Since the fall of the Soviet Union, a fundamental axiom of modern society has been that a socially-owned economic system coordinated by central planning is unfeasible, and that a privately-owned system coordinated by the market has proven itself to be the only realistic alternative. On the contrary, I wish to argue that actually-existing capitalism is neither privately owned nor coordinated by the market, but is rather based on large, centrally-planned, socially-owned corporations. From this perspective, at least, capitalism and communism are really two versions of the same system.
It is standard practice in this age of neoliberal hegemony to compare real-world communism with an idealised form of capitalism, with the virtues of market exchange and private property juxtaposed with the vices of central planning and social ownership. The problem with this sort of analysis is that real-world capitalism is based on large corporations, which are in fact centrally planned and socially owned.
The notion that corporations are centrally planned is hardly controversial. Indeed, we should not forget that Marx initially got the idea of central planning from observing capitalist enterprises. Most people, however, seem to think that these 'islands of central planning' are suspended in a 'sea of market relations'. On the contrary, as Herbert Simon and others have noted, most economic activity occurs within firms rather than between them. Putting two and two together, it seems indisputable that contemporary capitalism is, on the whole, centrally planned.
The notion that corporations are socially owned is less well recognised, since shareholders are usually assumed to be the corporation's owners. Even if that were the case, it would still represent a significant deviation from the ideal of private property as individual ownership, since ownership of one thing (the firm) by multiple people (the shareholder) would involve an irreducible degree of collectiveness (socialisation). Indeed, for this very reason, Marx hailed corporations as harbingers of socialism, demonstrating that private property would eventually become obsolete. When we add that shareholders do not own the corporation, which instead comprises an intricate web of rights and responsibilities between a diversity of stakeholders, the socially-owned aspect of capitalist corporations becomes even more clear.
Capitalism and communism, then, appear to be more similar than they are different - and we have not even touched on the critical role of the state in contemporary capitalism. Indeed, I would argue that central planning and social ownership are inherent to any form of large-scale economic system. The problem is that these two aspects do not always mix well, since the central planners and the social owners are not usually identical. Just like the communist state, the capitalist corporation is supposed to be run in the interests of society (and not, as the conventional wisdom would have it, solely in the interests of shareholders). However, as soon as this task is delegated to a limited group of people - which it must be in the case of large-scale organisation - the potential for corruption arises. This seems to be what happened to the Soviet Union; and it seems to be what is happening to corporate capitalism.
A promising answer to this dilemma is cooperative organisation. Like all viable economic systems, it is centrally planned and socially owned, and therefore susceptible to the same tendency for corruption. This corruption, however, is made salient - it is anticipated, identified, and discouraged. Indeed, it is perhaps no surprise that utopians on both sides of the political spectrum - libertarians and anarchists, free-marketeers and bleeding-heart socialists - have converged on the cooperative ideal as an alternative to both real-world communism and real-world capitalism; for it represents an expedient hybrid of the two, an auspicious alternative to both, or perhaps just a different version of what is essentially the same underlying system.
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