Towards an Internationalism of Planning

This text is the translation of the last chapter of the book GOBERNAR LA UTOPÍA: Sobre la planificación y el poder popular [GOVERNING UTOPIA: On planning and popular power], published in 2021 at Caja Negra Editora.

I

The 2008 global crisis marked the beginning of a cycle of social uprisings that spread throughout the world. Even today, we are still witnessing the metastases of this event. From the Occupy Wall Street Movement in the United States, through the anti-austerity movements in Spain, Greece and Italy, to the so-called Arab Spring in several countries in the Middle East throughout the 2010s and the international feminist strike of 2018, up to the 2019 cycle of protests in Latin America and the transnationalization of the antiracist movement Black Lives Matter in 2020, protests in recent years have vehemently denounced the concentration of political and economic power enabled by several decades of globalizing neoliberalism. This extreme inequality and the unprecedented ecological destruction of this era have been registered by mottos such as “we are the 99%,” “real democracy now,” “we strike,” “end profit,” and “extinction rebellion.” Additionally, each protest cycle has brought with it prophets announcing either “the end of the model” or, less optimistically, a “terminal crisis,” which will once and for all blow capitalism to pieces. However, what has actually happened is that market fundamentalism has become stronger and firmer, as is visible in austerity policies, precariousness of labor, debt increase, State authoritarianism, and an even higher concentration of wealth among even less people.

Somehow, the political events that have shaped the beginning of the current century resemble the contradictions of the revolutionary processes analyzed by Marx in The Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, probably one of his most insightful political writings. Paradoxically, as Marx observed, the French Revolution set in motion historical events whose turbulent dynamics ended some decades later in a dictatorial coup by means of which Louis Bonaparte threw overboard the liberal concessions of earlier secular struggles, thus installing, once again, “shamelessly simple rule by the sword and the monk’s cowl.” The complex historical interaction between revolutionary and reactionary forces, so powerfully portrayed by Marx in this text, clearly resurfaces to the extent that Bible-carrying Fascism becomes a force threatening to colonize the Latin American political landscape. Superstition and mysticism are coping mechanisms against despair. This is the reason why the nihilistic furor of Pentecostal sects has often been considered the spirit of late capitalism. Emancipatory politics faces the task of building an alternative to new dark ages ahead stemming from the new extreme right: an era of walled-up and militarized ethno-States coexisting with the transnational logistic networks that support the consumption habits of those capable of accumulating debt. For those unable to consume, repression and environmental apartheid await. Responding to this threat requires a fundamental reshaping of the strategic and tactical repertoires that have characterized resistance movements for decades.

According to Hannah Arendt,^[1] the history of revolutions teaches us that if the pre-political and natural force of the masses does not pour into constituted powers capable of shaping it coherently, it will unavoidably tend to self-destruction—or to the establishment of reactionary forces, as is happening now. Historically, planning arises as a mechanism that seeks to shape the world view emerging from citizens who are active in mass movements. Planning transforms these world views into protocols and instruments of intervention capable of concretely regulating collective life. In the 20th Century, modernist planning gave rise to complex episodes of bureaucratization of public power, and monopolization of expertise; in some cases, however, planning materialized in impressive physical and social infrastructure—stadiums, parks, social housing projects, hospitals, schools, etc.—aimed at expanding fairness, and the possibilities of social life in previously unforeseeable directions. In some specific historical circumstances, these intervention projects even served as a buffer against a fascist menace by offering large parts of the population the conditions for a dignified life.

In the face of the psychic perturbation and material privation produced by neoliberalism and its profound crises, it is no surprise that the redistributive spirit and the forms of enjoyment and aesthetic elation typical of left modernisms—which made the welfare state possible—awake today a sort of nostalgic curiosity. Books such as Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley, Architecture in Global Socialism by Lukasz Stanek, and Towards an Architecture of Enjoyment by Henri Lefebvre, or Marshall Berman’s posthumous Modernism in the Streets, all explore a sensibility which today seems so distant from the perspective of the privatized and medicated stress of neoliberalism. The auratic charge of its works of art, the formal power of its music, the monumentality of its architectonic artifacts, the radical nature of its mass movements, and the high mindedness of its popular culture make the historical reality of modernism a radical critique of the lack of political ambition and outrageous inequalities of the neoliberal present.

One of the elements of new popular movements in the post-2008 political context that stands out is precisely their claim to recover the old modernist aspiration of politicizing desire. The Latin American feminist movement that formed around the International Feminist Strike 8-M is perhaps the most illustrative example of this emerging libidinal politics. Feminist potency, as Verónica Gago puts it,^[2] is an alternative deployment of power as a desiring capacity. To quote Gago, this is the capacity for “common invention against expropriation, collective enjoyment against privatization, and the expansion of what we desire as possible here and now.” One of the most remarkable elements of this movement is the fact that it has placed the body—as suffering and desiring materiality—at the center of a political project that not only agitates on the streets, but also begins to build institutions, and to achieve democratic victories. There is a decidedly futurist drive in fourth wave feminism’s attempt to understand the process of social change through the body and its multiple potentialities. The iconic bandanas of the green wave expanding through Latin America are today the symbol of this promethean and anti-nostalgic struggle for sensual, economic, and reproductive emancipation.

Similarly, and against the neoliberal misery of individualistic and ecologically destructive consumerism, eco-socialist movements have advanced worlds of “communitarian luxury,” where collective consumption takes place—parks, theaters, public pools, public transportation, sporting infrastructure, etc.—and new social relations are invented, low-carbon relations which are full of meaning. Faced with the destructive voracity of transgenic monoculture, food sovereignty movements have prefigured agro-biodiverse food systems by connecting with cities through short logistical circuits. In this context, the act of eating seasonal food becomes a feast for the senses and an excuse to come together. Against the anti-democratic and monotonous character of the spaces of waged labor, cooperative and self-managed movements trace worlds of economic heterogeneity in which people gain autonomy over their own productive activity, thus finding new forms of enjoyment and personal realization.

Throughout my book I have suggested that planning offers the necessary instruments for radical visions about alternative futures to cease being mere rhetorical or testimonial exercises, and for them to consolidate into technical protocols, to effectively circulate among different audiences, and eventually to tangibly replicate by inserting themselves in the fabric of state level decision-making. Without the organized force of the potestas and its institutional networks, utopian imagination alone is incapable of having a material impact on the real world. In this sense, planning’s peculiar capacity to combine substantive and formal rationalities—in other words, to achieve complex articulations between utopia and management—can infuse new energy into movements seeking a convincing alternative to the new dark ages foretold by the current post-globalization context.

Transforming the visions about the future that emerge from constituent power into real artifacts—urban, socio-technical, legislative, regulatory, etc.—is no trivial task however. In the past, this difficult task of translation has required that a broad range of abilities, interdisciplinary dialogue, and epistemic circuits be widely distributed in the transnational space. In other words, the possibility of developing a post-capitalist public intervention ethos requires first the development of a very specific form of internationalism: an internationalism of planning. Even though this internationalism would have to build on the transnational calling of the new geography of post-2008 social movements, it would be mainly aimed at allowing the circulation of formulae, knowledge, protocols, and prototypes capable of shaping the design of public policies on different scales. As we shall see below, the experience of the epistemic circuits that have animated and mobilized the project of neoliberalism have some important lessons to teach us.

II

Long before people like Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet and Ronald Reagan came to power, neoliberal thought had already transited from the abstract spheres of political and economic theory to the pragmatism of concrete visions for public policy. When the Presidential Palace (Palacio de la Moneda) in Santiago de Chile was stormed by the plotting right in the context of a coup d’état in 1973, the “Chicago Boys”—as the group of Chilean economists is known in neoliberal mythology—had ready an ambitious program on economic policy aimed at dismantling the developmentalist model of import substitution and replacing it with a free market model. Known as “The Brick”—due to how heavy its mimeographed copies were— the document contained both macro- and microeconomic sector prescriptions that were supposed to enable the building of a society shaped around a marginalist doctrine of the rational expectations of economic agents. Macroeconomic prescriptions focused on monetary, fiscal, international trade, tax and capital market policies, while the microeconomic ones concentrated on land, farming, natural resource and education policies. The history of the implementation of “The Brick” is well known. The knowledge production politics that inspired its creation, however, reveals lesser-known aspects concerning the tactical calling guiding these economists. According to Milton Friedman, mentor of the Chicago Boys and central figure of the monetarist school within economic thought,

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.^[3]

Before winning the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976, and thus becoming the face of the new economic paradigm that would later bury welfare States in most of the world, Friedman was considered an eccentric in his own discipline. His most important work on monetary supply and rational expectations was written at the peak of the Keynesian hegemony. Talk of privatization, price signals and subsidiary States was unheard of in the context of a macroeconomic policy aimed at securing aggregated demand and full employment through an interventionist State. Friedman’s work, however, was not merely aimed at engaging in byzantine debates against the establishment of the Keynesian economic theory. Together with intellectuals like Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Karl Popper, Friedman played a central role in the international expansion of the Mont-Pelerin Society (MPS). Founded in 1947 in a conference organized by Hayek, the society’s aim was to vindicate the interpretation of classical liberalism developed by the Austrian School. Further, it sought to offer an alternative to State interventionism and collectivism of any kind. What’s relevant about MPS’s history is that it led to a powerful international movement of technical teams and think tanks whose function was basically to create policy alternatives that could be put in place at the next opportunity.

Today it would be impossible to think about the different programs of “structural adjustment” and massive privatization of State companies that started being implemented from the decade of 1980 onwards without understanding the important role of epistemic translation played by those think tanks. They worked as nodes distributed in a wide network of knowledge circulation that traces back to the MPS. The dynamics of these epistemic circuits have been so large and complex that they have produced intellectual traditions in the fields of economic sociology and economic geography with the aim of studying the mobility of policy and governance instruments through an intricate international space of knowledge—including consulting agencies, think tanks, universities, technical operators, and power brokers. As I mention in more detail in my book, the peak of neoliberalism was accompanied by urban models, protocols and formulae (the Barcelona Model, the Bilbao Model, the Medellin Model, etc.) traveling around the world and feeding governance agendas aimed at increasing competitiveness, attracting investment, and ensuring the observance of the “efficiency gospel.” That is, neoliberal thought cannot be separated from its material existence within multiple prototypes informing modes of intervention and resource administration in the economy.

But, beyond mere urban formulae, the space of neoliberal globalization also includes many prototypes designed with the aim of providing coherence to the global flux of capital and goods. The maquila and the special economic zone, for instance, are two prototypes of industrial organization that have multiplied non-stop in recent decades, thus allowing for new forms of tax, ecology, and labor deregulation. According to Keller Easterling,^[4] the late phase of globalization has produced a new family of far more ambitious prototypes no longer limited to replicating a single architectonic or territorial artifact, but multiplying entire global cities and infrastructures networks on huge scales. Easterling calls the set of protocols through which different versions of Dubai and Shenzhen are reproduced together with their networks of logistic and infrastructure chains “the zone.” There are different versions of this zone: King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, Songdo City in South Korea, Cyberjaya in Malaysia, HITEC City in Hyderabad, India, among many others. The infrastructure, according to Easterling, is no longer just the pipes and cables sustaining modern urban life. More broadly taken, it is the matrix of formulae or the operating system that generates the spatial products that today shape the process of economic globalization and define its texture.

In its initial stages, the zone included maquilas and other manufacturing spaces with low regulation standards. Today, as Easterling explains, the zone has diversified to include more complex prototypes such as scientific, innovation, communications, financial, and logistic parks, among others. The multiplication of these infrastructural and territorial formulae has been dramatic. In 1975 there were 79 special economic zones distributed among 25 countries. By 1993 this number had nearly doubled. In 2006, the emergence of a new family of infrastructure formulae enabled an exponential growth of these prototypes, reaching a total of 3500 special economic zones throughout 130 countries. According to Deborah Cowen,^[5] the logistic city is one of the most advanced prototypes among the new generations of the zone, since it has given rise to a global urban form that coordinates the global circulation networks sustaining the world trade and war-policing activity of modern States. These cities, according to Cowen, are environments conceived to serve a mode of production increasingly structured to more directly foster speed, homeostasis, and flexibility. The defensive architecture typical of the logistic city (video surveillance, gates, walls, wire fences, etc.) has the aim of preventing possible obstructions to the flux of goods, creating environments which are free from the unforeseen factors usually present in the urban space.

The unchecked multiplication of these intervention protocols and prototypes was no spontaneous phenomenon. Indeed, many of these master plans are designed by global consulting agencies; they then “travel” thanks to networks of experts and brokers with contacts in national or local governments. I discuss some aspects of these emerging forms of neoliberal territorial design in more detail in my book. What I wish to highlight here is the practical and experimental motivation behind these knowledge circuits. These networks have enabled neoliberal ideals—of efficiency, price signaling, homeostasis, etc.—to acquire a concrete materiality under the guise of architectonic or technological artifacts, easy to replicate anywhere in the world. A further interesting aspect of this type of internationalism has been the use of the think tank as an institutional and epistemic spearhead to promote policy changes at different governmental levels. From the start, Hayek considered MPS’s internationalism as an intellectual community against collectivism, though resisting political propaganda or even public relations. That is, he thought of the MPS as the avant-garde of an internationalism that operates silently, avoiding great gestures, but waiting for the “the politically impossible” to become “the politically inevitable” and to embody their world views in instruments of governance.

Of course, it would be counterproductive for an internationalism of planning to merely copy the operational dynamics of these epistemic circuits. One of the biggest inconsistencies of both neoliberal governance and high modernist planning, as I have pointed out, has been to replicate standard formulae designed and implemented in a top-down approach. To appropriate these formulae and intervention protocols would also be no plausible solution, since nationalization itself does not solve the main problem of a post-capitalist project, i.e., the expansion of democracy in the State and within the rule of law, at the workplace, and at home. In fact, many of the prototypes of neoliberal territorial design are conceived to function within the context of political and economic authoritarianism. The zone is the archetypical example of a permanent state of emergency within the formal or legal norms of the rule of law. The great lesson that this type of neoliberal knowledge politics has to teach a future planning internationalism is, therefore, exclusively methodological and tactical.

In neoliberal consulting networks and think tanks, the usual project disposition at the face of knowledge introduces questions concerning the kind of prototypes that could circulate internationally to push a transition towards an alternative society. We should probably be thinking of the contributions proposed by grassroots innovation movements regarding replicability or re-application of technologies, so that the circulating prototypes possess a plasticity adequate to travel and adapting to the local conditions and demands of the place they land in.^[6] Experience of the institutional and socio-technical design of neoliberalism reveals the complex material infrastructure needed to activate epistemic circuits capable of real impact on the implementation of policies. The type of promethean and tactical imagination that enabled the Chicago Boys to write “The Brick” in a context of political turmoil did not come out of the blue. It required years—even decades—of building international networks, as the history of the MPS reveals. An internationalism of planning is thus mandatory if we wish to achieve any real change.

III

The current landscape of global social protest offers increasingly fertile soil for an internationalism of planning able to operate tactically to dismantle the regulatory and institutional scaffolding of neoliberalism. As Verónica Gago suggests,^[7] probably one of the most characteristic features of the international feminist movement has been precisely its capacity to conjoin massiveness with radicalness. This new feminist internationalism differs from earlier workers’ internationalisms by being rooted and territorialized in an ample heterogeneity of local struggles. From this position, it creates bonds that extend as dense multiscale networks. Because it lacks an avant-garde or a secretariat concentrating the movement’s strategic or ideological vision, Gago claims that this internationalism challenges national geometries, as well as abstract notions of class or even peoples. Additionally, the organizational figure of the strike has allowed this emerging internationalism to deploy a politics of place that is not “localist,” for it binds demands concerning gender issues with broader demands of the working class. Also, by being rooted in Latin America, this movement has powerfully introduced the pluri-national to its transnational projection, thus bringing together and amplifying the great socio-cultural variety of the territorial struggles that shape it.

Similarly, the international movement led by, at the time, Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg, under the motto “Fridays for Future,” later led to the broader Extinction Rebellion, and has turned global warming into a catalyst for a new politics of the masses. Unlike the liberal environmentalism that has dominated the political landscape of the last decades, this movement operates with an inherently anti-capitalist sensibility, despite its heterogeneity. Besides being able to organize massive demonstrations in many cities around the world, its nonviolent direct action tactics have increased the movement’s media exposure. Hundreds of activists were arrested for committing acts of massive civil disobedience. The fact that this movement is beginning to be perceived by the establishment as a menacing force (both due to its accelerated growth and to its demands, which directly target the two fundamental pillars of the process of capitalist accumulation: the fossil fuel industry and the ideology of infinite economic growth) is possibly a sign of its transformative potential. These demands, as one would expect, activated the reactionary drives of governments whose conflicts of interest with the fossil fuel industry are clear. Setting a worrisome precedent, police forces in the United Kingdom recently included Extinction Rebellion in their list of terrorist and extremist organizations, putting this movement on a par with jihadist and neo-Nazi organizations.

The consolidation of a new politics of the masses with a transnational and anti-neoliberal calling offers a powerful social and organizational infrastructure on which to build a future internationalism of planning aimed primarily at having an impact on public policy and at circulating intervention protocols. Of course, there are already some initiatives to develop international networks through which this type of applied and political knowledge might circulate. The network of Fearless Cities—whose first international summit took place in 2017 under the coordination of the rebel City Council led by Ada Colau of the movement Barcelona en Comú—is without a doubt an important effort in the path to build transnational circuits for the mobility of policies with strong territorial roots. Although the network is relatively recent, its size illustrates its evidently internationalist aims: this summit managed to bring together 700 representatives of municipal movements distributed throughout five continents. Following the initial 2017 event, the network has organized other summits in Warsaw, New York, Brussels, and Valparaíso.

Despite the diversity of its origins, Russell^[8] explains that the political project of the Fearless Cities Network is based on some central issues that inspire its intervention horizon, namely the feminization of politics, the commons, and solidarity economies. Similarly, the network of think tanks of heterodox and anti-capitalist economists organized around new democratic socialist movements in the Anglo-European world (whose main features are discussed in my book), allows us to glimpse new configurations of epistemic circuits aimed at intervention. Think tanks such as the New Economics Foundation, the Next System Project, The Democracy Collaborative, the Common Wealth, and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), among others, have become centers for the incubation of ideas and political formulae which have started to flow through the transatlantic political landscape, being upheld by political campaigns like Jeremy Corbyn’s in the United Kingdom, and Bernie Sanders’ in the United States. Some political sectors with parliamentary impact in these countries have started to speak of concrete models to, for example, transform the railway sector into a cooperative sector, or to develop inclusive property models to change the structure of governance of big corporations and make them more democratic.

These spaces are still incipient, but the internationalist sensibility that moves them is encouraging, for it might very well be laying the foundation for future and more complex forms of policy mobility. Some authors have voiced skepticism regarding the transformative capacity of these new networks of think tanks and municipal movements. Mainly, their detractors have considered the political initiatives to be too timid, being essentially aimed at mitigating and relieving the market’s polarizing effects, thereby lacking a planning proposal that operates with a view towards the future which enables it to be more affirmative than defensive.^[9] Despite the criticism, there is no doubt that these epistemic networks reveal a new mentality and a new mood in these social movements, regarding the production of knowledge, and, in particular, the idea of public intervention. There is not only a deliberate attempt to appropriate the State as an arena for debate, thereby enlarging the boundaries of the public sphere beyond the traditional dichotomies of State-market or public-private. There is also an intention to produce applied knowledge that may be used as instruments and artifacts to solve collective problems.

Thanks to the historical perspective that the passing of time has enabled, today we have gained a more nuanced vantage point regarding planning and the particular sensibility or ethos that gave rise to it in the first place. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin claims that just as “flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.”^[10] Returning to the lost worlds of planning means recovering the emancipating factor within planning, but also questioning some of its premises, and firmly alerting to its dangers. It also means unearthing the failed experiments and paths not taken which emerged in the interstices between the great paradigms of centralized planning, and thus overcoming the scalar determinism that is captivated by the attractions of the macro, the meso or the micro-political. More than oscillating between the false alternative of centralized planning or municipal planning, the challenge lies in conceiving different layers of planning operating synergically, without any one of them being subsumed under the others. This way, plan and market need not be mutually exclusive, but rather the foundation of a democratic economy whose horizon is the expansion of social freedom in collectively regulated markets. The figure of the professional planner—the white male expert—dissolves to give way to heterogeneous planning communities that combine different forms of knowledge and audiences.

Some of these principles can already be seen as humbly present, with greater or lesser intensity, in the intervention traditions that I discuss in my book. Initiatives such as the Green New Deal, Community Wealth, or the National and Integrated Care System, to name just a few examples, allow us to foresee what might be the first fragments of a new planetary conscience seeking to generate forms of socio-economic equality and democratization, whose specific attributes we cannot yet imagine. They also offer us some clues regarding the modes of general cooperation that might follow from the radical interdependence that made modern capitalism possible. By its own nature, the idea of a form of popular planning operating on interdependent but irreducible layers is perhaps related to the utopian figures that, for Fredric Jameson,^[11] belong the late stage of globalization. According to Jameson, one of the main traits of utopian imagination in this era has been the transition from a unitary utopia towards utopias under a great plurality of forms. This new diversity of the utopian strongly resonates with the Aymara idea of a ch’ixi modernity,^[12] opposed to previous discourses of communication, pluralism, hybridization, and even empire, and exhibiting the creative power of difference in its individual irreducibility.

The possibility of a popular economic planning whose proposal to create forms might be extended to the entire planet can be clearly seen in Jameson’s image of the utopian archipelago. This image refers to a constellation of discrete centers that are at the same time internally linked to each other by a structural collective object that functions as their libidinal horizon. We cannot know yet with any certainty what the post-capitalist object of desire is. Maybe the planetary crisis will eventually hasten a moment of revelation that clarifies its edges, enabling it to be named without any fears. What is clear right now is the existence of a growing archipelago of heterogenous political spaces that are united in their difference by the strong conviction that life can be better, that the misery of capitalist relations must come to an end. By appropriating the subversive content of the methodological languages and sensibilities of planning, these research-action communities are taking the future out of the hands of those who wish to imprison it and lock it up forever. These dense plots that combine—into a differentiated unity—rebel municipalities, grassroots organizations, think tanks and communications infrastructure, aspire to map the wealth that has been socially generated over so many centuries of human interdependence, and to make the future planetary system of structural relatedness more accessible and imaginable, a future system that is most probably developing now, in these furious days of social turmoil and transformation.

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^[1] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, Viking, 1963).

^[2] Verónica Gago, La potencia feminista, o el deseo de cambiarlo todo (Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2019).

^[3] Quoted in Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto, Knopf, 2007).

^[4] Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London, Verso, 2016).

^[5] Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

^[6] See Adrian Smith, Mariano Fressoli and Hernán Thomas, “Grassroots Innovation Movements: Challenges and Contributions,” Journal of Cleaner Production 63 (2014): 114–124.

^[7] Verónica Gago, La potencia feminista o el deseo de cambiarlo todo (Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2019)

^[8] Bertie Russell, “Beyond the Local Trap: New Municipalism and the Rise of Fearless Cities,” Antipode 51, n. 3 (2019): 989–1010.

^[9] See for example Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano, “Planning for Conflict,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119, n. 1 (2020): 11–30.

^[10] Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations (New York, Harcourt, 1968), 255.

^[11] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York, Verso, 2007).

^[12] Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Un mundo ch’ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis (Buenos Aires, Tinta Limón, 2018).