The People's Republic of Walmart
How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips · first published 2019
52% recommend48% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Argues that large firms like Walmart already run internal planned economies, using supply-chain and management technology that could inform state planning. For readers of socialist planning and the calculation debate.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Some leads for you: - Ronald Coase's "islands of conscious power" - Herbert Simon "Organizations and Markets" - Both of which I discovered via "The People’s Republic of Walmart" by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski A quote from Simon: "The economies of modern industrialized society can more appropriately be labeled organizational economies than market economies.…
on “Beware Centralization” ↗You could give The People's Republic of Walmart a read. Full disclosure, I haven't read it, I've just read/listened to media talking about it. > For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market…
on “Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design” ↗The book _The People's Republic of Walmart_ by Leigh Phillips <sp?> and Michael Rozowski <sp?> makes a compelling argument why employing the same technologies companies use to manage supply chains and decision making on a state level could actually…
on “Why KPIs are destroying businesses” ↗…it and said “well ok, I’m going to be one of the capitalists, and this is actually good.” There are actually planned economies in our system, Einstein would have been shocked by Walmart. I recommend “People’s Republic of Walmart” by Phillips and Rozworski if you want to read about it.
on ““Why Socialism?” By Albert Einstein, 1949” ↗…developed. After all, nobody in their right mind thinks Stalin's USSR is a good thing to repeat. But many also think we can do better than neoliberalism, and practice seems to bear that out. Look up "The people's Republic of Walmart" for a recent book on the calculation debate for example.
on “Historians Find Another Spy in the U.S. Atomic Bomb Project” ↗…Beer. It’s the most fantastic layman’s introduction to cybernetics, written from the perspective of the economist behind the “Cyber” in the Chilean CyberSyn project (1970-3). I discovered him reading People’s Republic of Walmart, another fantastic book about how effective socialist strategies for centralized government are applied in piecemeal to the largest corporations on the globe. Highly, highly recommended—-and yes, I believe…
on “A Software Engineer’s Guide to Cybernetics” ↗…you were to ignore the inevitable exploitation of the workers. Planned economies can instead more efficiently allocate resources, even when done within a capitalist economy and for profit. The book “People’s Republic of Walmart” goes into a lot of detail on this topic. A democratically planned economy with society’s overall welfare as a goal could be even more efficient.
on “Food waste responsible for 10% of global emissions?” ↗…They are immune to the business cycle (as the USSR didn’t experience the Great Depression) and can be more efficient even within capitalist economies (witness Amazon, Apple and Walmart). I recommend “The People’s Republic of Walmart” on this topic.
on “Why is U.S. labor supply so low?” ↗Another interesting book is the People's Republic of Walmart which is a more layman version of Cockshott's book. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24767710
on “Project Cybersyn” ↗You see this as a debate, but it’s an opportunity to step outside the mainstream liberal ideology. At least read “The People’s Republic of Walmart”, if you won’t read research. You’re right that it’s pointless to continue, since you’ve been reduced to picking on my non-native English.
on “AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain” ↗There is a nice book on this theme: "The People’s Republic of Walmart"[0] [0]https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38914131
on “Today’s management-speak has a lot in common with 1930s Soviet propaganda” ↗> they all suck because they all have one thing in common - they are planned I suggest you read The Republic of Walmart [1]. Every big corporation in existence works with planned systems. Every. Single. One. That argument is a fantasy repeated by people that never truly thought/read about it. Most people read somewhere…
on “Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth” ↗Theres a great book about this called The Peoples Republic of Walmart
on “Project Cybersyn” ↗See also The People’s Republic of Walmart
on “Aicracy – Governed by Algorithms” ↗…of books on this topic: Cockshott, Cottrell: Towards a New Socialism, brief synopsis as well as a link to the PDF version at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism Phillips, Rozworski: People's Republic of Walmart, https://www.versobooks.com/books/2822-the-people-s-republic-... Disclaimer, I've only skimmed through the first and not read the second. I'm not personally super-convinced as I think markets are in…
on “Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design” ↗