Aaron Benanav

Since the 1970s, the working class and the Left have been in retreat. This extended beyond the stagnation and collapse of the Soviet Union to social democratic parties, left-Keynesian ideas, and welfare states. The dominant question became how to preserve earlier gains, not what it would mean to win.

The 2008 financial crisis brought a real revival: the 2010s saw large social movements and new left parties. But they did not develop a new vision of what they were fighting for.

The excitement and the frustration of that experience pushed me to look more seriously at the problem. I came to think that the Left had not adequately reckoned with the failures of the twentieth century, and that this failure was blocking a genuine renewal.

Aaron Benanav

My new work grows out of my experience with Endnotes. Endnotes has theorized a long era of deindustrialization and economic slowdown and has examined the social and labor movements that have arisen beyond the end of the classical labor movement. We try to see how they might become the basis of an exit from capitalism.

But like many Marxist groups, we did not think it was important to say what should come after capitalism. Taking that question seriously changed my views. The transformation we need to undertake cannot simply be carried out through autonomous action from below. It has to be consciously enacted at the level of society as a whole.

Endnotes also gave me a rigorous way to think about capitalism as a society organized around a particular way of valuing our activity: everything good is represented as a monetary sum, and the goal is to expand those sums through profit-making.

In my new work, I develop what I call a theory of values. Instead of a world in which everything has to be translated into money, we should create a world in which a variety of ethical and political values — many of them difficult to express in monetary terms — can directly shape what and how we produce. These might include sustainability, material security, care, the quality of work, community, and individual autonomy.

Aaron Benanav

Yes, Marxism puts forward truths about capitalism that other ways of seeing the world lack. The division of income between capital and labor, for example, is not a technical outcome automatically determined by the organization of production. It is political, and our institutions systematically disadvantage workers in that struggle.

But Marxism tells us remarkably little about what comes after capitalism. Across the twentieth century, attempts to make it serve as a guide to a society or economy beyond capitalism often blocked people from thinking more freely about new institutions.

The most controversial conclusion I have drawn, from a Marxist perspective at least, is that we need markets after capitalism. In late twentieth-century debates, any allowance for markets was treated as a concession to capitalism. But markets make a viable postcapitalist society more decentralized, adaptable, and open to experiment.

The mistake Marxists made was to identify market exchange with profit-oriented investment. Markets and currencies existed for thousands of years before capitalism without producing a dynamic economy organized around profit. We need to preserve exchange while abolishing the power of private profitability to direct investment.

That distinction matters because profit-oriented firms cannot treat sustainability or work quality on their own terms. They can recognize such values only after translating them into effects on revenue or cost. The question is how to use markets for decentralized coordination while preventing accumulated wealth from governing production.

Aaron Benanav

The five-year plan, which was originally developed by Menshevik economists before Joseph Stalin purged them, is one of the most important institutional discoveries of the twentieth century. They showed that investment can be coordinated: society can agree in advance on a general direction and get different parts of the economy moving toward it at the same time.

The five-year plan was not drawn from any Marxist blueprint. It emerged from attempts to solve a practical problem: how to develop a poor economy without creating shortages in one sector and unusable surpluses in another. The same coordination challenge returns whenever an economy must transform many interdependent systems at once.

Capitalism struggles with transformations of that kind. We can see it today with electrification: many different systems have to change together, but each develops separately, so the transition is slow. A five-year plan allows a society to choose a direction and set out along it. It may not be the best path, but coordination gets you there faster, and you learn as you go.

The Soviet economy was extraordinarily wasteful. The information and coordination problems of central planning overwhelmed the dynamism of the five-year plans.

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China later separated coordinated investment from total planning and combined it with market exchange more successfully, although they remained capitalist. We should use these tools to get out of capitalism instead.

Aaron Benanav

Since writing the essays, I have abandoned that science-fictional term. It gave the wrong impression. Once currencies are digital, it becomes possible to produce a real-time, but necessarily partial, digital picture of economic flows and connect it to biophysical, social, and subjective indicators. I call this a common ledger.

Forecasting and advisory services based on this ledger could help households, firms, and investment boards bring that information to bear on their choices. But the ledger has no executive function: it informs choices rather than making them.

Aaron Benanav

Neurath understood that a society beyond capitalism could have many standards of value rather than one. We could organize the economy around material security, sustainability, care, good work, fairness, and justice, instead of economic efficiency and the increasing quantity of goods and services we consume.

Neurath also saw that our values necessarily come into conflict. They cannot all be realized to the same extent. At some point, producing more goods will conflict with making the economy more sustainable. One account of good work will conflict with another. Society has to decide how to compose these values in a particular way.

People often say that they want democratic rather than authoritarian socialism, but they do not explain why democracy would actually be intrinsic to their version of socialism.

Neurath shows us the way. If there is no single measure of value that we can use to identify the best possible future, and if different futures realize our values in different ways, then we need democratic procedures for choosing among those futures.

Neurath himself remained committed to central planning and could not explain how multiple values should enter such an economy. His contribution is not a complete institutional model. It is the recognition that economic judgment cannot be replaced by calculation. A society can measure its resources and study the likely consequences of its options, but no equation can tell us which sacrifices are worth making.

Aaron Benanav

Keynes gives us the idea of an economy in which investment has been freed from the need to generate a profit. This sounds strange because people hear “investment” and think of financial assets purchased to earn a monetary return. But we already invest in infrastructure, schools, and hospitals without expecting them to generate profits. Investment simply means mobilizing people, resources, and productive capacities to rebuild and transform what and how we produce. We can invest for reasons that have nothing to do with making money or maximizing growth.

Radical Keynesians such as William Beveridge focused on full employment as one goal of non-profit-oriented investment. He envisaged public authorities controlling 75 percent of investment. I would extend that to 100 percent. I also reject their technocratic approach: in my proposal, investment decisions would be made democratically.

That does not mean putting every initiative to a vote. In the civic sector, individuals and small groups could organize projects and attract resources without having to justify them in advance, operating under democratic rules and light oversight.

Aaron Benanav

MMT’s central insight is correct. A government that issues its own currency is not like a household. The ultimate limits on its spending are the available labor and other resources. Inflation becomes a risk when spending outruns those limits. As long as resources are going unused, public spending can and should mobilize them.

But MMT generally uses a job guarantee to support employment while leaving most investment in private hands. Profitability still determines which productive capacities get built, while the legislature tries to stabilize the economy after the fact.

I draw a more radical conclusion from the premise MMT shares with Keynes. Investment does not require someone to save money first. In real terms, saving is society’s decision to set aside part of its current productive capacity for building the future. Once workers, machines, and materials have been made available, society can create the funds needed to mobilize them. The investment fund is social from the outset, not the property of whoever has accumulated money. The fiction that private savers created these resources and therefore acquire the right to decide how they are used falls away.

Once investment is freed from profit and individual control, the question becomes political: What should we use these capacities to build? There is no single optimal future toward which we can simply launch ourselves. We have many good options.

Aaron Benanav

Most investment decisions would be made by democratic sectoral boards, each responsible for one field of production. Take health care. Should more resources go to expanding mental health care, preventive medicine, or end-of-life care?

These choices require technical knowledge, but they also reflect different judgments about what matters and different visions of the sector’s future.

A health care board might bring together elected representatives of health care workers and patients, technical experts, and civic groups concerned with the sector’s wider social and ecological effects. It would receive a budget and choose among investment proposals. Each proposal would embody a view of how the sector should develop. The resulting package would not necessarily point toward a single coherent future.

Democratic planning allows society to move forward without resolving these disagreements once and for all: people can continue to favor different futures while deciding together which projects to support and on what scale.

From this perspective, a sectoral board would be less like a central command center than a representative government within a field of production. Then, because some transformations cross sectoral boundaries, additional mission committees would coordinate projects such as greening the economy or reducing working hours.

Put the pieces together and you have the basic framework: the Soviet discovery of coordinated investment, Neurath’s account of multiple and conflicting values, Keynesian public investment, and markets that preserve decentralized knowledge.

Aaron Benanav

Hayek’s starting point was right. Modern society has not only a division of labor but also a division of knowledge. Prices allow people who know different things to coordinate their activities without anyone having to understand the whole economy.

But markets are not the only institutions that solve this kind of knowledge problem. Climate science brings together atmospheric physicists, oceanographers, geologists, and ecologists, each working with a different body of knowledge. The modern corporation does something similar within the firm, bringing engineers, designers, accountants, and production workers into a common organization.

Both show that markets are only one way of coordinating divided knowledge.

The deeper problem is that an economy must coordinate not only different forms of knowledge but also different ethical values. Once we recognize this plurality of values, economic decisions become problems of composition. The values at stake cannot be ranked on a single scale. Every choice realizes some goods and sacrifices others.

People disagree about what to do. Hayek wanted individuals to make judgments about values within their own lives, while the market coordinated the results.

But many value-laden economic choices are unavoidably collective. Investment decisions determine which possibilities society creates for everyone: whether we build toward greater material consumption, more care, lower emissions, or less work. Democracy and markets can work together within the same process of composition.

Aaron Benanav

The Bolsheviks initially thought they would abolish money. What the Soviet Union ultimately did was divide money into two circuits: cash rubles for consumption and noncash rubles for production. But the two remained forms of the same currency, held in a fixed one-to-one relation. People earned wages but often could not find goods to buy, so enormous savings accumulated on the consumer side. By the 1980s, this monetary overhang contributed to the system’s breakdown. A real split requires separate circuits with a flexible conversion rate between them.

That led me to study the history of money. Before the nineteenth century, markets commonly operated with different currencies serving distinct circuits. Peasants and long-distance merchants had different monetary needs, and their currencies did not inevitably converge as long as the circuits remained mostly separate.

Capitalism required a sustained political effort to produce a singular currency that could serve as both a universal means of exchange and a universal store of wealth. If markets are going to persist after capitalism, there will probably also have to be multiple monies.

Aaron Benanav

The problem is that under capitalism the same accumulable money passes through production, consumption, and investment. The surplus a firm earns can become private income for business owners or finance changes in production.

Firms generate that surplus by cutting costs or increasing revenues. Gans in economic efficiency, in this narrow sense, therefore take priority. Sustainability and work quality count only when they improve the bottom line.

Reformers often try to make other values count by attaching financial rewards to measurable proxies for those values. But that leaves financial gain in command.

People game the metrics rather than pursue the underlying goal: schools teach to the test, while hospitals manipulate reported waiting times. A market organized around a universal, accumulable currency cannot treat ethical values as ends in themselves.

The split currency breaks this connection without abolishing markets. In my system, Points used in production cannot be converted into Credits used for consumption, accumulated indefinitely, or used to finance investment. A firm gains no private income or additional productive power by underspending its operating budget.

Producers still face prices and have budget constraints, so they have to use resources carefully. But they can compose sustainability, work quality, efficiency, and other values within that constraint instead of being compelled to maximize a surplus.

The split also prevents inequalities in consumption from becoming inequalities of productive power. Someone with more Credits cannot use them to buy productive assets or command investment. Consumption remains decentralized, while decisions about society’s productive future pass through democratic institutions.

Aaron Benanav

I dislike the “utopophobic” way that Marx’s line about cookshops is used to bar any conversation about what should come after capitalism. There is a real difference between the cookshop and the recipes. We should not decide in advance exactly how health care, agriculture, housing, or family life will be organized. Those are the recipes: they will remain subjects of political conflict.

But we do need to elaborate on the cookshop: the institutions that allow different views to contend without reproducing capitalism. A postcapitalist society will still contain political opponents with incompatible views of the good life. Its achievement would be to give those conflicts a durable, democratic form, not to settle them in advance.