{"id":8047,"date":"2022-11-07T08:00:17","date_gmt":"2022-11-07T13:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=8047"},"modified":"2022-11-13T16:01:30","modified_gmt":"2022-11-13T21:01:30","slug":"why-we-need-a-planned-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/11\/why-we-need-a-planned-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"Why we need a planned economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>hrough most of the 20th century, socialism appeared possible, feasible, even inevitable. Then socialists\u2019 confidence broke under the giant wheels of neoliberalism. The capitalist West trounced the ostensibly \u201csocialist\u201d Eastern economies on the global competitive stage. It became \u201charder to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world\u201d (Frederic Jameson<\/a>), and it appeared \u201cthere was no alternative\u201d to capitalism (Margaret Thatcher<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Phoenix-like, the resurgent 21st-century Left is regaining ideological ground. Electoral efforts internationally prove class politics still have mass appeal. Unionization and strikes are back. Anti-oppression politics adopt an increasingly anti-capitalist framework. Socialism is popular again.<\/p>\n

But recovery<\/a> remains uneven. Neoliberalism taught above all that market forces must organize the economy. This market fundamentalism affected the entire political spectrum<\/a>. Those who continued to defend socialism increasingly followed the path of Alec Nove, whose influential 1983 The Economics of Feasible Socialism<\/a> argued that large-scale coordinated economic planning must fail. Few socialists today defend a planned economy. Most, like Naomi Klein, Richard Wolff, and John Roemer, argue that Keynesian macroeconomic policies plus decentralized worker-run cooperatives must temper the indispensable role of the market in any functional socialism.<\/p>\n

\"A
\u201cDecommodification means making things free.\u201d A Covid 19 vaccination. Photo<\/a> by Christian Emmer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Others pose the gradual decommodification of growing economic segments as the way to end or at least reduce the role of market forces. (Decommodification means making things free. City parks and library books are current examples of decommodified goods.) A few such as W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell<\/a> argue that modern computing power and logistics software allow for a comprehensively planned economy to escape the 20th century debacles of planning carried out by inhuman, yet all too human, state bureaucracies. Decommodification and computerized planning are likely important assets to a transition from capitalism. Yet to focus solely on them is to sidestep the question of planning as a democratic social process. (Cockshott and Cottrell, whose Towards a New Socialism is worth reading, do in fact address the need for democracy, but their main emphasis is on tech-enhanced planning. Therefore while valuable, their work is outside the scope of this review.)<\/p>\n

Early in the ascendancy of neoliberalism, a few Marxists, still possessing the needed confidence, challenged the Left\u2019s turn to \u201cmarket socialism.” Under growing ideological siege, they developed the case for the necessity and feasibility of planning to new heights of clarity. The three writers discussed below each responded directly to Alec Nove. If these writers are correct about the perils of the market socialist vision that dominates our movement today, then their cases for planning need the attention of today\u2019s Left.<\/p>\n

Mandel<\/h4>\n

Ernest Mandel\u2019s 1986 piece \u201cIn defense of socialist planning\u201d<\/a> argues that an unstoppable trend toward \u201cobjective socialization of labour\u201d accompanies economic growth. This increasing \u201cobjective\u201d interdependence both marginalizes market mechanisms and makes them dangerously irrational. For example, large corporations coordinate their vast internal \u201ceconomies\u201d using planning, not market exchanges. Complex production chains require periods of many months to produce new products\u2014think of the annual release of new cars or the periodic drop of new iPhone models\u2014so that output cannot be governed by current supply and demand. Mass production creates demand for capital goods and parts that require routine and stability, rather than constant \u201cshopping around\u201d for cheaper prices and different suppliers. And aggregate consumer buying habits, especially regarding necessities rather than luxuries, show the same type of stable pattern. Mandel therefore argues that large and central parts of modern economic production don\u2019t require input from market signals. They could be administered through social planning or even simply automated.<\/p>\n

Not only planning but also \u201cobjective informal cooperation\u201d play a larger and larger role in the real economy. Purchasing decisions by both companies and consumers rely on direct relationships and routine more than price signals. And rather than the unlimited permanent increase of consumer demand assumed by market socialist advocates like Nove, a century of data on consumer trends internationally showed that once consumer needs reached \u201csaturation,” demand declined. This fact was at odds not only with the frantic fear that human planning can never keep up, but also with capital\u2019s imperative of self-expansion.<\/p>\n