Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail: Toward an Expanded Notion of Democratically Planned Postcapitalism

Abstract

With the advent of digitalization, the more techno-optimist among critics of capitalism have articulated new calls for post-work and post-scarcity economics made possible by new advances in information and communication technology. Quite recently, some of this debate shifted for calls for digital-democratic planning to replace market-based allocation. This article will trace the lineages of this shift and present these new calls for digitally enabled and democratic planning. I will then argue that much of the discussion focuses on capitalism’s laws of economic motion, while rendering less visible capitalism’s social, political, and ecological ‘conditions of possibility’. To remedy this shortcoming I will ask how these fit into the recent debate and suggest avenues to extend the discussion of democratic planning in that way. Concretely, I will discuss features of a postcapitalist mode of reproduction that abolishes capital’s subordination of non-waged and waged care work. The following part will focus on both planning’s need to calculate ecological externalities and consequently determine sustainable and egalitarian paths for social and technological development on a world scale. The last section will elaborate on the ‘democratic’ in ‘democratic planning’ in terms of planning’s decision-making, multi-scalar politics, and politics of cultural recognition.

The role of work and social protection systems in social-ecological transformations: Insights from deliberative citizen forums in Sweden

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The ‘means’ and the ‘ends’ of economic calculation: The missing aspect of an epochal dispute

“…The core intention of collectivist central planning is to limit individual choices and deprive individuals of the opportunity to own key economic resources. This discrepancy is often concealed by the term ‘democratic’, which is becoming a common substitute for ‘socialist’ (Cottrell & Cockshott, 2008; Sorg, 2023). This is perhaps ironic in that the real‐life builders of socialism in the twentieth century, who still inspire many left‐wing thinkers, often considered democracy a reactionary instrument that legitimised injustice and humiliation (Trotsky, 1920, p. 38).…”

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