The reintroduction of the question of democratic planning into contemporary Marxist debates has rested on two conjunctural factors. First, the multiple crises defining our current moment make a socialist transition, if not an inevitability, then certainly a necessity if we are to counter the tendential death drives of contemporary capitalism. Second, the qualitative leap in the productive forces – especially data-driven computational technologies – are seen, by some, as addressing the technical and logistical questions raised by prior iterations of the calculation debate: primarily the complexity of real-time, global-scale resource allocation and incentive mechanisms. These technologies, particularly data-driven tools and adaptive machine learning are said to hold potential – if oriented towards socialist aims – to manage the scale and complexity of resource allocation effectively.
And, so, the return of this debate to not only Marxist circles but also mainstream liberal discussions[1] has been driven more by external factors – crises and technological advances – than by any strategic gains made by existing revolutionary movements. This context, marked by the absence of any credible advances toward mass control over social mechanisms amid various crises, has shaped the character of the debate. Broadly speaking, the debate comprises on the one hand, the top-down, rationalist/realist approach to planning (which is sober about the prospects of a revolutionary force emerging to meet current exigencies)[2] and the more bottom-up approach, encompassing de-growth varieties,[3] which defends the status of direct democratic control and sustainable metabolic processes, in principle, against these kinds of centralist impulses.[4] In the absence of a clear strategy for initiating a post-capitalist transition from below, and under the pressing threat of multiple time-sensitive crises, the debate has therefore coalesced around a pragmatic embrace of technology and centralisation, and an impulse to defend horizontal decision-making structures, even while the political composition of a subject which might lay the ground for such structures is not clearly defined.
The conjunctural features of this debate are important for understanding which intellectual resources and historical precedents are being used to support these different positions, and more significantly, which elements of the Marxian and Marxist tradition are emphasised, and which are overlooked. In this light, the absence of Charles Bettelheim from these discussions – a figure whose name was synonymous with “democratic planning” and “socialist transition” during the postwar period – is perhaps symptomatic of the current theoretical and political climate we find ourselves in. Considering his extensive advisory role on economic planning to twentieth-century socialist leaders worldwide – including Nasser in Egypt, Nehru in India, Castro in Cuba, Ben Bella in Algeria[5] – François Allisson has recently given him the title of ‘planning doctor’.[6] His absence from contemporary planning debates is therefore curious. Not only because he provided us with a body of work that represents the most extensive empirical elaboration of the economic features of twentieth-century socialisms[7] but also because he developed one of the most comprehensive Marxist theoretical accounts of socialist transition and democratic planning.[8] This was a theoretical account which drew primarily from Marx’s mature works, in particular his value-form theory, far more than any political figure that witnessed and grappled with the economic practicalities of socialist transition. Indeed, it was in response to the limitations observed in socialist experiments throughout the twentieth-century across different regions, that Bettelheim returned to Marx’s Capital and to Marx’s critiques of the utopian socialists. Bettelheim’s focus on the role of the value-form in Marx’s critique, and his reading of this as (among other things) a retaliation against the socialist plans put forward by the utopian socialists of his day, became central to his diagnosis of the problems afflicting twentieth-century socialism.
The disregard for Bettelheim’s work in today’s debate may illustrate just how far removed our present moment is from his, when transitional social formations were still accessible for direct study. However, Bettelheim’s contributions remain highly relevant – not only because he offers a framework for considering postcapitalism through the lens of value-form analysis (which provides an important bridge between current discussions on socialist/democratic planning and contemporary value-form theory debates) but also because he makes an important contribution to the question of strategy, which is perhaps more salient for us today than the question of transition. His critical analysis of the limitations of postwar socialist plans offers valuable guidelines for navigating organisational and strategic issues in our present context. These insights could serve to temper the appeal of certain paradigms which have become hegemonic in socialist strategic thinking, namely nationalisation, workers’ control, and technological utopianism.
To this end, I want to reconstruct Bettelheim’s main criticisms of twentieth-century approaches to socialist transition (primarily levelled at the Soviet trajectory), look at his use of value-form analysis to make this criticism, and try to draw from his conclusions some strategic propositions to conclude with. This will be based mainly on his 1971 text The Transition to Socialist Economy and his 1975 follow up Economic Calculation and Forms of Property.
Both of these texts seek to develop a distinctly Marxist theory of socialist planning, beginning from a question that preoccupied Bettelheim throughout much of his work, which was: why do commodity categories persist in actually existing transitional social formations? Why had not the transformation of capitalist social relations—the liberation of the means of production from private ownership and their transfer to state control—led to the disappearance of the value-form characteristic of those former relations? Why, despite these changes, do products continue to appear as commodities with value? How can value-relations persist if the fundamental basis of the capital-relation (i.e., workers possessing only their labour-power to sell and the private ownership of the means of production) has been overcome? And what are the implications of the continued operation of commodity-relations for attempts to coordinate production consciously around political and social priorities, or, as Bettelheim terms it, social economic calculation?[9]
On these questions, Bettelheim is unconvinced by the explanations offered by Stalin[10] and, later, Preobrazhensky, who argued that the persistence of the value-form in socialist economies was merely a residual effect of incomplete state control over production.[11] They attributed this survival to the coexistence of multiple economic subjects with ownership titles over the means of production: state property, collective property of cooperatives, and, to a lesser extent, small private owners. For Bettelheim, however, this response fails to address why commodity categories persist even within state property itself. Why does buying and selling still occur between units of production now under state ownership, when legally, the output of these units is the property of the state? And why, then, does the state continue to perform social economic calculations through monetary means?[12]
In contrast to these accounts, Bettelheim, following Marx, argues that the value-form obtains in existing transitional social formations precisely because elements of the material conditions of production characteristic of capitalism remain intact. After all, Marx insisted in Capital that it is
only under particular social conditions that products are transformed into commodities – that is, into ‘sensuous-supersensuous things,’ into things endowed concomitantly with ‘physical’ qualities and a measurable ‘economic’ quality – the capacity of being exchangeable in determinate proportions with other products. (50)
Here, Bettelheim tracks the effects of property relations under state ownership upon the conditions of the means of production, asserting that simply transferring ownership of the means of production from capitalists to the state does not equate to a real subsumption of production under socialist relations but, rather, to a formal one. Unless the nature of the property transferred to the state (i.e., the means of production) is fundamentally transformed, socialist relations of production remain formal. While the means of production and their outputs may be legally owned by the state, and, by extension, producers may hold a new legal relationship to their products, the productive forces remain de facto governed by the same command structures which have been inherited from capitalism.
In this direction, Bettelheim insists on the importance of the role of the ‘double separation’ which characterises the historical precondition of the capital relation. Here, he raises one of Marx’s most concise definitions of the commodity:
Objects of utility become commodities only because they are the products of the labour of private individuals who work independently of each other.[13]
From these lines, Bettelheim establishes that the capitalist mode of production requires the separation of the worker from the means of production, but also, and his critique rests on this point, the separation of means of production from each other. Under capitalism, the basic unit of production is the enterprise. It is a fundamental characteristic of the capitalist mode of production that production in general is fragmented into delimited arrangements of labour processes bounded by individual possession. Each unit of production, legally defined as a separate enterprise, establishes a correspondence between the centralisation of control and the delimitation of a production process, which has as its definite end point the product for sale. This structure enables a personification of that centralised control (the manager) to dispose of the means of production and its products. Thus, the manager’s autonomy stems from the clear boundaries that define each production unit as a separate entity. It is based on this framework, that Bettelheim characterises Soviet transitional social formations: they inherited the enterprise-form from capitalism, and thus managers retained autonomy to dispose of discrete units of production.
Why is this important? Insofar as the enterprise remains the basic unit of production, and managerial autonomy prevails over discrete enterprises, production in general will continue to be characterised by commodity relations between private producers. As the control of managers extends to the products of their separate enterprises, they will encounter each other (in their reciprocal dependency on each other’s products) through exchange relations. As Bettelheim puts it:
Concretely, the ‘plurality’ of these capacities of disposition, each ‘rooted’ in a determinate enterprise, is one of the objective bases for ‘commodity exchanges’ between units of production.”
Therefore, value-expressions established through exchange relations between things will continue to be the form of articulation between units of production. In other words, the law of value will continue to play a preponderant role as regulator of production and goods allocation and will embody a rivalling power to any conscious attempt to coordinate the economy.
Here, Bettelheim draws out two related effects of the persistence of the enterprise-form which have debilitating effects on socialist planning. First, because value mediates the relationship between discrete units of production, abstract human labour continues to function as the intermediary in the exchange of commodities. As a result, the social necessity of different types of concrete labour is established not through collectively coordinated production, but through individual acts of exchange, where value relations established between things indirectly determine the social requirements of different types of concrete labour. And the magnitude of values brought into relation via abstract labour ultimately derives from the average quantity of human labour socially necessary to produce given commodities; and the necessity here implies meeting the threshold for expanded reproduction of capital. In other words, the demand for the valorisation of value continues to dominate the organisation of production, and the allocation of goods.
Secondly, the labour processes peculiar to enterprises reproduce the material foundations of the capitalist mode of production. These labour processes sustain the structure upon which social production is organised into separate units that interface through commodity relations. The existence of independent enterprises reflects relations between producers and discrete labour processes that excludes relations of cooperation organised at a social scale. Relations of direct cooperation in the capitalist mode of production are restricted to the scope of control exercised in the enterprise – which reaches its limits in the commodity produced. Beyond the commodity produced by a given enterprise, the value-form takes the place of a relation of cooperation. As a result of this threshold, labour processes within enterprises are technically organised and executed as if they operate independently of other production units. Because these interdependencies are mediated by commodity relations, labour processes within enterprises are materially divorced from the system-wide dependencies they actually occupy.[14]
For socialist planning, this disjunction means that labour processes peculiar to enterprises deprive producers from acquiring the knowledge and technical capacity necessary for broader social cooperation in the organisation of production. The knowledge and technical capacities which develop in the enterprise are defined by the end point which governs the organisation of the labour process: the production of commodities. As Bettelheim argues, one form under which the obstacles to the development of social economic calculation occur “is constituted by an ‘absence of knowledge,’ an absence ‘necessarily inscribed in the functioning of the market, in as much as the market ‘establishes the relations between different units of production in a way that is purely external”[15]
Therefore, one of the functions of the enterprise form is to reproduce conditions that prohibit the knowledge and capacities necessary for the effective domination of production by socialist relations – and it is the labour processes peculiar to the enterprise which guarantee the domination of the capitalist mode of production.
This is Bettelheim’s diagnosis of why commodity relations persist in the socialist economies he is studying in the mid-sixties – state ownership of the means of production does not do away with the mute compulsion[16] of the value-form, and it does not do away with the material conditions of capitalist production relations – reproduced as they are by labour processes peculiar to the enterprise.
Thus, for Bettelheim, transition toward a socialist mode of production cannot simply be based on a ‘reproduction’ of the material and social conditions of production inherited from the capitalist social formation. It must begin by exerting a transformative action upon the productive forces. The organisation of production must change, it cannot simply change hands. Production as such must undergo a transformation, precisely because production under capitalism is subsumed to the powers of capital. So deeply do these powers inscribe themselves into the organisation of production that the positions which make up the organisation of production are converted into its bearers – in other words, the very labour processes of enterprises suppress the capacities needed for socialist cooperation across units of production. And so, it is only through a definite transformation of the productive forces that the specifically socialist mode of production can be constituted. This principle, for Bettelheim, extends to the question of planning. A socialist plan can only secure control over production by the producers if the productive forces are reconfigured and socialised against the socialisation of production peculiar to the capitalist mode of production. This means, primarily, an elimination of the enterprise-form which converts labour processes into bearers of the capitalist organisation of production, and an elimination of the value-form which enables capital to dictate the social requirements of different types of concrete labour.
What, then, are the strategic implications of Bettelheim’s appraisal of twentieth-century socialist planning? It should be clear from what has been said that a socialist strategy which views nationalisation as its end point, is not sufficient. Nationalisation, according to Bettelheim, merely displaces the effects of the contradictions of capital, since it leaves the enterprise-form intact, and thus allows the material and social conditions for the domination of production by capital to prevail.
It should also be clear that self-management of units of production by workers does not alleviate these issues either. This merely establishes the workforce as the figure bearing the role of manager in the enterprise. As such, it encloses workers’ control within the limits of the autonomy of the enterprise, its labour processes and its products, thereby concealing the need for a socialisation of the productive forces in a way that is radically opposed to the one brought about through commodity relations.
So, then, the strategic imperative, according to Bettelheim, is to develop revolutionary horizons which do not begin and end with the aim of dispossessing the dispossessors, but which combines this aim with the goal of radically transforming the existing organisation of production. Bettelheim argues forcefully that the class character of the political domination of the relations of production, depends ultimately on the degree of autonomy given to the enterprise. This means that class struggle is not only to do with property relations within the economy (who owns the means of production, who only has their labour to sell) but is also to do with the ideological, political and legal relations which maintain the organisation of production peculiar to capital – and this means all those relations which uphold the enterprise as the basic unit of production which we encounter and embody on a daily basis as workers.
Bettelheim puts this argument in the following terms:
At the ideological and political level, the form of existence of the unit of production as an ‘enterprise’ also ensures the separation of workers from their means of production. This is achieved through specific ‘ideological relations’: the ‘authority’ of management, the internal hierarchical organization of the enterprise, and the social division of labor… [the revolution of ideological and political relations] forms one of the ‘moments’ in the ‘revolutionization’ of the enterprises, of their transformation into another ‘form of organization’ involving a different distribution of the functions of direction and control. Only a transformation of this kind can establish (along with other transformations that concern not only the enterprise) one of the stages leading to ‘new forms of socialization of labor,’ and thus to ‘the elimination of the value-form from the process of production’ itself.[17]
It is important, therefore, that we also wage struggles on these terrains in the aim of subordinating the autonomy of enterprises to new modalities of relations between different units of production which overcome the value form as a point of articulation. This is what the late Michael Burawoy termed ‘the politics of production’[18] – a field of power relations which permeates the technical composition of a unit of production, the stakes of which have always to do with conditions which hold at bay socialist relations. From this perspective, workplace struggles for equality are not secondary to workers’ efforts to eliminate the managerial form. Instead, they are essential for dismantling the ideologies that reinforce, on a daily basis, capitalist command structures over the production process.
We are still a long way from achieving these goals, and Bettelheim’s analysis traces the contours of a prolonged phase of class struggle. Yet, when it comes to how theoretical speculations about postcapitalist planning weigh upon current strategic considerations, his emphasis on transforming the conditions of productive forces remains a crucial point – one we should not overlook. This is especially true given how both sides of the current planning debate – and even discussions about the green transition – continue to sideline the fundamental questions of abolishing the enterprise- and the value-form. It is also pertinent considering the thesis put forward by Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy which argues that the structural position of managerial classes in the current formation of capitalist class relations is surpassing that of capitalists as such.[19]
From an organisational perspective, Bettelheim’s prognosis is yet another reason to avoid the trap of sectionalism. Sectional interests, even those with the most militant intentions, reproduce, in their political ambitions, the enterprise as the basic unit production. And these interests are not only reproduced in workplaces, but also through legal structures, and institutional frameworks which flow from these structures such as trade-union formations which compartmentalise workforces in ways that often mirror capital’s organisation of production. But it should also be the clear that, without a real socialisation of the productive forces (led by the existing bearers of production relations), technocratic approaches to democratic planning (regardless of the state of technology) will continue to flounder against the organisational power of capital.
Today, therefore, we should be thinking of political compositions that could emerge at the seams of production, where units of production interface through their commodities. Another important consideration involves how to develop organisations capable of connecting these formally distinct workforces – not only to cultivate revolutionary power at the level of class but also to advance the technical knowledge and capacity required to subordinate the autonomy of the enterprise to direct collaboration in the event of a revolutionary situation.
Logistics in global supply chains has been highlighted in planning literatures as a pivotal shift in the global organisation of production.[20] It has been understood as an indication of the tendential integration of global production, as the paradigm of lean production forces formally distinct production units to be ambiently responsive to real-time shifts within production in general. But, far from representing a re-socialisation of production which promotes more direct relations of collaboration between enterprises, this, in fact, represents the disintegration of previously unified labour processes, via subcontracting, now connected through commodity relations (the commodity here being services). The technical integration of production in supply chains certainly represents a diminishing autonomy of discrete entities in the production process, subordinate, to some extent, to logistical management. However, at the same time, the forms of labour discipline which flow from this shift (flexibilisation, precaritisation, atomisation, algorithmic management and so on) constitute the current technical/legal/political/ideological conditions of the labour process which reinforce commodity relations between units of production. These contradictions within the existing organisation of production represent the current terrain of class struggle; terrain which is markedly different from Bettelheim’s moment. What remains pertinent in Bettelheim however is the strategic priority of breaking down the ideological, political and economic relations which reproduce the enterprise as the basic unit of production.
References
Allisson, François (2024) ‘Charles Bettelheim and World War II, or The Making of a Planning Doctor’, History of Political Economy, 56 (S1): 283–304.
Bernes, Jasper (2013) ‘Logistics, Counterlogistics, and the Communist Prospect’, Endnotes 3.
Bernes, Jasper (2020), ‘Planning and Anarchy’, South Atlantic Quarterly, January, 119 (1): 53–73
Bettelheim, Charles (1945), La planification soviétique, Paris: Librairie Marcel Riviere Et Cie
Bettelheim, Charles (1946), Les Problèmes Théoriques et Pratiques de la Planification. Cours professé à l’École nationale d’organisation économique et sociale, Centre national d’information économique. Paris: P.U.F.
Bettelheim, Charles (1950), Traité d’économie politique L’économie soviétique, Paris: Recueil Sirey.
Bettelheim, Charles (1967), Planification et croissance accélérée, Paris: François Maspero.
Bettelheim, Charles (1968), India Independent, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Bettelheim, Charles (1974-82), Class Struggles in USSR, Sussex: Harvester Press.
Bettelheim, Charles (1974), Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organization in China: Changes in Management and the Division of Labor, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Bettelheim, Charles (1975), The Transition to Socialist Economy, Sussex: The Harvester Press.
Bettelheim, Charles (1976), Economic Calculation and Forms of Property, London: Routledge.
Bettelheim, Charles (1978), China Since Mao, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Burawoy, Michael (1985), The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism, London: Verso.
Duménil, Gérard and Lévy, Dominique (2018), Managerial Capitalism Ownership, Management and the Coming New Mode of Production, London: Pluto Press.
Cockshott, W. Paul and Cottrell, Allin (1993), Towards a New Socialism, Nottingham: Spokesman Books.
Devine, Pat (1988), Democracy and Economic Planning: The Political Economy of Self-Governing Society, London: Routledge.
Grünberg, Max (2023), ‘The Planning Daemon: Future Desire and Communal Production’, Historical Materialism, 31(4), 115-159.
Madarini, Matteo and Toscano, Alberto (2020) ‘Planning for Conflict’, South Atlantic Quarterly, January, 119 (1): 11–30.
Marx, Karl (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1, London: Penguin Classics.
Mau, Søren (2023a), Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, London: Verso.
Mau, Søren (2023b) ‘Communism is Freedom’, Verso Blog, July.
Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor and Ramge, Thomas (2018), Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data, London: John Murray.
Morozov, Evgeny (2019) ‘Digital Socialism. The Calculation Debate in the Age of Big Data’, New Left Review, March-June, 116 /117.
Muldoon, James (2022), Platform Socialism How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech, London: Pluto Press.
Neel, Phil A. and Chavez, Nick (2024) ‘Forest and Factory: The Science and the Fiction of Communism’, Endnotes.
Pendergrass, Drew and Vettese, Troy (2022), Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics, London: Verso.
Phillips, Leigh and Rozworski, Michal (2019), People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism, London: Verso.
Preobrazhensky, Evgenii (1973) From N.E.P to Socialism: A Glance into the Future of Russia and Europe, London: New Park Publications.
Stalin, J.V. (1972), Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, Peking: Foreign Languages Press.
World Economic Forum (2022), ‘Accelerating Digital Transformation for Long Term Growth’, initiatives.weforum.org
[1] See for example World Economic Forum (2022) or Mayer-Schönberger and Ramge (2018)
[2] The classic example of this argument is Cockshott and Cottrell (1993). More recently see Phillips and Rozworski (2020), Muldoon (2022). For a more measured version of this argument see Morozov (2019) and Grünberg (2023).
[3] See for example Pendergrass and Vettese (2022)
[4] See for example Bernes (2013), Bernes (2020), Devine (1988)
[5] Bettelheim also advised leaders in China, Vietnam, and Mali.
[6] François Allisson, (2024)
[7] See Bettelheim (1945), (1950), (1968), (1974-82), (1974), (1978).
[8] See Bettelheim (1946), (1965), (1975), (1976).
[9] Bettelheim frames this problematic in relation to a faithful reading of Engels’ portrait of socialist relations: “Direct social production and direct distribution preclude all exchange of commodities, therefore also the transformation of products into commodities…and consequently also their transformation into ‘values’. Bettelheim (1976), p. 32.
[10] Stalin, (1972).
[11] Preobrazhensky, (1973).
[12] Bettelheim, (1973), pp. 59-62.
[13] Marx, (1976), p. 165.
[14] Ibid, p. 111.
[15] P. 94.
[16] It is unfortunate that Soren Mau did not follow the implications of his excellent book Mute Compulsion in his speculations of a post-capitalist society (Mau, 2023a) which appears untroubled by questions of commodity relations and the socialisation of the productive forces (Mau, 2023b). Phil A. Neel and Nick Chavez draw this out in their critical response to Mau. Their effort to think through the technical aspects of a socialisation of productive forces under socialist relations comes closest to the spirit of Bettelheim in the current context. Neel and Chavez, (2024).
[17] Bettelheim, (1976), p. 89.
[18] Burawoy, (1985).
[19] Duménil and Lévy (2018).
[20] See Mandarini and Toscano, (2020).
