Laymen explanation of concrete menachisms of planning

So, could someone explain to me how would ideas of democratic planning be concretelly applied?

Is the plan of production to be local, regional, national or international?

Also how does that relate to nationalization, if revolution comes in a wave, in one state and then another, etc, and not simultaniously across the world?

Can there be directly democratic central planning? As I understand it, left communists advocate that, with directly democratic delegates forming a council that makes the economic plan. Also another way that maybe such thing is could be done is by the people deciding on a general plan by a referendum instead of the central committe making it. Also, if there is to be a general plan, what timeframe should it encompass- one year, five years? Is there to be a general plan, or plans only general to branches to specific secundary industries?

About decentralized production- who should decide on quotas about how much things should be produced in different workplaces, the workers in the workplaces themselves- making production sort of of a spontaneous coordination, of should it be decided by federations of worker councils? Again, federations at what level- local, regional, national, international? Should it be across industry or divided by branches of industry? Or maybe it should be decided at all by the workers councils, but by consumer councils on the level of communities (those would of cource include the workers being that make up the bulk of the community), and again there is a question about the level of communities and their federations. Or should the plans be made by comittees made for making a compromise plan by putting together proposals by workers and consumer councils, as parecon suggest. Which is by the way the only specific suggestion that I came across, that spells out a precise proposal of how things should work.

A lot of questions :grin: Just to add that I'm interested in a plain, down-to-earth explanations, as people say "explained in your own words", in laymen terms, with concrete explanations, if you can point me to such posts or esseys, or if someone isn't too bothered to write an explanation, that'd be great.

Here is how I see it potentially working. Workers councils will run each enterprise, and consumers councils will be elected in communities by popular assembly. Information technology will be used to process economic data, including consumption patterns, resource availability, ecological impact, productive capability, etc.

Workers and consumers councils will federate together on a local, regional, national, and international level. Computer algorithms will process economic data and create a series of potential economic plans that will result in the creation of an artificial abundance, allowing for free self-determined consumption by all. Workers and consumers councils, through federation, will democratically determine the best plan in a given period. Once a plan is agreed upon, the federated councils will then decide how to best implement the plan. Once this is all figured out production begins, and aims at meeting the target quotas. We will automate every part of production that can be automated, to reduce the need of human labor and enable everyone to have more free time and less labor time.

This would be a system of directly-democratic cooperative planning, using information technology and all that is made possible by it. With the technological power we have today, rational economic planning is not only possible but imperative.

Yes....


Centralization-Abstraction Diagram of Political Forms

http://s6.postimage.org/xxj3liay5/23..._NEwo_V_fs.jpg




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

http://s6.postimage.org/ccfl07uy5/Mu...Consumptiv.jpg



Same basic idea -- as much as possible, as quickly as possible.



This relates to a common misperception that potential feasible post-capitalist approaches need to be beholden to the *historical*, Soviet-type approach -- basically, a 'blueprint', designed from the top-down, to encompass a grand plan that accounts for all social production.

While the very definition of socialistic cooperative social planning inherently *implies* centralization, this fact doesn't mean there can't be some 'wiggle room' along the way, as for realizing a truly 'bottom-up' process instead of a 'top-down' one.



Ultimately, yes, decisions -- especially over particulars -- should / must be decided by the liberated laborers themselves, per 'self-determination', from the individual outward, and at all scales of involvement / deliberation.

But I differ with tradition here, in that, due to current communications technology, we no longer need *any* kind of political representation anymore, whatsoever:




And, no quotas needed -- the determination of what should be produced can be found from the communicated needs and desires of the population itself. I developed a model that accommodates this -- here are excerpts:




(Again) no political personages required -- see the 'Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy' illustration above, and think of how that approach could function in a bottom-up way.



Yup -- good topic.



I've come across this blueprint-by-computer approach before, and I find it to be too technologically substitutionistic -- and too top-down as well.

Here's from another thread:

There's no consensus on how a such an economy would look. Nonetheless, coherent models of how things *could* be as an alternative to capitalism need to be devised IMO.

To avoid too much waffle il give a brief outline as I see it:

• A planned economy must be a dynamic thing. Yes there maybe quota for certain industries to provide x or y amount of services, but the plan as whole must be capable of being readjusted very regularly in light of new information. By readjusting we mean matching the plan with what it is currently feasible to produce with the current means of production. Better to think of a planned economy less like a movie script and more like a nervous system, with information flowing freely from the periphery to the core and vice versa

• Today we use money to make economic calculations, but this can also me done with labour time, as it is an attribute common to pretty much every product and service in an economy. People can be remunerated in vouchers equal to the labour time that they have contributed, which can then be "spent" in the communal stores on goods/services equal to that value. We would want to gauge societies production priorities and match that with the labour available in the finest possible detail.

• Decision making. I personally would advocate all administrative bodies being made up of a random selection of the population to best ensure equal representation, much like a jury. This can be augmented by technical experts who are elected where specialist knowledge of a subject is needed. The central planning agency itself could be more like a distributed network. Workplaces feed all current information about their production status into a global database that is there for all to see, to enable the planning agency to make adjustments to the plan in real time.

• As for workplaces, people can join wherever there is a vacancy much like today. However, they should be free to self-manage and decide how to best carry out their role in the plan as they see fit. Freed from the pressure of cut-throat market economics, hopefully we will be able to experiment with more egalitarian and creative forms of workplace organization.

Thanks for the thread. it's made me realize just how hard it is to begin describe alternatives to people without trying to tell everyone everything all at once!

There's nothing *wrong* with the fundamental focus on labor time, but the labor *voucher* approach to implementation is too problematic since it isn't 'free-access', as a post-capitalist political economy is supposed to be.

One could even say that *any* indexing of labor time to material rewards is *too much* like commodification, since labor -- while supposedly liberated -- would implicitly be valued according to what it produces, per locality. This makes it more like *syndicalism* than anything else, and we'd doubtlessly begin to see economic competition (for more labor productivity and lower voucher-rates) among the various syndicalist productive entities.