Democratic Socialist Planning: Back to the Future

Some socialists have continued to argue that there is nothing wrong – indeed, that there is everything right – about early socialist visions of an economic system in which workers manage themselves, and worker and consumer councils plan and coordinate their activities together. And it has been thirty years since Michael Albert and I first proposed a model of participatory economic planning for the twenty-first century to show that deviating from this vision, to instead champion a model of worker-owned enterprises coordinated by markets as a way of escaping the dying Soviet system of state enterprises coordinated by a central plan, was both unnecessary and a mistake. The participatory economics ‘model’ has since been refined a number of times because it behooves those like myself, who continue to propose that councils of workers and consumers plan and manage their interrelated activities themselves, to explain concretely how they can do this, because it turns out it is neither obvious nor simple. The point of making a libertarian socialist vision more concrete is not to dictate to those who will live in some future economy what they must do. The point is to show by counter example why workers and consumers need not expose themselves to the anti-social forces inherent in markets nor to the authoritarian dynamics inherent in central planning because they can plan their interrelated activities perfectly well themselves. This essay reviews what the participatory economics model contributes to making the vision of early socialists more concrete, comprehensive, and convincing. While showing how and why new information technologies and capabilities are relevant to democratic socialist planning, it argues that whatever has prevented participatory planning from already being tried, it is not because it required some advance in mathematical theory, computational capacities, or information technologies yet to come. Participatory planning did not become possible only after mathematical theory evolved sufficiently to solve large, constrained optimization problems, only after computer capabilities evolved sufficiently to store and process large quantities of information quickly, and only after vast quantities of information could be accessed and communicated virtually instantaneously by anyone with a laptop computer