculous. It’s there every day,  verbal assaults on nurses, by patients, patients’ families.

Morgan described that nurses repeatedly identified “frequent fliers,” or patients that regularly came into the hospital and threatened nurses. Despite flagging them to security, she said that the officers were rarely helpful. The day after one such patient had been identified as threatening, she continued, the patient attacked a nurse, grabbing her by the throat and reportedly slamming her head against the wall. Morgan said:

That nurse has not been back to work since. She has significant PTSD. She doesn’t even know if she wants to return to nursing.

She explained a separate incident where a nurse checked bathrooms looking for an absent patient, also previously flagged to security, only to be greeted by the patient cooking synthetic tranquilizer in the bathroom. Morgan recalled that the nurse inhaled the fumes and “had an altered mental status” that required an emergency room visit immediately. Nurses have even begun calling 911 to deal with physical threats because in-house security is less responsive than the Boston Police.

“(Management) was like, we have to look into that further,” Morgan said, in response to nurses raising concerns about workplace safety. “We don’t have all the details, blah, blah, blah. Then it’s crickets.” 

Morgan said multiple workplace issues have shown that nurses and patients are relegated to second-tier for the hospital. The decision to strike was not just about wages, or safety, but about the dignity of patients and nurses themselves.

The Board of Chuds

MGB’s Board of Trustees provides a glimpse into why the hospital has stonewalled its workers.

Out of the 26 Trustees, 15 of them are former, current, or the spouses of corporate CEOs. An additional four Trustees are executives at private equity or venture capital firms.

There are some familiar faces among the Trustees as well. One os Jonathan Kraft, son of militant Zionist and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and brother to Josh Kraft, who ran a failed primary campaign against Boston Mayor Michelle Wu in 2025. Another familiar face is that of the president and CEO of Lockheed Martin, James Taiclet, helming the world’s largest weapons manufacturer while also serving on the hospital board. Taiclet has overseen military transfers to Israel including: F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, which comprise 80 percent of the Israeli military’s fighter aircraft, AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, and M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems. 

Diane Patrick, retired law partner at Ropes & Gray and spouse of former Governor Deval Patrick, also sits on the board. Her law specialty is employment law — on behalf of employers, naturally — with particular specialization in the healthcare sector.

Former Boston Mayor and Secretary of Labor and current NHLPA union Executive Director Marty Walsh is another Trustee. Despite his seeming labor bonafides, he hasn’t been very visible during the nurses’ strike. Morgan told Working Mass in a text message that Walsh has always been supportive of the union and likely continues to be, but that nurses believe “the MGB Board is silencing him.”

There are only two actively practicing physicians on the board, and predictably, no nurses. As the governing authority of the hospital system, the board has significant sway in contract negotiations. Given the overrepresentation of billionaires and absence of workers on the body, class-war delineations of the negotiations become clear. 

MGB paid its executive staff a total of $35.9 million in 2024. MGB CEO earned over $8 million in compensation, prior to her bonus. Again, nurses were offered a 0 percent cost-of-living increase. The hospital is a non-profit organization.

Nurses understand that healthcare is in a precarious position, over a year out from damaging Trump cuts to research and Medicaid/Medicare has impacted industry staffing, as reported previously by Working Mass. But nurses consistently highlighted that they are cognizant of these factors outside of the hospital’s control. Management, however, is less motivated to cut a deal. McCarthy said:

If they had come to us and said, look, we’re in a tight bind, we could come back and say, yeah, I can understand that. But that’s not the case. You have a board of directors, run by hedge funds, venture capitalists.

The hospital has hired law firm Littler Mendelson to fight the nurses’ union effort. Littler Mendelson is the largest employment law firm in the country, pushing ethical boundaries for anti-worker outcomes, assisting Starbucks, Amazon, and Delta Air Lines with union-busting efforts. In an interview with SFGATE, labor lawyer Stewart Weinberg said that the firm has a nickname among union lawyers: “Hitler, Mussolini, and Fascist.” 

“How much money are they paying them?” Morgan wondered, arguing that the cost of the law firm’s services, travel nurses-lodging and wages, and lost patients from the strike exceeded the cost of settling with the union by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.

Management’s strategy, she argued, is not motivated by near-term finances, but a once-in-a-generation opportunity to weaken MGB’s various healthcare unions. 

“They’re making a long-term financial play,” she said. “They’re looking 20 years down the road. If they can break us, that means that the other (unions) are an easy target.”

Chris Brady is a member of Boston DSA and an editor of Working Mass.

The post “Union-Busting” Law Firm and Business-Backed Trustees Lead MGB Nurses to Largest Nurses’ Strike in State History appeared first on Working Mass.

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Events and Actions

Tuesday July 21 (4:30 PM – 7:00 PM)  Jackie Fielder Town Hall & Tenants Rights Lit Drop (16th St. Mission, Qa, 2000 Mission St)

Tuesday July 21 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday July 21 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing (1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 22 (6:00 PM – 7:30 PM) Phonebank for the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act – Hybrid (Syzygy SF, 395 S Van Ness Ave,)

Wednesday July 22 (7:00 PM – 9:00 PM)  Socialist Shop Talk (1916 McAllister St)

Saturday July 25 (10:00 AM – 2:00 PM)  No Appetite for Apartheid – Store Canvass (1916 McAllister St)

Sunday July 26 (1:00 PM – 2:30 PM)  What Is DSA? (1916 McAllister St)

Sunday July 26 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM)  Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group (zoom)

Monday July 27 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM)  Tenderloin Healing Circle (220 Golden Gate Ave)

Tuesday July 28 (5:30 PM – 7:30 PM)  Phonebank for the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act (1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday July 28 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 29 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) DSA SF Electoral Board x WFP Happy Hour (Teeth Bar SF, 2323 Mission St)

Wednesday July 29 (6:45 PM – 8:30 PM) Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday July 30 (7:00 PM – 9:00 PM)  ICE Out Orientation (1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 1 (1:00 PM – 3:00 PM)  Immigrant Justice KYR Canvassing – Pacific Heights (Raymond Kimbell Playground Park, 1901 Geary Blvd)

Monday August 3 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St

Apartheid-Free Bay Area Outreach Training and Canvassing

Come join our store canvass for the No Appetite for Apartheid campaign on Saturday 7/25! We will meet at 1916 McAllister St for the training at 10. Snacks will be provided. Canvassing starts at 11:30, and will run until around 2.

This event is very new member friendly! We hope you can make it!

RSVP here.

Immigrant Justice Know Your Rights Canvassing Event & Social

Join the Immigrant Justice Working Group for Know Your Rights (KYR) canvassing Saturday August 1 at 1:00PM at Raymond Kimbell Playground Park!

We will be distributing red cards and KYR materials to businesses and community members in the Pacific Heights neighborhood.

We will meet at Raymond Kimbell Playground Park on the corner of Geary Blvd. & Steiner St. to receive training and materials before canvassing.

Join us after for a social/debrief session at a local spot and grab food/drinks!

New to canvassing? No worries! There will be a brief how-to training before we go out in pairs or small groups.

Reportback: EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing Week #1

Last Tuesday we held our first session of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) course Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing, a four week course that goes into the basics of organizing: from organizing committees to inoculation against the boss. A group of 10 met in person at 1916 McAllister to watch the course plenary before diving into a discussion about the material we covered. This week’s topic was “Developing Leadership” and was focused on the organizing committee, the core group of workers who lead a union campaign. We heard from a worker-organizer at Attaboy, a newly-unionized cocktail bar in Manhattan. She recounted how they identified leaders in the workplace, assembled an organizing committee, and eventually charted every member of their workplace. Her account emphasized how the organizing committee model played a decisive role during the unionization campaign. The plenary kicked off our discussion, where we compared our own experiences to the blueprint laid out in the plenary. We also talked about the differences between organizing in a small and large workplace and how we have spotted leaders in our own jobs.

The next session will take place on Tuesday, July 21th at 7PM, hosted at 1916 McAllister and will cover the organizing conversation.

If you’d like to get involved with the SF local chapter of EWOC, reach out to the lead coordinator Caitlin S or email labor@dsasf.org. EWOC is a standing topic at meetings of the Labor Board, which are held every other Monday at 7:00 PM, both in-person at 1916 McAllister and over Zoom. Anyone is welcome to attend, and we’re always looking for people interested In workplace lead canvassing, organizer trainings, and volunteer outreach. If you’re interested in organizing your workplace and would like to be connected with an EWOC organizer, fill out the request form here.

New York City’s Economic Development Corporation turns public assets into private profits. Will Mamdani keep, kill, or reform the agency?

The post Neoliberalism Versus a New Economy appeared first on Democratic Left.

U.S. socialism is back after a long absence. What’s the big idea?

The post Meet DSA appeared first on Democratic Left.

Collective study and public debate lead to collective liberation and the advance of socialism. Socialist Forum is DSA’s main platform for airing the thorny but necessary theoretical, political, and cultural issues that confront us in an age of U.S. hegemony and empire. The editorial board of the publication—writers, organizers, and political educators—are  committed to a vehicle to present ideas and analysis that would prove useful to winning socialism. We develop thinkers and writers who can provide clarity for our peers and comrades looking for ways to understand the world as is and ways to resist. We seek pieces that explore how capitalism leverages structures and institutions to exploit the peoples of the world. Analysis, inquiry, and discussion into forms of effective resistance are vital in fighting for the liberation of all peoples from exploitation and domination. 

As the late great thinker and writer, Ghassan Kanafani had once stated, “Scientific revolutionary thought is clear thought whereby the masses are able to understand their enemy, his points of weakness or strength and the forces that support and ally themselves to the enemy. Likewise, the masses should understand their own forces, the forces of revolution, how to mobilize, how to overcome the enemy’s points of strength and take advantage of the weakness of the enemy, and through what organization, mobilization and political and military programmes, they can escalate their forces until they can crush the enemy and achieve victory.” Theory and written analysis is a foundational part of our ability to grow as a movement and to some day, succeed, finally winning a world freed from capitalism, colonialism, and U.S. hubris. 

Socialist Forum, therefore, is an avenue for DSA members not only to publicly present their thinking but to work with one another. Our editors are themselves constantly learning and developing ways to strategically address the dilemmas facing the movement. Inspired by thinkers like Kanafani, we are not just a publication. Our aim is to help generate theory that can aid in practice. Moreover, DSA as a multi-tendency, big tent organization creates the ideal circumstances for struggling through ideas together. Pushing ourselves to engage with thinking and debate across the various socialist traditions forges  more robust analyses. We are a stronger organization when we discuss and debate our ideas openly in our publications.

Socialist Forum publication is organized into quarterly-themed issues. We accept pitches on a rolling basis on a variety of topics, and encourage all members to pitch on the current theme topic. Send us pitches that present the general topic of your article, the main argument you hope to emphasize, and its connection to DSA’s larger project. While our sister publication, Democratic Left, reports on the news and events, our publication prioritizes longer form writing and analysis with a global view. As such, our articles typically range from 3,000 to 8,000 words. We also strongly encourage engagement with previous articles and ongoing debates within the publication.

We look forward to writing from seasoned experts on an issue as well as comrades exploring a topic for the very first time. We are all revolutionaries and, at Socialist Forum, we want all revolutionaries to be heard. 

Scabby is one of the most recognizable symbols of managerial misconduct. But where did he come from? It turns out this rat has a complicated history.

The post The history of Scabby the rat appeared first on EWOC.

There are multiple reasons why Robin Hood remains the most-retold, favorite saga in the English language, exceeding, even in the United Kingdom, King Arthur and all the associated court drama. A perfect saga for popular theater, then films and television, Robin features the poor-versus-rich, the wrongful ruler, furtive romance across social classes, and so on. This year’s The Death of Robin Hood follows a century of film fascination.

In 1922, the newly launched independent United Artists studios borrowed heavily to produce the first notable film, Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, and succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Among much competition for successors, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Olivia de Haviland and Errol Flynn, would remain totemic for generations of screen audiences.

In the time of my childhood, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-59) was the first British series to become a hit on U.S. television, with an accompanying theme song that reached millions. Its scriptwriters happened to be blacklisted leftwingers who hid in the metaphorical forest, under pseudonyms.

It was succeeded best, in my view, by Robin and Marian directed by Richard Lester, an ally of the Beatles. In this version, we see Crusaders slaughtering innocent populations, Good King Richard in charge of war crimes, and Audrey Hepburn as the rebel Marian turned prioress (to escape persecution) who tries to revive Robin from war wounds with her healing herbs and finally administers the poison that they take together. 

Nothing since (and there have been many more) has been anywhere near as good, with one interesting exception: Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (1987-93), a hugely popular, perky, and funny British television show for children, which featured a Rastafarian who had his own interpretations of society and religion.

That Robin Hood lore is also, at base, a religious, folkloric saga is not well understood. We start with the Wat Tyler Rebellion of 1381, the first of the Radical Reformation mass struggles, highlighting the deteriorating condition of life for the poorer classes together with the impact of the Wycliffe biblical translation. Lollardy, a heretical Christianity, spread from the Oxford community as lay preachers and organizers mobilized the masses to urge the confiscation of the Church’s wealth and that of the Monarchy. The uprising was brutally suppressed, but the sentiment and the movement lived on across the continent. The 1525 peasant uprising behind Thomas Müntzer, a minister-revolutionary beheaded at the order of Martin Luther, stands among the most noted successors.

It was said that the Wat Tyler rebels could quote passages from Piers Plowman, that epic poem from the onset of English literature. Something is amiss, and protagonist Piers, sleeping in the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire, is awakened by the Lady explaining to him that the earth provides clothing, food, and drink if only its measures can be taken properly: it belongs to all. 

So much of English village life had been sustained for centuries around the Commons and the use of oak trees, along with ash and elm, apple and cherry, to sustain the  human inhabitants with their livestock. The Norman Conquest threw much of this into imbalance, but the expansion of serfdom pushed harder yet. The forest had become home to the deer—protein on the hoof— forbidden to villagers on penalty of death. It was now contested territory, notwithstanding the Magna Carta.

At one level, the more or less contemporary appearance of Robin Hood could be seen as revenge against the rising wealthy classes. For the great utopian socialist William Morris, ordinary people resisted the kind of “progress” pressed upon them by the rising upper classes, while they themselves looked backward at a Golden Age, before class society. A popular nineteenth century socialist idea, it reflected a belief in a kind of religion of nature. But it also reflected the folklorist English Christianity wrapped around holidays and rituals. Such rituals survived into the nineteenth century, including the Mayday night mating rituals in which the Virgin Mary became Marian the Queen of the Village and Robin her necessary mate.

The totemic Child Ballads folklore collection of English and Scottish ballads contains almost forty Robin Hood sagas. With plenty of direct action, these recall, explore and anticipate the further attack upon the established clergy in the name of a higher Christianity. No less than John Knox attacked the religious rebels, “the rascal multitude stirred up to make a Robin Hood… [who] disobey and trouble the town” of Edinburgh. The earliest printed version of A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, reprinted several times in the sixteenth century, openly advocates civic insurrection and the overthrow of the empowered clergy. As Robin instructs Little John, “these bishops and these archbishops/You shall beat and bind.” 

It is not entirely clear when Friar Tuck appeared in the Robin Hood saga, but he matches the restless element of the Church as it consolidated its property and power. He spies upon the powerful and reports to Robin, allowing the Merry Men to prepare for battle. But he also, famously barrel-chested, is the jolly Christian dispatching the images of blue-nosed propriety.

This year, though, the Robin Hood on screen tells us that his legend is a lie, and in real time, the famous Sherwood Oak in which Robin allegedly hid his gold, has died. Neither Robin nor the Oak will be allowed to die in imagination, for the acorns planted by legend bear high hopes. Such is the nature religion of lore that the Oak is Robin and Robin is the Oak. 

Paul Buhle is, with Mari Jo Buhle, coeditor of the biographical William Morris graphic novel, If I Could But See It, written and drawn by Nick Thorkelson, scheduled for September publication by Pluto Press. Much of the material in this essay is drawn from the text in the collaborative comic edited by Paul Buhle, Robin Hood: People’s Outlaw and Forest Hero (PM Press, 2011).

The post Robin Hood Redux, or What Happened to Friar Tuck? appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

The post Statement on Netanyahu Visit to DC appeared first on Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America.

Think your boss holds all the cards? Explore the history and modern reality of collective bargaining and learn how workers build real power together.

The post Debunking the workplace power deficit myth appeared first on EWOC.

In two recent episodes of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber makes arguments about market socialism and central planning that should be familiar to those who remember the debates over what constitutes “feasible socialism” from the late 20^th century. Indeed, Chibber’s views are reminiscent of those offered by the entire market-socialist school that appeared in the wake of—at the latest—Alec Nove’s The Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983). Ultimately, the debate was not over whether or not there were gigantic flaws in central planning as practiced in the Soviet Union and other countries of what was termed “actually existing socialism”; virtually all contributors to that debate agreed such flaws existed. Nor was the idea that socialists need to do more than provide vagaries about the mechanisms of a post-capitalist economy seriously challenged. What was, and is, at stake in the debate is whether or not socialism can be a society in which—to quote Marx—capitalism’s “anarchy of production” for profit is replaced by planned production for use by “the associated producers.” Or if that strategy is found infeasible, the question is whether a vision of socialism that retains market coordination of (most) production of goods and services can fulfill the socialist goal of a classless, emancipated society. 

Despite saying that “if planning can further our [socialist] goals … we should push it as far as we can,” Chibber substantially agrees with Nove and other market-socialists—including avowed Marxists such as David Schweickart—that planning a modern, complex economy will lead to Soviet-style failure. Any attempt at comprehensive planning, however different it might be from central planning as it was practiced in the official Communist societies, can’t work; only via market pricing, with its sensitivity to supply and demand, can decisions on what and how to produce be rendered “efficient,” and only market competition can provide incentives to motivate worker-managed enterprises to be efficient and innovative. But we needn’t worry too much, Chibber says; as he puts it  in “Our Road to Power,” the market “will be constrained so it isn’t the arbiter of people’s basic well-being” and inequalities of wealth “will not be allowed to translate into political inequalities.”

This places entirely too much faith in “politics” being able to override “economics.” Presently, inequalities of wealth do translate into political inequalities, and there’s little reason to think that those who own (or, as in Schweickart’s model, lease from the state) firms in market socialism won’t do all they can to make sure that government policy once again rewards market “winners.” And how much “market constraint” can we really expect in market socialism? If it’s constrained too much, what happens to the much-vaunted advantages of the market over wide-ranging planning? Won’t this interfere with “efficiency” and “innovation”?

Marx vs. the Market 

Let’s go back to the Marxist basics. Any “socialism” that deliberately retains generalized value-production—wealth calculated by means of “spontaneous” prices set by the pressure of supply and demand—will be unable, as Peter Hudis puts it in Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (2013), to overcome capitalism’s “inversion of subject and predicate, in which the products as well as the actions of people take on the form of an autonomous power that determine and constrain the will of the subjects that engender them.”  Our working lives will remain dominated by abstract labor, “a monotonous, routinized activity” that serves as the substance of value. Businesses—even ones attempting workers’ self-management—whose survival depends on competition with each other to retain their market share will still be required to work at a uniform rate of exchange that workers themselves do not collectively determine. This will erode workers’ self-management and lead to a return to the traditional corporate-capitalist division of labor. Furthermore, the “planning” that exists within models of market socialism is generally indicative planning—where the government attempts to align commercial activities with wider economic objectives; planning by remote control, essentially. There’s little reason to think that such “planning” would be better able to overcome the “anarchy of production” in a “socialist” context than fiscal and monetary policy, foreign trade and exchange rate policy, urban and regional policy, competition and industrial policy, and prices and incomes policy have been able to accomplish within a capitalist context; there, as we know,  unemployment, inflation, balance-of-payments problems, regional and personal inequality, etc., remain norms.

In capitalist society, which lacks commanding centers of planned regulation, the distribution of productive forces—both people and means of production—among the different branches of the economy, the distribution of the net product between classes, the allocation of surplus value (Marx: “the value created by the labor of a wage-worker over and above the value of his labor-power and appropriated by the capitalist”) to expanded reproduction, the introduction of technical innovations, etc. are all determined by the law of value (the “invisible hand” of the market). It logically follows that a system of “market socialism,” in which the means of production are administered as the collective property of the immediate producers (in essence, its shareholders) would, in response to market signals, mimic capitalism, even if this property is formally owned by the public and leased to specific groups of workers. Such a system would be fundamentally unstable and most likely lead back to capitalism, which is the more consistent expression of these relations. This, after all, is essentially what happened in Yugoslavia, which is surely as relevant to discussion of market socialism as the failures of Soviet planning are to discussion of any type of planned economy. Market competition in Titoist Yugoslavia led to participation within enterprises which became  progressively dominated by professional managers, and inequality between the federal constituent Republics grew as growth rates and living standards deviated. As Pat Devine states, the unresolvable tension in visions of market socialism is “how to maintain an incentive structure based on the competitive performance of autonomous enterprises while at the same time limiting their autonomy in order to promote the society’s social objectives.”

Again, this doesn’t mean that the only alternative to market socialism is central planning. As practiced in the Soviet Union and other official Communist countries, central planning had many well-known deficiencies, which Chibber discusses at length. As Marxist economist Hillel Ticktin explains, “There is something wrong with an economy where the repair sector is bigger than the industry itself, where new technology has to go into new factories, as in two-thirds of cases, rather than updating old factories as in the West. There one-third of new technology goes into new factories. In short, new technology was blocked , and the product was normally technologically backward, defective and unreliable.” 

One aspect of Soviet-style planning that Chibber does not stress, however, is the absence of workers’ self-management at the enterprise level (or at the collective farm). The “planning” was neither conceived of nor carried out by the associated producers. Ticktin again: “The Stalinist system was organized or administered from above. The surplus product was extracted under the control of the Soviet ruling group … and the distribution and re-investment of that surplus was performed under their administration and in their favour. The essential problem was that, in spite of their political-economic control, they could not ensure the intended outcome of their ‘planning’. They could neither raise their own standard of living and that of their families to what they aspired, nor could they raise the level of productivity, or growth rate, to that which was necessary to assure the stability of the system.” Furthermore, in the Stalin-era USSR, command planning took place in the context of all needs being subordinated to the needs of the state for arms production; hence the priority rendered to heavy industry. 

Planning From Below 

We agree with Chibber that socialism can’t immediately dispense with all “market categories” (prices, money).  The a priori calculations of democratic planning must be tested against what might be called “market expectations” (is there a demand for this or that use-value, are there people trained and willing to perform this or that type of labor and, if so, in what quantities?). But this doesn’t have to mean the domination of the law of value. Following Pat Devine in Democracy and Economic Planning: The Political Economy of a Self-governing Society ([1988] 2010), social ownership of industry should be used to overcome market forces—where each private owner (including the worker-owned firm) acts in an atomistic fashion, in ignorance of the decisions being made simultaneously by all the other owners—while retaining the use of market exchange: the output of an enterprise, produced with its current capacity, being sold to another enterprise in the case of intermediate goods and services, or to consumers in the case of consumer goods and services. We shouldn’t try to plan consumption in advance, but we must incorporate planning in advance of significant investment. Changes in the structure of productive capacity, involving major investment and disinvestment, should no longer be brought about by the operation of market forces as in capitalism and market socialism, but by what Devine calls “negotiated coordination” among those who would be affected by changes in capacity and the structure of productive resources, analogous to the decisions made by the headquarters of multi-division capitalist firms.

The greatest strength of Devine’s model of democratic planning is the attention it pays to contributions made by the founders of the Austrian school of economics to the socialist calculation debate, initiated in 1920 by Ludwig von Mises and continued by Friedrich Hayek and the current Austrian school. The Austrians first claimed that much, perhaps most, information relevant to economic decision-making is local information, specific to time and place. They argue that such information cannot be formulated, transmitted to a planning center, and then processed because of the sheer enormity of the task. This has been answered by models of electronic socialist planning that make use of modern information technology and computer processing. However, the Austrians also insisted that such knowledge is not just decentralized but also generally “tacit”—meaning that it is knowledge based on knowing how to do something rather than on knowing that something is the case. Such knowledge, von Mises and Hayek maintain, is learned through practical experience and can be drawn upon only by those who have had that experience. It cannot be separated from those whose tacit knowledge it is, and so, by its very nature, it cannot be centralized. As Devine states, “[t]he classic example is learning to ride a bicycle: one can read or be told how to do it, but one only learns how to do it by trying, through experience.”

Devine’s model of participatory planning through negotiated coordination avoids what could be called the Hayekian problems that would surely plague even electronic central planning. Decisions at the level of Devine’s socialized enterprises are taken by the social owners at that level, drawing on their tacit knowledge, as is presently done by capitalist enterprises. The difference is that the social owners include all those with an interest in said decisions and not solely private owners and their representatives as in capitalism, and therefore the range of tacit knowledge drawn upon is much broader, and the decisions made are likely to be more efficient. Investment decisions, in particular, are made by negotiated coordination bodies, encompassing the social owners at that level, incorporating a much greater range of tacit knowledge than in capitalist decision-making.

A central point of socialist economics—Chibber would agree—is to maximize the public good and meet everyone’s needs. But this requires effective society-wide planning and central coordination while creating ample room for local autonomy and initiative. Contra Chibber’s doubts, this is technically feasible. But to provide every minute detail in advance would be futile. Ultimately, no mass audience for socialism will be recruited based on how convincingly Marxists answer von Mises or Hayek on socialist planning. Even with the inevitable usage of market exchange, socialist society can still be built upon an organizing principle that doesn’t capitulate to market forces, that abolishes labor-power as a commodity, and which places human needs at the center of social concern, rather than as a contingent instrumentality of capital accumulation. Socialist production and distribution will rest upon the solidarity of the associated producers. But advocating “market socialism” won’t help us reach that necessary solidarity. 

Image: Detail photo of the mural “If Walls Could Talk… About Economics” by Ángel Idígoras. Photo by Daniel Capilla and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.