#william clare roberts is a pretty cool guy

[cozyunoist]

what do you think of william clare roberts saying that communism can have markets in his debate with martin hagglund?

'can x have y'/'does x abolish y' is always such a funny form of debate to me; at the end of the day it always hinges on conceptual redescription of these hotly contested terms, right? we can set up either a thin concept of x where it refers to a single condition, or we can take x in with all its contradictory historical valences; and we can set up a concept of y which makes it impossible to abolish, or collapse the concept of y into a sort of heavily-asterisked bad-y which can be abolished simply by making the things about y we consider bad no longer the case.

maybe this is surprising considering how much time i spend on something that looks suspiciously close to cookshop-receipt-writing,

sidenote 1, pt 1: i would argue that the only concern that motivates me to do a little cooking in my work is the understandable fear (i think implicitly shared by wcr) that this (already impossibly broad) set of possibilities is one that we can't even show exists.

but i tend to think the concept of communism has precious little determinate content. because the historical movement is both more or less dead & composed of people of people with wildly different programmatisms, in this sort of programmatic content i tend to use 'communism' very loosely, to include anything in 'the purposive replacement of generalised commodity production with... something else...'.

sidenote 1, pt 2: to recapitulate something that happens in the middle third of my book, we want to avoid the sort of useless conceptual redescription that happens when i swap out my market for a computer or set of social arrangements that do what markets do and converge on doing them how markets do them, because this would invite the question 'why bother?'. so, to get down to brass tacks we replace the concept of generalised commodity production in this thin conception of communism for a concept of what commodity production, per marx's whole thing in capital, necessarily does wrong apropos of social valuation. but then the sort of wall we run into is that people fail to meet the criterion we got out of marx everywhere we apply it: in c&c, in an ideal-type description of soviet FtAL planning, even in cogp!

i realise i've walked myself into a trap here, though, because i've done just the things i warned u about: i attempted to walk out of the terms of the question by setting up a very thin conception of communism, and then pretended that the concept of generalised commodity production was unproblematic.

sidenote 2: it's not; not because marx does a particularly poor job setting up commodity production conceptually, but because a description of an ideal average (the only level at which you can make the deductions he does) is necessarily unhelpful for the task of figuring out the fit between the stylised model and the world, even if you're able to prove, as he does, that it has a sort of shaping dynamic, wherein a social process itself described in the model forces us to behave more & more according to the entities of the model. this shaping dynamic is powerful, but definitely not sufficient for any commodity production to become totally generalised: see, for instance, the very slow entry of the sort of human activities which fall under the bracket of 'social reproduction' into the sphere of commodity exchange. it's unclear what the theoretical maximum even is--can we conceive of every interaction being commodity exchange--or why we ought to understand it to be reachable. and where this commodity exchange is only partially realised, the strong conclusions you reach in capital don't quite hold; every good is knocked off its true gcp value by the existence of a non-commodified basic good; the pseudo-natural laws needed to make these categories coherent don't quite obtain.

we're not going to make all parties happy, but what matters to me here when it comes to defining communism such that it has these boundary conditions, is something like the pragmatic rationale we give in conceptual engineering. as i say above, the minimum thing i consider to be specific about communism in the book is the resolution of the problem we attribute to commodity production, something akin to what wcr sets up as domination, although i do not find domination theory persuasive for the same reason i do not ultimately find theories of freedom broadly construed persuasive. communism is defined this way because it makes the rationale for its coming into existence readily apparent, and in the same stroke excludes all the other things we've tried.

exhausting preliminary stuff aside, let me get to the meat of your question. as for wcr: i would actually argue, as odd as it sounds, that he doesn't say communism can have markets--even though he says we likely will have markets in some places. he makes a subtler point, one whose intellectual honesty inspires in me genuine admiration, although i could not disagree more: that there is a tension between actually realising this freedom from market domination (allowing the concept for a second), and radical democratic theory, particularly one that necessitates a great deal of devolution, rousseauian plebiscites, & all. he says, in other words, that we are lying to ourselves in believing that the general will would coalesce in the way marx has it without a type of authority that marx doesn't argue for, a type of sociation we might find abhorrent, a vision of reconciliation we might find silly... furthermore, the mechanism of a wholesale replacement for market valuation ('planning' is a very poor descriptor) is necessarily one that is incompatible with the fact democratic polities may choose indifference to one another; it requires the production of a kind of information there is no reason to assume every polity may have, and the valuation decisions it makes are almost certain to cut against majoritarian wish-lists.

this all is to say, wcr reads social republicanism as radical democracy against communism, and in so doing argues that we ought to choose the former, biting the bullet on the difficulty of showing it necessarily entails the latter. i would make a similar argument, actually, just in favour of communism over republicanism-slash-democracy: democratic theory has near-zero appeal to me, because i believe a properly elaborated means of social valuation, the sort we need to replace the multitool of the market, is itself as normatively forceful, as good a grounds for practical reason at the level of the community, as anything possibly could be, and in its wake arguments about freedom (as wcr himself notes!) strike me as little more than residual liberalism.