The People’s Republic of Walmart

This was a really interesting book that discusses how much planning and cooperation goes into the operations of mega-corporations like Walmart & Amazon. It shows that “ruthless market competition” is far less relevant in our current corporate capitalist system than we've been led to believe. It discusses the dichotomy of planned economies vs anarchic markets and the viability of leveraging modern computing for planning.

It takes a critical, rational look at the Soviet Union's system and gleans valuable insight from what they accomplished and where they erred.

It also discusses something I didn't know anything about before: Chile's “Project Cybersyn”, a precursor to the internet tasked with economic planning. “...management cybernetics could serve Allende's vision of an anti-bureaucratic democratic socialism in which workers participated in management and that would defend individual civil liberties.” That was a great success until the US-backed fascist coup in 1973, which resulted in the dismantling of “Project Cybersyn”. I've now renamed my router to “Cybersyn” in solidarity.

This book says what I've been saying for years now: Capitalism cannot fix the climate crisis. Caputalism caused the climate crisis. The profit motive and endless growth caused climate change. No amount of regressive Pigovian flat taxes on carbon will solve this crisis. “The market's profit motive—not growth or industrial civilization, as some environmentalists have argued—caused our climate calamity and the larger bio-crisis. The market is amoral, not immoral. It is directionless, with its own internal logic that is independent of human command.”
Massive economic planning already exists in various siloed systems, but with tyrannical capitalists as the decision makers. The goal is to democratize the process and prioritize humanity instead of the profit motive.

It pairs well with “The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths “ by Mariana mazzucato (2013), which shows that innovation is far more prevalent in state-backed research, not profit-based enterprises. I highly recommend that book. The concept of anarchist markets is covered deeper in “Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty” Edited by Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson (2011) , I mildly recommend this book.

Great book. Highly recommended

“And the transformation needed if it is to be democratic, rather than technocratic, will have to be led by, not on behalf of, workers at Walmart, Amazon, Facebook and other transnationals.”