An Obsolete Idea?

The planned economy was originally defined by early twentieth-century socialists, such as Otto Neurath in Economic Plan and Calculation in Kind, as the antithesis of laissez-faire and the free market, which assumes competition between private producers and profit maximization as the criterion guiding decisions on production. It is instead characterized by 1) the collectivization of production decisions and cooperation between production units, which is based on 2) the direct assessment of social needs, without monetary mediation.

In light of the failures of the centrally planned system in the Soviet Union, the debate on socialist economic calculation, and the rise of neoliberal hegemony, the Left has until recently put aside calls for economic planning. Yet in the last few decades, as market coordination proved dependent on massive state interventions and as ecological crises further discredit the ideology of market self-regulation, reflections on planned economies resurfaced. This also greatly renewed the concept.

Recent calls for planning now systematically adorn the word with the qualifier “democratic” — as illustrated by the recent formation of the International Network for Democratic Economic Planning — to suggest that autocratic capture could be prevented. The potential role of digital technology in overcoming the inefficiencies of twentieth-century planning is now widely discussed.

Despite these efforts to rehabilitate the concept of planning, part of the radical left remains reluctant to embrace it for at least two reasons. First, far from being exclusive to the Left, (ecological) planning is now a term taken up by a broad political spectrum, including, ironically enough, some proponents of economic liberalism. As defined earlier, a fully planned economy theoretically corresponds to a socialist mode of production. However, since the self-regulated market is a fiction, capitalism itself has to resort to planning in practice.

Consider post–World War II dirigisme in France, where business leaders and the government met to reduce investment risks; intra-firm planning, which grows as capital continues to concentrate; or inter-firm planning, as a function of monopolistic capital’s power to subjugate smaller companies. Private actors seeking a monopolistic position constantly circumvent competitive constraints.

Alongside these dominant forms of negating competitive relations, there are also embryonic forms of ecological planning, motivated by the desperate attempt to reconcile decarbonization with the imperative of capital valorization. This capitalist-compatible ecological planning thus appears more as a rescue program for capitalism than as a revolutionary project aiming to replace the rule of the market with conscious and collective direction.

Second, even if we stick to a radical or socialist definition of planning, it’s common knowledge that the term is burdened by the obsolescence of the political ideal it represents. Why embarrass ourselves with a term associated with authoritarianism and productivism when what we want is a democratic, green socialism? The problem is that in order to demonstrate that “democratic planning” is not a useless oxymoron, advocates often engage in a speculative exercise, designing a nonmarket-based system in the abstract. Their models — for instance, the parecon model promoted by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, or Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell’s model of computerized planning — are coherent but closed in on themselves, leaving few margins for real political experiences and imagination.

It is as if proving that planning is not necessarily productivist and technocratic required disconnecting it from real-world problems and dynamics. Consequently, these models of planned economies struggle to convince skeptics, who may hark back to Friedrich Engels’s critique in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: by making “the solution of the social problems . . . spring from the human brain,” they “became lost in pure fantasy.”

The issue here is not so much in thinking about the future before it arrives, but in failing to explain how this future is rooted in the contradictions of the existing mode of production. Useful in this regard are Cédric Durand and Razmig Keucheyan’s efforts to respond to this critique in their 2024 work Comment Bifurquer. They develop a vision of ecosocialism grounded in already existing institutions and policies, which they redesign as a “functional substitute” for, rather than mere complement to, the reign of the profit motive and monetary calculation.

In short, the term “planning” refers to different realities, whether it is approached in theoretical or practical terms. Theoretically, it was defined as a mode of coordination opposed to the market, as the organization of production by the collective, based on a direct assessment of its needs. Practically, it is instrumentalized by a diversity of political agendas and suffers from the obsolescence of its political imagery and the abstract images of it advanced by its radical proponents. Faced with this divergence between theory and practice, skeptics might say that planning is either just a redundant term for economic democracy or a Trojan horse for technocracy. So why not get rid of this term and advocate instead for ecological socialism or economic democracy?

A Minimalistic Case for Planning

Here, I will argue that planning simply cannot be swept away, because it is necessary to sustain any type of economy — whether capitalist, autocratic, or democratic. By focusing on the risk that the ideal image of a planned economy may not exist in practice, debates on planning within the Left risk obscuring this basic fact. From this standpoint, advocating for planning should not amount to designing a perfectly democratic, efficient, and well-oiled economic model. Instead, it could merely stem from the consciousness that there should be planning if we want to give an alternative system the chance to exist and persist through time. This minimalistic case for planning invites us to shift the focus, from the possibility to plan democratically to the necessity of planning for democratic socialism to exist.

To illustrate this idea, it’s worth considering the Cybersyn Project and Chilean socialism under the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970–1973). This case study is especially interesting because it saw a pioneering use of information technologies to plan the economy, together with a rapid economic democratization. How did these two aspects of Chilean socialism interact? Was Cybersyn’s planning techno-apparatus of any use to the establishment of a popular power? Would the latter have existed without the former?

It is surely necessary to distinguish between the technocratic Cybersyn Project, organized by the government, and the democratic, spontaneous popular movement in the Chilean factories. As historian Eden Medina highlighted in Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, the claims that the Cybersyn Project would empower workers and serve democratic planning were not realized in practice. Only engineers and managers, not workers, were actively involved in designing the system — as denounced by cartoons in the Western social democratic press, which portrayed Cybersyn as an autocratic Big Brother–style project.

The people, on the other hand, did not wait for the deployment of Cybersyn in the real economy before they took control of the factories. The two phenomena, in this perspective, were uncorrelated and contradictory.

But this picture should also be nuanced by looking at the events of the 1972 truckers’ strike, a serious attempt at paralyzing the economy and bringing down Allende’s government. Then, the Cybersyn Project’s network of teleprinters were used in resisting the strike. Technological tools for planning proved useful to preserve the economy governed by popular power in the face of sudden shocks.

Confronted with urgent supply issues threatening to paralyze the country, the network of telex machines served to communicate urgent information about daily production and coordinate factories across the country, as detailed in Evgeny Morozov’s podcast The Santiago Boys. In this episode, Cybersyn provided the mechanisms for coordinating decisions, without encroaching on the redistribution of decision-making power to the people. The planning tools were placed in service of popular power, allowing it to minimize the damage caused by opponents of Allende’s government. This was a necessary condition for preserving — albeit temporarily — the nascent and vulnerable reorganization of the economy along democratic lines.

The Chilean experience, like so many others, teaches us that the establishment of popular power exposes the flow of resources to massive and sudden shocks. These may either be provoked externally, by the dominant power’s resistance to its overthrow (such as sabotage, embargo, boycotts) or internally, by the profound restructuring of the economy itself (for instance, degrowth).

Regardless of their origin or intent, these shocks are likely to threaten the survival and reproduction of the reversal of class relations. For a system, whether it be capitalist or socialist, is dependent on material conditions for its survival. Therefore, thinking about planning means taking seriously the question of the maintenance of any economic order, especially one that is devoid of capitalism’s coordination mechanisms (generalized market competition), and exposed to deep instabilities threatening the provision of the people’s needs.

Democracy Is Complex

This example thus suggests that planning is not somehow made redundant by economic democracy but is itself necessary to maintaining it. To take things a step further, we might ask if an unplanned democratic economy is conceivable, even abstracting from the shocks and disruptions caused by the revolutionary transition.

In such an economy, a defined group called “the people” would make sovereign decisions on production choices based on its needs, with no other constraint than the availability of resources. But what happens when “the people” makes a choice whose consequences unfold over the long term and necessarily affect a second group — people living in the future? Similarly, what happens when we acknowledge the various possible spheres and scales for defining “the people”? If democracy is exercised across multiple territorial and temporal levels, how can we ensure that a decision made at one scale does not conflict with another made at another?

The need for planning arises from the multiple expressions of popular sovereignty, in the name of that same sovereignty. No democratic decision made anywhere can ever be absolute, as it would inevitably collide with others located elsewhere in space and time. To plan, therefore, is to take into account the generalized interdependence between different democratic expressions and the resources that they mobilize. It is to ensure a permanent mediation between these expressions and their respective claims. Once again, this is not about capturing decision-making power but about allowing these potentially conflicting instances to coexist and engage in dialogue.

The idea of planning defended here bears no resemblance to the purified and idealized models designed by some enthusiasts for planning: it relates to spaces and practices dedicated to the mediation of conflict, not the negation of such conflict. In this sense, planning an economy does not imply designing and sticking to an immutable accounting rule replacing exchange value, which can then deductively orient all production decisions. Instead, it simply refers to inductive practices of communication, discussions, and adaptations among the various democratic instances. Democratic planning can thus be redefined as the conscious interconnection among distinct democratic bodies.

To use a term central to the Cybersyn Project, the idea of planning goes hand in hand with the recognition that a society can survive only if it has self-“control” — meaning that it adapts to the disturbances and shocks threatening its various systems. A socialist economy would not abolish control but change the manner through which it is exercised, so that democratic relations of production become an operational and sustainable mode of production rather than a fleeting dream.