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Book Review: Schweickart and Economic Democracy

As could reasonably be expected, the fresh debate on socialism ignited by the collapse of the Berlin Wall induced several authors to theorize workable models of market socialism, a form of socialism that does not come in for the severe criticisms traditionally raised against the Soviet model. One of these, and in my opinion a very interesting one, is a model of market socialism, or economic democracy, with state-controlled investment proposed by David Schweickart first in 1993 and 1998 (building on ideas from an earlier 1980 study) and, recently, in its final version (Schweickart 2002). Schweickart proposes a critique of capitalism and a new model of society. Though vigorous and effective, Schweickart’s criticisms of capitalism are not particularly new, although his model of market socialism is doubtless original. Concerning his critique of capitalism, it will be enough to draw attention to a single datum on income distribution that is sure to prove disconcerting even to readers fairly familiar with this subject. On page 2, Schweickart (2002) estimates that the wealth owned by the 225 most affluent persons in the world equals the aggregate earnings of the bottom 47 percent of the world’s population, which is tantamount to saying that each such world nabob owns on average the total annual income of 10 million people whose average earnings are those of the bottom half of the world’s population. My main concern in this article is therefore with Schweickart’s new model of society, especially those aspects that depart from the current best-known market socialism model theorized by Ward (1958) and Vanek (1970). Consequently, this is a review essay of a very particular kind, which, instead of presenting a detailed resumé of Schweickart’s train of thought, focuses on the innovative points of Schweickart’s main proposal as compared to Ward and Vanek’s (Ward, 1958; Vanek, 1970). Section 2 highlights its salient points, sections 3 and 4 analyze in detail the kind of social control of investment theorized by