Rethinking Marxism

A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx20

Socialist Investment, Dynamic Planning, and the

Politics of Human Need

Aaron Benanav

To cite this article: Aaron Benanav (2022) Socialist Investment, Dynamic Planning,
and the Politics of Human Need, Rethinking Marxism, 34:2, 193-204, DOI:
10.1080/08935696.2022.2051375

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2051375

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa

UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group

Published online: 07 Jun 2022.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 2109

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrmx20
RETHINKING MARXISM, 2022
Vol. 34, No. 2, 193–204, https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2051375

Socialist Investment, Dynamic Planning,

and the Politics of Human Need

Aaron Benanav

Building on the work of Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine, this essay considers the social
presuppositions for the construction of a socialist investment function. When it comes
to investment, people care about many issues: not only efficiency but also work
satisfaction, fairness, sustainability, and so on. Investment decisions therefore need to
be structured to make people feel that their voices can be heard across the wide range
of their concerns. Facing this complexity and potential for conflict, socialist investment
would likely be structured as a negotiated political-planning process in which not only
workers take part but also individuals organized into a variety of civic associations,
including political, cultural, scientific, and religious. This essay questions how such
associations would acquire the resources needed to carry out their activities and
proposes a possible solution in social provisioning.

Key Words: Calculation Debate, Investment, Planning, Socialism, Voluntary

Association

Socialism is not a harmonious community; instead, it is a complex civil society

composed of overlapping associations.1 In associational socialism, there would
not be any social optimum, whether technical or economic. The important ques-
tions socialist societies would face would be irreducibly political; their paths
forward would be radically open.2 The context of the climate crisis should
already make this need for openness clear. How to produce energy, how much
meat to eat, how to make reparations for the legacies of colonialism, how to orga-
nize climate migration, and what kinds of geo-engineering to engage in, if any, are
contentious issues that offer different futures to humankind.3 Climate scientists

1. Precursors to this view can be found among the Guild Socialists, such as Cole (1920), Russell
(1919), and Polanyi ([1922] 2016; [1944] 2001, esp. the final chapter, “Freedom in a Complex
World”). Pateman (1970) and Hirst (1994) provide additional reference points. My account
draws on O’Neill (2003).
2. See Neurath (1983a, 2005a, 2005b).
3. For an example of one way to think about these issues, see Vettesse and Pendergrass
(forthcoming).
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or
built upon in any way.
194 Benanav

can help us understand the choices we face but cannot tell us which alternative we
should choose.
We each need to figure out our own views on these questions, but we also need to
fight for a world in which decisions on such matters can be reached via a democratic
political process informed by technical know-how derived from a variety of
sources.4 Saying so does not require that we imagine a world in which all the
most important decisions are made locally. On the contrary, many decisions—re-
garding industrial-policy priorities, for example—will have to be made at larger
scales, sometimes even globally.5 Still, to be carried out at all, local actors will
have to see global priorities as legitimate. The best we can do to face this complexity
and potential for conflict is to promote an open space in which not only individuals
but also political, scientific, cultural, and religious associations can participate.
In this response to Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine’s (2022) contribution, I will
highlight three issues.6 The first concerns the question of investment dynamics,
the second the question of dispersed knowledge, and the third the question of
free association. Before I consider these issues, I will summarize what I believe
to be Adaman and Devine’s major contribution to the theory of socialism: that
is, their notion that achieving democratic control over the investment function
is one of the crucial fights for a transition to socialism.

Democratic Control of the Investment Function

Investments change the production possibilities of society by creating or transfer-

ring fixed resources, such as buildings and equipment, across workplaces and
communities. Investments reshape social and material infrastructures, determin-
ing what will become easy and what will become hard to do. In a capitalist society,
investment takes place via a complex financial process involving corporations,
banks, and stock markets.7 These institutions funnel resources away from stag-
nant economic sectors and into potential growth sectors based on differences in
expected future rates of return. Profit-oriented investment generates a social-pro-
visioning process ill-suited for meeting the variety of people’s needs—which

4. O’Neill (1998) and Devine (1988) provide examples of how these decisions might be organized.
For a similar approach, but focused on health policy, see Herlitz and Sadek (2021).
5. See Devine (1988) on industrial policy. Recent years have seen a renewal of interest in indus-
trial policy, best indicated in Mazzucato (2015). However, Mazzucato shows little interest in ques-
tions of democratic control, which is concerning, given that much of her work focuses on
innovation in the United States military.
6. The reappearance of certain themes—especially related to incommensurability—leads me to
wonder whether we are witnessing a convergence in thinking among Adaman, Devine, O’Neill,
and Thomas Uebel. Is there a Manchester school of socialism? What issues remain to be resolved
among their different accounts?
7. Existing theories of investment, especially among neoclassical economists, are unfortunately
poorly conceived. See Baddeley (2017) and Shaikh (2016).
 Calculation Debate Revisited 195

include, importantly, not only their material needs for goods and services but also
their social and psychological needs for personal autonomy, competence, connect-
edness, purpose, and so on.
Because businesses remain going concerns only insofar as they turn a profit,
they are forced to economize on priced inputs at the expense of everything
unpriced, such as environmental sustainability, workers’ health, communities’ vi-
tality, the extent of our trust for one another, and so on.8 Relatedly, in spite of mo-
bilizing a large portion of society’s resources, investment decisions in a capitalist
society involve a small slice of the population: corporate managers, state actors,
and high-net-worth households. A laser focus on efficiency is possible only
because the vast majority have no say in investment decisions.
As Adaman and Devine argue, the investment function’s shape in a socialist
society would be transformed dramatically. Fixed resources would no longer be
capitalized—that is, entities holding assets would no longer derive an income
stream, or rent, from their use.9 Private actors seeking monetary returns on the
ownership of assets would correspondingly no longer be the ones making invest-
ment decisions. Instead, investment boards—whose members would be democrati-
cally elected from among each sector’s workers, the users of that sector’s output,
and the members of relevant associations—would be responsible for making in-
vestment decisions.
Each board’s delegates would evaluate proposals drawn up by worker-owned
firms and then allocate available funds in whatever ways seemed most likely to
improve people’s happiness, security, and capacity to carry out their life projects.
Investment boards would coordinate their activity with one another through, for
example, coordinating committees. Meanwhile, a portion of all investment funds
would be set aside for disbursement by bodies tasked with the implementation of
industrial policies (such as greening production or reducing work hours).
When allocating investment resources in a socialist society, multicriteria deci-
sion analysis and democratic procedures would be not only virtues in themselves.
In such a society, many more people would be able to make their voices heard in
the decisions that shape and reshape the future. People care about many issues:
not only an expanding basket of goods and services but also issues like sustainabil-
ity and work quality.10 They would voluntarily participate in a provisioning

8. See Kapp (1963) on social costs. Any vision of the future that imagines social provisioning
taking place mainly via the uncoordinated activity of profit-oriented firms is likely to face snow-
balling social costs over time.
9. We already use the term investment in a way that requires neither capitalization of assets nor
monetary returns when we speak of public investment in, for example, schools.
10. Offe and Wiesenthal (1980) discuss these concerns as impediments to collective action, which
workers face in their confrontation with capital: workers are concerned with a variety of criteria,
whereas capitalists concern themselves with just one (profitability). In a socialist society, the goal
would not be to get workers to behave like capitalists but rather to free them to make proposals
to transform their work along a variety of axes. See also Vanek (1972) for a sketch of a “vectoral
model” of decision making in worker-managed firms.
196 Benanav

process only if they saw it as the outcome of a legitimate procedure incorporating

various ends and aims, especially if they disagreed with some of the ways in which
this process were being carried out. For that very reason, opportunities for cost-
benefit decision analysis and algorithmic decision making would be limited.11
There is no neutral way to balance efficiency against sustainability, workers’ sat-
isfaction, social justice, and such. Workplace investment decisions would thus
become more contentious. So would decisions about the creation and transfer
of resources across workplaces, sectors, and communities.
As a guide to investment decisions, it would be hopeless to try to settle once and
for all on a fixed understanding of what human beings need to feel happy, secure,
and capable of carrying out their projects—that is, what it means to be human.12
Answers to key questions about human happiness vary geographically, historical-
ly, and personally. Moreover, people can be counted on to act in ways that trans-
form our understanding of the frontiers of human life and possibility. Figuring out
what human beings need and how to prioritize among those needs would thus
become irreducibly political and would have to be revised continually over time.13
Meanwhile, even a socialist society that opted against growth—that is, against
expanding its total capacity to produce goods and services—would need to
invest.14 Buildings and equipment would still need to be repaired, updated, and
transferred between uses. Many of our necessary investments already are, or
could be, growth neutral. Setting aside space and equipment to plant trees
along streets or to make work less backbreaking would alter the shape of the
social-provisioning process but would not necessarily affect the volume of
goods and services produced. If society already sets aside a portion of its resources
for investment every year (as every society must do), then the use of those re-
sources for a wider variety of purposes need not imply growth.

Three Issues for Resolution

Dynamics Precede Statics

In the socialist traditions arising out of the economic calculation debate, efforts to
imagine a socialist society have generally seen the problem of long-run dynamic

11. See Neurath (2005b), O’Neill (1998), and Benanav (2020).

12. Happiness is here conceived, not as a single, overall measure of subjective well-being (or
utility), but as an experience incorporating multiple incommensurable factors, including, e.g.,
pleasure and a sense of purpose.
13. See Soper (1981). Thank you to Daniel Zamora Vargas for this recommendation.
14. Focusing on investment (and especially growth-neutral investment) rather than economic
growth might be one way to reorganize the debate among “degrowthers” and “ecomodernists.”
A society can continuously, dynamically reorganize itself without increasing its consumption of
material resources—i.e., material throughput.
 Calculation Debate Revisited 197

planning—that is, of socialist investment—as supplementary to the main issue of

constructing socialist pathways to a short-run static equilibrium.15 To achieve an
efficient allocation of resources (in terms of welfare), proposals have relied on a
variety of mechanisms: markets, linear programming, or other equilibrium-gener-
ating participatory procedures. By contrast, Adaman and Devine argue that social-
ist dynamics should take precedence over socialist statics.
In reality, there is no such thing as a static equilibrium. Static equilibrium is a
fictional construction of economists. The issue is not that static questions are
entirely unimportant, but they are derivative. The important questions we
would face once we did away with the profit-driven capitalist economy involve
developing planning institutions that would allow us to reorganize the use of
spaces and equipment—and to facilitate the redeployment of labor—in ways
that better contributed to human happiness. Housing, healthcare, education,
and transportation networks would all have to be rewired to expand and contract
a vast number of suppliers’ capacities to produce goods and services.
Investment decisions would have to be made at the appropriate scale, whether
in geographic or sectoral terms, and would often involve coordination across geo-
graphic and sectoral units. Many decisions would have to be made regionally or
even globally because they could not be aggregated from local decisions. This
would be true especially when responding to climate change, which involves
massive alterations in energy production, infrastructure, and migration patterns.
The choices we need to make require open and contentious debate.
The recognition that investment is inherently political does not mean that we
need to engage in negotiated planning about everything. The generation, repair,
and reallocation of structures and equipment accounts for around 15 percent of
economic activity in advanced capitalist societies. Information technologies will
never fully automate what is inherently political, but they will speed decision
making by increasing transparency and facilitating communication. Meanwhile,
a large portion of the remaining 85 percent or so of activities could be organized
in less dialogical ways.16 Based on the affordances that material and social infra-
structures provide, workers would have wide latitude in choosing among produc-
tion methods.
Devine and Adaman’s argument about dynamics and statics distinguishes
between “market forces” and “market exchange.” In their view, replacing the
profit-driven investment function with a political, negotiated, and dynamic

15. See Lange, Taylor, and Lippincott (1938), Roemer (1994), Albert and Hahnel (1992), and Cock-
shott and Cottrell (1993). Exceptions include Schweickart (2011, 2018) and Devine (1988). On the
original socialist calculation debate, see Lavoie (1985) from the Austrian side and O’Neill (1998)
and Adaman and Devine (1996) from among the socialists.
16. Many other decisions that shape and constrain social provisioning will have to be made dia-
logically and politically, including how much of society’s resources to set aside for investment,
how to distribute investment funds across sectors of society, what will be the average working
time per person, and so on.
198 Benanav

alternative does not mean doing away with markets entirely, but it does mean lim-
iting their purview: namely, markets would continue to play a role in the exchange
of intermediate inputs such as electricity, lumber, medical devices, and so on,
which are necessary for the production of final goods and services. However, I
believe alternatives to the market exist when it comes to this exchange.
Even in a capitalist society, the price mechanism is only one among many
mechanisms that facilitate the allocation of intermediate inputs in the short
run. Formal and informal networks, trust, and habit also matter.17 Instead of
markets, a socialist society might rely on a variety of allocation protocols for dis-
tributing intermediate inputs; participants could periodically revise these proto-
cols through agreed-upon procedures. Designing such protocols would most
depend on determining the relative quantity of producer tokens to be allotted
to each workplace producing final goods and services in each year so that every-
one would know the relative standing a workplace had vis-à-vis others when
bidding for intermediate inputs.18

Distributed Knowledge

When it comes to investment decisions, we must recognize that no society could

ever rely on democratic decision making alone. Groups possessing relevant
knowledge, including nonpropositional knowledge, need to help craft the
options from which people choose. For example, building a new transportation
system or expanding the availability of dental work should involve technical spe-
cialists and end users in determining the alternatives. As Adaman and Devine
argue, the inclusion of such groups in decision making would be crucial if dem-
ocratic negotiation were to replace the market as a discovery process. By implica-
tion, a socialist society must be composed not only of individuals and coordinating
institutions but also of a complex network of producer and civic associations.
Friedrich Hayek famously posed the problem of complexity for socialists.19 He
claimed the market is the only institution—because nondialogical—that can or-
chestrate production decisions in an increasingly complex society. By complexity,
Hayek was not just referring to the large number of calculations required to orga-
nize social provisioning in any society. The real issue with complexity concerns
the distribution of different forms of technical know-how and the knowledge of
local conditions across the population. Under socialism, workers must use their

17. For an overview, see Lee (2017).

18. See Saros (2014), whose proposal involves the abolition of money, as a general equivalent,
and its replacement with consumer-facing credits and producer-facing points. Saros’s system ex-
hibits several problems, however, regarding the organization of both consumption and produc-
tion, especially when it comes to matters of collective concern, such as transportation networks
and healthcare facilities, as well as investment.
19. See Hayek (1980) and Lavoie (1985).
 Calculation Debate Revisited 199

knowledge to adjust the flows of production in which they are involved. This
means they need degrees of freedom to choose among production possibilities
—with some sense of the consequences of their decisions for efficiency (and
also for sustainability, working conditions, etc.)—and to make investment
proposals.20
Hayek was wrong about how—and how well—capitalist societies orchestrate
relations among individuals and groups with nonpropositional knowledge.21 In
reality, this orchestration is already carried out in a variety of ways not mediated
by the market. Examples include coordination within firms and among scientists,
especially in publicly funded research. Curiously, Hayek derived his concept of
tacit knowledge from Michael Polanyi’s work on science, a realm of social life
that was—at least when Hayek was writing—mostly insulated from market
forces and market exchange. Meanwhile, one of the persistent, if not worsening,
problems of market societies is how much tacit knowledge they ignore due to
both the hierarchical organization of firms and states and the market power of
large firms.
Recognizing the role of technical expertise in making production and invest-
ment decisions need not imply that socialists must set up a group of experts to
rule over the rest of society. As Devine has already argued, the point is to see
that everyone brings some expertise to the table already, often in forms that go
unrecognized. This point can be extended to think about the broader contours
of an associational socialist society.
People would need ample opportunities to develop the skills that interest them
and to participate in the life of producer associations that would serve as guard-
ians of “the joint-stock of human knowledge.”22 Participation in associations
that produce and transmit knowledge between generations, as well as across
society, would likely serve as a source of meaning for many people, as well as
one source of motivation within the workplace.23 Socialist societies must therefore
ensure that a wider variety of specialisms are accorded dignity and organized into

20. For these reasons, it is difficult to imagine the dictates of linear programming replacing
markets or auctions—even if the related difficulties concerning computing power can be over-
come—when it comes to workers’ choices among production techniques and suppliers.
Models based on linear programming give up far too much in terms of local democratic initiative
and discovery, and they concern themselves too little with criteria beyond efficiency, such as the
health and safety of workers, the satisfaction they derive from their work, etc.
21. Points made in this paragraph depend heavily on O’Neill (2006).
22. See Dugger and Peach (2015), who draw from the work of the institutionalists a conception of
the economy—understood in its widest sense—as a “social provisioning process” in which the
“joint-stock of human knowledge” is the primary productive force. See also Neurath (1983b)
on the orchestration of the sciences.
23. The motivation to work (and to innovate and transform the work process) is one of the least
studied aspects of the socialist calculation debate. In my view, it is crucial for thinking through
the organization of a socialist society. For critiques of money motivation that offer more hetero-
geneous accounts of work motivation—especially when workers are no longer worried about
200 Benanav

associations so that these associations can in turn send delegates to serve on in-
vestment boards when and where their knowledge is relevant. These producer as-
sociations should also play crucial roles in evaluating workplaces in terms of the
associations’ internal standards of work (which association members would them-
selves continually debate and revise).
A lot would depend on the character of these producer associations: how much
they trusted one another and whether they felt their knowledge was respected and
integrated into the decisions that shape production possibilities. Meanwhile, indi-
vidual associations might be more or less democratic, more or less resistant to
change, or more or less open to working with other associations.24 People
would need to ensure that these groups retained their vitality.

Free Association

Of course, producer associations aren’t the only ones that matter in a socialist
society. As Devine has pointed out, other civic associations would also need to par-
ticipate in planning if it is intended to result in investments that contribute more to
happiness. Once again, because there is no technically or economically best path
for society to progress, the future is radically open, and decisions about how to
face that future involve not just cooperation but also political conflict, in which
all sorts of associations should play major roles. Where would all these different as-
sociations come from, and how might they thrive? One issue with Adaman and
Devine’s account is that, like other socialist models, theirs says too little about
the relationships between the social provisioning process and the rest of social life.
In his original contribution, Devine suggested that the work week in a socialist
society would decline to around twenty to twenty-five hours, leaving people with
more free time. In most accounts of alternative economies, we are left thinking
that people will use this time primarily for leisure and the pursuit of hobbies.25
But clearly, with people no longer plagued by the pervasive insecurity that
marks capitalist society, and with inequalities reduced, people’s worlds would
open up in a variety of other ways. They would likely want to pursue a variety
of passions outside of work, whether cultural, religious, scientific, or political.
Some people would do so individually, but many others would form larger asso-
ciations as part of civil society.26

securing the conditions of their survival—see Deci and Flaste (1995), Frey (1997), Pink (2011),
Laloux (2014), and Spencer (2011).
24. Baiocchi and Ganuza (2016) helpfully discuss the issues that arise when allocation proce-
dures lean too hard on either associational or participatory forms of democracy.
25. See, e.g., Albert (2004). For a precursor, see Keynes ([1930] 2010).
26. As far as I can tell, Kropotkin’s ([1892] 2015) is one of the only texts to conceive of human
activity, beyond necessary work, in terms of overlapping free or voluntary associations con-
cerned with all sorts of aims and ends.
 Calculation Debate Revisited 201

Whether people joined, for instance, mathematical associations, societies for

ethical relations to animals, or collectives focused on fashion, they would need
fixed resources to pursue their noneconomic ends. How would these civic associ-
ations gain access to new or existing fixed resources, especially if the social benefit
they were to provide were contentious or obscure?27
To meet a variety of undefined or underdefined needs—including needs for ex-
perimentation and innovation in art, culture, science, and so on—humanity would
have to set aside a portion of its fixed resources for free use.28 One possible way to
organize the distribution of such resources would be to give each individual a
quantity of producer tokens that they could use to set up civic associations and
to bid on society’s intermediate inputs without having to promise any particular
social benefit in return. People could use these tokens themselves or give them
away to associations they supported. Investment boards could be tasked with en-
suring that, as long as civic associations remained within established rules (e.g., no
weapons manufacturing), they would gain access to fixed resources commensu-
rate with the quantity of tokens they received.29 Civic associations would then
be free to engage in a variety of projects, some of which would transform
widely shared understandings of human possibilities. Associations would also
generate innovations that people might want to incorporate into the wider
social-provisioning process.
Allowing free association, especially with access to producer goods, introduces
the danger that some groups may try to dominate the rest, reintroducing unfree-
dom into society. Trying to prevent factions from forming is no solution to this
problem. On the contrary, it is necessary to create institutional frameworks in
which factions can proliferate.30 No set of political rules, no matter how perfect,
can substitute for an active civil society remaining vigilant against domination’s

27. To my mind, this question is ultimately the most important (although underdiscussed) issue
that the socialist calculation debate raises. Friedman (1962) asked how concerned citizens in so-
cialist societies acquire the means to operate an antisocialist printing press. This problem can be
generalized, as I have done here, to ask how any civic association in socialism might gain access
to fixed resources, such as printing presses and warehouse space, and to intermediate inputs,
such as ink, paper, solvent, electricity, and so on.
28. General-equilibrium theories concern themselves with the allocation of scarce resources to
best satisfy existing consumer preferences. These theories are woefully inadequate when it
comes to the question of allocating resources to meet needs that are difficult to define in
terms of preferences, as already expressed. People want to watch movies, for example, but
when movies are written and produced simply in order to satisfy preexisting consumer
desires, they tend to become repetitive and boring rather than culturally transformative.
29. Where associations felt that the investment board had discriminated against them, they
would need to have the right to appeal the decisions and plead their case before a neutral arbiter.
30. Although he is very much an antisocialist, I found Levy (2015) helpful in thinking through
questions of civic associations in a free society, which Levy describes in terms of the problem
of intermediate bodies.
202 Benanav

reemergence.31 But the point here is not only the negative one of preventing dom-
ination but also a positive point: such civic associations would help shape invest-
ment alternatives to better suit people’s evolving sense of their own needs and
aims, not only by people contributing their knowledge but also through their par-
ticipating in an inevitably contentious decision-making process in which a variety
of ends and aims would come into play.
This role for civic associations would only be possible in a world in which such
associations were already pursuing a range of different ends and in which they
could be called upon—or could demand to be heard—when their perspective
was relevant to shaping investment alternatives. Every individual would not
need to be active in public life all the time, but enough associations would need
to be active at any one time so that a variety of different perspectives would
always be represented. Meanwhile, people who felt their voices were not being
heard would have to find ways to organize politically with others, either via exist-
ing associations or by the creation of new ones.32 Again, to have any power at all,
these associations would need access to fixed resources without having to promise
any defined social benefit in return.

Conclusion

One of a socialist society’s major aims would hopefully be not to atomize individ-
uals, like a capitalist society, but rather to empower people to organize themselves
into a variety of associations. Because many associations would make important
contributions to the social-provisioning process, people’s capacity to disrupt
social provisioning through an organized refusal to participate would increase. In-
stitutions would need to be structured so that people felt the key decisions shaping
society were legitimate in the sense that they were reached through democratic
procedures incorporating a wide variety of perspectives and taking a wide
variety of investment criteria into account. This in turn would both necessitate
and ensure that investment decisions be politically negotiated in an open and con-
tentious way. People would then be freer, with all of the excitement and danger
that this freedom implies.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank John O’Neill, Tony Smith, and Bjorn Westergard for comments on
this essay. Thank you to the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu
Berlin for financial support in making this article open access.

31. On socialist republicanism, see Gourevitch (2014), Roberts (2016), and Leipold, Nablusi, and
White (2020).
32. My thinking on democracy in a socialist society has been deeply influenced by DuBois (1920).
 Calculation Debate Revisited 203

References

Adaman, F., and P. Devine. 1996. “The Economic Calculation Debate: Lessons for
Socialists.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 20 (5): 523–37.
. 2022. “Revisiting the Calculation Debate: A Call for a Multiscale Approach.”
Rethinking Marxism 34 (2): 162–92.
Albert, M. 2004. Parecon: Life after Capitalism. London: Verso.
Albert, M., and R. Hahnel. 1992. “Socialism as It Was Always Meant to Be.” Review of Radical
Political Economics 24 (3–4): 46–66.
Baddeley, M. 2017. Investment: Theories and Analyses. London: Macmillan.
Baiocchi, G., and E. Ganuza. 2016. Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Benanav, A. 2020. “How to Make a Pencil.” Logic Magazine, no. 12: 195–214.
Cole, G. D. H. 1920. Guild Socialism Re-stated. London: Leonard Parsons.
Cockshott, W. P., and A. Cottrell. 1993. Towards a New Socialism. Nottingham, UK:
Spokesman.
Deci, E. L., and R. Flaste. 1995. Why We Do What We Do: The Dynamics of Personal Autonomy.
New York: Putnam.
Devine, P. 1988. Democracy and Economic Planning: The Political Economy of a Self-Governing
Society. London: Routledge.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1920. Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Dugger, W. M., and J. T. Peach. 2015. Economic Abundance: An Introduction. London:
Routledge.
Frey, B. 1997. Not Just for the Money: An Economic Theory of Personal Motivation. Cheltenham,
UK: Edgar Elgar.
Friedman, M. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gourevitch, A. 2014. From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican
Liberty in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hayek, F. 1980. Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Herlitz, A., and K. Sadek. 2021. “Social Choice, Nondeterminacy, and Public Reasoning.” Res
Philosophica 98 (3): 377–401.
Hirst, P. 1994. Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance. New York:
John Wiley and Sons.
Kapp, K. W. 1963. The Social Costs of Business Enterprise. Nottingham, UK: Spokesman.
Keynes, J. M. 2010. Essays in Persuasion. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kropotkin, P. (1892) 2015. The Conquest of Bread. London: Penguin.
Laloux, F. 2014. Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the
Next Stage of Human Consciousness. Brussels: Nelson Parker.
Lange, O., F. M. Taylor, and B. Lippincott. 1938. On the Economic Theory of Socialism.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lavoie, D. 1985. Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, F. 2017. Microeconomic Theory: A Heterodox Approach. London: Routledge.
Levy, J. T. 2015. Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leipold, B., K. Nabulsi, and S. White, eds. 2020. Radical Republicanism: Recovering the
Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mazzucato, M. 2015. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public versus Private Sector Myths.
London: Anthem.
204 Benanav

Neurath, O. 1983a. “The Lost Wanderers of Descartes and the Auxiliary Motive.” In
Philosophical Papers 1913–1946, ed. R. S. Cohen and M. Neurath, 1–12. Dordrecht, Neth.:
Springer.
. 1983b. “The Orchestration of the Sciences by the Encyclopedism of Logical
Empiricism.” In Philosophical Papers 1913–1946, ed. R. S. Cohen and M. Neurath, 230–
42. Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer.
. 2005a. “Economic Plan and Calculation in Kind.” In Economic Writings: Selections
1904–1945, ed. T. E. Uebel and R. S. Cohen, 405–65. Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer.
. 2005b. “Socialist Utility Calculation and Capitalist Profit Calculation.” In Economic
Writings: Selections 1904–1945, ed. T. E. Uebel and R. S. Cohen, 466–72. Dordrecht, Neth.:
Springer.
O’Neill, J. 1998. The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics. London: Routledge.
. 2003. “Socialism, Associations and the Market.” Economy and Society 32 (2): 184–206.
. 2006. “Knowledge, Planning, and Markets: A Missing Chapter in the Socialist
Calculation Debates.” Economics & Philosophy 22 (1): 55–78.
Offe, C., and H. Wiesenthal. 1980. “Two Logics of Collective Action.” In Political Power and
Social Theory, ed. M. Zeitlin, 67–115. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI.
Pateman, C. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Pink, D. 2011. Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. New York: Penguin.
Polanyi, K. (1944) 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our
Time. Boston: Beacon.
. (1922) 2016. “Socialist Accounting.” Theory and Society 45 (5): 385–427.
Roberts, W. C. 2016. Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of “Capital.” Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press.
Roemer, J. 1994. A Future for Socialism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Russell, B. 1919. Proposed Roads to Freedom. New York: Holt.
Saros, D. E. 2014. Information Technology and Socialist Construction: The End of Capital and the
Transition to Socialism. London: Routledge.
Schweickart, D. 2011. After Capitalism. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.
. 2018. Against Capitalism. London: Routledge.
Shaikh, A. 2016. Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Soper, K. 1981. On Human Needs: Open and Closed Theories in a Marxist Perspective. Brighton,
UK: Harvester.
Spencer, D. 2011. “Work Is a Four-Letter Word: The Economics of Work in Historical and
Critical Perspective.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 70 (3): 563–86.
Vanek, J. 1972. The Economics of Workers’ Management: A Yugoslav Case Study. London:
Routledge.
Vettesse, T., and D. Pendergrass. Forthcoming. Half-Earth Socialism. London: Verso.