Article on Neurath
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Jacobin has a quite good article on Otto Neurath
Neurath’s utopia was moneyless. This may seem like a holdover of romantic ideas, but at heart the vision underlying it was modernist. The notion of a moneyless society emerged from its author’s peculiar critique of free-market capitalism. What Neurath objected to in capitalism was not primarily its exploitation and domination but its anarchy. Capitalism, he argued, is irrational, therefore not properly modern. For Neurath, modernity is inherently progressive. It is an evolutionary process in which capitalism is but one step. Its telos stretches from market anarchy via statism to a moneyless collectivist society. In this respect, aspects of Neurath’s thinking mirrored the nonconflictual view of socialism, which came to be known as Fabianism in the Anglophone world.
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Neurath recognized that a planning dictatorship would be little better at fairly organizing the allocation of resources. Instead, he proposed democratic deliberation, the weighing up of alternative economic plans based on multicriterial analysis and aimed at addressing the multiplicity of human needs. In his envisaged socialist order, “growing crops will be decided in the light of people’s nutritional needs in much the same way as building schools is decided in the light of educational needs.” The planned economy would be concerned above all “with utility,” with the interest of the social collective and providing all citizens with “housing, food, clothing, health, entertainment, etc.”
I think there is more in Neurath’s thinking, as serious thought on how to run a non-market economy, than the author gives credit for.
We have been aware of Neurath’s view for 40 or more years, as in this passage from an article published in 1984:
“There were three possible reactions to Von Mises’s criticism:
1. To accept that money would have to continue to be the unit of economic calculation in “socialism”;
2. To argue that labour-time could be the unit of economic calculation “in an economy where neither money nor exchange were present”;
3. To argue that in socialism “calculation in natura [in kind] can take the place of monetary calculation”.(….)
Otto Neurath (later prominent as a logical positivist philosopher) argued that even labour-time accounting would be unnecessary in socialism (state capitalism). In an “administrative economy” production plans could be drawn up and executed directly and solely in real physical quantities:
‘The theory of the socialist economy knows only a single economic agent — society — which without profit-and-loss accounting, without monetary circulation — whether metallic money as now or labour-money — and on the basis of an economic plan, organises production without using a unit of account and distributes the means of subsistence according to socialist principles.’ (O. Neurath, Wirtschaftsplan und Naturalrechnung, Berlin, 1925, p.84)
As the last part of this passage indicates, Neurath too argued that consumer goods could be directly allocated to people in kind.
(…)
In the end, then, it was Otto Neurath, with his view that socialist society could organise the production and distribution of wealth directly and solely in kind, who was on the right track.”
Having said this, Neurath did seem to have a rather centralised view of how production and distribution would be organised, with free distribution rather than free access.
There is a version of his works online Here so if anyone wants to read directly they can.
Interesting Otto was impressed by wartime planning. Ernie Mandel argued that central planning can be made to work by citing soviet tank production during the Second Great Working-Class Cull. Of course soviet managers who got things wrong were taken out and shot.
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