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How might a modern economy work if it were driven by multiple social goals instead of the pursuit of private profit? The first part of this contribution discussed the ways the classical socialist tradition addressed this question, from the nineteenth-century utopians to the crash industrializers of Soviet Russia, the planners of Red Vienna, the guild socialists of Edwardian Britain and the architects of the postwar welfare state.footnote1 A major problem they failed to resolve was how to design the institutions through which multiple democratically determined aims could be articulated and composed, with resources allocated accordingly. Early ideas of a simple community-regulated economy could not survive the growing differentiation of economic and social structures thrown up by capitalist development from the 1870s on, which had created complex, layered processes of production and correspondingly specialized, sometimes mutually unintelligible forms of knowledge and world outlooks. New social struggles—feminist, anti-colonial, anti-racist—advanced competing, perhaps incompatible values: autonomy, equality, recognition. Imposing a uniform plan overrode broader aims in pursuit of maximized output and ignored real local differences, with perverse results.
Organizing an economy around multiple goals dramatically increases the complexity of decision-making. Enduring ethical and political disagreements will persist. Even if broad consensus were achieved, material and technical constraints would mean that not all ambitions could be realized, requiring negotiated trade-offs. Besides, irreducible uncertainty about the future means we can never wholly predict the consequences of our decisions or anticipate new wants and needs; course correction has to be part of the decision-making process. The result will necessarily involve ongoing political contestation. As Otto Neurath recognized, this means that the institutions of a multi-criterial economy should be designed not to suppress disagreements but to articulate them as intelligible alternatives and to structure the choices among them.footnote2 Neurath and his followers in 1920s Vienna made some headway, but the rise of Nazism crushed and scattered them before they could figure out what needed to be done.
The theoretical starting point here picks up from Neurath’s insight that different goals and values—like good-quality work and housing for all, or sustainable agriculture and ecological balance—are not substitutable; they cannot be reduced to a single metric and ranked or ‘optimized’ accordingly. Their benefits need to be expressed in kind, for what they are themselves, and evaluated on that basis.footnote3 Some courses of action can be ruled out from the start, if they cost more and deliver less across all relevant dimensions—they are ‘dominated’ options, in the terms of rational-choice theory. But among the viable options that remain, there may be no automatic way to determine the best; no algorithm to make the final choice. They present what are known as partial-order problems, in that they can be partially ranked and ordered, but not fully so. Partial-order problems arise at every level of economic life: in households, deciding how to allocate time and resources; in firms, selecting inputs and production methods; in investment bodies, weighing competing futures. From a technical standpoint, there may be no single optimal answer. But from an economic and political perspective, a choice must still be made.footnote4 This requires a shift from optimization to composition, and from theory to practice. The question becomes: how can the composition of our values be organized institutionally under real-world conditions?
In what follows, I start with a brief overview of the institutional ensemble that will allow a multi-criterial economy to flourish. I then discuss in more detail the thinking about how each would operate, what capitalist practices it would replace and what the social effects would be. It should be stressed, first, that this is not a blueprint. It simply sketches mechanisms by which the challenge of replacing the profit drive by other, contestable values might be met. It should thus be seen as a framework for institutional design—necessarily underspecified, with the names of the institutions deliberately plain and bald; operating at a level of abstraction sufficient for the ideas to be applicable in varied national contexts, adaptable to specific cultures, histories and struggles. Second, it is not a theory of what those values should be. I have my own views about what matters most—how we should respond to climate change, for example, and what kind of world we should build in its wake. But readers will not find those views here. The aim is not to prescribe an ideal outcome, but to suggest a framework within which people can debate and resolve those questions themselves.footnote5
Yet no system of collective choice can be legitimate if people lack access to livelihood, education, health, time or voice. Without a commitment to a shared baseline of rights and entitlements, without real freedoms and material guarantees, deliberation would be hollow. How those rights are defined and what they include will vary. But this framework assumes that the provision of universal basic services and income is the enabling condition for people to engage fully and freely in the decisions that structure their world. That is what makes the project emancipatory—what makes it socialist.
The framework for a multi-criterial economy envisaged here implies a series of structural breaks. Capital accumulation and waged labour are both abolished. Investment is no longer driven by the pursuit of profit but by the purpose of meeting socially defined needs, while sustaining a wider diversity of ends that individuals and communities choose to pursue. Workers no longer depend upon their employers for their income, which is supplied instead by the Technical Associations and ubi. All providers—whether offering public or private goods and services—are non-profit entities. The framework proposes a large role for public provision, especially in sectors like housing, education, health, care and culture, which will absorb significant quantities of labour and resources. But consumer markets will remain vital arenas for personal choice.
Even where final consumption is largely de-commodified, production must rely on extensive exchange among firms. We need only think of the wide range of intermediate goods and services required to produce the most basic final products. A bakery needs ovens, flour, cleaning services, maintenance, accounting software, packaging, transportation and more. A neighbourhood clinic relies on specialized equipment, sterilization services, lab diagnostics, pharmaceuticals and repair technicians. Inter-firm exchanges are essential to any complex economy, and firms must be able to choose their suppliers, change them in response to delays or quality issues, and experiment with new approaches and partnerships. Market exchange enables this kind of flexibility and responsiveness, especially when production is distributed across many units.footnote6