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The authors of "Half-Earth Socialism" ask us to imagine how a global parliament might avoid ecological catastrophe by planning economic activity.
It's a nice thought. The more novelistic chapters are fun. But the book has at least three significant shortcomings as a political polemic.
First, while they speak warmly of Otto Neurath's arguments for multi-criteria decision making techniques, their illustrative example does not describe a structured mutli-criteria decision making process. Instead, it describes an ad hoc adjustment of a linear model by a group of "planners" responding to a group of elected representatives. The basic idea is that complete "plans" would be drawn up by technically sophisticated planners to be voted on by technically unsophisticated representatives. Generally speaking, the space of possible plans would be infinite, even if many plans would be practically indistinguishable. The authors suggest a rough protocol in which the planners generate a plan by adding or removing constraints and changing the variable optimized for, at which point the representatives consider the plan and provide verbal feedback to be incorporated into the next plan iteration. This continues until the representatives approve a plan (presumably by majority vote).
Second, the books contains no discussion of decision making at different scales. Let's grant that a global parliament could decide on land use, greenhouse gas emissions, primary energy consumption in aggregate. How would these aggregate figures be disaggregated regionally? Viewing the same problem from below, we might ask how an accurate global model can be constructed without accurate regional models.
Thirdly and finally, they provide no indication of which of their proposals should be considered part of "Half-Earth Socialism", that is to say part of a program to which others would have to assent to make common cause with the authors, and which proposals are merely preferences they personally would advocate for within the new dispensation. They put forward ecological arguments for veganism, for example; is that something about which socialists can reasonably defer decision, or is that part and parcel of a commitment to socialism? A perhaps related shortcoming is the total absence of a legal theory for this future society. Is each plan a law, adopted by the global parliament? Can that law be overturned? What are the sanctions for breaking it? Will there be law defining the planning procedure, or is that itself to be defined anew with every meeting of the global parliament? Would socialist legality distinguish "constitutional" laws from others? Would planning procedures be definined at the constitutional level? How precisely? How would the constitution be amended?
The absence of a legal theory seems to commit the authors to a view of the law as we know it today as distinctively bourgeois, destined to whither away once technically sophisticated "planning" supplants the exchange of commodities with money (Cf. Pashukanis).