Capitalism is predicated on the separation of political and economic spheres. In this system, politics is marked by formal or nominal equality. Meanwhile, the economy is governed by what Marx called capital’s ‘mute compulsion’ — the silent pressure of market forces. In contrast, socialism can be seen as an attempt to unite these two spheres under democratic control. Yet, it remains far from clear how to actually practise economic democracy. Decades of actually-existing socialist governance reveal the dangers of one-party despotism, inefficient planning, and the degeneration of ‘market socialism’ into capitalist restoration.

In this talk, Drew Pendergrass will reconstruct Hungarian economist János Kornai's firsthand account of the pathologies of socialist planning in the Eastern Bloc. He will give an account of Kornai’s officially-sanctioned attempt to use computers to improve Hungarian central planning in the early 1960s. Kornai led a team of over 150 economists and technicians in a linear programming exercise that delivered significant savings over traditional planning methods. Kornai felt the ultimate failure of his technocratic reforms arose not from information problems, as neoliberals would argue, but because socialist institutional arrangements had evolved into a stable and self-reinforcing system which could not be adjusted by computational readouts — and indeed could only be reformed by a transition to capitalism, which would subject institutions to new evolutionary pressures. Pendergrass will argue that direct democracy addresses Kornai’s institutional problem without resorting to capital's mute compulsion, and will conclude by considering the implications for planning under the environmental crisis.

Drew Pendergrass is a writer, activist, and climate scientist whose work imagines how humanity can democratically govern itself under a worsening environmental crisis.