Economic Planning Shouldn’t Be a Swear Word
For decades, many leftists dropped talk of economic planning due to its association with Soviet bureaucracy. But both the climate crisis and the reality of massive state intervention in capitalist economies have made democratic planning inescapable.
A computer-generated image of the Project Cybersyn operations room. (Wikimedia Commons)
In his song “l’Estaca,” Lluís Llach compares Francisco Franco’s Spanish dictatorship to a stake in the ground that, when pulled hard enough, will finally be unearthed and fall. Since the end of the twentieth century, the neoliberal capitalist economy has looked rather similar — starting to totter because of its recurrent crises, but still difficult to finally bring down. In this context, the long-forgotten concept of “planning” or a “planned economy” is resurfacing in political discourse.
This term surely carries different meanings and degrees of radicalism, depending on the political position of those raising the idea. Yet, the reemergence of this concept within the Left reflects a rising interest in thinking practically about how to create a solid, well-anchored socialist order — able to resist the shocks that it will inevitably face.
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.
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