Nicolas Villarreal’s response to my comments on his conception of growth and degrowth is very welcome, so I would be happy to continue this exchange here. First, I would note that my position has continued to evolve in the months since I originally wrote my reply—often changing in Villarreal’s direction—so I apologize if I don’t defend my original stance exactly. What interests me instead is the way that emphasizing or de-emphasizing the break from Capital’s “mute compulsion” in the transition to socialism reveals a difference in how we conceive of this transition to begin with. Elaborating on this distinction is vitally important if we are to get to the ‘real’ questions of power and politics that these econometric minutiae are ultimately rooted in. After all, if all that mattered to me was whether a given metric was ontologically bourgeois, I would agree that my stance would be purely idealistic. However, I find the roots of my enthusiasm about post-capitalist metrics to lie precisely in the question of material necessity. So let me try and be specific about what those necessities are.

To begin, it would be obvious to both Villarreal and I that any socialist society ought to outperform its capitalist (or rentist, techno-feudal, etc.) adversaries. This means at the very least that 1) it is able to reproduce itself and its immediate environment for longer than its counterparts are able to do, 2) it is not fundamentally reliant on non-socialist supply chains and can capture or substitute them as their proprietors self-destruct, and 3) it can defend itself against the desperate assaults such dying regimes would launch against it. Presuming that we want socialism to effect a state of general flourishing, though, rather than the mere capacity to outlast its ecocidal alternatives, the sustainability of socialism would have to be complemented with its preferability to the vast majority of (working) people. These two elements can be said to imply one another, in the sense that an unsustainable society would disturb anyone with the slightest degree of foresight, and a vastly preferable society could see its model spread and be reinforced as a result. Overall, if socialism can persist and even thrive under conditions that other social systems cannot, and those conditions are the ones we can expect in the coming century, then we would have created a stable and probably meta-stable social system that can and will win.

So far, I don’t see where Villarreal would disagree. I imagine we even agree on the conditions under which the confrontation between socialism and its enemies would proceed. Barring a simultaneous global uprising, which would require the reach and unanimity of a sci-fi scenario like Pluribus, it is inevitable that the metaphorical life rafts of socialism would have to contend with the gunships of capitalism, all of them floating in a vast sea of market forces that could swallow them whole if they can’t handle its waves. While the rafts could tie themselves together to make a mighty catamaran—like how a socialist Germany could have saved the USSR from the perils of “socialism in one country”—only a craft as big as the sea itself would not be bothered by its tides. This is an imperfect metaphor, I admit, since the sea in question is created by the sailors themselves, but the larger point stands: you cannot wish away the world market, not until socialism has won absolutely. Even the most autarkic socialist outpost would be interdependent with some other non-socialist polity, would be forced to exchange goods and services with it, and so would need to apply something close to the metrics of capitalism to its own economy to make sure it can continue to compete.

Here is where the potential differences between Villarreal’s reasoning and my own begin to make their appearance. Although I agree that incipient socialist societies cannot afford to neglect capital accumulation and capitalist metrics, this compulsion may not be as strong in this century as it was in the last. In a global environment of secular stagnation and chronic disinvestment, where even highly productive economies like China are past their peak in terms of GDP growth, it becomes easier for any socialist newcomer to “keep up” with the rest. Without a looming technological transformation and/or a global episode of creative destruction, the constant revolutionizing of production we associate with (state) capitalism will continue to slow to a crawl, with even those elites who derive their livelihood and legitimacy from this mechanism turning against it, as Villarreal points out. Although it is historically poignant to point out that socialist economies may beat capitalist ones by their own standards, and participatory methods of production can certainly provide a productivity boost in particular industries, I don’t believe this is either a necessary or a likely means by which the struggle will be won. To put it another way, while socialism will absolutely outperform its adversaries, I don’t believe it will do so by outproducing them, at least in the sense of offering more goods for less to the global market. As I see it, capitalism is more than capable of undermining itself economically; its continued survival depends more on the present inability of the decomposed to overcome their decomposition and reorient production around their own needs, than the fact that global profitability is still too far above zero. Widening this gap between what Capital demands and what capitalists want may be useful, yes, but that appears to be taking care of itself.

To be clear, I am aware that there is more to the call to develop the productive forces than preserving the global competitiveness of socialist commodities on the world market. What is produced is never just an idle mass of valuable things, but rather consists of that which makes a given society tick. Revolutionizing society along socialist principles would undoubtedly be a vast economic enterprise, if only in the effort to defend itself against the “people with guns” and those who command them. At the same time, it is not the case that revolutionary conflict is simply symmetrical, where the superior production of mirrored military capacities is sufficient to carry the day. If anything, the attempt to overcome an ideological enemy by a method of their choosing can rob a revolution of its competitive advantage; imagine if the French republic had tried to outbid the Austrians for Europe’s, instead of using its novel social structures to create the levée en masse. Building on this notion of material asymmetry, I would also argue that those efforts which would genuinely require a massive mobilization of labor and material, like putting the global metabolism of humanity on an ecologically sound footing, are best evaluated by metrics other than economic activity or value creation. This is what I mean by our “apathy” towards economic performance. If we manage to complete the transition to a global eco-socialist society, that may well end up increasing GDP per capita or labor productivity. But it is not the compulsion to augment society by these metrics, mute or otherwise, that will get us to make this transition.

This brings me to my penultimate point, concerning the question of how to measure a society’s economic performance under post-capitalist circumstances. Really, I am agnostic as to whether this ought to use a single unit of account or else be formally multi-criterial. This is because even that single unit would inevitably be derived from a synthesis of multiple factors, and this calculus would have to be public and publicly accountable to avoid the parasitism and self-exploitation which “blind” market socialism still allows for. All in all, the difference between one measure or many would be minor.

As for what the new “prices” of socialism ought to be optimized for, I take little issue with the striving to make labor more productive and so lower the necessary labor time involved in reproducing any given part of society. What matters more is that we decouple this unit of account from any question of compensation or distribution; it may be smart to incentivize astute planning and efficient work by way of a bespoke reward scheme, but it should not become the general engine of profit-seeking that drives wage laborers and firm owners into their constant race to the bottom.

Additionally, we should be mindful of the counterproductive nature of certain attempts to improve labor productivity, which often dovetail with schemes to improve labor discipline and enhance rent-seeking. I am speaking specifically of the immense bureaucratization in the services sector, most recently embodied by the attempt to incorporate LLM technology into every form of information work. Since the urge to improve labor productivity this way is at least partly genuine despite its farcical nature, it can be said to represent the fundamental inability of capitalist firms to acknowledge the low capacity for optimization inherent to certain kinds of work. In reality, there is no way to make a nurse or a cinematographer produce 5% more value year on year, and the incessant need to try and make it so only destroys the care and creativity such jobs are meant to provide to society. Thus, if we were to try and come up with a unit of account to evaluate the performance of such work, it had better optimize for factors other than mere labor productivity.

Lastly, I would return to the notion of degrowth, which is what set off this engaging discourse to begin with. All in all, my own perspective may be summarized as a neutrality with regard to its technical aspects—the need to reduce material throughput or economic activity on the whole being highly context-specific—but sympathetic to its emotional argument against the compulsive accumulation drive of all modern economies, including some non-capitalist ones. The degrowth movement’s exhortations to “slow down” and learn to take sufficiency as our collective objective is psychologically refreshing if nothing else.

If I understand Villarreal’s position correctly, his concern is that this emphasis on reducing or preserving a given level of economic activity risks sacrificing one of socialism’s most potent advantages, namely the capacity to outgrow capitalism by its own metrics. Personally, I am skeptical that this advantage would be all that great altogether. Even an ambiguously socialist power like China has managed to effect an economic model which prioritizes industrial investment for its own sake, something which Villarreal signals as one of the main advantages of public versus private investment, given the way that the latter also tries to preserve its own reproduction and consumption. In my view, the sorts of changes that would make China (more) socialist could easily make it less productive by narrowly economic metrics, as working hours are reduced and more social activity escapes the readily quantifiable sphere of commodity production. At the same time, such changes would also make China’s society more resilient, sustainable, and generally capable of defeating global capitalism.

Putting it all together, the conflict between these modes of production—if not between all modes of production—strikes me as fundamentally asymmetrical, where the obsolescence of the defeated party derives partly from their ignorance of the process and thereby the metrics by which they are being defeated. While this process is always material by definition, it is the way in which the respective societies conceive of their own success that allows one to outmatch the other. To put it another way: socialism won’t win by producing more of what is valued in capitalist exchange, but by producing to a different standard, using measures which are more subtle, more deliberate, and obviously more democratic. The task at hand for people like Villarreal and myself is to figure out how we can make such measures.