Socialist Planning Research Articles

Planning and truth: the Bulgarian 1963 reform and the problem of profitability

ABSTRACT The conventional account of socialist planning proposes that annual plans were sets of imperative requirements that kept the economic actors from planning for themselves and doomed them to inefficiency. This article claims that planning was an intricate mechanism of negotiations between economic, political and social actors, mediated and regulated, but never actually subdued by the communist party based on an analysis of the Bulgarian 1963 reforms, largely neglected by the historians. Furthermore, the conventional account claims that the 1960’s economic reforms intended to repair the socialist economies by supplementing planning with market elements, such as profit and credit, yet the reforms were compromised by the political elite. This article claims that, on the contrary, the reforms intended to repair the socialist economic system by inscribing mechanisms of horizontal bargaining in its very core, irreducible to the vertical bargaining described by Janos Kornai.

Input-output planning and information

In this paper, we show how socialist planning can be based on input-output data. We argue that the information required for this can be obtained by a central planning agency and thus dismiss Hayek’s information argument against socialism. We further show how economic planning can be made responsive to consumer demand through a feedback control mechanism. Output targets of products would be adjusted in response to observed consumer demand or based on predictions about future demand. Planners can use machine learning to make more accurate forecasts. The valuation of goods plays an important role in the feedback control mechanism. The values of goods can either be measured by the labour time necessary for their production (labour values) or through shadow prices based on linear programming.

The political economy of complexity: The case of cyber-communism

This article analyzes cyber-communism and the feasibility of central planning from complexity theory. It first introduces the most known definitions of complexity in economics, namely computational and dynamic complexity. This enables to construct a complexity political economy from which then deal with cyber-communism. This political economy highlights the notion of cultivation, as a natural selection approach to established successful institutions and rules. In contrast to cultivation, the article presents the notion of control, which corresponds to traditional political economy, as the belief in the effective alteration of economic variables by a group of planners or policymakers. This work emphasizes some problems central planning faces: self-reference, noncomputability of optimal points, reflexivity, and less adaptive capacity. It concludes that cyber-communism conflicts with a complexity political economy based on cultivation, and that cyber-communist planning is not realistic, ultimately meaning that technology cannot allow and effective socialist planning.

From city in the park to “greenery in plant pots”: The influence of socialist and post-socialist planning on opportunities for cultural ecosystem services

The paper examines the links between the cultural ecosystem services concept, political ideologies and urban planning. In particular, it investigates the extent to which cultural ecosystem services were considered in urban planning in socialist and post-socialist Zagreb. We conducted a content analysis of three socialist and two post-socialist plans of Zagreb and interview transcripts with urban planners and academics. To take account of the relational character of cultural ecosystem services, we assessed the extent to which urban planning facilitated opportunities for human–ecosystem interactions rather than individual cultural ecosystem services themselves. This revealed planning factors that helped promote and discourage conditions for CES to arise. The findings indicated that socialist planning facilitated interaction opportunities to a wider extent than post-socialist planning, mainly by providing abundant, fair-sized, well-distributed green spaces with clearly outlined functions. The proposed assessment approach could be implemented in the planning process to evaluate how conditions for CES generation are provided by the current planning cycle and inform the process in the following cycle.

Craft Production in a Socialist Planned Economy: The Case of Jingdezhen’s State-Owned Porcelain Factories in the Mid to Late Twentieth Century

This article explores how politics influenced the autonomy of the craft field in China, with a focus on state-owned porcelain factories at Jingdezhen from the mid to late twentieth century. It is based on a study of the archival materials of China’s socialist planned economy, as well as oral histories of fourteen former workers of Jingdezhen’s state-owned porcelain factories. Some aspects of the autonomy of the porcelain industry were strengthened in China’s socialist planned economy period—for example, higher qualification levels among workers; improved precision; broader access to craft skills; and the preservation of some traditional techniques. Other aspects show a weakening of autonomy, such as the lack of creative freedom for individual makers to respond to the market with self-determined strategies; the introduction of industrial logics in a field previously based on the authenticity and integrity of craftsmanship; and the erosion of traditional apprenticeship.

The Potentials and Limits of Computing Technologies for Socialist Planning

The notion of productive forces is usually grasped from a narrow perspective which reduces its content to technology and productivity. The distinction between force (Kraft) and its expression (Äußerung) plays a key role in Marx's dialectical analysis. Insofar as force is the outcome of a relation in dialectics, productive forces comprise an active element, namely labor. It is through the mediation of this active element that relations of production intervene in the process of expression of productive forces, which indicates the agency, that is the subversive subject, its empowerment and possibilities. Under capitalism, all aspects of individual and social life are reduced parameters to serve the overriding principle of profit maximization. Only the empowerment of working people can avoid such parameterization of society, which requires the abolition of the law of value as well as private property in the means of production, but is not granted by this abolition. The empowerment of workers is not an outcome of the advancement of productive forces, but is rather a significant element of the latter.

Entrepreneurship and Decentralised Investment in a Planned Economy

Abstract Since the 1980s, authors of the Austrian School have argued that the problem of rational allocation in a planned economy is not computational or technical in nature (static optimisation, with given information) but a question of dynamic efficiency (innovation and the creation of new information), and that this would be impossible without market processes and free entrepreneurship. In this article, we argue to the contrary that a planned economy can effectively drive dynamic efficiency. We first reveal that the Austrian thesis on the impossibility of dynamic efficiency in socialist planning is based on tautological arguments, or on problems already solved by technological development. Secondly, we present an institutional formula for promoting innovative activities and entrepreneurship within a framework of social ownership of the means of production and social control of investment.

Global Economic Planning as a Challenge for the Labour Movement

The central line of argument in this contribution is that the urgency of the economic, social and environmental crises demands to go beyond the institutionalist efforts to install more Global Framework Agreements or Decent Work Campaigns that often only come with piecemeal changes, if at all. The social uprisings in various countries around the globe that erupted in 2019 and 2020 underline the emerging pressure towards a broader vision of systemic change. The shift of emphasis towards Global Economic Planning opens up the following perspectives: 1. It allows to study and adapt the methods used by transnational corporations in economic planning for alternative purposes. 2. It allows to retrieve experiences made both in capitalist planning, i.e. in the framework of industrial policy and developmental states, and in socialist planning and to apply enhanced versions of both. 3. It allows to intervene strategically in order to exploit the potentials of renewable energy for which investment is stagnating globally. 4. It offers an avenue for the labour movement to become a reliable partner of environmental initiatives and the global climate movement. 5. It can provide an avenue for mass participation in systemic change with concrete objectives like the conversion of the automobile industry, decentralised renewable energy grids, and public and community based health and care systems.

Deconstructing and Historicizing Access to Medicines: The Changing Priority of Pharmaceutical Governance in China.

Securing access to medicines (ATM) is critical for improving public health outcomes. Existing research has long identified and analyzed various barriers that may impede ATM at the global, national, or local levels. However, it tends to adopt a normative perspective to prescribe what infrastructures, resources, and measures should be put in place to improve ATM. Little scholarship has explored how and why countries may prioritize certain dimensions of ATM over others in pharmaceutical governance within specific historical contexts. This article fills that gap by deconstructing and historicizing the concept of ATM. The author aims to make two arguments. First, tensions easily arise between different dimensions of ATM, and prioritizing certain dimensions in pharmaceutical policy may impede improvements in others (e.g., availability vs. affordability). Second, which dimension(s) of ATM might be prioritized in the state’s pharmaceutical policy hinges upon social, economic, and political forces. To substantiate these arguments, the author draws on interview and archival evidence from China. Specifically, the author provides a historical account of how and why the priorities of pharmaceutical governance in China changed over time: 1) 1949—late 1970s: pursuing both drug availability and affordability through socialist planning; 2) early 1980s—2015: priority shifting from availability (before the mid-1990s) to affordability (after the mid-1990s); 3) 2015—present: striving for a rebalance between drug availability and affordability.

The Baconian Background of Hogben’s Scientific Humanism

This essay examines the impact of Baconian utilitarianism on Lancelot Thomas Hogben (1895–1975), a biologist whose view of science was heavily intertwined with his support of socialist planning. Like Bacon and Marx, Hogben considered science to be a collective tool of utmost importance for empowering people and improving life conditions through a conscious and methodical intervention on our surroundings. Convinced by the fundamentally applied nature of science, Hogben successfully used the principles of the emerging Marxist historiography of science in his popular science books to teach abstract ideas through their origins in practical life. Furthermore, he extended the view of science as planning from biology and economics to linguistics by designing the international language Interglossa that would also serve to enhance scientific literacy in the lay public.

The Continuing Adventures of the Dialectic

This article begins by dwelling on the forms and causes of Western “historical nihilism” toward the Chinese socialist project. I then analyze issues attendant to Deng’s appeal to “liberating thought,” particularly as regards the importance of the development of the forces of production and the dilemmas this presents for socialists. This segues into a discussion of contradiction analysis, which is theoretically central in Boer’s book. Through the discussion of the difference of such analysis from forms of “either/or” logic dominant in the West, I arrive at the significance of the category of the “concrete universal” (Hegel) for the understanding of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” After unpacking some of the central issues posed by the “reform and opening-up,” I dwell on the question of socialism in China. I emphasize some of the complications inherent in the combination of socialist planning and the market economy, including the issue of the conception of a future or prospective “communist” stage. The discussion concludes by dwelling on issues of law and political structure, with particular emphasis on the innovative importance of “rule of law” in the socialist context, as well as on the importance of contradiction analysis for understanding the dialectic of sovereignty and globalization.

Theory … “With feet on the Ground”

It is essential to develop the theory for the socialist transformation as the guide for permanent development, based on experience and accumulated knowledge, to orient our process of socialist socialisation with greater effectiveness and sustainability in current and future conditions. This text reflects on and presents proposals on conceptual elements present in the current Cuban process of transformations, and their expression in the terms that appear in the Island's governing documents, in the first place the new Magna Carta. We focus our attention on state work in socialist planning. Socialist planning is essentially a political task, the content of which is inextricably linked to that of the new type of state. From this comes the importance of the conceptualisation of the state, as an organisation of society and as a specialised political institution - the System of Popular Power - and the conceptualisation of the “work of governing” in a process of socialist transformation.

The Evolution of the Right to Property in India: From a Law and Development Perspective

AbstractProperty rights are contentious in any jurisdiction. But the right to property in India, adopted as a fundamental right in Article 31 of the Constitution of the India, 1950 (“Article”), has had a particularly tumultuous legal and political history. It holds the distinction of being the second most debated Article in the Constituent Assembly, the most amended provision of the Constitution and the only fundamental right to ever be deleted. The history of the Article is commonly understood as arising from an ideological institutional conflict between a Parliament in pursuit of socialism and a judiciary safeguarding individual freedoms. However, looking at the Article and its initial amendments from a “law and development” perspective provides a critique of the current narrative of “conflict” and offers an alternative interpretation of the history of Article 31. The paper argues that rather than arising from the pursuit of either authoritarian socialist planning or an egalitarian social revolution, the travails of the Article came in the context of India’s quest for economic modernity through a process of “passive revolution”. The powers of eminent domain reinforced in the Article empowered the state to modernise economic relations in industry and agriculture by restructuring a semi-feudal pre-capitalist property rights regime established during colonialism along productive capitalist lines. In this process, the Article helped to consolidate the powers of the developmental state in the domain of economic policy; forged the relationship between state, market and the individual; and helped shape the regime of private property rights in India. Understanding the evolution of the fundamental right to property in India therefore, not only tells a key part of India’s development story but also contributes to the “law and development” literature by assimilating diverse historical experiences within its framework, which, as critics have long argued, tends to have a strong Eurocentric bias.

New Norms — Old Modus. Tensions from Socialist Planning Surviving the Regime Change in Hungary

Post-socialist transformation is a widespread phenomenon with numerous variations. Even if the study is restricted to Eastern European countries, their recent developments vary depending on their distinct socio-economic contexts and historic path dependencies.
 In constructing new planning systems, these countries did not have a single model to follow. What they shared, however, is that the emerging market system demanded new regulatory forms of planning that were alien to the socialist planning tradition, in which the plan operated more as a horizontal structure synthesizing a range of sectoral public investment programs [Tsenkova, 2011]. Whereas the phenomena of post-socialist urbanization are elaborately reviewed and debated in the discourses on urban geography, economy and governance, the literature on urban planning in these cities is very limited. The first generation of studies on the era’s planning challenges, lacking sufficient empirical material, offered generalized accounts of the links between land reforms, the alienation of real estate, and the development of planning institutions [Andrusz, Harloe, Szelényi, 1996; Bertaud, Renaud, 1997; Hamilton, Andrews, Pichler-Milanović, 2005; Tsenkova, Nedovic-Budic, 2006; Stanilov, 2007]. In response, this paper presents an empirically deep single case study of the urban planning regime’s transformation in Budapest between 1990 and 2010. It introduces the substantial time shifts between the reforms in different domains and the resulting tensions. Whereas economic reforms had already targeted the decentralization of the planning under socialism in the 1960s, the spatial planning system‘s persistence remained apparent even in the years following the regime change. With the rapid and excessive post-socialist decentralization of authority, political competences concerning urban planning were delegated to lower levels. In contrast, its modus operandi long remained largely unchanged, not properly adapted to the transformation of the economic and political systems. The hypothesis is that there exists a nexus between the persistence of socialist planning and the laissez-faire type of post-socialist urban development by means of the internal tensions within the urban planning system and its resulting dysfunctionality under the new market conditions.
 The methodology for this study draws on content analysis of policy documents and secondary sources of analytical information pertinent to the urban planning regime in Budapest during the time period under investigation, supplemented by personal interviews with major stakeholders.

Janos Kornai: a non-mainstream pathway from economic planning to disequilibrium economics

This paper first positions Janos Kornai in the controversies about the feasibility of socialist planning (Lange, Hayek). Kornai has leant in favor of Hayek???s thesis contending that, without an actual market price system for conveying information to those who can beneficially use it, a socialist economy is impracticable. The paradox is that Kornai worked at the Computer Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in relation with the Planning Institute of the National Planning Office and conceived an algorithm for decentralized two-level planning, i.e., the best improvement ever brought into Lange???s model of market socialism. This is due to Kornai being also involved in actual dysfunctions of central planning in Hungary (shortages) that he eventually theorized with disequilibrium modelling in his Economics of shortage. However, the latter departs from standard disequilibrium economics (Barro???Grossman) which has been joined by most former planometricians (such as Malinvaud for instance). Eventually Kornai adopted a more institutional approach for his recommendations as regards post-communist transformation into a market economy with a Hayekian flavor, in particular his support to an organic development of a privately-owned sector within a gradualist process instead of mainstream-supported overnight privatisation. His recent analysis of capitalism as a surplus economy shows the continuity of his non-mainstream view of disequilibrium over five decades. All this makes Kornai an original front-running researcher and breaking-through analyst, though somewhat paradoxical, and a quasi-heterodox economist, one foot in and one foot out of the mainstream.

Kornai’s Overcentralization and naïve empiricism

This paper addresses Janos Kornai’s early work on the socialist economy as summarized in his first book, Overcentralization in Economic Administration. In this context, I discuss the parallel research of the 1950s by American scholars, such as Joseph Berliner, David Granick, Gregory Grossman and Eugene Zaleski, who used similar methods and arrived at similar conclusions. Kornai found little evidence of comprehensive planning. Instead, he determined that the planning system consisted of quarterly gross output orders that could readily be manipulated by managers and had to be fulfilled at any price. Kornai’s Overcentralization already contained the seeds of Kornai’s later key findings of the dysfunctionalities of socialist planning; namely, soft budget constraints and the shortage economy. Kornai’s most important finding was largely overlooked throughout the socialist world—that the planned economy could not be reformed by partial measures.

The other Europe? Scandinavian intellectuals and the fragility of democracy in the wake of World War II

It is often argued that the Scandinavian post-war period was marked by a democratic optimism that contrasts with the deep concerns for the inherent dangers of popular sovereignty and the thorough moral reconsideration that took place on the European continent in the wake of World War II. This article seeks to balance this view by exploring what Scandinavian intellectuals believed had caused the collapse of democracy in Europe in the 1930s and what they saw as the main threats to democracy in the emerging post-war societies. Focusing on the fears of socialist planning, concerns about the position of individual rights and freedoms in modern societies, and the anxieties concerning the secular total state, the article suggests that the Scandinavian post-war democratic settlement was indeed built around a different set of ideas from those evident in many other places in Europe, but that it was no less informed by recent historical experiences or concerns for the fragility of democracy.

Conceptualizing the future: Marx’s value theory and the debate on markets and planning

Marx posits a vision of socialism in which mass-produced items are priced via computation of embodied labour-time with remuneration such that one hour of actual labour is exchanged for items produced in one hour. But implementing Marx’s scheme today would incentivize increased individual labour time and drive a tendency to ecologically harmful “growth.” As pushing beyond capitalism remains indispensable, we must assess newer models of socialist planning and distribution providing alternatives to capitalism and market socialism.

Back to the Post-Industrial Future: An Ethnography of Germany's Fastest-Shrinking City by Felix Ringel

Reviewed by: Back to the Post-Industrial Future: An Ethnography of Germany's Fastest-Shrinking City by Felix Ringel Marcel Thomas Back to the Post-Industrial Future: An Ethnography of Germany's Fastest-Shrinking City. By Felix Ringel. New York: Berghahn, 2018. Pp. 238. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-1785337987. How do urban communities deal with the loss of their future? This is the central question Felix Ringel asks in his ethnographic study of Hoyerswerda in Saxony, often described as Germany's fastest-shrinking city. Hoyerswerda was planned as a socialist model town from the late 1950s onwards and experienced a rapid growth in the socialist era, with its Neustadt entirely built from prefabricated concrete blocks. However, following reunification, the privatization of the mining and energy industry that had provided the foundation for Hoyerswerda's postwar boom resulted in the loss of jobs and perspectives in the city. Hoyerswerda began to shrink rapidly from just under 70,000 inhabitants in 1988 to a mere 33,000 in 2016, and one housing block after the other fell victim to demolition. With high unemployment rates, an aging population and a growing neo-Nazi scene, Hoyerswerda became widely seen as a city without a future. Ringel lived in Hoyerswerda for sixteen months in 2008–2009 and fully immersed himself in the local community of the dwindling city: he interviewed local politicians and activists, spoke with members of the clubs and associations, and boarded with local families to understand how the inhabitants of Hoyerswerda engage with different notions of the city's future. One of the great strengths of the book is Ringel's ability to strike the balance between capturing the richness of life in the community [End Page 206] and, from a critical distance, carefully dissecting the locals' own assessment of their prospects. Back to the Post-Industrial Future is not a study of everyday life in the city per se, nor is it a history of Hoyerswerda's recent past. Instead, Ringel focuses on political debates, urban planning campaigns, or conversations within the community through which the future of the city is negotiated. The local really matters in this story: the author does not simply see Hoyerswerda as an example of larger phenomena, but examines how broader structural changes interact with the local context. This richness of local meanings is still too often missing from explorations of change in contemporary Germany. In his stimulating analysis of official and private attitudes, Ringel shows that in Hoyerswerda the future has been rendered a problem in its own right—a phenomenon he describes as "enforced futurism" (23). He develops his argument in five thematic chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the locals' different attempts to contextualize shrinkage, while chapter 2 more specifically focuses on the engagement with the socialist and Nazi past in the city. The third and fourth chapters are devoted to attempts to envision an alternative future through urban planning interventions and the role of affect in local politics. Chapter 5 continues to investigate this search for a viable future and shows how the inhabitants of Hoyerswerda have tried to invent new "traditions" after 1990. The conclusion ties together the concepts developed in the previous chapters and also offers the author's reflections on his more recent return to Hoyerswerda, an important addition given that the ethnographic research at the heart of the book was carried out a whole decade ago. For scholars of post-Wende Germany, Ringel offers a refreshing perspective that questions many of the established narratives about the legacy of socialism. A central strength of the book is that it does not rely on simplistic interpretations of Hoyerswerda's problems, which have often been explained with the failure of socialist planning or the unforeseen negative outcomes of reunification. Ringel repeatedly makes clear that he approaches the city "not with an eye on the past, but with a focus on the future" (55). In his refusal to locate Hoyerswerda's problems in its socialist past, he adds to a body of recent work by Eli Rubin and Annemarie Sammartino, which has reconsidered socialist model cities as more than just a failed utopia. Revealing the complex range of factors behind Hoyerswerda's recent...

Cálculo y plan. Balance de un debate a partir de las posibilidades técnicas actuales

La crítica a la posibilidad del cálculo económico en el socialismo ha señalado dos tipos de problemas presuntamente insolubles: uno de computación, ligado a la escala de una economía compleja (esta sería la objeción de la escuela neoclásica) y otro de disponibilidad de información (según apunta la escuela austriaca). El artículo hace balance de estas dos críticas a partir de los avances técnicos en las últimas décadas en informática, telecomunicaciones e inteligencia artificial, y defiende que ya es técnicamente posible balancear y calcular exhaustivamente costes en una economía con millones de productos distintos, sin que la existencia de procesos de mercado sea condición necesaria para generar la información que requiere una asignación eficiente de los recursos. La conclusión es que el desarrollo técnico actual abre posibilidades reales, por primera vez en la historia, para una genuina planificación socialista de la económica inspirada en las ideas de Marx.