Central Planning!!

[ExUnoDisceOmnes]

Hey everyone. I've noticed that there's a strong divide between people on this forum in regards to central planning. Many say that it abolishes inefficiencies. Others say that it puts to much power in the hands of the few or is "impossible".

I wanted to hear your opinions on central planning. Without central planning, how would you hope to maximize economic efficiency and cater to the needs of the entire population? With central planning, how would you prevent corruption and how do you know that it will actually work?

I'm on the fence, and was hoping to clarify the issue for myself and others in my position.

[Victus Mortuum]

Within the Socialist mode of production, there are several proposed modes of distribution.

There's:
Central Planning: SU Style Banking and Planning
Decentralized Coordination: Parecon, Libertarian Communism
Market Signals: Market Socialism, Mutualism

Each of those has its benefits and drawbacks for different sectors of an economy. In my mind, it would only make sense to have several developing systems of distribution (presuming the mode of production has already been reset to socialism) entered into according to what communities and local worker's councils want.

[ComradeOm]

With central planning, how would you prevent corruption and how do you know that it will actually work?Simple: embed it in a socialist society. There is nothing inherently anti-democratic about central planning once a) there is sufficient grassroots input into the process, and b) the planning apparatus remains democratically responsible to the wider population

Obviously neither of these have been characteristics of past planned economies but that does not mean that we should throw the latter out entirely. We have gained a wealth of information and experience through the only modern large-scale alternative to the market and it would be incredibly foolish to disregard the techniques and systems developed over half a century. We can make it work better in a genuine socialist society

[SamV]

Central planning never has, and never will work, economic calculations are impossible in a socialist commonwealth. What we need to do is abolish currency altogether, and maybe mix a barter economy with a gift economy, none of this authoritarian crap.

[robbo203]

Simple: embed it in a socialist society. There is nothing inherently anti-democratic about central planning once a) there is sufficient grassroots input into the process, and b) the planning apparatus remains democratically responsible to the wider population

Obviously neither of these have been characteristics of past planned economies but that does not mean that we should throw the latter out entirely. We have gained a wealth of information and experience through the only modern large-scale alternative to the market and it would be incredibly foolish to disregard the techniques and systems developed over half a century. We can make it work better in a genuine socialist society


Define what you mean by central planning. If you mean classical central planning in the Hayekian sense of society-wide planning with a single planning authority compiling some immense leontif-type input-output matrix then you can forget about it. It doesnt stand a snowballs chance in hell of working. No economy, not even soviet state capitalism got near that and the soviet planning system, we know, was to a considerable extent a farce with planning targets being constantly modified to fit in with rather than guide changing economic circumstances as one might expect.


A far more productive approach, in my view is a non-market and relatively decentralised alternative to capitalism. This is where the cutting edge thinking is taking place. Central planning is passe and destined for the dustbin of history where it rightly belongs

[Zanthorus]

Here's something amusing, robbo203 in a thread in the political forum decried syndicat for putting forward an argument which he interpreted as a variant of the Mises/Hayek economic calculation problem, and in this thread he is citing Hayek in his argument against central planning. It seems that it's OK to imitate the Austrians when it suits your own political purposes. In general I would tend to agree with ComradeOm, and add that 'decentralised co-ordination' or any schemes of 'decentralised planning' are essentially contradictions in terms since the whole point of planning is precisely that everyone adheres to the plan, and it is thus 'centralised'.

[syndicat]

There are different forms of central planning. But the idea is that there is a single body that collects information about what consumers want/need, and information about the means of production and worker skills and so on, and then this single group devises a plan that consists of orders being sent to the workers to produce X. Some variations depend on differences concerning the kind of central body that devises the plan. In the more grassroots formulations (by some libertarian socialists such as Castoriadis), you have some single workers congress, and they are responsible for this. The more technocratic variants have a more statist body of politicians who have a body of elite professional planners.

the grassroots variation would suffer from certain inherent problems. Only a small number of decisions can be made by a democratic body of delegates, such as basic policy. but there are hundreds of thousands of products. so inevitably it would fall to some elite planner group to work up the plan.

that's just the beginning of the problems. any such system will be inherently inconsistent with workers management of production. that's because all the relevant decisions about techniques, products, expected quotas of output etc are simply issued as orders by the elite planning body.

what happened in the soviet union is 2 things: 1. there very quickly managers were being appointed from above, to manage workers, and Trotsky and Lenin were beating the drum for one-man management. there is a structural tendency for this kind of thing to occur. the elite planners and the appartchiks above them will want to make sure their orders are obeyed. so they'll want to appoint bosses over workers. 2. there was a systemic tendency for managers and workers on site to collude, to lie to the planning agency, to hid what their real capacity was. that's because they both had a stake in getting an easier rather than harder quota.

the problems don't end there. central planning has no way to obtain accurate estimates of potential benefits because this depends on the decisions and actual preferences of the consumers and communities affected by production.

now, there is an alternative. there is notion of negotiated coordination. this is a system where there are two lines of authority or decision-making...people who are residents in communities, and workers. Workers make their own plans for their industries or workplaces. this ensures they have a realm of power, of self-management, at work. second, people in neighborhoods have their assemblies and elected councils and they have their participatory budgeting meetings to decide on things like the kinds of collective goods they want for their community and the society, like "We need a 5 percent increase in dwellings", "We need a new school" and so on.

And then you have a society-wide process of structured negotation. There is a worker organization that all the plans are sent to. They do the number crunching and figure out the totals of projected supply (from worker plans) and total of projected demand (from household and community and regional consumption plans). Projected prices are adjusted to reflect projected balance of supply and demand. Then all the groups have to adjust their plans to stay within budget given the newly updated prices. The prices are not market prices, but prices that attempt to gauge the importance to people of obtaining various products, of the prices of using certain resources, etc.

So plans are made by the various groups in society -- local and regional and national -- and then they are "adjusted" to each other. This type of system is called participatory planning and is a decentralized system of planning. There is no single body that concocts a single plan for everyone. Rather you have an egalitarian process of interactive adjustment of plans.

[robbo203]

Here's something amusing, robbo203 in a thread in the political forum decried syndicat for putting forward an argument which he interpreted as a variant of the Mises/Hayek economic calculation problem, and in this thread he is citing Hayek in his argument against central planning. It seems that it's OK to imitate the Austrians when it suits your own political purposes. In general I would tend to agree with ComradeOm, and add that 'decentralised co-ordination' or any schemes of 'decentralised planning' are essentially contradictions in terms since the whole point of planning is precisely that everyone adheres to the plan, and it is thus 'centralised'.

The problem with this is that you seem not to realise that the argument against central planning in the sense of society wide planning is NOT the economic calculation argument. We are talking about two separate arguments here. Mises/Hayek are correct in arguing against central planning but they are dead wrong in about economic calculation in a socialist society.

I should mention also that if you read Mises you will see that he automatically assumes a socialist society would be a centrally planned one. He hardly touches on a decentralised model of socialism. But in point of fact it is the decentralised version that offers the decisive counter argument to the economic calculation precsiely becuase it incorporates a feedback mechanism in the form of a self regulating system of stock control. As long as you believe socialism would be a centrally planned system you will be unable to counter the ECA argument

One final point - decentralised planning is not a contradiction in terms. It simply means that you have many plans by virtue of having many planning centres. In a decentralised society order emerges through the spontaneous interaction of the plans. Central planning is the proposal to coordinate or plan the linkages all these millions of plans so that in effect you have only one single vast plan. It is a totally impractical idea in any modern large scale society. Ergo, decentralised planning is the only option available and it is how we organise this in a socialist society is what we should be focussing attention on.

[mikelepore]

Central planning means that those are not Portland, Oregon's trees, to be delivered only to Portland, Oregon's lumber mill, for exclusive use by the furniture factory in Portland, Oregon, for the benefit of people who have homes in Portland, Oregon, according to plans devised entirely in Portland, Oregon. Instead, the resources and industries exist for everybody, no matter where they live, and everyone shall participate in making the plans, no matter where they live. Like the astrological preoccupation with the moment of birth, people have likewise abandoned their the habitual preoccupation with geographical location.

[syndicat]

Central planning means that those are not Portland, Oregon's trees, to be delivered only to Portland, Oregon's lumber mill, for exclusive use by the furniture factory in Portland, Oregon, for the benefit of people who have homes in Portland, Oregon, according to plans devised entirely in Portland, Oregon. Instead, the resources and industries exist for everybody, no matter where they live, and everyone shall participate in making the plans, no matter where they live. Like the astrological preoccupation with the moment of birth, people have likewise abandoned their the habitual preoccupation with geographical location.


that's all well and good...except that having a single body make the plans inevitably will mean subordination of workers to a bureaucratic class. moreover, your argument is fallacious because it assumes that decentralized planning doesn't scale up to an economy over a vast region, and thus production of lumber in Oregon that goes to Florida and so on. in fact decentralized planning also is about integration of production and consumption throughout the entire revolutionary economy.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Central planning need not have a big bureaucratic planning apparatus. Computers can do much of the planning work (certainly more than the fetish for council input).

[Dimentio]

Central planning never has, and never will work, economic calculations are impossible in a socialist commonwealth. What we need to do is abolish currency altogether, and maybe mix a barter economy with a gift economy, none of this authoritarian crap.

Why not a resource-based economy or energy accounting? I cannot see a barter economy being able to administrate an industrial society.

[robbo203]

Central planning need not have a big bureaucratic planning apparatus. Computers can do much of the planning work (certainly more than the fetish for council input).

Computers are the least of the problem i.e. the putting together of the single society-wide plan in the form of a mega-gigantic matrix.


Far more problematic is the actual data-gathering process which in itself would spawn a sprawling bureaucracy of mammoth proportions


But what really kills the idea of central planning stone dead is the simple fact that economic realities are never going to be so obliging as to conform to what the planners intend meaning that for every little real world deviation from the plan, the plan will have to be rejigged in toto. This is what people dont seem to understand becuase they dont really grasp what is meant by central planning. Central planning means everything is planned from a single centre. It means millions of inputs and outputs are matched up in such a way that if something happens (e.g. a natural disaster) and you cannot meet the target for item X then that means you cannot meet the targets for items A, B and C of which X is an input which means you canot met the targets for items L, M, N, O and P of which C is an input. And so on and so forth. So you have to start from scratch and reconfigure the whole plan. It is the rigidity of the central plan that makes it completely unworkable.

Once you reject central planning then you are left with only option - the idea of a self regulating feedback mechanism that allows for the spontaneous ordering of the economy. Capitalism has its feedback mechanism in the shape of the market. A non-market socialist society needs to develop its own model of a feedback mechanism and this is where the future of socialist theorising on this subject lies. Central planning as a concept is finished. Completely.

[ckaihatsu]

The solution to this seeming conundrum of linear-vs.-nonlinear, centralized-vs.-decentralized, geographically-generalized-vs.-local, is to consider that there could be an area of emergent *complexity* within each pair of any of the two absolutes, yielding a *hybrid* system that self-reconciles, once the structure has been appropriately set up based on *scale*.

I'll suggest that, based on a geographic and productive-consumptive-volume notion of scale, there could be four 'tiers' above one's own immediate environment. So, to name them, they could be [1] entity / household, [2] local, [3] regional, [4] continental, and [5] global. (Picture a "pyramid" of four flat platforms on the ground, narrowing towards the apex, each supporting the one below.)

For any given tier there should be as much definition and qualitative / quantitative formalization as possible over regular, routine inputs and outputs. But, at the same time, it would be crucial to initially eliminate any remaining issues of boundaries / turf / jurisdiction / responsibility, as much as possible. Once done any resulting overlap of "zones" of production or consumption at any given tier should be *allowed* and *not* fastidiously, abstractly "zoned away" in the formalistic, top-down manner we're usually used to seeing.

Any emergent overlap between any two zones could go by a slightly different processing method than the clear-cut, no-ambiguity areas covered by one single zone alone. (I'll return to this in a moment.)

A *single*-zone area would, by definition, indicate that the avenues of production outward and/or consumption inward, for major industrial production and/or well-established mass consumption, would be very clear-cut and apparent for anyone to see and verify.

Perhaps a particular area only does logging, for example, and is geographically well-situated for such. There might *not* be any overlap with any nearby adjacent area for the production of logging. Thus that area could be readily defined and categorized according to its geography (and productive output) as a specific *productive* zone at a specific tier.

Or, conversely, perhaps a certain area is decidedly urban in composition and so has a fixed population size with well-known routine patterns of consumption. It would be categorized as a single distinct zone for all considerations of *consumption*.

In the case where there's the least bit of ambiguity or possible overlap or interference from nearby well-defined zones, the ambiguous area should be categorized as an 'overlap zone' of those two adjacent neighboring zones. (In the context of the U.S. this could be illustrated as overlapping zip codes.)

In practice the procedure would be to determine whether a definite point (nexus) of called-for production could be satisfied by a single / clear-cut zone, or not. If so, then there would not be any ambiguity about the best closest possible match-up, according to specifications. But if a single / clear-cut zone was *not* so apparent for the situation then, by definition, it would have to be an *overlap* zone that would be looked to to satisfy the outstanding situation. Within any given overlap zone there could simply be an internal arrangement of procedural "switching off", or "leapfrogging", to alternate the lead role among those entities within the overlap zone.

To address logistical concerns, these production and consumption zones on various tiers could be connected as well as possible both horizontally (in geographic space) *and* vertically, in terms of scale of productive output and consumption-based input. In this distibuted, yet generalizing way the material accounting for such would *not* be overly complicated, since any given point in the formation would only need to be in contact with those other associated entities nearby, below, and above. This localized, yet self-generalizing structure would be sufficient to realize the economies of scale called for by advocates of centralization while remaining under local control and mostly self-determining.

A determining political process would have to decide this entire economic supply-chain formation, so as to properly, consciously collectivize decision-making among entities at all tiers, among all zones of production and consumption, globally.

[robbo203]

The solution to this seeming conundrum of linear-vs.-nonlinear, centralized-vs.-decentralized, geographically-generalized-vs.-local, is to consider that there could be an area of emergent *complexity* within each pair of any of the two absolutes, yielding a *hybrid* system that self-reconciles, once the structure has been appropriately set up based on *scale*.

I'll suggest that, based on a geographic and productive-consumptive-volume notion of scale, there could be four 'tiers' above one's own immediate environment. So, to name them, they could be [1] entity / household, [2] local, [3] regional, [4] continental, and [5] global. (Picture a "pyramid" of four flat platforms on the ground, narrowing towards the apex, each supporting the one below.).


I dont have any problem with this - the idea of a kind of spatial hierarchy of planning - so long as it is recognised and understood that this is not central planning. Central planning is "society-wide" planning from a single centre and involves the formulation of a "single vast plan" to quote Engels. This is utterly and completely impracticable and must be rejected in no uncertain terms.

Any model that eshews central planning is by definition polycentric and your model is precisely that

[ckaihatsu]

I dont have any problem with this - the idea of a kind of spatial hierarchy of planning


More precisely, it's "quasi-spatial", and not *deterministic* on the basis of any spatial / geographic hierarchy, though it is heavily *influenced* by geographic space, for material-logistical reasons.

This is because, ultimately, it would be *mass demand* that overwhelmingly decides what to focus on for production, with liberated labor holding "veto power" based on their liberated, self-determining agreement or disagreement, and collective self-organizing ability.





- so long as it is recognised and understood that this is not central planning. Central planning is "society-wide" planning from a single centre and involves the formulation of a "single vast plan" to quote Engels.


So, with this formation, there *could* be a mass call for *moon rocks* and, as long as liberated labor was willing, such a demand *could* initiate a cascade of organizing that stretched all the way up to *global* levels, assembling and centralizing capacities from all over the world to build a space *mining* program in order to fulfill that mass demand for moon rocks. So, for the sake of argument and illustration here, this concept would not *preclude* a centralized arrangement, if one happened to be built from the ground up from all over the world.





This is utterly and completely impracticable and must be rejected in no uncertain terms.

Any model that eshews central planning is by definition polycentric and your model is precisely that


Such a multi-tiered formation might find that certain large-scale projects would be handled best with a globally *centralized* point of (co-)administration -- obviously it wouldn't be for such common, readily locally supplied things like food, but for more ambitious, civilization-scale projects there could be no other way to accomplish them.

[robbo203]

Such a multi-tiered formation might find that certain large-scale projects would be handled best with a globally *centralized* point of (co-)administration -- obviously it wouldn't be for such common, readily locally supplied things like food, but for more ambitious, civilization-scale projects there could be no other way to accomplish them.

Yes sure A few very large scale projects might be organised at a global level. But that is not a society-wide planning. Society-wide or central planning means the totality of production is organsed from a single centre and under the aegis of a single plan. Some vast large scale project organised globally would still be concerned with only a minuscule portion of the world's total inputs and outputs and even then I suspect that such project would entail a significant degree of decentralised decisionmaking

[ckaihatsu]

Yes sure A few very large scale projects might be organised at a global level. But that is not a society-wide planning. Society-wide or central planning means the totality of production is organsed from a single centre and under the aegis of a single plan. Some vast large scale project organised globally would still be concerned with only a minuscule portion of the world's total inputs and outputs and even then I suspect that such project would entail a significant degree of decentralised decisionmaking


Realistically I'd imagine that such a scale of emergent coordination would be particularly useful for things like standards -- for what fuels to use, how to supply electricity, the arrangement and construction of long-distance transportation networks, planning for forthcoming Internet services / protocols, etc. The issue of *standards*, or policy, is really central -- excuse the pun -- to politics altogether, because if things are *decentralized* enough then there *is no* politics, since there's no need for it. But politics are needed precisely to decide on policy standards so that not everyone has to provide their own fuel, generate their own electricity, drive only cars on unpaved roads, and use local bulletin-board systems (BBSes) for online information sharing.

So if we *are* to realize mass economies of scale -- so as to avoid a d.i.y.-type stasis -- then we *are* talking about things like policy, standards, politics, and society-wide / centralized planning.

[mikelepore]

that's all well and good...except that having a single body make the plans inevitably will mean subordination of workers to a bureaucratic class. moreover, your argument is fallacious because it assumes that decentralized planning doesn't scale up to an economy over a vast region, and thus production of lumber in Oregon that goes to Florida and so on. in fact decentralized planning also is about integration of production and consumption throughout the entire revolutionary economy.

All that worry about about "bureaucracy" and "subordination" only covers up the main question. If you don't agree with what I said -- that all the people should direct all the resources -- then the only alternative is that you would have the various localities, or industries, or some other units, operating as independent companies that buy and sell each other's resources in a competitive marketplace. There are no other alternatives. Somehow or other, you have to feed the outputs of one industry into the inputs of another industry. Either you have a common allocation network for all of society, which almost any fluent English speaker would call "central planning" or "centralization," or else you have capitalism, however it may be treated with the nicety of having worker-managed companies.

[gorillafuck]

Instead, the resources and industries exist for everybody, no matter where they live, and everyone shall participate in making the plans, no matter where they live.
I don't know what people everywhere want, nor am I capable of helping the planning of everywhere's economy.

[mikelepore]

Central planning is "society-wide" planning from a single centre and involves the formulation of a "single vast plan" to quote Engels. This is utterly and completely impracticable and must be rejected in no uncertain terms.

You are quick to give up on the idea of central planning. Consider that outcomes are no less "central" when they emerge from the similar directions of billions of parts. In the central nervous system, each neuron has no other goal but to react to one stimulus with one response, but a total direction emerges from similar processing happening in billions of cases. An intelligence emerges.

Besides that, there are a lot of issues that *DO* require rulings coming out of "a single center." Even to publish the guideline that radio or TV stations may not interfere with each other, that New York may have only one channel 13, is central planning. To publish the guideline that a washing machine made in city A is expected to operate correctly when plugged into the voltage in city B is central planning.

Let's not enable the anarchists to create any more of a phobia about the harmless word and concept.

[syndicat]

All that worry about about "bureaucracy" and "subordination" only covers up the main question. If you don't agree with what I said -- that all the people should direct all the resources -- then the only alternative is that you would have the various localities, or industries, or some other units, operating as independent companies that buy and sell each other's resources in a competitive marketplace. There are no other alternatives.

this argument is completely fallacious. within participatory planning, as described for example by Albert & Hahnel, there is no "competitive marketplace."

people are affected differently be decisions. the people who are most affected need to have a sphere where they get to make those decisions. there are many decisions in any given workplace that affect first and foremost the workers there. this is why they need to have a realm of autonomy, of decisions they get to control.

they do not need to be an independent company to be able to do that. there are also decisions about that workplace that will affect others, such as pollution effects or the products they make.

accountability of that group of workers requires, then, that there are conditions they must adhere to in order to continue to retain the use right to self-manage that workplace.

this is where a system of social accounting comes into play. we can measure the benefits that group of workers provide and also the social costs of their production unit. social accountability requires that there is some ratio of benefit per unit of cost they do not fall below.

the decisions about consumption, about what we want the various workplace groups to produce, also needs to self-managed, that is, by the people who are affected, which is everyone. but everyone doesn't want the same things. individual households, communities, regions, or a nation can develop their plans for what they want produced.

so the plans developed by the workers, when aggregated, provide a measure of projected supply, and the initial requests or plans of those who would consume the products, when aggregated, provide an estimate of projected demand. assuming a social pricing rule, such as "When projected demand exceeds projected supply by N percent, raise the projected price by N percent," then to stay in budget the various households, communities, regions, workplace groups will need to adjust their plans.

there is no "competitive marketplace."

your fallacy is in your assumption that the people "directing the economy" must mean that each person has the same level of say on all decisions. that is completely absurd since decisions affect people differently.

the participatory planning system i briefly described is also a form of generalized self-management, that is, a way for the "people to direct the economy."

[ckaihatsu]

social pricing rule


I would have a standing concern with the use of *any* system of abstract material values -- a "middle layer" between supply, however defined, and demand, however defined. I think there'd be a "philosophical" problem with defining the *meaning* of such a key indexing variable as 'price', both currently, of course, but also and particularly for a *post*-capitalist political economy. I'd imagine that some attempts would have to be made to give a formal, definitive definition as to what *one unit* of this abstract pricing value actually represented.

[syndicat]

I would have a standing concern with the use of *any* system of abstract material values -- a "middle layer" between supply, however defined, and demand, however defined. I think there'd be a "philosophical" problem with defining the *meaning* of such a key indexing variable as 'price', both currently, of course, but also and particularly for a *post*-capitalist political economy. I'd imagine that some attempts would have to be made to give a formal, definitive definition as to what *one unit* of this abstract pricing value actually represented.

i think this has no clear meaning.

the idea of a price in a socially organized economy is that it needs to encapsulate preferences as expressed in a socially interactive system of planning for production. In particular, people as individuals, groups, communities need to have budgets. when they decide to make a series of requests for production, the total set needs to be constrained by the budget, which represents their total entitlement to a share of the social product. If people are not constrained by budgets, then their "choices" will not give an accurate indication of strength of preferences. That's because they need to have to make a choice, X or Y?. we can't produce every conceivable thing people might want. There are limits to total labor time that we want to be working and to other resources. when people choose A rather than B that is an indication that they have a stronger desire for A.

we need to have a method to capture preferences so that we can measure the relative social opportunity costs of various productive outcomes. you can't measure social opportunity costs if people don't have a way of expressing what the cost is to them, that is, that they have to give up something to get A. when people are contrained by budgets, then they will be in the position of having to give up some things to get other things.

we can't have a measure of the value to people of the output unless we have a system like this of capturing the preferences. from this we can then measure the benefit provided by various products, and also the costs of producing them. we can't have an efficient economy unless we have a way of measuring both costs and benefits.

[ckaihatsu]

I would have a standing concern with the use of *any* system of abstract material values -- a "middle layer" between supply, however defined, and demand, however defined. I think there'd be a "philosophical" problem with defining the *meaning* of such a key indexing variable as 'price', both currently, of course, but also and particularly for a *post*-capitalist political economy. I'd imagine that some attempts would have to be made to give a formal, definitive definition as to what *one unit* of this abstract pricing value actually represented.




i think this has no clear meaning.


Actually, it *does* have a discernible meaning -- it questions the tangible material *inputs*, or *sourcing* of any given abstract valuation.





the idea of a price in a socially organized economy is that it needs to encapsulate preferences as expressed in a socially interactive system of planning for production.


I can appreciate this.





we need to have a method to capture preferences so that we can measure the relative social opportunity costs of various productive outcomes.


That method for capturing (consumer) preferences does not necessarily have to be a *price* system, though -- in my own proposed model, compatible with the topology outlined in post #14, the relative social opportunity costs would be determined with the method of (aggregated) political *prioritization* -- a clear-cut, quantified system of rankings. Here are relevant portions from it, with the document attached below.








Associated material values

consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily





Determination of material values

consumption [demand] -- Basic human needs will be assigned a higher political priority by individuals and will emerge as mass demands at the cumulative scale -- desires will benefit from political organizing efforts and coordination





Material function

consumption [demand] -- All economic needs and desires are formally recorded as pre-planned consumer orders and are politically prioritized [demand]





Infrastructure / overhead

consumption [demand] -- A regular, routine system of mass individual political demand pooling -- as with spreadsheet templates and email -- must be in continuous operation so as to aggregate cumulative demands into the political process


communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

http://postimage.org/image/35sw8csv8/

[mikelepore]

....... this argument is completely fallacious. within participatory planning, as described for example by Albert & Hahnel, there is no "competitive marketplace." ..........

That's right. What I'm trying to point out is that Parecon is a good example of central planning, because all of society's goods go through one inventory. When the bicycle factory needs steel, the steel gets disbursed from the common pot. The consumption credits issued to workers are shares of one common inventory shared by the whole society.

I use the name socialism -- others may use other names -- but an essential part of it is this: If bad weather causes a bad season of oranges, the orange workers don't have any more intense misfortune because of that fact than the shoe workers or oil workers do, because the input and outputs of each industry are society's entire inventory of all products. If the people vote to stop having gasoline automobiles, not a single worker in the gasoine automobile plant has to get thrown out of work, because that industry is just a department of the global organization. That IS central planning, and its advantages come directly from its central characteristic.

I'm complaining about the terminology being used in this topic. You hesitate to call your goal "central planning" because you have decided to reserve the term "central planning" for cases in which the system comes under the control of a bureaucracy or a bureaucratic type of ruling class. Unnecessarily, you're adding a newer connotation to an older idea.

With your choice of words, you're abandoning the strongest argument in favor of establishing a classless society. Of all the social problems caused by capitalism, the main way that capitalism causes those problems is that it has a non-unified nature, fractured into sections operated with nearsightedness. A classless society allows the interweaving of all parts into a single network. Its like an organism -- they are not the lungs' oxygen or the heart's blood, but they belong to the whole body. This is no occasion to abandon phrases like "central planning" or "highly centralized" when we describe our goal. Such terms should be among the main slogans that we promote.

[syndicat]

With your choice of words, you're abandoning the strongest argument in favor of establishing a classless society. Of all the social problems caused by capitalism, the main way that capitalism causes those problems is that it has a non-unified nature, fractured into sections operated with nearsightedness.

historically a planned economy advocated by socialists (and some anarchists) involved development of a single plan by one big meeting of some kind, such as DeLeon's National Industrial Union Congress or the National Workers Congress proposed by de Santillan. this idea of a single plan consciously devised by one big meeting or one single body is what I mean by "central planning" and this is how this term has historically been understood.

participatory planning doesn't have a single big meeting or single body that devises the plan. planning is coordinated, and there is a worker body that does aggregate all data about proposed production and proposed requests, to obtain supply and demand data for the social pricing system. this is part of what I mean when I say it's coordinated, whereas a market is uncoordinated.

[ckaihatsu]

Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

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