Trajectories of a Radical Idea

This text is the translation of the first 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.

In the intent to hypothesize, in the desire called cognitive mapping—therein lies the beginning of wisdom.

Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic^[1]

I

2019 marked the beginning of a cycle of protests that shook the social and political landscape in Latin America. The overwhelming reality of extreme inequality, social injustice, state violence, and socio-ecological suffering cracked the neoliberal consensus of the past three decades, prompting massive mobilizations on the streets and public squares of the region. Despite the particularities of each territory, the demand was clear and univocal: redistribution of wealth, and democratization of political and economic power. Later, the global Corona-virus pandemic not only exacerbated the deep dislocations concerning class, race, ecology, and gender produced by the late phase of Neoliberalism; it also made these dislocations even more visible. Meanwhile, left-wing governments have been incapable of offering a viable and sustainable project of transformation. Redistribution policies implemented by several progressive administrations in the region have left the primary-exporting model untouched, a model that has been proven to be ecologically disastrous and fiscally unsustainable. The wildfires devouring hundreds of kilometers of rainforest and agro-export plantations in the Amazonian region, under the rule both of Evo Morales and Jair Bolsonaro, symbolize an overwhelming truth: the dominant order is incapable of offering a concrete alternative to the world created by capital in its own image.

In the meantime, social revolt opened paths on the streets, and the pandemic opened doors in soup kitchens, hospitals and homes. Within these multiple spaces of coming together, of cooperation and care, different worlds are being imagined and forged, worlds whose concrete realization is directly threatened by the institutional inertia of the liberal order. What to do when the flames of popular radicalism and the urgency of the crisis die out and the return to “normal” begins? How might this succession of constituent moments overwhelm an agonistic-adversarial discourse and widen the spectrum of possibilities or even what might be thinkable? The present urgently demands forms of intervening in reality capable of surpassing the limit of what the cultural critic Mark Fisher called capitalist realism: the general acceptance—both explicit and implicit—that capitalism is the only politically and economically viable system, and that it is therefore impossible to imagine any coherent alternative.^[2] The emotional economy that has prevailed in the last decades is a “left melancholy”^[3] of intellectuals and political organizations who are comfortable with their marginalization and defeat. On account of this, they merely adopt a position of defensiveness, contestation or denunciation before the system’s excesses.

We cannot expect a post-revolutionary or catastrophic situation to automatically produce, by itself, a new socio-economic system. In their “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek claim that a postcapitalist transition demands a conscious planning effort able not just to develop a cognitive map of the current system, but also to come up with a possible image or representation of the future economic system.^[4] Alternative consumer habits alone are incapable of generating significant land reform that could break the power of concentration held by large transnational supermarket, pharmaceutical and industrial monoculture farming corporations. Trading your car for a bicycle might be an important individual act, but it is not enough to kick off a profound energy transition that actually enables the dismantling of the fossil fuels industry and the flourishing of clean and communal energies. Marches and protests against inequality, no matter how large they get, will have no true impact unless they transform themselves into fiscal reforms able to control big capital’s evasive drives and recover socially generated wealth in order to fairly redistribute it.

Therefore, creating a democratic power capable of disarticulating the capitalist market economy and moving on to more sophisticated ways of organizing our life in common requires more than confronting the establishment on the streets and in the polls. However, in the last decades we have witnessed how the question regarding the way in which a State may enable the transition to an alternative society has been displaced by a new consensus that plainly rejects institutions and considers social movements as the only viable agent of change. Meanwhile, the neoliberal order and their army of technocrats and economists continue to delve into unfathomable technical abstractions of regulation, kidnapping the State apparatus in favor of select elites. The neoliberal illusion of a market efficiently self-regulating has vanished in recent years, leaving behind an interventionist State that rescues large companies from crises, redistributes wealth upwards through tax exemptions and subsidies, and deploys impressive logistic transnational networks exclusively designed to secure monopolistic revenue for a handful of large companies. The planned economy is back, operating at an unprecedented scale.

For years, the general consensus in economic theory and in decision-making spaces has been the notion that the market is the most sophisticated and complete instrument to gather dispersed information concerning the economy. The market is seen as a diffuse, more-than-human super-intelligence, that translates this information into “signs” afterwards used to design institutions and policies. Thus, the market has been understood as the most efficient means to solve any collective problem regarding the distribution and management of resources. This common sense or doxa can be traced back to the famous “socialist calculation debate” of the 1920s and 1930s, in which Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises—philosophers and economists of the Austrian School—questioned the ability of national planning agencies to gather this type of information on complex systems such as national economies.^[5] Since then, the image of a rational individual maximizing their utilities—the basic building block of the diffuse collective agent called the “market”—has been so hegemonic a symbol of anti-collectivism that, as pointed out by Jodi Dean,^[6] it has even been adopted by the collective imagination of a left which considers individual and micropolitical practices to be a more important focus for action than organized, large-scale mass movements like unions, political parties, technical teams and, of course, planning organisms.

The series of global crises that started with the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States in 2008—reaching its peak during the 2020 Corona-virus global pandemic—has weakened this consensus. First, it has shown that the “catallaxy” (the term used by Hayek to describe the supposedly self-organizing nature of the market) of the neoliberal economy is, in fact, a governmental practice. It would be impossible without a wide array of mechanisms of political intervention and coordination among companies. The success of mega-corporations like Amazon, Facebook, and Walmart has also been possible due to ambitious strategic planning programs within these companies themselves. Referring to Gosplan (the Soviet Union’s central planning agency under Stalin), some analysts suggest that these type of coordination practices by monopolistic agents have led to a sort of “Gosplan 2.0” or “Google Gosplan.” As Campbell Jones suggests, when planning becomes the natural habitat where the political economy of capitalism develops, the question ceases to be if we should plan or not, instead it is how we should plan, to whose benefit, and who should be included in the making of the plans.^[7]

The notion of economic planning—burdened by the tumultuous events of the 20th Century—reminds us that anti-establishment politics are not enough if they are not accompanied by a struggle for democratic control over hegemonic economic spaces. Thus, the emerging debate on planning has opened an unexpected theoretical and political space to once again discuss ambitious and radical visions of post-capitalist futures. For some traditions, technological advances in super-computing, robotics, and logistic connectivity could allow us to overcome the calculation problem, finally enabling the planning of a socialist, post-shortage future.^[8] Others have suggested intervention modes to overcome the technocratic, male, Eurocentric approach that characterized planning cultures in the past.^[9] All differences considered, the discussion is refreshing in that it has led to a shift from typically moralist or celebratory arguments regarding alternative economies (be they solidary, cooperative, post-carbon, or non-mercantile) to the concrete assessment of their economic viability, their technical feasibility, and their political and institutional conditions.

II

The question regarding the institutional basis of social change powerfully reemerges at a time when the construction of constituent power—in massive demonstrations, assemblies, public meetings, and other forms of territorial participation—demands concrete mechanisms to make popular self-government politically and technically feasible. Despite the different approaches involved in the discussion regarding the concept of constituent power, everyone agrees on the fact that the final goal of the expansive and overwhelming force emerging from the organized people (potentia) is to dictate the fundamental norms organizing and configuring the branches of the State (potestas).^[10] Indeed, as Enrique Dussel^[11] suggests, popular power only becomes real when it clots into institutional forms and statutory orders, both within and beyond the State.^[12] In its most condensed manifestations, the potestas of a political community includes not only general legal forms—political constitution and statutory laws—but also specific devices that rule over collective everyday life in its complexity and heterogeneity.

            One of the central elements of planning is precisely the fact that planning is not only oriented towards the future, but that it deploys the technical instruments of the State apparatus—laws, statutes, plans, regulatory devices, censuses, etc.—in order to guarantee the concrete realization of that future. It is precisely due to its prospective nature that planning has been understood as a way of distributing resources ex ante, in opposition to the ex post distribution of resources through the market.^[13] Another characteristic element of planning is the fact that it is not restricted to individual sectors of the economy, but aspires to conduct the general process of socio-economic reproduction through development trajectories established democratically. Thus, democratic planning is the network of instruments that must be activated to configure (potestas) the visions of society emerging from the organized people (potentia). It may seem strange or even anachronistic to want to recover, rather apologetically, a concept with such a turbulent and heavy burden as planning. It was certainly its bombastic conception, as well as its bureaucratic and authoritarian disfigurations, that led to the demise of planning after the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, the idea of economic planning was not only considered arrogant, but also inefficient and politically dangerous. Its replacement, governance, emerged as a more sensible, impartial and apparently less ideological way of administrating scarce resources in a society.

            Following the demise of modernist economic planning, governance and urban planning gave way to a paradigm of economic policy untethered from the great utopian and normative designs.^[14] This paradigm’s main function is to ensure efficiency, to generate an attractive environment for private investment, and to foster businesslike attitudes and sentiments in the population. Territorial competitiveness becomes the new lodestar of public administration, and the different spaces of regulation (from national economies to sub-metropolitan spaces) begin competing against each other to attract direct foreign investment and highly qualified human resources. Regions and territories start specializing in attracting different types of investment—mining, tourism, agro-industry, energy, and finance among others. Furthermore, governance intervention protocols usually imply formal rhetoric and exercises of “participation” and “inclusion” aimed at gaining legitimacy amongst citizens. This kind of participative exercise, however, has been criticized for actually co-opting collective organization and deactivating real demands for redistribution.^[15]

Despite its critics, governance—with its gospel of efficiency and spurious mechanism of inclusion—presents itself nowadays as the only viable form of managing resources. For this reason, there is a subversive element in the idea of planning, precisely to the extent that it imbues the moment in which the excesses of post-modernism and neoliberal ideology would foreclose the possibility of thinking historically with dense historicity. As Frederic Jameson claims in Archaeologies of the Future,^[16] historical knowledge is one of the mechanisms that allow us to pierce the limit of experience which, in normal circumstances, prevents us from grasping radical alterity—i.e., the fact that things might not only be radically other, but that they have in fact been so at some other time, and that, therefore, rupture is a concrete possibility of social life.^[17] Planning, thus, overcomes the idea of the present as an empty time or mere continuum, claiming back a now dormant ability: the ability to imagine and produce a future that is more than a mere pastiche of the present society. In other words, planning not only configures the future-as-rupture, but because of its fundamentally prefigurative nature, planning summons alternative worlds and is, therefore, a mediated form or mode of existence of the future.

As follows from Marx’s materialist critique of political economy, commodities are a mediated or indirect form of human labor, like money is a mediated form of markets and economic interdependence. These forms crystalize—albeit in a partial, unstable and indirect way—the attributes of the social relations that generate them. Likewise, the technical instruments of planning can be understood as a mediated and reified expression of the visions of the future emerging from the constituent popular power. For example, the base studies, censuses and laws that gave way to the Latin American land reforms of the previous century, to some extent crystalized the sentiment of multiple mass movements who, with their chants of “the land for those who work it,” traced the road towards a society free from the domination of hacienda masters. Similarly, the intervention formulas and protocols emerging in the context of new struggles for territorial, racial, gender, and socio-ecological justice will also foreshadow worlds beyond other forms of domination. Thus, the aim of this essay is to identify and reclaim the emancipatory element of planning, as it has actually taken place. This includes not only planning in the historical past, but also new forms of insurgent planning emerging in municipalities and territories to confront the disintegrating effects of late capitalism in its financial, micro-electronic and rentier configuration.

This work has been partly inspired by the city of Santiago de Chile, which during the decade of 1960 was one of the main global centers of critical thinking on planning. The Center for Socio-Economic Studies, the Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning, the Center for the Study of National Reality, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean,^[18] were just some of the nodes of a vibrant, transnational epistemic network that linked universities, political parties and decision-making spaces. Afterwards, in the context of the revolutionary process led by the Government of Popular Unity following Salvador Allende’s electoral victory in 1970, Santiago de Chile became the seat of one of the most massive and transformative land reforms carried out by a democratic regime. In this period, the city also hosted the Synco Project, probably the most futuristic and ambitious effort ever to use cybernetic technologies to create a system of decentralized economic planning in real time. The dream of building a conscious and collectively coordinated economy based on the principles of economic democracy, national liberation and working-class self-government, as is well-known, was destroyed by a bloody military dictatorship. However, its phantasmatic presence is still alive in the political culture of the popular organizations challenging neoliberalism today.

Presently, in the Chilean neighborhood of Recoleta, there is a network of popular pharmacies where one can acquire medicines at a low cost outside the oligopoly circuit of big pharmaceutical companies. According to Daniel Jadue, the mayor that designed and implemented this project, the Popular Pharmacy not only has practical consequences by expanding access to affordable medicine to the working-class. It is also “a cluster-bomb, triggering change at the level of the consciousness, the will, and the mood of the left.”^[19] If we consider it strictly from the perspective of the present, the Popular Pharmacy may seem a modest and limited initiative. However, its technical form may very well hold the key to more radical and profound future reforms that could eventually reconfigure the way in which medicine is produced and commercialized. Since its launch in 2015, the model of the Popular Pharmacy has not only delivered 1,200,000 medicinal items to 24,000 users in Recoleta, but it has also been successfully replicated in more than 140 municipalities all over the country. More than an isolated case, the Recoleta municipality is part of an emerging municipal movement in which different rebel municipalities around the world have turned the metropolitan area into a laboratory to experiment with non-capitalist forms of markets and social relations.^[20]

Besides the planning methods developed by rebel municipalities in different cities around the world, new repertoires of public intervention practices—including, though not limited to, State actions—have given citizens the chance to actively redesign their environment. Insurgent planning communities, base innovations, tactical urbanism and citizen science, as we shall see, destabilize the tendency of neoliberal governance to exclude civil society from the process of conceiving and executing intervention mechanisms. Thus, the practices emerging from these communities decentralize the role of technical experts, empowering communities by allowing them to incorporate popular and situated forms of knowledge in the processes of resource management. Due to their tactical and cooperative character, these practices are related to what Silvia Federici has called counter-planning: daily micro-actions aimed at alternatively organizing life within the context of the current crisis of social reproduction.^[21] Despite the important contributions of these investigation-action communities to the democratization of knowledge, their effects are still limited, since their spectrum of action has somehow remained on the fringes of large scale visions, and their operations have been circumscribed within local environments.

III

Any democratic planning able to efficiently translate and expand the language of constituent power therefore needs new forms of imagining scale and time, such that the transformation horizon becomes broader than the territories affected by specific problems and reaches beyond short term issues. The visions that inspired the design of large-scale land reforms, welfare States, social housing projects, and programs of productive reconversion in the 20th Century hold cognitive maps to worlds seeking not only to expand socio-economic fairness, but also to widen the frontiers of material well-being, and even enjoyment and aesthetic experience, to millions of people. Therefore, this essay also wishes to recover some of the questions, methodological approaches and aspirations of modernist economic planning. Critically returning to these historical images does not imply a nostalgic or complacent attitude towards the lost worlds of socialism, social-democracy, or developmentalism. Historically articulating the past, claims Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, “does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”^[22] The history of economic planning enlivens and updates trajectories of democratization that have since disappeared in the face of the eternal present of capitalist realism. These trajectories could show us the way forward towards a different planning in the future.

            By reflecting on these trajectories of democratization I also seek to question the postmodern consensus that disdains the great designs of social transformation of the past. Today, new popular movements begin to offer grass-roots design and planning visions that operate at a national and even transnational scale. The Green New Deal, proposed by an emergent democratic socialism movement in the United States, articulates an ambitious program of deep carbon reduction in the technological infrastructure holding up the national economy. The development of this program will create large amounts of gainful employment.^[23] That means that the Green New Deal presupposes that a large-scale transition in the energy sector is unthinkable without previously guaranteeing the material well-being of the working-class and, particularly, of those communities most affected by the effects of climate change and the economic crisis. Although the Green New Deal project originated in the Anglo European world, it is currently being appropriated by parties and social movements in different countries around the world to simultaneously fight against the two great challenges of this century: global warming and extreme inequality.

In Latin America, the Green New Deal has been recently picked up by what Maristella Svampa and Enrique Viale have called the Great Eco-Social Pact: a program of economic and energy transition to overcome the monopolistic, predatory fossil fuel extractivism dominant in the region.^[24] In Uruguay, the National and Integrated Care System^[25] also illustrates a vision of planning that extends to a national scale. This system was created in 2015 following a large process of feminist social mobilization. The system marks the beginning of a public institution aimed at making care work visible, protecting vulnerable people, and promoting greater gender equality in reproductive labor.^[26] Despite being quite innovative, these cases are mere exceptions in the context of a general tendency to overlook large-scale and long-term institutional design, mainly based on the assumption that these imply a statist and homogenizing logic. Therefore, going back to the old problem of planning means asking the same old questions—many unresolved to this day—that motivated the different intervention programs and protocols of the past century.

Regarding concrete historical manifestations of planning, it is possible to identify three forms or ideal types. First, there was a form of planning in the past under historical Modernism that, though based on redistributive ideals and programs of diverse origins, was intrinsically bureaucratic, masculine, and centered on the ideal of economic growth understood as an end in itself. The persistence of some elements of this administrative paradigm are visible in the recent success of neo-developmentalist or neo-Keynesian platforms such as the so-called “pink tide” of progressive governments in Latin America.^[27] Secondly, there is a form of planning in the present under late capitalism whose polarizing tendencies have enabled new and more advanced forms of monopolistic power, social segregation, and ecological collapse. This is currently the dominant form of strategic planning. Its operating mechanisms have become more evident following neoliberalism’s recent mutation into a more openly authoritarian and interventionist model. Thirdly, there is a democratic form of planning in the possible future. This form of planning shall arise necessarily if popular masses activate politically and manage to insert themselves in a significant manner into the decision-making processes. This planning would be multicolored not only regarding its ability to combine state and non-state institutional forms (i.e., technical teams and grass-roots democratic movements), but also regarding the gender, race and class heterogeneity of its composition. Furthermore, this planning would not come from the top, nor from any kind of “center,” but would be the product of the synergic interaction of decision-making processes at different scales and levels.

Finally, this third form of planning would overcome an unhealthy obsession with the ideal of infinite economic growth, belonging not only to the (neo)Keynesian and (neo)developmentalist approaches, but also to productivist socialism in its many variations. On the contrary, this form of conscious coordination of the economy would be aimed at the full development of human abilities and of the use value as the regulatory principle of social relations. Its main objectives would be economic democracy, free time, care, interspecies solidarity, aesthetic elation, physical and psychic well-being. This mode of administration would be oriented towards the concrete realization of the philosophical anthropology that informs Marx’s Paris Manuscripts. In these writings, the young Marx claims that building a post-capitalist society is nothing else than the emancipation of the senses from the dominion belonging to abstract necessity. In this new society, people would fully develop the wide range of potentialities and attributes of their species-being (Gattungswesen), overcoming a system of social relations where their own individuality and senses are reduced to their animal functions—for those starving, meals do not exist in their social, convivial and humanized form, but only abstractly as foodstuff; for those ruined by debt and poverty, there is no difference between the sound of a melody and the noise of a falling object.

The emancipation of the senses, however, is far from being a grossly anthropocentric enterprise. As recent theoretical approaches concerning eco-socialist planning suggest, the political project of the emancipation of the senses of human beings would make a significant contribution to our battle against the climate crisis. The multiplication of new forms of personal development and collective consumption—expressed in leisure, sporting, artistic, erotic and intellectual activities—would have a smaller energy footprint than the forms of development and consumption under individualistic and irrational capitalist consumerism. The same would apply to the growth of the job market related to the process of social reproduction, such as care, education, health, public transportation, housing, etc. A transition towards lifestyles with a lower carbon footprint would reduce the stress on our planet’s species and ecosystems, enabling an effective and democratically coordinated program of climate stabilization.^[28] Thus understood, planning is not limited to an economistic exercise of organizing relations of production. By being a practice with a strong utopic sensitivity, planning also entails the aesthetic aspiration to create and set free new forms of desire and pleasure. The idea of turning the utopia of the masses into a logical correlate of the personal utopia was, as Susan Buck-Morss has claimed, a central element of the great public intervention paradigms of the last century.^[29]

It is probably the properly libidinal dimension of planning that explains our retromaniac fixation with the material culture of Modernism, often deliberately aimed at amplifying the sensual and ludic regions of the desiring body. For example, the atavistic fascination aroused today by architectonic artifacts of currents such as Brutalism, Bauhaus, Constructivism or Art Deco—in housing complexes, but also parks, monuments, stadiums, and recreational infrastructure—is a symptom of general discontent with both the dogma of neoliberal austerity, and the somber or bucolic asceticism of the more traditional left. After the devastation of the material and psycho-affective stability of the social body, caused by three decades of neoliberalism and a global pandemic, relaunching a politics of prosperity is probably one of the most urgent pending tasks. Unlike the old debates on planning, however, the stakes today are not limited to a struggle for the capacity to administer social well-being and happiness within a scenario of economic collapse. The nature of current events also forces us to radically redefine and expand what we understand by abundance.

Traditional narratives on well-being, based on western notions of material wealth, wage labor, heteropatriarchal family, and Gross Domestic Product (as the sole measurement of human progress), remained unquestioned for decades. Today, however, they face a deep crisis. Although neoliberal globalization has led to an increase in the material wealth of several sectors of society by guaranteeing them access to a greater amount and diversity of consumer goods, the cost for this has been growing levels of stress, debt, economic instability, work overload, and ecological destruction. Highlighting the unlibidinizing effect of this type of financial and individualistic consumerism, Kate Soper has recently advocated for an alternative hedonism as the political imagination of a future post-consumerist society.^[30] According to Soper, an alternative hedonism stresses the loss of pleasure that accompanies the irrational acquisition of increasingly more consumer goods, and envisions a complex and vibrant libidinal structure that could be activated by less rushed, chronocentric, and acquisitive work cultures and lifestyles. Returning to the old issue of planning, as I show in this book, implies returning to an important battlefield, where the concrete terms of a future politics of prosperity might be discerned.

Planning was one of the most important key ideas of the last century. Its disappearance coincided with the decline of that sensitivity described by Mark Fisher as “popular Prometheism,”^[31] consisting in the aspiration once held by the working-class to create a world that surpassed—experientially, aesthetically and politically—the miserable limits of bourgeois social relations. Historical knowledge of the contradictions and potentialities of economic planning can be useful to the tactical and strategic imagination of the new mass movements (feminist, eco-socialist, anti-racist) seeking today to reclaim this old futurist ambition. In general, my book reformulates the classical question about democratic planning and discusses some historical experiences and theoretical tendencies that allow to sketch the aforementioned third form of possible planning. This exercise also implies a politics of knowledge: after having focused on the issue for decades, social sciences have entirely abandoned their interest in planning. Today, the public calling for these disciplines is rather oriented towards the more restricted and politically ambiguous fields of “public policy” and “project assessment.” A critical reading of these kinds of experiences can therefore be useful for thinking a social science committed to social change.

IV

The different chapters that make up my book aim to consider the problem of democratic planning from the perspective of its conditions of possibility, by which I mean the dynamic and contingent principles—though neither directly nor linearly causal—that should enable the development and immanent deployment of this form of administration. Due to heuristic considerations, I have organized these conditions into four groups: first, technical conditions, understood as the different socio-material infrastructures—digital, computational, logistic and geo-statistic—that should enable the representation, characterization and administration of social wealth within a process of transition; second, political institutional conditions, which include the multiple manifestations of the relationship between constituted and constituent powers (parliamentarism and extra-parliamentarism, citizenship and State, market and plan); third, scaling conditions, related to the way in which different socio-spatial orders (city, region, Nation-State, and World-System) coproduce themselves, organize hierarchically and recalibrate with regard to each other; fourth, epistemic conditions, related to the network of forms of knowledge (expert and vernacular, situated and algorithmic, normative and technical) in motion, collision and recombination, leading to a kind of episteme suitable for the emergence of planning.

Although an analysis of the different conditions of possibility runs through the whole book, I have organized the chapters so that each one of the conditions may be discussed in detail. Chapter 2 begins with a brief discussion of planning at its peak in the early 20th Century, its decline after the end of the Cold War, and its comeback under the guise of a State-capitalism in the current global crisis. Next, I present a critical reading of the “debate concerning the socialist calculation” of the 1920s and 1930s, returning once again to the problem of the technical possibility of planning—especially in the context of recent discussion in critical social theory. The impressive socio-technical reconfiguration of the capitalist production mode has led some authors to suggest that the problems of data collection and computation faced by actually existing socialisms might be finally overcome. However, the issue of democratic planning does not rest exclusively on access to a technological infrastructure that efficiently quantifies and distributes resources, it also depends on institutional devices capable of expanding the possibilities of representative democracies in novel directions, including working people in the process of plan development and application. Thus, this chapter sketches possible shapes that the relationship between technology and politics could assume in the development of a new way of planning.

Chapter 3 discusses the relationship between planning and mercantile relations or, more generally, between market and plan. By revisiting the classic question regarding “market socialism,” I reflect on the role that money and the markets would play in a post-capitalist society. The chapter reviews both the original debate on this issue and the new directions it has taken in the era of big data and digital platforms. However, the main trends within this debate have operated with narrow and dichotomic views concerning the relationship between economics and politics. Considering the main presuppositions of the new forms of democratic and self-governed socialism, I present more expansive views regarding the place of monetary and mercantile circuits within a process of transition. Chapter 4 analyzes some approaches of radical planning whose aim has been to reinvent the economy beyond wage labor and the ideology of unlimited growth—the main blind spots of developmentalist/Keynesian theories and their contemporary versions. Against approaches that view growth quantitatively (growth as basis for social wellbeing, or growth as something negative that ought to be eliminated), I propose a third approach that considers growth qualitatively, i.e., a kind of socially and consciously controlled growth free from the imperative of the unlimited accumulation of abstract wealth, whose aims be care for life and ecosystems.

A significant challenge faced by democratic planning is dealing with the destructive forces of the sabotaging organized oligarchies whose interests might be threatened by a process of transition and popular empowerment. Therefore, chapter 5 explores the relationship between social conflict and planning. Taking the notion of historical change based on the theory of unequal and combined development as a starting point, I conclude that democratic planning should not only incorporate concrete and diverse mechanisms in order to offer social conflict an institutional outlet within a process of transition—instead of merely neutralizing or ignoring it, as it is the case with neoliberal governance and authoritarian regimes. Democratic planning also implies guaranteeing the sufficient conditions for legitimacy and social peace in the short term, in order to ensure more substantive or long-term reforms. Chapter 6 considers the scale of social change, as one of the main issues of modernist planning resulted from its excessive concentration on the national scale. Thus, I analyze the traditions of insurgent planning and new municipalism, and the way in which these have reclaimed the neighborhood and metropolitan areas as laboratories for concrete experiments with radical policy design. Considering the enthusiasm awakened by these new forms of intervention, I also discuss their limitations and weaknesses, particularly regarding their inability to synergically articulate themselves onto the national scale of the State apparatus, or to offer solutions beyond mere adjustments focused on redistribution or handouts.

Finally, one of the most salient traits of economic planning is the fact that it was made possible by the development of an episteme rooted in tight networks connecting universities, think-tanks, spaces of political activism and decision-making. Accordingly, chapter 7 reflects on the role that universities, especially social sciences, could play in developing a more holistic intellectuality oriented towards the defense of public interest. Even though such an intellectuality has been central to the formation of planning movements in the past, the fragmentation of the sciences together with the instrumental and ahistorical nature of knowledge under the neoliberal university pose major obstacles to the rearticulation of such an intellectuality today. Following the decline of economic planning in the decade of the 1980s, urban planning became the main paradigm for the management of constructed environments and peri-urban territories. However, the practices of this discipline lack the basic elements of planning. Therefore, it is rather a form of territorial governance aimed merely at the technical and mercantile—thus, apolitical—administration of territory and socio-spatial relationships.

(Re)politicizing urban planning implies, first and foremost, creating tension between its substantive rationality and its horizon—or rather, the absence of these in the way in which the field is currently taught and practiced. More broadly, it also implies questioning the Popperian philosophy of “fragmentary” and non-valuative social engineering behind the teaching approaches of public policy in the faculties of social sciences. The emergence of a new politics of masses, however, is currently catalyzing the possible rebirth of these fields of knowledge, and the construction of an international movement of radical planning. The last chapter, then, reflects on the epistemic and political conditions that could establish the grounds for an internationalism of planning. The neoliberal dogma of privatization, workforce casualization, State repression and austerity measures has not become real by mere chance. It was the result of dynamic international circuits through which knowledge, economic models, urbanistic formulae and intervention protocols flow. It is time to build a different internationalism.

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^[1] Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Indiana University Press, 1995).

^[2] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009).

^[3] See Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” Boundary 2, 26, n° 3 (1999): 19–27, and Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London, Verso, 2012).

^[4] Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Critical Legal Thinking, 14 May 2013, https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/.

^[5] The thesis of the impossibility of the socialist calculation denies the technical (not political or moral) feasibility of a consciously planned economy on two main theoretical grounds: first, neoclassical approaches have questioned its viability due to the calculation and accounting problems that the administration of such a large economy would cause; second, the Austrian schools have claimed its logical impossibility due to the fact that such an economy would be unable to gather all the information needed for a rational calculation of the general process of socio-economic reproduction (see Don Lavoie, Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered (Arlington, George Marcus University Press, 2015); Paul Cockshott and Maxi Nieto, Ciber-comunismo. Planificación económica, computadoras y democracia (Madrid, Trotta, 2017). Details regarding the calculation problem—and its possible solutions—are discussed in chapters 2 and 3.

^[6] Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London, Verso, 2012).

^[7] Campbell Jones, “Introduction: The Return of Economic Planning,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119, n° 1 (2020): 1–10.

^[8] See, for example, Paul Cockshott and Maxi Nieto, Ciber-comunismo; Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundations for Socialism (London, Verso, 2019); Evgeny Morozov, “Digital Socialism? The Calculation Debate in the Age of Big Data,” New Left Review 116 (2019): 33–67.

^[9] See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Los abajocomunes. Planear fugitivo y estudio negro, (Mexico City, Cráter Invertido, 2017); The UCLA Abolitionist Planning Group, Abolitionist Planning for Resistance, (Los Angeles, Luskin Center UCLA, 2017), and Thea Riofrancos, “Plan, Mood, Battlefield: Reflections on the Green New Deal,” Viewpoint Magazine, 16 May 2019, https://viewpointmag.com/2019/05/16/plan-mood-battlefield-reflections-on-the-green-new-deal/

^[10] See for example Antonio Negri Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and Camila Vergara, República plebeya. Guía práctica para constituir el poder popular (Santiago, Sangría, 2020).

^[11] Enrique Dussel, 20 tesis de política, (Mexico City, Siglo XXI, 2006).

^[12] According to Camila Vergara, the social history of modern popular movements shows that the constitution of the social body into a political subject—more precisely as a “plebeian people”—materializes itself as a response to the imbalances of institutional systems in which the self-destructive dynamics of oligarchic power have overrun the rule of law. The telos of this process of political subjectivation, according to Vergara, is not merely to revert the systemic corruption of legal and institutional structures, but also to build an anti-oligarchic republic. See Camila Vergara, “Populism as Plebeian Politics: Inequality, Domination and Popular Empowerment,” Journal of Political Philosophy 28, n° 2 (2019): 222–246.

^[13] See Ernest Mandel, “In Defense of Socialist Planning,” New Left Review 159 (1986): 5–37.

^[14] The argument according to which urban planning—at least as it is nowadays practiced and understood—is not actually planning, but rather a particular form of socio-spatial governance has been developed by Carlos de Mattos, “De la planificación a la gobernanza: hacia un nuevo modo de gestión urbana,” Ciudades 66 (2005): 1–47, and more recently by Samuel Stein, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, (London and New York, Verso, 2019). I consider relations between economic and urban planning in further detail in chapter 7 of the book.

^[15] See Faranak Miraftab, “Insurgent Planning: Situating Radical Planning in the Global South,” Planning Theory 8, n° 1 (2009): 32–50; Erik Swyngedouw, “La naturaleza no existe. Sostenibilidad como síntoma de una planificación despolitizada,” Urban 5, n° 1 (2011): 41–66, and Clarissa Sampaio Freitas, “Insurgent Planning? Insights from Two Decades of the Right to the City in Fortaleza, Brazil,” CITY 23, n° 3 (2019): 285–305.

^[16] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire called Utopia and other Science Fictions (London and New York, Verso, 2007).

^[17] In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, Duke University Press, 1991) Fredric Jameson points out that the main trait of Postmodernism is precisely a weakening or decaying of historicity and a notion of historical time lacking determination or even the possibility of rupture, thus becoming an eternal present. Instead of displaying the kind of collective historical consciousness of Modernism, in which a synchronic present distinguishes itself from the past, Postmodernism—according to Jameson—is characterized by the dominion of spatial heterogeneity. We inhabit the synchronic, and not the diachronic. Thus, under Postmodernism there is no emancipatory project in a historical sense, but rather a variety of “heterotopic” locations spread out through space, but never distinguished in time.

^[18] Centro de Estudios Socioeconómicos (CESO), Instituto Latinoamericano de Planificación Económica y Social (ILPES), Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Nacional (CEREN), Comisión Económica de América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL),

^[19] Quoted in Claudio Pizarro and Macarena Gallo, “Daniel Jadue, el hombre detrás de la Farmacia Popular: ‘Chile es un cartel’,” The Clinic, 2015, https://www.theclinic.cl/2015/11/15/daniel-jadue-el-hombre-detras-de-la-farmacia-popular-chile-es-un-cartel/

^[20] See Santi Fernández Patón, Municipalismo y asalto institucional: una visión descreída (Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2019); Bertie Russell, “Beyond the Local Trap: New Municipalism and the Rise of Fearless Cities,” Antipode 51, n° 3 (2019): 989–1010, and Matthew Thompson, “What’s so New About New Municipalism?,” Progress in Human Geography 45, n° 2 (2020): 317–342.

^[21] See Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, PM Press, 2012) and Silvia Federici and Campbell Jones, “Counterplanning in the Crisis of Social Reproduction,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119, n° 1 (2020): 153–165.

^[22] Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations (New York, Harcourt, 1968), 255. https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/books/Concept_History_Benjamin.pdf

^[23] See Kate Aronoff and others, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, (London, Verso, 2019).

^[24] Maristella Svampa and Enrique Viale, “Nuestro Green New Deal,” Revista Anfibia, 2020, https://www.revistaanfibia.com/green-new-deal/.

^[25] Sistema Nacional e Integrado de Cuidados (SNIC).

^[26] See Susana Draper, “Tejer cuidados a mico y macro escala entre lo público y lo común,” in Cristina Vega Solís, Raquel Martínez-Buján and Myriam Paredes (eds.), Cuidado, comunidad y común. Experiencias cooperativas en el sostenimiento de la vida (Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2018).

^[27] Even though these governments initiated constituent processes that led to progressive constitutions—in some cases the pachamama (Earth Mother) was even declared a subject of law—, they lacked the capacity to transform the existing economic model at a daily and concrete level. That is, they implemented a model that Eduardo Gudynas has called “neoextractivist,” since it introduces mechanisms of wealth redistribution, while the rentier, expansionist and enclave economies that support their fiscal activity remain intact. Eduardo Gudynas, “Agropecuaria y nuevo extractivismo bajo los gobiernos progresistas de América del Sur,” Territorios 5, (2010): 37–54.

^[28] See Michael Löwy, “Eco-socialism and Democratic Planning,” Socialist Register 43 (2007): 294–309; Kate Aronoff et al, A Planet to Win, and Cedric Durand and Razmig Keucheyan, “Hacia una planificación ecológica,” in El futuro será verde (Santiago, Editorial Aún Creemos en los Sueños – Le Monde Diplomatique, 2020).

^[29] Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2002).

^[30] Kate Soper, Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism (London, Verso, 2020).

^[31] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014).