What Did Marx Get Wrong?

There are lots of criticisms commonly directed at Marx. Most of these I think are misplaced; two of them I think are correct. This list is obviously not exhaustive, but here, very briefly, are some of those common criticisms. (In line with my new blogging practice, I’m not even aiming to argue for these positions here – this is just what I think…):

Criticism: Marx has a teleological stagist view of history.
My view: No he doesn’t.

Criticism: Marx’s labour theory of value is untenable.
My view: Marx doesn’t hold the labour theory of value.

Criticism: Marx’s humanist philosophical anthropology paints too rosy a view of human nature.
My view: Marx doesn’t have a humanist philosophical anthropology.

Criticism: Marx’s narrow economism has no space for agency.
My view: Marx is not narrowly economistic.

Criticism: Marx is too optimistic about the possibilities of technology.
My view: Marx is right to be optimistic about the possibilities of technology.

Criticism: Marx is too optimistic about the possibilities of central planning.
My view: I agree with this criticism.

Criticism: Marx’s attempt to provide blueprints for future institutions is dogmatic and utopian.
My view: Marx doesn’t provide such blueprints.

Criticism: Marx ought to provide blueprints for future institutions.
My view: I agree with this criticism.

~~

All that is by way of saying, I see two central flaws in Marx’s work. First – he is too optimistic about the possibilities of central planning. His position is – as always – more nuanced than a quick summary suggests, but at base Marx thinks that bringing the uncoordinated and indirectly coordinated actions of the complex system of capitalism under some kind of centrally planned control is the way to eliminate the irrational and coercive aspects of that system. Marx is far too incautious about the concentrations of power that accompany such central planning – he doesn’t give nearly enough attention to the abuses of power and the exploitative dynamics that are likely to result from such massive concentration of political and economic power.

That said, Marx doesn’t spend much time writing about the shape of the more centrally planned society he’d like to see because, second: Marx is of the view that the shape of future society will basically be worked out ‘in practice’ – that it is not the job of intellectuals or political activists to provide ‘recipes for the cook-shops of the future’. I disagree with this too. Institutional change comes about because people change those institutions, and they change institutions by thinking about what institutions they’d like better. I believe there’s no reason why such thought can’t take place ahead of time – and I believe it’s better that a lot of such thought take place ahead of time, so that people aren’t having to do that thinking at short notice in incredibly stressful circumstances with catastrophic consequences of poor judgement calls.

So – those are the main areas where I disagree with Marx.

In other news, I have a new comment policy. (It basically just says that I’m going to stop responding to comments, because it takes me forever – like months and months – and really what good is that to anyone.)

Elements of Liberalism

A quick post differentiating some of the different elements of liberalism. Worth doing because both critiques and defences of liberalism often blur quite a lot of different things together.

The following is an excellent starting point: Charles Mills’ 2012 Stony Brook lecture on ‘Liberalism and Racial Justice’.

Mills starts his talk by distinguishing five different things that people can mean by ‘liberalism’. These are:

a) a set of value commitments: moral equality; freedom; self-realisation of individual; etc.
b) a social ontology: atomic individualism
c) a conceptual cartography: the distinction between the private and the public realm
d) a theory of history: Whig progressivism
e) a particular schedule of rights, protections and freedoms.

These are all worthy of long discussion, but I’m going to basically focus on just (a) and (e). That is I’m interested in the political ideals of liberalism, rather than its contributions to our framework for analysing social reality, etc.

Ok – if we’re just interested in liberal political ideals: what are those ideals? Here are five different elements of those ideals:

In the first box – the ideal of liberty. The principal ideal of liberalism is to maximise, or at least give high priority to, the liberty of the individual.

But what does this mean? I think it’s worth distinguishing three different concepts of liberty:

1) Negative liberty, in the good old John Stuart Mill / Isaiah Berlin sense. That is to say – freedom from coercion. Liberalism aims to create a sphere of personal freedom for each individual within which the individual is free from the coercive actions of others. Obviously there’s a lot of different ways of understanding the scope of that sphere, and the scenarios in which this entitlement to freedom from coercion can be lost or withdrawn. Still.

This ideal gives us a role for legitimate force (probably wielded by the state): coercion is legitimate (only?) if it prevents people from infringing on others’ freedom.

Ok – that’s negative liberty. That’s a pretty slim-line concept of liberty.

2) Liberty in the sense of capacity. That is – the concept of liberty associated with, for example, Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach. Here the idea is that you are only free to do something if you have the capacity to do it – so poverty is a form of unfreedom, because it restricts one’s range of action; disability is a form of unfreedom without a social context that accommodates the disability, etc. Prejudice and informal social sanction generate unfreedom, because they restrict the range of action of their targets, etc. etc.

This is a much more capacious sense of freedom. Indeed, a lot of political goals that are often articulated under the banner of egalitarianism (where the ideal of equality is often treated as distinct from and even incompatible with the ideal of freedom) can be captured under this category. And I think that’s a good way to understand these goals: increasing the freedom-as-capability of people across society seems like a more concretely impactful and less arbitrarily relational political goal than equality in the abstract. (Not that these should be conflated.)

Next up:

3) Positive liberty, in Isaiah Berlin’s sense. That is to say, more or less, grounding others’ power over us in our own choices, in some sense.

Putting it crassly: if negative liberty (1) is about the creation of a sphere of freedom from coercion; and capabilities liberty (2) is the creation of the ability to actually act as we might wish within that sphere; positive liberty (3) is about who gets to coerce us at the limits of that sphere, and the source of their ability to do so.

Obviously things can get a bit dicier here, as Berlin among many others points out: grounding the ability to coerce people in those people’s own purported self-determination is a reliable recipe for sophistical justifications for unjustified violence. Still, it doesn’t seem absurd to draw distinctions between more and less legitimate governance apparatuses, and to ground that legitimacy in the choices of the governed. How one goes about doing that will fork our concept of positive liberty in many different directions (different forms of democracy, different authoritarianisms grounded in different understandings of the will of the people), and that can’t be covered here. But this is clearly another important sense of liberty.

Ok – that’s three ideals of liberty we’ve got going. Now, moving away from the ideal of liberty, but staying with the governance apparatus:

4) Checks and balances on the exercise of power.

This isn’t really a political ideal – more an institution-building principle – but it’s another very important element of liberalism. The idea (obviously) is that whatever governance system you’ve got, it’s likely to be abused by those who wield its power – so checks and balances on power is essential to preserving whatever other forms of liberty you’ve got going on. You need to design your governance institutions in such a way that untrammeled power is difficult to exercise – a separate point from how you actually understand liberty.

Ok – then the final element:

5) The appropriate sphere of application of the concepts above.

That is to say, more or less: who gets to count as a political subject who can enjoy these ideals? Who are the citizens of the liberal political entity? And who falls outside it? To whom do these ideals not apply?

As Mills – and Losurdo, and many others – point out, liberalism has historically drawn that line between the citizen and the non-citizen – and, more broadly, the human and the not-quite-really-fully-human – in many different places. John Stuart Mill moves from outlining the ideals of liberty, in one paragraph, to explaining why they don’t apply to the brutes in the colonies he made his living administering, in the next. Liberalism, historically, has been built on a hierarchy of the human. At the top of that hierarchy are the full humans who deserve the full realisation of the ideals of liberalism; at the bottom are those animals or barely-more-than-animals who can and must be coerced – for whom violent coercion is the only possible route to any kind of freedom. And between these two extremes is a vast scale of greater and lesser humanity, that warrants the differential realisation of greater or fewer ideals of liberalism, as circumstances require.

Now throw all these elements of liberalism up in the air, and see where they come down: which among these one chooses to emphasise, and how one understands its application, will determine what kind of actually-existing-liberalism you get. Though, of course, in reality it is more often on-the-ground practice that determines which ideals get emphasised.

I think this is a useful way of breaking down liberalism, though I obviously don’t claim that these categories are anything close to exhaustive. Still – something to keep thinking about.

Inferentialism / Institutionalism

“[P]eople who are interested in political speech have found thinking about the concept not in terms of how it represents the world, but rather of the circumstances of appropriate application. For instance, if you’re interested in the concept of property, the inferentialist analysis says the notion of property is really a bundle of rights and responsibilities, and we should look at the circumstances under which we say that someone owns something and what the consequences of saying that they own it are. One of the advantages of that is that we see there may be other equally natural bundles of rights and responsibilities. We needn’t treat ownership of real property as coming with all the rights and responsibilities a piece of portable property would have. Maybe if the land that you own has wetlands on it, you don’t have as many rights with respect to it. With that notion of ownership, you would have to unbunble some of the rights and responsibilities that went before, whereas if you are just thinking in representational terms, you don’t get that insight. The meaning of property is a matter of inference from the circumstances to the consequences of application that’s curled up in it.” – Brandom, p. 385.

“A final reason for the failure to develop a theory adequate to handle the problem of harmful effects stems from a faulty concept of a factor of production. This is usually thought of as a physical entity which the businessman acquires and uses (an acre of land, a ton of fertiliser) instead of as a right to perform certain (physical) actions. We may speak of a person owning land and using it as a factor of production but what the land-owner in fact possesses is the right to carry out a circumscribed list of actions. The rights of a land-owner are not unlimited. It is not even always possible for him to remove the land to another place, for instance, by quarrying it. And although it may be possible for him to exclude some people from using “his” land, this may not be true of others. For example, some people may have the right to cross the land. Furthermore, it may or may not be possible to erect certain types of buildings or to grow certain crops or to use particular drainage systems on the land. This does not come about simply because of government regulation. It would be equally true under the common law. In fact it would be true under any system of law. A system in which the rights of individuals were unlimited would be one in which there were no rights to acquire.” Coase, p. 134.

“Institutional rules are prescriptive statements that forbid, require, or permit some action or outcome (E. Ostrom 1986a). One of the three deontic operators – forbid, require, permit – must be contained in a statement for it to be considered a rule. All three deontic operators are used in this definition of rules.

Some analysts limit their conception of rules to prescriptive statements containing only required or forbidden actions and outcomes. With that limited conception, some recurring situations are rule-governed, and others are not. By including all three deontic operators in a definition of a rule, it is always possible to identify the set of rules that constitute a situation: (1) Is this action or outcome (or its negation) required? (2) Is this action or outcome (or its negation) forbidden? Any action or outcome (or its negation) that is not required or forbidden is permitted. Consequently, the absence of a rule forbidding or requiring an action is logically equivalent to the presence of a rule that permits an action.” – Ostrom, p. 140.

~

Brandom, Robert & Williams, J. J. (2013). “Inferential Man: An Interview with Robert Brandom.” symploke. 21(1), pp. 367-391.

Coase, Ronald H. [1960] “The Problem of Social Cost.” in Chennat Gopalakrishnan (ed.) (2000) Classic Papers in Natural Resource Management. Palgrave, Macmillan. pp. 87-137

Ostrom, Elinor. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge university press.

NewAPPS comment

The comment of mine pasted below doesn’t seem to have made it through moderation at this NewAPPS post. I trust it will, in time – but I thought I’d archive it here just in case:

UPDATE: The comment’s now visible at NewAPPS, retrieved from the spam folder.

~~

This petition has been organised by the ‘Institute of Science in Society’ (ISIS) – see their page here.

In promoting it, you should probably also make your readers aware of ISIS’s advocacy of alternative therapies for AIDS, (“herbs, minerals, mushrooms, probiotics, exercise and even simply better nutrition”), based on “the truth of the many anecdotal stories about these compounds”; the organisation’s important research about ‘water memory’ and homeopathy; and the “remarkable theory of everything that claims to relate all forces of nature” discussed in the organisation’s director’s book ‘Living Rainbow H20′; as well as the various other ‘unconventional’ scientific breakthroughs published by the site, and likewise endorsed by lists of people with ‘PhD’ after their names.

This may allow readers of NewAPPS to make a more informed initial assessment of the types of reasoning likely to be behind this petition’s claims, as against those of the French High Council on Biotechnology.

That last link does have the benefit of basing its claims on legitimate scientific methodology.

Economics as Science

The recent Nobel Prize [1] in economics has prompted a fair bit of commentary/discussion along the lines of ‘is economics a science’? I thought I’d add to that commentary. The extremes of the commonly articulated positions are roughly:

“Of course it is – and a stronger, more manful, more mathematical science than your [puny / relativistic / fraudulent / etc.] [psychology / sociology / history / etc.]”

“Of course it isn’t – it’s a series of barely coherent apologies for the interests of the powerful, detached from any reference to or understanding of the suffering inflicted upon billions by the policies it advocates and sophistically excuses”

With of course a range of other positions too.

The former of the two positions above is articulated principally by economists; the latter principally by left critics of economics. I’m in many respects on the left [2] – but I’m also in training to become an economist. Where does that place me? [Well – not to build up suspense: I think economics is indeed a science (that’s why I think it’s worth doing economics). But the longer version follows.]

Prior question: what does it mean for something to be a science? As a first pass, I take a disciplinary research-space to be a science if:

1) The object it studies is a real phenomenon that can actually be empirically studied.[3] [4] (So astrology doesn’t count – because the relationships between celestial objects and human personality is not a real phenomenon; but astronomy does count, because celestial objects are real things.) (What’s actually real is of course itself a scientific question – but so it goes; there’s no paradox there – just the usual Neurath’s Boat principle of there being no discursive ‘outside’.)

2) There exists a set of established norms and research practices for testing claims about these objects against empirical evidence – for an endeavour to be scientific, claims must be vulnerable to rejection in the light of empirical findings.

3) There’s a discursive space, for researchers, within which those norms for testing claims against evidence can themselves be debated, contested and transformed.

Science is therefore a communal endeavour – it can’t exist outside of a community of research. Science relies on the collection of evidence; the positing of claims on the basis of and for testing by evidence; and the collective ongoing assessment of the evidence, the claims, the methodological connections between the two, and the norms governing the whole endeavour, within a community of researchers.

This definition of science does not require the following things:

– That practitioners of scientific inquiry be particularly rational. All else being equal it’s better for practitioners to be reasonable and informed than not, but the ‘rationality’ of the system resides principally in the possibilities made available by the overall institutions of the system, rather than in the virtues of individual researchers. (It is necessary, though, for a sufficiently large number of members of the community to be committed to reproducing those broad institutional practices enumerated above, that the practices are indeed reproduced.)

– That scientific claims be correct. The whole point of the scientific endeavour is that claims (including both empirical claims and the methodological claims that inform empirical claims) are open to revision.

– That members of a research community be capable of predicting the future behaviour of the phenomena studied. Some phenomena are amenable to this, in the current state of knowledge; others are not. It is not a requirement of science that predictions of future events be created, only that evidence (including evidence generated by future events) be capable of modifying our claims.

– Relatedly, that ‘general laws’ be discovered. Science can study unique specificity just as scientifically as it can study general principles; one is not more sciencey than the other.

– That there be broad consensus on most major topics within the research community. One hopes that warranted consensus can be established, but an important part of the mechanism from which it might emerge is disagreement.

None of those things just listed need apply for a community to count as a group of scientific researchers.

In these terms, is economics a science?

I think the answer is: clearly yes, economics is a science. There is a real object of study (the economy, however that’s understood). There are established principles for collecting evidence and testing claims against evidence. There are ongoing (quite sophisticated) debates about the methodological principles involved in these tasks. So I think economics is pretty unambiguously a science, and I’m happy to be a member of and participate in that research community of scientific practitioners.[5]

What about the second objection, though? The objection that economics is just serving the interests of the powerful, etc.?

Well – just because a community of research meets all the criteria for science, doesn’t mean that it isn’t full of bullshit – nor does it mean that the kinds of bullshit dominant in a field are in any way accidental. Here, as often, it’s important to distinguish between best practice and actual practice. Best practice is not something that exists independently of actual practice – it is generated in and emerges out of actual practice. But it is also something that actual practice can be judged against – and often judged severely. Like any discursive space, the discursive space of economics is variegated – it contains many voices in dispute. In participating in that discursive space, we add our own voices and evaluate those voices already in contention. The norms of evaluation – and, therefore, the conclusions – that we take away from engagement in that space may be minority views relative to the space overall.

So it’s important to distinguish between the claim that economics is a science, and the claim that economics in general has things right, or is even on the right path. It’s important to have an account of the many things wrong with economics too – which I’ll start to talk about in a future post.

[1] The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

[2] This post articulates my politics I think reasonably well – although I’m losing patience with left positions and figures sufficiently rapidly that, while I don’t think I’m on the classic ‘Trot to neocon’ ideological trajectory here [not least because I was never a Trot, but you know what I mean], it’s hard not to see why some such view would look reasonable, from the outside.

[3] “What about mathematics?” Well, mathematical objects (whatever their status – as it happens, I have a conventionalist line on the status of mathematical objects, but nothing here relies on that) can’t be empirically studied, so mathematics isn’t a science in this sense. What gives mathematics its objective character (on my account at least) is the degree of consensus that can be (and has been) attained around mathematical norms – math is pretty much unique in this respect. This is what distinguishes mathematics from, say, theology, which also has an object of study of ambiguous status (real? fictional? social? supernatural?) but where the degree of consensus is far lower, even within specific religious communities, let alone between religions.

[4] “What about the SCIENCE OF BEING that myself and three other graduate students in this Heidegger course are developing?” Sorry – that’s not a science.

[5] Note, though, that economics is not a more manful or vigorous science than any other social science, even if it involves a lot of math.

Notes on the Prisoner’s Dilemma

I’ve just started reading Elinor Ostrom’s ‘Governing the Commons’ – the 1990 book summarising the research program for which she won a Nobel Prize in 2009. Ostrom’s work is interesting, empirically oriented, methodologically and theoretically eclectic, and I think provides a valuable set of resources for those trying to think about institution-building.

At the start of the book, Ostrom summarises three standard ways to understand the problem of commons governance, in the economics literature:

1) Garrett Hardin’s fable of the tragedy of the commons (written from a position of anti-population growth; Hardin is also a signatory on the notorious ‘Mainstream Science on Intelligence’ letter to the Wall Street Journal – that is to say, an advocate of scientific racism); though Ostrom (like others) draws attention to earlier figures who had described the same dynamic, such as H. Scott Gordon:

“Wealth that is free for all is valued by no one because he who is foolhardy enough to wait for its proper time of use will only find that it has been taken by another” (Gordon 1954, p. 124; quoted in Ostrom 1990, p.3)

2) The prisoner’s dilemma game. This is the famous game-theoretic scenario in which two participants have to choose one of two courses of action (cooperate or defect). The game scenario is set up such that if the other player defects, one is better off defecting; and if the other player cooperates, there is no disadvantage to defecting (though no advantage either). In this circumstance, it seems ‘irrational’ not to defect; but if both players defect, both players are worse off than if they had cooperated. In Wikipedia’s always-useful words:

“[The prisoner’s dilemma] was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker formalized the game with prison sentence rewards and gave it the name “prisoner’s dilemma””

(I need to read all this work.)

3) The logic of collective action. In his 1965 book of this name, Mansur Olson writes:

“unless the number of individuals is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests” (Olson 1965, p.2,; emphasis in the original; quoted in Ostrom 1990, p.6)

I haven’t read Olson and can’t summarise his arguments; I should look at all of that too.

Anyway – Ostrom has various criticisms of all this: notably that these various analyses of commons governance typical presuppose given, immutable rules that determine the choices available to actors in these scenarios; but in actual social life the social rules and institutional frameworks within which we must make our decisions and take our actions are themselves also determined by our collective actions. To put things crudely: if we’re faced with a ‘prisoner’s dilemma’, why can’t we do something about the prison?

I wanted to briefly mention another issue with the prisoner’s dilemma, and related models, though. In Ostrom’s words:

“those attempting to use these models as the basis for policy prescription frequently have achieved little more than a metaphorical use of the models” (Ostrom 1990 p.7)

The use of such models as metaphor, though, can have a specific ideological function beyond the occlusion of the possibility of institutional change. The basis of a prisoner’s dilemma or tragedy of the commons scenario, is a situation in which economic actors engage on more or less equal terms, and where it is indeed the case that absent cooperation no economic actor will be better off. This is what makes the ‘tragedy of the commons’ a tragedy, rather than simply the defeat of some actors by others.

In some commons scenarios, however, it may be (indeed it sometimes is) the case that some specific actor or actors, in taking the ‘defect’ strategy, will be better off in absolute terms. If a specific actor can benefit sufficiently from the extraction of resources from the commons, it may not matter if the commons is exhausted or destroyed in the process – the actor who benefits most may still be on top, relative to even the best-case ‘cooperative’ scenario. All else being equal, the greater the power differentials between the different actors (and the greater the resources to be appropriated), the more likely this scenario is. If we consider that actors can (in fact) move between different ‘commons’ extracting resources from each, and so an actor’s considerations don’t have to be restricted to the specific game we’re currently imagining, this scenario seems quite a bit more likely. (And, of course, there are plenty of examples of actual real-world resource depletion or appropriation that seem to fit this model very well.)

That is to say – this framing of the problem of commons governance can de-emphasise one central way in which such governance can fail: not lack of coordination, but simple domination. A full reckoning with the challenges of institution-building needs to take account of both of these issues (and many others).

I’m sure there’s lots of work that’s been done on this and similar scenarios – but I don’t know this work. I’d like to explore these issues – and, in general, I’d like to look at how power differentials can be given a more central place in this kind of modelling of economic phenomena.

~~

Works cited:

Gordon, H. Scott. “The economic theory of a common-property resource: the fishery.” The Journal of Political Economy 62, no. 2 (1954): 124-142.

Hardin, Garrett. “The Tragedy of the Commons∗.” Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research 1, no. 3 (2009) [1968]: 243-253.

Olson, Mancur. The logic of collective action: public goods and the theory of groups. Vol. 124. Harvard University Press, 2009.

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge university press, 1990.

Wikipedia contributors, “Prisoner’s dilemma,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Prisoner%27s_dilemma&oldid=574372985 (accessed October 2, 2013).

Alternatives to the Market

What about alternatives to the market? Are there better ways to organize the signaling and negotiation associated with the distribution of goods, and the production of goods for distribution? Off the top of my head (again, without spending really any time with the relevant literature, so this is all very preliminary) I can think of three broad alternative categories of economic organization:

1) Economies sufficiently local to not involve large-scale trade. These would have to be very local economies. Such a mode of economic organization is feasible in plenty of locations; but by its very nature it can’t ‘scale’ to mass production and the complex division of labour. Such a mode of economic organization is therefore, I think, simply not capable of producing sufficient resources to sustain a global population in the billions, at a decent standard of living. So this is ruled out.

2) Central planning. This was of course the classical socialist solution: the alternative to the anarchy of the market was the rational planning of a benign centralized bureaucratic organization, deputized to serve the interests of the people. This was, for generations, the main thing that people meant by ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’. The achievement of centrally planned economies, and the failure of those economies to realize the emancipatory hopes invested in them, is obviously the standard, tragic, and in my opinion basically accurate story of the failure of communist ideals in the twentieth century.

Could an alternative approach to centrally planned economies realize those ideals without replicating the failures of the twentieth century planned economies? It seems relatively clear to me (and to most) that the central failure of those communist states was their authoritarianism. In the absence of democratic institutions, those with power are always very likely to use that power for oppressive purposes, with little in the way of checks and balances to prevent this. So could central planning work if it were properly democratic?

I don’t want to rule this out; it’s worth spending time working on what this would be in more concrete practice. But I do have a reflex skepticism on this (characteristic of my time): the concentration of power required for the fully planned administration of an economy seems extremely vulnerable to abuse, even if much stronger democratic checks and balances are built into it than was the case for the twentieth century communist economies. So my impulse is that much more decentralized modes of organization are preferable – but I don’t want to take this for granted.

3) An alternative signaling system to money. It must, one would assume, be possible to devise an alternative way of fulfilling the information-transmission function of money, using modern computing: some kind of mechanism that enables the signalling of demand without the use of the ‘effective demand’ communicated by purchases and hypothetically projected future purchases, and (further) without the need to centrally manage the information thus communicated (though the problem of how to signal demand is also of course a problem for central planning). I know that there are proposals of this kind out there, but I haven’t actually read up on them; I ought to.

~~

Given that (2) and (3) above both seem at the very least worthy of serious consideration, I don’t think it’s at all obvious that ‘market socialism’ is the best candidate when considering how to build more emancipatory economic institutions. I want to give more thought to the above. But for now I’m still going to take ‘market socialism’ as the leading contender for a credible realisable emancipatory economic system, when reading and thinking more about all this.