More questions than answers

FEBRUARY 4, 2025

Mike Phipps reviews Reclaiming the Future: A Beginner’s Guide to Planning the Economy, by Simon Hannah, published by Pluto.

This book is written in the spirit of what Sam Girdin called “establishing popular confidence in the feasibility of a socialist society.” It’s a worthwhile objective.

Hannah has a good diagnosis of the problems and evils of the existing economic system and draws on the writings of Marx and Lenin and the experiences of the last century to show how the struggle against capitalism can prefigure socialism. Like the Plan drawn up by Lucas Aerospace workers to challenge the closure of their factory in the late 1970s, he cites Italy’s GKN workers who occupied their plant and proposed their own alternative green production plan in 2023.

Hannah foregrounds the centrality of class relations, which is fine, but his correct insistence on a global struggle tends to make these antagonisms look very general – between “the vast mass of humanity who do the work and those who control how the work is done and how the surplus is used.”

The reality is that the financialization of capital is changing the contours of the global class struggle. The rise of rentier capitalism means that for many the exploitation they suffer lies as much in the rent extracted from them and the indebtedness they incur as in the surplus value expropriated at their workplace.

In the Global North especially, the old proletariat, the basis for mass democratic socialist parties, is shrinking, throwing these movements into perhaps terminal crisis. In their place, as Guy Standing argues, we see the growth of a new mass precariat, defined by insecure, unstable labour, volatile earnings and in some cases a lack of guaranteed citizenship. The lack of an organised labour movement encompassing this class means its support for socialist ideas is far from automatic.

Hannah’s discussion of the route to a more rational, eco-socialist society is short and doesn’t really go beyond what Lenin and Trotsky said on the subject, which is problematic. Yes, it’s positive to raise demands that transform a defensive struggle into one that raises the possibility of an alternative economic system. But counterposing to piecemeal reforms a revolutionary approach, one which recognises the class nature and repressive character of the state apparatus, is ultimately inadequate if it can’t fully explain how, or to what extent, the necessarily authoritarian character of a social revolution inevitably taints the new society it seeks to give birth to. Likewise Hannah’s insistence on a revolutionary party won’t do, if he can’t take on board the legitimate reasons why those in struggle distrust self-styled ‘vanguards’ with readymade programmes, whose attitude to the real movement is all too often manipulative and parasitic.

To be fair, Hannah’s book is not really about the path to socialism as much as how a transitional society might be organised. His vision for this is a sustainable, democratically planned economy – coming from below, not gifted from on high – meeting human needs. The weakness with his discussion of rational workplace planning is that it assumes an economy largely based on commodity production – which feels less true than it once was.

If socialist theorists in the past have been cagey about setting out their blueprint for the future, it is for good reason. First, declaring something is not the same as making it a reality. Hannah talks of a workers’ government taking control of the economy and dismantling the market. But market relations are not identical to class exploitation and may actually be necessary in a transitional society.

This is where a deeper grasp of economics might come in handy. Hannah references ‘war communism.’ He talks of abolishing unemployment – easier said than done – scrapping personal debt like mortgages or credit cards, which might prove problematic, and seizing the money of the wealthy – although “the rich ‘taking their money abroad’ is mostly irrelevant as the state bank can just print more money.” This feels economically illiterate: having once lived in a country suffering hyper-inflation, I can say it’s no fun – especially for the poor.  Rationing, says Hannah, could be used to tackle rising commodity prices. This, however, fuels a black market and enriches its operators.  

Understandably, Hannah can’t prescribe what form a revolutionary government might take, but historically revolutionary crises have tended towards a “commune or committee-style organisation of the masses”. Initially, this is true, but it’s worth probing the reasons why this rarely lasts.

He proposes some challenging measures the government might enact, including abolishing the police. I get the point that the state repressive apparatus is utilised in a way that benefits the ruling class, but dismantling the laws protecting capitalist private property might be a better place to start.

There is a difference between looking radical and achieving useful results. Hannah suggests confiscating second homes to help solve the housing crisis. But the real crisis is one of affordability, not shortage of units.

The big question that Hannah has to grapple with is: how much planning? How much socialisation of production? There is a logic to having small businesses in the service sector, but if a fish and chip shop (his example) that grew substantially were likely to be collectivised by its workforce and integrated into a larger unit on efficiency grounds, then why would its original capitalist owner be particularly interested in seeing the business grow? Of course, this opens the wider issue of what role there might be for incentives and financial inequality in a socialist society.

I don’t wish to be negative – after all, these are big subjects to wrestle with. The flaw is that Hannah’s frame of reference is too narrow: he repeatedly scours the early years of the Russian Revolution for clues, but perhaps this is not just self-limiting, but entirely the wrong paradigm?

The second half of the book should be stronger, but then it is on safer terrain – refuting the many arguments that have historically been levelled against socialist planning. The most challenging one is the role of markets in determining the price of a commodity and the way market mechanisms generate more data than is available to central planners. Hannah’s rejection of these ideas is based more on showing the flaws of the working of global markets in practice than on the superiority of a system that supersedes market principles entirely. This blunts his critique considerably.

Some interesting issues are discussed along the way, for example “shadow pricing” – but Hannah shows himself to be both traditionalist and ultimatistic, for instance towards the concept of a universal basic income. He supports those who disdain the idea, essentially because it does not address other problems intrinsic to capitalism and is therefore somehow reformist. There is an unfortunate tendency throughout the book to divide policies into revolutionary and reformist, the latter damned by this categorization.

Hannah touches on other interesting debates which probably need more exploration. Taking its cue from Marx, revolutionary socialism traditionally envisaged a massive expansion of the productive forces. A modern greener approach, however, requires us to consider ways of reducing economic activity to limit energy usage and environmental degradation. The author does not solve this issue, although he is clearly right to say that “any reductions in economic activity must occur within the context of reducing global inequality.”

Hannah is to be commended for setting out his stall, but he is asking us to take a huge amount on trust. There’s precious little here about the real world of trade unions or local government and what can be and has been rationally planned with some success and with very limited resources. Perhaps such initiatives are in the dumpster marked ‘reformist’ – but the threat of a good example can be more potent than a raft of fully worked out theories.

Or as Marx wrote, “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.