439. Do Socialists Dream of Electric Institutions, Part 2 (ft. Aaron Benanav)

106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it, hit it, hit it. Hey folks, just popping in for a quick promo before we get the show started. So Ed and I are going to be guest of honor at Capricon, a science fiction convention held in Chicago from February 5th to February 8th. This is a really fun and unexpected invitation for us to receive. The theme for this year's convention is Rise of the Humans. And so the organizers are fans of TMK and wanted to get us out there to do what we do best. We will be doing panels. We'll be doing discussions. We'll be doing some interviews ourselves. I'll be doing a book signing. Ed and I are going to be there for the whole convention. We're going to be heavily involved doing things every single day, plus attending panels and discussions ourselves and parties and so on. And so this will be a great way, if you live in the Chicagoland area, to come out and see us at Capricorn February 5th to February 8th at the Marriott Chicago O'Hare. I'll have a link to this in the episode description So you can see where it is, see when it is Register if you'd like to come along And see us at the convention This will be a really fun time and we hope to see you there If you're a fan of TMK, make sure you come and say hi Alright, on with the episode Hello friends and enemies It's episode 439 of This Machine Kills I'm Jathan, joined by Ed later in the episode. Got hung up with something. It's fine. He'll be here. And Jeremy, of course. And we're just going to jump straight into it because, once again, very excited to be joined by Aaron Beninoff to talk part two of his essay series, Beyond Capitalism, and the New Left Review. The last free episode we had Aaron on to really go through the framework of the critique of capitalism and the vision of a multi-criterial economy. So this critique of kind of single parameter optimization that the political economy of capitalism is really built on, min-maxing, maxing out your profit, minimizing your cost, everything else, everything in service of optimizing for that one parameter. But of course, we live in a world where people have a lot more different values and interests and visions and desires that are not just constrained within this one parameter of profit. And so Aaron has laid out a groundwork for what a multi-criterial economy might look like. We talked about all that in the last episode. Now, here we're going to actually get into the real concrete, where the rubber hits the ground in terms of where I think most analysis of capitalism, most critiques of it, most people's whole body of work ends where Aaron's first essay ended. Right. Laying out the critique, laying out an incisive analysis. Right. And then saying we need a different way forward. You kind of in there. Right. Well, that's just not how Aaron works. Right. Aaron's like, well, and now I'm going to lay out the institutional blueprint for what that world would look like, how it might actually operate. So, Aaron, thank you so much for coming back on. I'm really excited to get into this. Great. I'm excited to talk to you about it. Well, you know, laying out a good critique of capital, a good critique of political economy is really hard. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of energy. You know, it's why there's actually so few good critiques of political economy out there. But I think what's even harder is then putting your mind to the institutional grindstone and saying, let's actually hammer out what alternative institutions would look like, how they might operate in a system, in a macroeconomic system. That kind of stuff is really hard because it requires thinking beyond capitalism, as your essays are titled. It also requires those thinking in ways that are so concrete, so material, so just institutional. Most people are not really attuned to thinking in that way. We're not taught to think in that way, and we really don't teach people to think in that way either. And so before we get into what this framework actually looks like, I want to pose to you, I mean, how did you kind of get your mind into thinking about what real institutions and an ecology of institutions might actually look like? Like, where were you going to for kind of inspiration, for resources and thinking in these real concrete institutional ways? That's a really great question. And you should know that there's actually, when I do eventually put this out as a book, there's going to be hopefully a second volume that's more historical material that talks about those precursors. In some ways, I think Marxists, you know, there's a few famous lines. There's a line from Marx about not writing recipes for the cooktops of the future. there's this uh there's this kind of um version of it that adorno has that's a bit almost in a religious vein this ban on graven images this kind of ban on talking about the future and you kind of get the sense that um that as a result of that there's just nothing in the marxist canon that would give you any kind of material to work with right um to describe what that future world could be. And so it's just a blank slate and you have to just dream, you know. At least that would be one way to approach it. But actually, I think that the reality is much more interesting. So Marx himself says that utopianism is a feature of a period in which the working class movement is not very well developed. And so people dream of a future rather than fighting for one. That's a simple version of what he says. And the Second International, Rankowski, really repeated this in the late 19th century. The problem for them is that as the working class movement developed, especially in the second half of the 19th century, people started producing many different utopian visions, and they became extremely popular. So even within the Second International itself, August Babel wrote this book, Women in Socialism. It was one of the most famous, it was the most widely read book about Marxism besides Engel's origin of private property, family, and state. And in that book, he lays out an account of what communism will look like and actually develop some of the institutional frameworks for that, that then go on to influence the ABC of communism by Prey Brzezinski and Bukharin, which came out in 1920. and, you know, influenced then visions of communism also in Russian sci-fi, like Bogdanov's Red Star. And once you start looking, you'll see that there's a ton of literature where people have developed these institutions. You know, you can go all the way back to Thomas More, and I do in some of my writings, but, you know, you can really look at these late 19th century developments. Etienne Cabet, who else do I talk about? There's Edward Bellamy's book, Looking Backwards. There's William Morris, News from Nowhere. There's the ABC of Communism. There's Guild Socialism Restated by GDH Cole. And the list goes on and on. And actually, a lot of these books develop institutional frameworks. And they try to struggle to think about how you would solve these problems. So I would say one thing is actually that, you know, setting aside this line for Marx and Adorno, There's actually a really large extent literature on institutions that you can draw on in this Marxist and socialist canon. The second thing is that there's the actually existing Eastern Bloc countries, right? And many Marxists respond to what happened there either by saying, oh, you should just do what they do but not screw it up. Or they say, you know, well, whatever happened there, it was not actually socialism, right? So, like, it just, there's nothing to learn because they didn't try to implement what we wanted to do. And I think those are both defense mechanisms. Like, you have to actually go look at what they did, analyze those institutions and the kinds of problems that emerged there, and take it really seriously. So those are two major sources, the utopian tradition and the Eastern Bloc experiments. And I would say the third really important thing, which, you know, which we could talk about in more detail, is the socialist calculation debate. So the fact that Mises and Hayek started this debate in the 1920s, I think they were, I take them very seriously as responding to the real failures of thought within the history of Marxism and socialism. These aren't just like, you know, like critics misreading their, their, the objects of their criticism. They were really responding to the failures of a particular way of thinking about what those institutions of a post-capitalist future would look like. And they really caught hold of something. And then you can find, as a result of that debate, there's the 20s and 30s versions of socialist responses to that. There's a set of responses that emerged kind of after World War II, but really in the 80s and 90s, there's a real revival of the debate. And all of these people, you know, there's Michael Albert and Robin Hanell, Paracon. there's um there's cockshot and cuttrell it's kind of computer socialist vision and then the one that i i end up relying on the most which is this uh this author pat devine who wrote this book called um um uh democracy and economic planning and i think 1988 so you know those are so there's there's actually a huge literature that you can draw on to to start thinking through this um and and it's really important to reference all of those literatures because otherwise you are just you know, making shots in the dark. And just, you know, one other thing I would say about what you said, I do try to stay away from the term blueprint as I go about this. And I just want to say why, because I think that, you know, I think that it's possible to describe the institutions that we need in order to build a post-capitalist or beyond capitalist future. But I don't think there's any one way to make those institutions work. I think there would be many different ways we could organize them, ways we can imagine democracy playing out, a whole kind of institutional experimentalism that we would need to actually figure out how they would work. And so I would prefer kind of in line with everything I do in the project. The best thing to me would be if I could present different ways to structure each institution, you know, that are just starting points rather than saying, ah, here's how you do this, here's how you do that. And ultimately, something I'm working on this year is like a mathematical formalization of the model. And I think that will enable me to present a truly mathematically abstract version of what the institutions have to do that makes it even less necessary to say, oh, it has to be like this. It's sort of to say it has to fulfill these functions in some way. So yeah, those are some thoughts about that. No, and I'll take that last point and I take it very well. And I mean, I think it even speaks to the lack of precision, but also a lack of the right concepts for talking about this kind of thing. Because I think you're right, like on one hand, you know, blueprint recipes, right? These are things that are like step by step methods or kind of lay out the here's the architecture, right? Here's how to build the building of a post capitalist society. So there's a really kind of there's an aspect of it that's really overdetermined. It's really rigid. It's high. It's overly structured, a recipe, a blueprint. But then the other ways we talk about these things of kind of like visions, world making, right? There's a bit of a, they're underdetermined, they're understructured. There's too much kind of, there's not enough there there, you know? But what you're doing is somewhere in between, a synthesis, one might say. But I don't think we have a really good way to think and talk about that somewhere in between aspect. Because on one hand, we do want the, I think, a lot of critique, a lot of critics, a lot of, you know, analysts, a lot of, you know, scholars, activists, they tend to exist in the kind of, And, hey, I count myself among these. They exist in the kind of the vision area, right? Like, here's a vision for a new world. Here's things we should consider or things we should try to achieve or safeguard or reject in that new world, right? But there's a little bit of, there's not a lot of substance there, and there's certainly not a good, solid transitional pathway to get there. But on the other hand, because we reach to these statements that you mentioned from Marx, from Adorno, from others that say, hey, don't try to create a recipe or a blueprint. Or, you know, you think about the, I think about the essay from David Graeber that he wrote in The Baffler, right, of flying cars and the declining rate of profit, where he talks about the, you know, the critique, the constant refrain to any critique of capital is, well, what's your solution then, right? as if capitalism came about because the Medvediches and a couple other families in Italy in the 16th century all got together and sketched out this new system called capitalism and then implemented it. That's not how these things happen. They happen organically. They happen over time. They happen through experimentation, things becoming kind of concretized. And so the refrain of what's your solution then is asking for, unless you've got a blueprint for the thing that you're going to build tomorrow, then you have no standing to critique the thing that exists today. But I think your work, and especially this second part of the essay, the institutional framework, really does something different where it exists in that in-between period. It says, like, here's something more concrete than a vision, but less structured than a blueprint. Right. And you can kind of imagine what a transitional pathway to some of these things might look like, not by implementing the whole suite of institutions you lay out. and we're going to talk about, you know, whole cloth. But you can imagine doing a version of an investment, a national investment board tomorrow, right? And then maybe that evolves over time to becoming something that kind of takes the whole investment function of society out of the private market. And then maybe, you know, you can imagine concretizing, like, you know, professional associations that we're all part of in different ways, right? Like the American Sociological Association, for example. And you could say, well, maybe that becomes something a bit more than just a formal but kind of loose professional membership body. Maybe that starts becoming a governing body for all sociologists, right? So the institutional framework here does kind of have baked into it. You don't really talk about this in the essay, but it does have baked into it a kind of a transitional pathway because it's more concrete than a vision, but still yet more fluid and unstructured than a blueprint. Yeah, I should also say, and I'd be happy to talk about it, there was a whole transition plan. And, you know, for reasons I can't totally get into on there, it was not printed in the New Left Review. So I'm trying to figure out where to put that. But there's like a 7,000-ford transition program that develops some of these lines. It's because you can't explicitly call for, even in the pages of the New Life Review, putting a bunch of people against the wall. Is that right, Aaron? No comment. No comment. All right. Well, let's get into the institutions then here. So kind of one of the things that is a constant surprise to me in both of your essays as a communist myself is that, you know, so much of my body of work is essentially a critique of the market and the encroaching marketization of everything that is not already marketized. I mean, I just wrote an essay a couple of weeks ago about Calci, about prediction markets and this kind of vision of like a total financialization of, you know, turning every opinion into a tradable asset on prediction markets, which is the explicit vision that the co-founder of Calci laid out at a Citadel Securities Future of Markets conference. As he said, we're going to turn every opinion, every difference of opinion into a tradable asset on prediction markets. And so, you know, this idea of the, to me, market is a stand in for bad enemy. But you very productively, you don't refuse the market. But you're also not quite doing market socialism in a way that I think people think about market socialism. And so and in your institution, in your institutional framework, the market really plays a role here. But also so does this other thing that, you know, I think any good communist would have set themselves as the goal of abolishing, which is the value form. Right. And especially one represented through a monetary system. Right. A kind of system that abstracts all values into a single unit of exchange and thus becomes a logic that dominates all other forms of value in society. Right. You don't deny the monetary system either. And so I wonder if we could start there as a kind of groundwork for the institutions that you didn't build on top of this. is on one hand, a kind of a role of the market and of competition as something that you see as being, you know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's productive aspects of this kind of social institutional system of the market. But also same with you lay out a kind of a dual monetary system, as you call it, where you say, actually there's something really useful here for having like you know fungible units of exchange that can be used in in these ways uh maybe let's start with the market and then we can get into the monetary system yeah i will i just want to say though that i i mean it might require going quite deep into this but i think that i've proposed the only actual abolition of the value form and of the universal equivalent. So we can talk about why what I propose is that, but we can talk about first about the market. I think that this is one of those things where, you know, it's a huge dividing line. And part of what I do in this kind of forthcoming at some point historical volume is I really talk about what I see as a very particular tradition of socialist thinking that starts with Thomas More. and you know Moore finds resources in in the Bible in the book of Acts and in Plato for this idea but he becomes a real you know frequent reference point for this idea of the abolition of money and private property in the market and replacing all those things with this immediate community-based allocation of resources and I see Marx as kind of you know a real important nodal point in this history of kind of like non-market, anti-market, community determination socialism. And before it was called communism, it was called the community of goods. And I really think that's actually a helpful way of thinking about it. And Engels refers to communism as the community of goods in some of his earliest works. It's very helpful because it specifies this idea that it's not the market, but like society as a whole, that's going to decide how resources are allocated. Now, I think, you know, this is one of those cases where you do really have to look at what happened in the Eastern Bloc. And I think like a lot of the critiques of it, a lot of the critiques of what happened in the Soviet Union have to do with the weakness of the planning apparatus and the fact that like the planners couldn't plan. And that's what leads to like these contemporary visions of computer socialism. Like we can plan, we can make a plan better than they did because we have computers. I think what that misses about a lot of the problems with what happened in the Eastern Bloc countries is that it wasn't just coming up with the plan, there's problems implementing the plan that was the problem. And to make a long story short, the reason is that whatever, however you come up with this plan, you actually need to like get resources to different producers. they have to make stuff and like pass that down the chain to the next set of producers. And however perfect your plan is, if kinks start to appear in that implementation process, especially if your plan is really good and doesn't have any waste in it, the more kinks appear, the more screwed up the whole plan will become, right? The more defective parts that you'll have cascading problems emerging within the system. And the idea is that a lot of the reason for this is that within these models of like planning as a whole, what drops out are the direct links between the producing units. So in a market, what happens is like I can choose which supplier I want to get my inputs from, right? And it matters a lot because I know how my machines work. This is basically one of Hayek's key criticisms of socialism. It's like I know how my systems work and I'm going to choose the supplier that can give me the input that I actually need. And the other thing about it is like I'm only going to get inputs that I can actually use. And if I get a lot of stuff I can't use, I'll sell it back onto the market. So there's this real need for producers to be able to ensure that they can get what they actually need and not hoard resources that they don't need. And that's precisely kind of like what went wrong in the Soviet Union. There's all these further problems that emerge. But the key idea is that you need producers to be able to directly contract or link with the producers they depend on. And a market is just a really good way to do that. Now, that's on the producer side. And I really specify that where you really need markets, most importantly, is to organize inter-firm transactions, inter-firm linkages. It's also true I talk about markets on the consumer side. And I think that anyone who studied the problem eventually comes to that very obvious conclusion that you need markets on the consumer side just because not everyone wants the same bundle of goods and services. You know, we have diversity of needs and interests. There should obviously be a lot of things met by universal basic services. But, you know, some people are going to want to work more, others less. Some are going to want to live closer to the center of the city. Some are going to want larger living spaces. You know, there's going to be these diversities and trade-offs. And as long as the differences in people's incomes are not very large, markets will help organize those trade-offs. You know like if we all start off with the same number of credits these like consumer tokens then you know if you choose to eat meat and let say meat is very expensive because it actually you actually have to pay the cost of it you going to give up things to get what really matters to you that are going to be different from the kinds of things other people are going to do That's an important part about markets. But I think the thing that's really important for the model is understanding the necessity of producers of whatever kind, whether it's child care facilities, hospitals, schools, advanced manufacturing plans, business services. They need to actually be able to connect with the specific groups that do what they need, rather than having that assigned to them, either by a computer or a bureaucrat. And that's the function that markets really fulfill in the model. Yeah, I think you really hone in on something that... that you've read way more than me around the kind of socialist calculation debates and just things around planning, right, socialist planning. But from my perspective, you read a lot more around points of macroeconomics in left-wing and heterodox economics, but not a whole lot in microeconomics, right? And I think, you know, so macro is the kind of the aggregate economy, right? Talking about like, you know, the shape of the economy, the function and organization of like sectors, you know, production, you know, gross domestic outputs, like, you know, these kind of big macroeconomic aspects at the aggregate level. And I think that tends to be where a lot of heterodox economics, a lot of critique of political economy really focuses on these macroeconomic points around like how is the economy organized? How is it shaped? What does it do? And why does it do the things it does? How is it constructed? Right. So the kind of social construction of the economy as a concept, right? But what you don't see a lot of in heterodox economics and kind of, you know, Marxist political economy and so on is talk of microeconomics. And this is, you know, this is the exchange and decisions made by behaviors and firms at that kind of real small scale level. The allocation of scarce resources, right? behavioral economics is ultimately about microeconomics. You know, neoliberal or neoclassical economics is really fixated on microeconomics. You know, I think in a lot of ways where, you know, you can think of like Keynes as the kind of the hegemony of the macro. Hayek is the hegemony of the micro in some ways, right? Because, you know, it's the kind of Thatcher, there is no society, there's only, you know, individuals and their families. And I think Hayek would say something similar. There is no economy, right? There's only people in the market making decisions. He literally says that. That's a line from Mises originally. But this idea, it's not an economy, it's a catalaxy. They have this other term for it. Exactly. Yeah. And so Mises' magnum opus there is human action, right? It's all about human behavior in the market, human actions based on maximizing your interest. And so and so but I think that difference of the micro and the macro is really important because it on one hand, it shows the limitation of the neoliberal and neoclassical and Austrian kind of economics is that it's only fixated on the micro. And this model of the of the homo economicus and so on, and then exporting that to all other functions. So this is the real like Gary Becker kind of innovation here is taking the models of microeconomics and exporting that to all other spheres of society. But on the flip side, I think the limitation of the heterodox and the left wing economics is a fixation on the macro. And this is where the critique of the market becomes, I think, really where that really takes form is if you're only focused on the macro, you see the market as the root of all evil in some ways. The thing that causes the problems, that prevents people from gaining access to services they need, that reshapes how we value things like nature, become just market commodities or assets or whatever. but what's really difficult and I think this is where you are reaching to the market as a solution is like you can plan a macro economy but once you start planning a micro economy that's where you get like 1984 right that's where you get kind of the visions of communists is everyone wearing the same grey jumpsuit and drinking the same grey you know swill or at least like having to do it way in advance That's a famous feature of a lot of these systems of ex-ante planning. It's like, oh, you wanted red shoes? Well, you should have let us know last year. Exactly. But this might actually get us nicely into the kind of the dual monetary system here as well, because I think communists see the market as a place of chaos and disorder. and I think communism wants an orderly society. That's the whole idea of having a plan is that you can have order, right? You're not just, you can set goals and then create ways to achieve those goals, not just doing what the market does, which is just like, who knows what's going to happen, right? But at the same time, when you try to do that at the micro level and create order, what that is, is an authoritarian control over people's daily lives. So how does your dual monetary system also function as a way to kind of take the really, I think, useful things of the market, which is allowing for people to express different interests in different ways, while also not taking the destructive thing of the market, which is subjecting every aspect of our lives to a competition of all against all. Yeah, and I just want to sort of repeat something you said, which I think is really important. I would say that my model, and I think everyone who has a brain who talks about economics, we all agree, or we should all agree, on the primacy of macro. You know, it's like it's the it's the shape of the overall system that's ultimately determinative. But, you know, there was this project within neoclassical economics to to do like a kind of micro foundations of the macro. And you could say what's missing in a lot of the heterodox stuff is they don't have a micro founded macro. And it's a huge problem. And there were there have been a few thinkers. There's this guy, Fred Lee, who's a really interesting kind of wobbly economist. There's some great essays about him in this new magazine called Strange Matters that I would recommend. But in general, I think heterodox thinkers from Marxist to Keynes rejected this, like didn't see a way to microfound their macro account. And that is exactly what I'm trying to do. I think the thing that people don't like about markets, which you're capturing, is not like what I'm emphasizing is a kind of autonomy on the part of producers, right? That they get to decide how and what they make, right, locally. They're not just receiving commands from above, often commands that they're unable to fulfill with the resources made available to them. What people don't like about markets is like what you said, the chaos of the market, right? And I think a lot of that chaos, if we could specify it, and I think even if you read Mark's volume one especially carefully, you'll see that most of the problem has to do with how supply responds to demand. It's how producers enter and exit from markets, how technological change happens and transforms what kind of supply is available. All of these things, it's really about how supply responds to demand that causes a lot of the problems. And a lot of that is driven by the fact that markets, in capitalism, all of that entry and exit is organized around profit, right? So basically, there's massive competition for market share. There's all this entry into lines where there's a high possibility of making profits. And it generates a lot of dynamism, but of a very particular kind that unfolds in an incredibly chaotic way. Some of that chaos, I think Marxists are overcritical of. because actually you want experimentation. We want trying things out. We want to waste resources in our effort to find new and better ways to do things. There's a total overemphasis on not wasting. Like you don't want wasting to get out of hand and you want wasting to be for the right reasons, which is trying out multiple things. But I think that there's a kind of overfocus on that. So I'll explain a little later when we talk about investment, how we politically transform the way supply responds to demand. But I think that what I'm doing with the dual currency model here is really making it like making markets safe for socialists. You know, it's like, oh, it's a little toy market. You don't have to worry. It's not doing any of the bad things that you don't like markets to do. I mean, behind it is actually a way of responding to ways that Keynes and Mill, there are all these thinkers who try to imagine markets working without profits. And they could only imagine that working in a world without dynamism. So they saw it as an emergent feat. Markets could become safe for socialism only when there was no longer any true dynamics in the system. Because dynamics in a market system generate profit, right? And profit generates the kind of chaos and competition problems that we're trying to avoid. So what I do by having a dual currency system is I just disconnect the market that are playing out in these producer areas from anything like profit. By separating points, which is the producer currency, from credits, which is the consumer currency, there's these two currencies, the idea is that there's a firewall between them. You can't translate any leftover points you have into credits. So there's no reason for any particular producer to not use the full budget that's being available to it. So all producers in different ways that may be a little too complex for a podcast, but we can talk about it. They receive these points in different ways as producer currency, P production, P points. They receive it and they want to spend that whole budget because there's no way to take leftover points and use them either to pay themselves out in terms of like paying themselves an income that they can then use to buy things. there's also no way to use those points for investment. The points are only used to transact with other firms. And so what does that mean? And to pay these like rental charges they have to pay for using factors of production. What does that mean? It means that it's like the markets here, it's almost like an auction. Everyone has a budget of points and they're just spending them to try to get the resources they want in competition for those resources with everyone else. Not competition in the kind of way we talk about in capitalism, but just like you're bidding in an auction. You have a certain amount of firepower, the points you have available, and it's just an auction. And at the end of every period, that auction kind of resets and you can re-perform these activities. But you can't say, oh, I didn't spend all my auction points, so I'm going to just pay myself out with these. It's just this convenient system for allocating resources. And it really frees people to just be able to say, oh, I run a hospital, I run a school, I run a manufacturing plant, and I'm just trying for my team to acquire the inputs we need given our budget. I'm trying to get what we need so we can produce what we need to produce. I don't have to worry about how people are going to get paid because that's a different system. I don't have to worry about making a profit so I can convince the banks to lend me more money. That's a different system. It's just a system that lets markets solve the single problem that they really need to solve in a socialist economy, which is how do we create without profit, without all these things, the basic autonomy of each producer or the workers in each production unit to go out and get the resources that they need to produce what they're actually going to produce? How are they going to do that without profit? And that's what's really, I don't like when people call what I do market socialism. It's like socialism with markets, because market socialism usually refers to a system where all of these relationships are organized around profit-making firms and essentially capitalists. Everything is still there from capitalism, but the difference is that the profits are distributed to all of us equally in some way. Here, we just have really gotten rid of profitability as a motivation for the system. It gives rise to the question, well, what are the motivations people have? But they can't be motivated by profit. This is very interesting to me as well. This idea that I want to reemphasize something you said, which is this kind of what you call in the essay permanent stability. Right. And I think this is a really classic critique of socialism. I think Baked Within Your Essays is a response to a lot of the critiques of socialism, which is this idea that it's a stagnant form, right? How could you have Coca-Cola and jeans, you know, and blue jeans in a socialist society, right? How could you have, you know, this kind of dynamism and innovation in a socialist society? And I think the mistake here is on one hand, when people, when heterodox economists or socialists hear that, right? So you lay out the Keynesians when they hear that, they say, well, that's fine because we're going to get to this point where it's utopia, basically. Permanent stability is what you will want because everything is just like, everything's good. Why would you want to change it? And that, you know, we talk about it in the last essay or last essay, last episode about your last essay that like that's just not how people work. Right. Like people have like values and interests are not static things and nor are they like threshold things. Right. Where it's like everyone once you reach a threshold of like this value has been fulfilled, then you're just like, OK, I am now satisfied to stay in this like static state forever. Like, that's just not how people work. And fortunately for that. Right. But the other aspect of it is that I think the critique that you often hear of the of the social of that idea of socialist stagnation is like is that, well, you, you know, you capitalists assume that innovation and creativity can only happen by if it's motivated by profit. But you don't take into account the vast, boundless creativity of people. And I think that's true, right? Like people do a lot of things that are not motivated purely by market competition or by profit maximization. But what you're getting at here as well is the kind of like, yeah, okay, that's fine. But how do you allocate resources in a scarce world? Because we do live in a scarce world where we don't have the Star Trek. Star Trek gets around this by saying, actually, we're in a world of boundless abundance, and you can materialize anything that you want out of thin air. And so, boom, we've solved that problem. Or you see this with a lot of science fiction, where it's like, we have discovered some boundless form of free energy or something that has allowed for the problem of scarcity to no longer be a problem. and we see this with the abundance discourse right now in a very you know I think strange and hollow way but but you know that really that whole thing really upset me because originally I actually if you read the end of the automation book I originally called what I'm doing post-scarcity economics and part of what I was doing is I was criticizing this idea that scarcity is like this ever-present problem of limited resources. And what I was very interested in is the idea that people's lives really change when they feel like they're no longer insecure and their needs are met. That scarcity in its original meaning was more like what happened during a flood or a famine. It's when production drops below some threshold and people are really scared for their survival. but it's not the normal condition for humanity before capitalism for so many people to be insecure. So I thought about it that way. And it was really interesting, this idea, which I'm still really interested in, of the idea that we can get to a world where you have so many friends and so many possibilities and so much security in your life. It's not like you reach this point of fullness where you can't have more stuff or wouldn't want better medicines that could keep your, you know, people you love alive, but like you, you achieve a kind of fullness of life that I think is very possible for us to aim at. But these people, this whole abundance agenda stuff and all these things, they really, I really decided, ah, I just, I can't compete with these people. So I just dropped that whole thing. And I'm like, no, no, it's multi-dimensional economics. So I got rid of that whole framing because of those people. But it's also because of what you're saying, which is that as I worked on it more and more, I realized that scarcity is actually really important to the story in the economic sense that you're describing, that essentially I am talking about a world where our resources are limited and we have alternative uses. And that basic idea of the budget constraint, that's the idea of the budget constraint. And that turns out to be something I take as one of four or five pillars for thinking about what a post-capitalist economy looks like, is you need to keep this idea of scarcity and budget constraint, like you're saying. Yeah. And I mean, so much, and that becomes a really crucial foundation to then build your institutions on top of. And maybe we start getting into the institutions. I want to just emphasize, because it is so important, the kind of the dual monetary system here, again. So this is your, you know, it's hard to learn complex things on a podcast. I think podcasting is a really actually terrible medium for learning complex things. And, you know, TMK has kind of set itself an impossible task by trying to talk about complex things on a medium not conducive for it. But I want to reemphasize here, so this dual monetary system is your way of eliminating the profit problem, right? Because it's no longer about accumulating capital, maximizing profit in this kind of hoarding capacity, right? And then through that comes through an accumulation of capital and a maximization of profits comes an increase of social power, of the ability to exert dominance over other people, to win the all-against-all competition of the market. And that creates a lot of perverse incentives around the things that we've talked about and have critiqued on the show and in this episode and stuff around not just hoarding, but then also doing things that are fundamentally socially useless and socially harmful because it allows you to hoard more profit. Even just things like stock buybacks, rather than reinvesting your profit into greater production capacity or innovation or better wages for your workers, you do things to artificially, financially engineer higher profits so you can pay yourself out. Or it's better to waste a bunch of resources if it allows you to secure a bit more profit at the CEO level or whatever it might be. So lots of perverse incentives. And so this dual monetary system, by creating points are for producers, credits are for consumers, creating a firewall, a schism between these things where they are not exchangeable. interchangeable, right? And so, and we'll get into how like a producer gets points, you know, through this kind of investment boards and everything, you know, that allocates and decides kind of macroeconomic decision making around, okay, this hospital needs X number of points in order to fulfill its function of providing high quality medical care to its community. And then, the next fiscal quarter or year, however the cycle works, you say, all right, we're hearing from the hospital that they don't have enough points. They don't have enough producer budget to get all of the medicine or to pay the labor charges for enough nurses or whatever. So, okay, we're going to – but there's no – so those decisions about points and producers are made in this way of the kind of use it or lose it. You can't decide not to use it by cutting labor costs so you can then hoard it yourself. That's completely schismed from the credit system where consumers go and buy the things that they want beyond their basic needs are all met, right? The assumption here is that all housing, food, a very high quality of life is provided as a floor. Everything above that is luxuries, basically. Yeah, and I just want to say a way that economists talk about this, even Marx talks about it, is to say that within this system, points function as a means of exchange, but not a store of value. and what that means is like points can be used to facilitate and organize and limit you know the kinds of exchanges that can take place among all of these producers who are ultimately trying to meet needs and wants that people have but you can't use the points as a store of value you can't say oh right like this is you know i'm worth this much that there's wealth uh that that it's also a measure of wealth or that you can take this currency out of circulation and keep it for yourself. In capitalism, one of the really fundamental structural features of capitalism is that the means of exchange are also a store of value. So anytime dollars or any currency get into your hands, instead of spending it, you can be like, oh, this is actually mine. I'm taking it out of circulation, and I'm just making it part of my own personal wealth. And that's also what it means to talk about a system that's not just a market economy, but a private property economy, right, that you can take it out and say, oh, this is going in my bank account. That's like a it's such a fundamental basic feature of capitalism that makes possible all the things you're talking about, stock buyback. You know, that whole world is basically different ways that value is being stored. And it's very interesting, actually, because it also it's also fundamental to why within a capitalist economy, it's very hard to make Keynesian stimulus work. and you saw this also during the during the pandemic like basically when an economy turns down the state can print money and just hand it to people and tell them hey go out and spend this money stimulate the economy but if instead they take that money they've been given they're like oh I don't want to circulate this I want to just keep it for myself I'm going to pay off my debts I'm going to build up my savings I'm going to take out from the means of exchange and use this as a store of value once you do that you know In Keynesian terms, you reduce the multiplier effect. You reduce the effectiveness of the stimulus to actually stimulate the economy. So both within capitalism and within the Keynesian metric, we can think about the different ways that these means of exchange and store of value functions of money are working. And by removing that store of value function from the points, we can kind of purely use points to organize the means of exchange. we can also establish a much greater degree of macroeconomic stability because we know that all the points are going to circulate, not that some of them are going to be removed to become the savings of different actors So that also turns out to be important later when we talk about the macroeconomic stability of the system But maybe that another conversation No, this is great. This is great. So I think we've really laid the foundations here. And now with that, you then in the essay lay out a number of institutions that actually make this work, right? That actually kind of provides function to the foundation of, okay, so we're going to have a dual monetary system where points are for producers, credits are for consumers. The assumption here is a universal basic services, right? So people are also not existing in a world where they have to use their consumer credits to go and buy food and housing and childcare and all of these things, right? All of that is provided. And so you're, in a way, you're providing abundance in a scarce world, right? You're providing abundance in the sense that everyone's essential needs are met. And what counts as essential grows as the society grows. So something like childcare, right? We can count that. That's an essential service, right? In a previous society, that would be considered a luxury. But we can see how what counts as essential grows as society grows, as our values are actualized in different ways. And we say, actually, that kind of care work is not a luxury. It's essential. And then the kind of the scarce world that you then have to contend with is more about like, okay, the atmosphere is a scarce resource, right? We can't like just continually pollute into it. We have to account for that. Or, you know, rare earth minerals are a scarce resource, right? And there's cost with that. And so that's where this idea of, you know, the kind of producer points, consumer credits as ways of allowing people to self-manage at the micro level, these kind of micro economics. While at the macro level, there are decisions being made about how many points are allocated to each sector and each industry, about how many consumer credits are given according to different jobs. Because you do kind of have a bit of like a labor market at play here, but it's organized in a really different way. And so maybe let's get into the investment board. I think the first real macroeconomic institution that you lay out in the essay and one of the really important ones here. So what are the investment boards? Yeah, so I would say that's like the real key to the whole system and maybe also why I would say it's an abolition of the value form. We can again, we can talk about that later on. But the idea here is just that, you know, you would have these sectors of the economy. Maybe there's like 20 or so. There are different ways of dividing them up. The OECD itself has one of these like 20 sector models. And what you say is like each sector has a kind of governing body. But unlike in traditional models of socialism where this governing body for the sector, it might be like a bureaucracy that's going to tell everyone, you know, here's what you're going to produce and here's what you're going to, how you're going to get your inputs and like is going to design, as we were saying, like the microeconomics of each sector. What these boards do is they just focus on investment. And it's hard even to start talking about investment because I think that within the left and socialist tradition, there just isn't that much conversation about what investment is. There's interestingly in Marx, there's a focus on accumulation, which is the result of net investment. Like you accumulate as you invest more than what you lose to depreciation, like the wearing out of machines. But essentially what investment means is it's purchasing buildings, like equipment, other structures, software as well. It's purchasing or upgrading or repairing all the stuff we need to produce what we produce, whether it's goods or services. And so the idea here is that in capitalism, investment is fundamentally organized around profitability. And that's what constrains investment to be fundamentally efficiency focused, because you make a profit by somehow making some process in the economy more efficient. You either reduce costs or you increase revenue. So only investments that do one of those two things are going to be available within a capitalist economy generally. In this system, instead, investment is going to be freed from that constraint of having to generate a profit. In fact, there's going to be no profit basis of investment at all. Remember, investment is just purchase or repair or change of plant and equipment. It doesn't include anything about profit in the idea of investment. Profit could be a result of investment, but in this system, it has nothing to do with that. And so the idea here is that these boards, they're each board. There's like 20 in all, let's say. Society is going to set aside a certain share of all the points for the purposes of investment. And then there's going to be maybe a survey you could do in different ways of like deciding how those investment resources are going to be allocated across this, let's say, 20 boards. So, you know, maybe maybe we say 20 percent of all points are going to be for investment and they're going to be distributed, you know, in whatever way across like health care and manufacturing and, you know, child care and other social services and agriculture and mining and energy production. So those would be examples of sectors. Then each sector will then have this kind of budget. It's investment budget. And it's really important. It doesn't come from taxes. It doesn't come from profits. it's not that it was someone's resource that's been taken to use for this purpose. It's just a socially general outcome. We just decide to generate resources for this purpose. And that, again, it's a little difficult, maybe on a podcast to explain this, but it's a really important insight that Keynes has that you don't need to save in order to invest. You can just invest. Investment generates the, like investment because of the, it's so hard to explain on a podcast, But like because the economy is a set of circular flows, it doesn't matter where in that circle you start. So one way to think about it is we have to save in order to invest. Another way to think about it is that by investing, we save. It's a circular flow. So we don't have to say, you know. And this is a point that like the modern monetary theory people kind of make as well, right? If you have a sovereign monetary system, so you have a system where you create your monetary supply and you have sovereign control over it, you can just create more monetary supply and pump that into free health care for people. And people like Larry Sanders will scream about the inflationary effects of that. And, you know, sure, like that's something you have to take into account. But also like that's also how the economy works is that like money is constantly being destroyed in the economy or taken out of circulation. And money is constantly having to be put back into the economy. So the question is, is when and where and how do you do that? Right. In a capitalist economy, that tends to happen through, for example, the government buying corporate bonds. And so you're kind of giving corporations new money supply and then letting them be the agents of deciding how that money is put into the economy. Or maybe it's done through a stimulus. You give everyone a $1,000 check and then hope that they go spend it. Right. But maybe that could be done by creating a free health care system. And so I think the point you're making here, because the modern monetary theory people are ultimately like neo-Keynesians in this regard, like, you know, it is that like, you know, we don't live in a world where it's a gold peg, gold backed currency where you can only create as much money as you have gold bars in Fort Knox. Like we live in a world where all of like these decisions are socially constructed choices. Yeah. And as long as there's like, I, I, I, because of the modern monetary people, I don't really like everything they say. So I agreed. I agree. I use this older term that, that Keynes uses functional finance to describe the situation, because what functional finance means is like, we're not finance doesn't exist. to serve the private interests of all these different actors, it's used functionally to produce macroeconomic stability. So we're going to introduce as much money into the system functionally that we need to make the system work. And I like that idea. Modern monetary theory, like what does that mean? I don't know why it's called that exactly. But functional finance speaks to me. So this is a kind of, I call it fully functional finance because there's no store value problem that I was describing before. but precisely as long as there's an investment sector, as long as there's already a set of people and machines and tools that are going to be used to make more machines, tools, and structures, right? As long as those physical and social resources are already there, we can generate the financial resources to employ them. And it's really important, again, that it's just a social resource. It doesn't belong to anyone. And as a result, also, it doesn't have to make a rate of return. There's no idea of a financial return on investment. The returns on investment are the real improvements in our lives that result from these activities, right? We could invest in ways that, as you said, expand the healthcare system. Then the return on that investment is better healthcare for everyone. We could invest in ways that, you know, beautify our streets, just building statues, like whatever it is that makes us feel happy and makes our spaces feel full of meaning and become spaces of connection. That's a return on investment, right? And part of the whole structure here that's really important is this idea that there are many different things we need to live well. And those different goods, goods not in the sense of goods and services, but goods in the sense of things that make us feel good, those aims and ends are incommensurable. Right. They can't be you can't say, oh, you know, giving up beauty in the streets and human connection and meaning there is worth this much of some other thing. You know, like we could trade off this much beauty for that much meaning or that much health care. These are all different goods that we need. And part of the whole idea of what this system is trying to realize is trying to give us access to a world where we're free to invest in ways that actually improve our lives across all of these different dimensions of well-being. And there's no agreement about that. And we'll talk about why that matters in a moment. This is not a system where there's harmony, where we can agree about what that is, but it's a world where we're going to be fundamentally free to invest in ways that are going to actually improve our lives across many different aspects of our lives. The main point is that we can't do all of those things, right? Like if you have a healthcare sector, let's say, you could think about, okay, how are we going to make this healthcare sector more sustainable? How are we going to improve the working lives of nurses and medical assistants and other staff, right? How are we going to improve patient care and like family connections with patients? How are we going to improve public health so we're not just doing preventative work, right? Like et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We only have in each year so much investment resources for the healthcare sector. And so we have to decide what are the next most important things to focus on that we can improve with the resources we have. And so what each investment board is going to do is they're going to receive a set of proposals coming from different hospitals, different groups, let's say, within health care. Here are things we want to do and here are the costs associated with that. Right. Here's what we think is the most important thing that we see. Here are the innovations we're looking at. They might also come from firms working with research centers, with multidimensional consultancies, with like community groups, right? All these different actors proposing specific ways to transform health care that they think are most important. And then what the board is, is it's a kind of political self-governance structure for the health care industry. So in the case of healthcare, it's going to have these elections that are going to bring people from different groups of workers within healthcare, different patient groups, other industries that interface with them, maybe some technical experts of different kinds drawn from these technical associations, community groups. They're all going to come together through elections. They're going to be stakeholder elections. And then they're going to have to decide as a group, they're going to vote on which proposals to select for investment, which ones are going to actually play out and which ones aren't. And what's really important about that is that there are going to be really different visions for the future of health care. Some people are going to, you know, they're going to be different ideas about where health care should go. what and those are not only going to be concrete specific ideas about what they want to focus on, but also broad world making visions of what health care should look like. What are the futures of health care that we want to aim at? And through these elections and also through what happens on the board, there's going to be contention around which futures are going to be realized through having their investment proposals chosen and which are going to fail and fade away. Right. And that whole political process of kind of like surfacing our options and then selecting again and again and again and having elections, having all of these modes of contestation and conflict that play out, not just within healthcare, but within each sector of the economy structured in that same way through these kind of self-governing structures, through elections, through debates and so on. What we're able to do is like fight our way towards futures, you know, along all of these different dimensions. And so that's that's really the core of the vision. And it's what having those firms only handle day to day activities and not have to generate or be responsible for investment, not have any ownership over investment resources. Right. Because they're just because individual firms are just focused on the day to day. they can then also be making these proposals that enter into this broader politicized investment system. And that's really that kind of, yeah, that's kind of the core of the of the model in some way. And in that way, it also this kind of proposal system, you know, the cost, the the constitution of the investment board is made up of, you know, as you said, like representatives from, you know, medical workers, patients, technical experts, researchers, right, like people from across different areas. This also becomes a way of, you know, one thing we talked about in our last episode was that, you know, the high X, you know, use of knowledge in society, right, this idea that the price system is the best way or the only way that you can kind of embody this local knowledge, microeconomic knowledge, and have that represented in a price system that then provides incentives and feedback to producers and suppliers and consumers. But the proposal system you outline of the investment board is a way of feeding that local knowledge back into macroeconomic decision making, which then feeds into a budget system to say, okay, go forth and make this vision into reality. I like this as well because, look, the investment board, I agree, Marxist, leftist economics, outside of Keynes, I love the idea of the functional finance, the investment boards. You also talk about, we've talked about on TMK, back when the essay first came out years ago, Saul Omarova's essay on a national investment board, this idea that essentially taking investment seriously as a function of political economy. And you're right, there's not a lot of work that does. One thing that really appealed to me about your analysis here and the kind of institutional framework you're laying out here is that because of my work on the political economy of technology, I do take and have thought and written a lot about the function of investment in giving us technologies that we have. Because ultimately, when it comes to technological development, we do have a central planning system. It's just a central planning system that exists in private markets. It's a handful of venture capital firms in Silicon Valley that make most of the planning decisions about what kind of technologies we have, in what way, for what reasons. Venture capitalists are notorious herd animals. They largely follow the decisions made by a handful of mega firms like A16Z or Sequoia. And so we also have these functions of like allocating resources through proposals. Right. I mean, I'm an academic. You're an academic. This is how the grant system works in academia. Right. And so much research and development happens through the grant system, which then the only pathway forward into society for it is through commercialization, which then becomes a kind of, okay, we have an academic grant system that funds a ton of research and development. And then people use that as the basis to spin out intellectual property or startups or other commercialization pathways, which they then throw themselves at the mercy of investment boards, venture capital firms, to try to get resources to spin that up. I exist in a faculty of information technology. We have multiple associate deans whose whole function is essentially increase entrepreneurship and impact, which means increased connections with industry and increased pathways for commercialization, right? Like this is built into the academic system. So everything you're laying out here is not like a strange foreign land. It is just taking institutions that already exist in capitalism and changing them, changing their function, directing their means and their ends in different ways. But it's not as if the market is not this purely chaotic system, and nor is it a purely microeconomic system, contrary to the Austrians, right? Like the market is a highly planned system. The question is who's doing the planning and for what ways, right? Like do we have a grant system that's meant to feed into a private market? Do we have investment boards that exist in the private market? Or do we instead have a proposal system that feeds into a public investment board, making decisions in different ways. And that's one thing that I think was really attractive to me about the framework you lay out here is just how familiar it feels to me. It's not this strange, you know, I'm not in a strange land here, right? Like, I can understand, I think I can really grasp what an investment board of this kind could look like because we already have very similar kind of more perverse versions of them. And I think also, you know, something you could say about this is that instead of what's been happening for the last 40 years, which is a kind of absorbing science into capitalist markets and entrepreneurialism, this would be the opposite notion. It would be like dissolving capitalist entrepreneurialism into a form of scientific economy. And I think that's always been an aspiration of socialists to have a scientific economy. But I think that what you're capturing is what you say is like that in this longer history, socialists mostly misunderstood what science is. Because they often thought of science as like rational planning, like they thought of science in the form of mathematics and logic, like everything being planned out in advance, and not what science actually is, which is this experimental system, Right. For for grasping one's way forward along many different lines. And I think that that, you know, that's that's a really important idea here, like what you're saying, that in some ways this is like the grant system, you know, that already drives a lot of research and development in our society. but kind of pushed all the way to the level of implementation as well, rather than saying, oh, if you want to realize these ideas, you have to find a way to make this profitable and to sell it, you know, to like sell it in the sense of pitch it to one of these venture capital firms. Here it's like, no, no, no. If you have a proposal that's going to make the world better, you can just argue for it on that basis. If it's going to make the world better and it's viable, you know, then it becomes possible to implement. But I think that also captures something really important about motivation, right? Because I think there's a real, like, first of all, you know, when we start talking about motivation, I start getting upset because I think a lot of people have bought into a certain kind of neoliberal ideology that people are fundamentally materially motivated. And Marxists are already primed for this because sometimes Marxists will tell you that when they talk about interest-based politics, they mean a politics of increasing wages. You know, that's like the primary idea. And they think of exploitation primarily in terms of the distribution of the surplus, right? How much money goes to profits versus wages. But I think that, like, you know, studies of motivation have shown something quite different from what that implies. Most studies of motivation show that monetary motivation is not very effective in getting people to do stuff, right? Monetary motivation works best to motivate people when those people are very insecure, like they're trying to get just enough money to pay their rent and survive, and when the tasks they're doing are very repetitive. So monetary motivation works really well for the drudgery of capitalism. But what all research shows is that even within capitalism, when it comes to people who do more creative work and when it comes to people who are not living on the margin of survival, it turns out that trying to motivate them with monetary incentives is just not a very good way to get them to do good work. the best way to get them to do good work is to actually provide them with certain conditions of work that allow them to intrinsically motivate themselves and that's giving them a lot of autonomy and how they carry out the work making sure that they get to use and develop their skills and that they know that the work they do has a meaning then this isn't in the stalinist sense of like i don't know what the meaning of my work is but supposedly the great leader knows it's like you actually feel like what you're doing is inherently meaningful right and that's why you know at google They used to have that slogan, don't do evil. They did Google Books. They did all these activities that were supposedly making the world good, and then they were just going to profit off of it on the side. As Google started doing military work and, you know, got rid of that slogan, they started to have a lot more worker discontent, right? Because people no longer felt like their jobs were meaningful. That's also why there's whistleblowers. and Facebook, like all these, you know, workers in tech world are seeing the ways they thought their work was meaningful being dissolved in the face of the incredible greed and profit motives of the owners of these firms or the top level managers. But it's really important to see that, like, the reason why we do what we do, the reason why scientists do what they do, and even the reason why, like, researchers at Apple or at other tech firms, Toshiba, Sony, most of these people are not motivated by making money. They're motivated by their kind of scientific interests or tinkerer interests or engineering interests. And in a better world that we want to get to, we actually want to get to a place where everyone is secure, as we already said, right? They're not struggling to survive. They feel like their needs are going to be met. And to get them to work and to do good work and also to get them and sort of think in innovative and creative ways, we gonna have to improve their work in this sense right Like give them more autonomy give them avenues of advancing their skills give them a feeling that what they do is meaningful and important And then what we find is that actually like it not again it's not saying you don't have to pay people. People have to feel like they're, you know, being treated fairly, that they have what they need to live and so on, and, you know, more than that as well. But what people really need is this kind of environment that allows them to access and open up all of these motivations. and that's the sense in which I see this as a scientific economy. It's also like because it's thinking kind of like the motivations of scientists and engineers for everyone in some way, but not in the way that socialists have talked about, but more in this experimental orientation. But just the other really important thing about that is there's always been these attempts, like there's this ESG stuff now, carbon taxes. There's all these ideas like, well, how are we going to get people to work sustainably or to innovate sustainably. And the idea is to try to get them to motivate them by creating monetary incentives to do that work. But what that kind of thing does, and there's so many studies of this, is it generates gaming. If you tell people, here's the goal, we want to make a sustainable economy and we'll give you money every time you meet some goal, people will work so diligently to figure out ways to meet the target and get the money without actually fulfilling the goal. And it destroys organizations. It destroys institutions like science and teaching. There's all these efforts to make all this public activity more oriented toward monetary rewards. And with teaching, what happens if you say, oh, we'll give you more money if your students do better on the tests? What do teachers do? They stop teaching. They just teach the test, right? Because that's how they're going to get their reward. And the teachers are actually good and are teaching broadly to teach their students the way where it's like, oh, I've taught them to do well. And then as a byproduct, they'll do well on the test. Those teachers are demoralized and they stop doing what they're doing and they start teaching the test. Right. So there's all these studies of how trying to fit other goals in by monetizing them generates gaming and actually has this really counterproductive effect. What I'm saying is like we need to get to a world where we actually if we think sustainability matters, you need to convince people that producing in a sustainable way is actually a meaningful activity that promotes their community, that helps people, that sustains the world for future generations. We can only actually like get where we want to go if we activate these intrinsic motivations to fulfill a variety of different goals, not monetizing them. And this system of innovation I'm describing, of course, developing these proposals would take a lot of work and fair recompense means people should get extra pay for doing that extra work of making investment proposals. But the main goal of making these proposals and winning them should be like, I'm making my world better. I have ideas about how to make the world better and I'm seeing them realized. Those are kinds of like scientist motivations rather than kind of, does that make sense? rather than entrepreneurial motivations that guide our economy. And I really think we're only going to get to a better world when we really think through these motivational issues and see the incredible possibilities that will open up for us for motivating people beyond capitalism. Absolutely. And I think one of the things that allows that kind of scientist motivation, You know, I like this idea that the kind of the intrinsic motivation, the fixation on something because you're intrinsically motivated on it, you work towards it because you want, you know, one of the things that allows that to happen and flourish is the autonomy of academia, right? Like the academic system, the university system is built around, you know, autonomy where, you know, for people who are in academics, right? Like, you know, you don't really have like a boss in a traditional sense of like someone who's looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do. You know, you've got hierarchies, but they're more like administrative kind of governance hierarchies, not managerial ones. there's freedom, there's stability that's what the whole tenure system is meant to be built on now we see a lot of this being hollowed out because the university is becoming more and more like a highly financialized highly corporatized workplace and so you start seeing all of the perversions of that coming in and making the work of teaching and research more into work rather than into what Weber would call a vocation. And ultimately, so you can really see how the way you organize work does also really matter a lot in terms of how you organize motivations in this way and what kind of motivations matter. And so I would love to get into then the question of labor because you've laid out this whole how investment would work and the monetary system. And this idea of motivations, I think, is incredibly important and not just using money as the sole form of value, right? And so it's like, well, if you want to use carrots to get people to be more sustainable, then you have to create this convoluted system of metrics and measurement and stuff around ESG and provide monetary. And you're right, like at the end of the day, that just creates perverse incentives for people to get the carrot without achieving the impact. But with this as well, I mean, you know, we're all socialists and communists here. We're obsessed with labor. We fetishize labor. I think you have a really interesting kind of institution here for what you call the technical associations that really gets at this question of organizing labor, but it also gets at, I think, the real heart of the matter in this relationship between labor and capital, which is a power dynamic here, right? An antagonistic relationship because capital controls the conditions of labor, because capital is able to exert control over employment, working conditions, setting wages, right? A lot of the problems of the capitalist political economy comes from capital having these levers that they can pull on labor, these avenues of being able to exert power, control, dominate labor through setting wages, through the working and so on. And what you lay out here with the technical associations, again, creates a schism. You know, just as the points and credit system creates a schism in the monetary to take to prevent the kind of perverse power dynamics and perverse incentives. the technique, what you lay out here with the technical associations does something very similar, kind of taking it out of the realm of producer controlled labor and allowing a real level of autonomy in the labor system. So love it if you could outline this for us. Yeah. You know, it's an interesting feature of how unions have developed in the capital system that unions are actually often like really opposed to worker control at the point of production you know like local participation it's a it's a very interesting feature of the system like basically the more that workers exert control at the local individual level of their plant the more they're going to develop specific ways of doing things within their space whereas like what the union wants is for you to organize at like the total like at the sector level you know they want to kind of like push against that. And so in this conception, it's sort of like we need to think about the role of something like trade unions after the end of capitalism, right? Where a lot of the functions that trade unions perform, you're right, in a kind of antagonistic mode within the system, sometimes cooperative, but Marxists have generally been against, you know, really upset about moments where labor and capital work together, you know, for good reason. But here we need, you know, we need to think about a very different model for what trade unions do. And so I don't call them trade unions. I call them technical associations. And they fulfill a range of functions that trade unions currently fulfill, but also many other functions. And so the main way to think about what these institutions do is they are actually responsible for paying people their salaries. And I think it's very important that no one's paid by the hour. You know, everyone should have the dignity of a salary to just receive the same amount every month. And it's very important that the associations are the ones that pay that for a few reasons. One is that it ensures that firms never touch credits. Like, firms are really firewalled. They're a pure points-based system. They have to pay rent to use labor. Like they have to pay society to use different kinds of labor. But the workers who do that labor are actually paid by their associations and credits. And so it keeps that firewall that the firms only deal in points. It also means that like, you know, workers have this kind of fidelity, not just to their firm, because it's a big problem in many models of socialism, the syndicalist dimension. that if people are too loyal to their specific workplace, it might generate all kinds of counterproductive kinds of sectionalisms and particularisms. So one of the thinkers I really rely on, this guy Otto Neurath, he said one of the measures of the health of a society is the divided loyalties that people have. You want to actually have a world where people have many different loyalties, and it helps organize, it helps societies work through conflicts. basically, the less sectional and factional they are on the terms of like particular industry. So we're moving a lot of that activity to the technical associations. But unlike unions, so one difference from unions is that they pay the workers directly rather than the firms doing that. Another difference is that these associations are really responsible for training, right? They're responsible for the whole world of actually like, you know, if you want to be a carpenter, if you want to be a scientist, if you want to be a whatever caregiver, you have to go through a process of like, you know, training and showing and demonstrating your competence, right, that you've achieved the capacity to do this at a certain level, and you are then a full member of this association. What I think is really important, because I was talking before about motivations, one really important motivational aspect is like, you know, competence, feeling like we're good at what we do, you know, and that we're recognized for that. And so it's very important that these technical associations provide people with a way to feel that way, but that they also become like democratic spaces where we debate about what it means to be a good whatever we are, right? So like what it means to be a good sociologist, what it means to be a good caregiver, what it means to be a good nurse or a good teacher and so on, right? There's no single way to describe what it is to do those things. There's actually a political conversation that's already going on, but that could be much more developed and organized where we all debate, like, what does it mean to be really good at our job, right? And having those kinds of debates, it's really important just to stimulate people to have that kind of professional standard and to have a relationship also where they can criticize their members who don't uphold those standards, right? This is very important for the organization of a good society. But what it feeds into is like this idea of technical expertise. So one thing that all of these beyond capitalism models need is they need some way to bring in technical expertise. We are no one who works in this becomes like, well, not, I shouldn't say that. Many people become just so pro-democracy that they think that, you know, the vast numbers always know best, you know. But in reality, in the advanced kinds of economies we have, you really need a lot of technical knowledge to organize this economy and to push it forward. Right. It can't just be like what everyone wants. People have to, that democratic element has to be deciding among things that are technically, you know, good ideas. And so we need this really big role for technical experts to make that work. But where do technical experts come from? In our society, they just seem to be like you just watch TV and you're like, well, why is that guy? Who said that that guy, you know, he's the who elected that guy? Like, why is he the guy to talk about? Yeah. Right. And we have a society as a result that's very distrustful. It's increasingly distrustful of experts. Right. These talking heads, where do they come from? They're always admired in scandal. And so one advantage of having these politicized technical associations where debates are happening about what it means to be a good version of that, like a nurse, a doctor, a teacher, whatever, is that it creates the space where we can also have conflict over who should be our representative experts, right? that we should elect people to these role of expertise. They're going to represent us in our role as healthcare, like as doctors or teachers or cleaners or line cooks. These are going to be the people we put forward as our experts who are going to advise people from the perspective of our technical profession. And when they do badly, we are going to have to depose them and say, no, you're no longer representing us. We're going to pick someone else. But the other feature about it is that hopefully in a well-ordered society and well-ordered association, there's going to be diversity in terms of experts, right? Our disagreements among us about what it is to be a good version of what we do are going to be reproduced at the level of the set of experts who are made available to society. And that's really like a lot of people who work on science society interactions think this is really important to building rebuilding trust in communities is that experts should not present a unified face across all questions like debating in secret and then only presenting the public. Like, ah, here's what we all agree about, right? Like experts should talk about what their disagreements are so that we know what they agree on and what is considered like agreed upon among all the different factions within that. And what are the real open questions of dispute? So I think having this way that workers are not only integrated into technical associations that verify their competence, that give them a standing to participate in these debates about what it means to be good at your job, it's really important that they also participate in this politicized process that will really make their associational life important to them of electing experts. We're then going to go out and have real impacts on the kinds of investments and decisions that take place in society. that's it in a nutshell there's so much more in the essays that obviously we can't touch on in the podcast But ultimately, I think what we've really laid out here with the idea of the investment boards, with the technical associations, right? There's much more, right? You've got an idea of a free associations that kind of oversee more kind of cultural and creative, but also just fun, recreational kind of things, right? Is that like, you know, at the end of the day, you've identified what the point of institutions are, right? I mean, I think in our world today, we think of institutions in terms of like a very like, you know, again, they vary and, you know, bring back Weber, right? A kind of an iron cage of bureaucracy, right? Institutions as these like forces that exert control over our lives, that tell us what we can and can't do, that trap us in their own logics, you know, that tell us no when we want to hear a yes. Like we, I think there's a distrust of experts. there's also a distrust of institutions in society. And we see this through all the survey data, through all the research, because people see institutions as things that exist outside of them, above them, and against them. But at the end of the day, you've identified here what the actual role and function of institutions are, is there are ways to concretize social organization, They're ways to actually bring people together to create social relations, social bonds, social coordination and organization, and to do that with a structure. That's what an institution is. It's a structured form of society. And at their best, institutions allow us to do better, to be better, to connect with people better, to do things. like join an institution of people who love to play pickleball, and then you can all get together and you can play pickleball, right? Or join an institution, join the technical association of people who are Marxist political economists, and we can all get together and debate about the best way to do Marxist political economy, decide what the role and function of Marxist political economy is. People can hire us to be Marxist political economists in their firms. But at the end of the day, my loyalty is to my association of other Marxist political economists. Them, not the firm that hires me, whatever. That association that I'm a democratic member of decides what it means to be a Marxist political economist, what kind of salary that might come with, what the precepts and tenets of that organization might be. At the end of the day, an association, institutions should make our lives better. They should make us connect with people who share similar interests and values and visions. They should help us develop those interests and visions in better ways. And so I think what you've really done here with this institutional framework is identify what the point of institutions should be and in a way provide a implicit critique of the failure of institutions in the society that we live in today because they're not doing those things, right? because they don't feel like enablers to our lives. They feel like hindrances or oppressive kind of features of the social landscape rather than supportive features. And there's a lot more in these essays for people to get into, and I really hope that everyone cracks them open and reads through it because it's thought-provoking, it's fascinating, it's interesting, But it's also doing something that I that we talked about at the top of the show, which is it's it's providing something that we don't see a lot of, which is a real concrete kind of, you know, framework for what not only what a society should look like, but how it might be organized. and it provides that real feedstock to think with, I think, right? And that's kind of how I'm thinking about these essays as well, is like feedstock, right? Because it's like with a 3D printer, the feedstock is what you feed into the printer so you can then print the thing that you want. In a lot of ways, I think about these essays as you're printing something, but you're providing feedstock for us to use to create the kind of things that we want, right? It's doing what the old Jameson quote of, you know, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Well, if we have the feedstock needed to imagine a world beyond capitalism, it becomes a lot easier if we're not trying to print from thin air. And I think these essays provide that feedstock. Well, great. I think in some ways you're a much better popularizer than I am. I'm sitting here thinking, oh, I need to employ this guy too. Well, that's what we do in the Podcasters Association, you know. Aaron, thanks so much for coming on for a massive two-part episode right around the holidays as well. Really appreciate your time. Always love engaging with your work and talking to you about it. We'll have links to these essays, of course, but is there anything else you want to direct people's attention to as we go into the new year? No, I think we've covered quite enough. Keep fighting the good fight. A better world is possible. Perfect place to leave things. Thank you again, Aaron, and thank you, everybody, for listening. You can, of course, find us at patreon.com slash this machine kills for additional premium episodes. and we hope to see you in the new year and until next time later Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's a shit.