All economies are planned. The only difference is who is doing the planning.

But for real, a huge amount of very effective central planning is already done by private interests for the sake of profit. Big companies like Wal-Mart control huge amounts of the economy, and while they’re not in total control of everything, they are centrally-controlled within their sizeable boundaries. If planning didn’t work, Wal-Mart wouldn’t exist as we know it. The important question isn’t “does central planning work?” or “is it the most efficient/effective way?” it’s “who should be in control of the planning?”

If you want a really interesting view on central planning, look up Project Cybersyn. It was an experiment in a sort of hybrid centralized-decentralized planning of Chile’s economy using management cybernetics and early computer systems.

Sure.

You’ve probably been told all your life “Centrally planned economies don’t work! They’ve always been a catastrophic failure!” which is simply untrue.

• the USSR industrialised at record pace, went from a backwards joke that was jealous of its Western neighbours to the undisputed 2nd-most-powerful country in the world, launched mankind into space, defeated Hitler, electrified and industrialised the whole country

• unplanned economies have been disasters: Russia under shock therapy in the 1990s. Thatcher closing down coalmines, GW Bush (and Greenspan) deregulating everything and causing the biggest financial crash in 80 years

• Look at the history of Britain’s economy, did great under planning with people like Clement Attlee, worse when the free-market ideology took hold: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=iH6ur0X4wMI (you should watch the whole thing, but from 14:20 has a bit on Britain’s planned economy). War economies are often centrally planned and do in-kind accounting, and war economies stimulate growth.

• look at how much better China and Vietnam perform at growth and poverty-alleviation than Friedmanite countries

• The boring ‘Walmart’ argument: there are already massive country-sized planned economies with in-kind accounting. Called Amazon and Walmart. Amazon runs an economy the size of Australia (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-tech-giants-worth-compared-economies-countries/) and does it by databases that manage supply-chains, logistics, just-in-time ordering, modelling future demand, etc.

Two caveats –

• Marxists don’t “believe in” doing things a certain way, that’s Utopianism. Marxists believe in practice. Various things work at various times in various doses. That includes market mechanisms, like the Chinese economy today, or Vietnam with its Đổi Mới policy. Giving a template and demanding it be followed is anathema to “scientific socialism”

• Marxism ≠ centrally planned economies. Marx mostly critiqued how capital was a means of exploitation, and said lets do ‘something else’ that doesn’t rip workers off so much. That leaves room for a lot of noncentrallyplanned methods. Which one is best? A stupid smallminded question. Like asking which food is the best food to eat, or which medicine is the best medicine to take. Depends on the context.

You may say you don’t believe in centrally planned economies. Do you believe in a centrally planned economy to provide tap water? If it works for tap water, why not for other things? It works for public housing too. It works for transport infrastructure. It works for railways. Why is it such a stretch to think that what you probably already believe in for water, railways, roads, education, housing could also run some clothing and furniture factories?

This was kinda written in a hurry, I can add references or answer questions if needed.

I will give you an actual example of Centrally Planned Economy that they don’t teach you in school: US War Economy 1942-1945

The US plunged into the Great Depression in 1929 as a result of financial speculation with nearly one quarter of the workforce unemployed. By 1933, FDR struck the New Deal and the economy began to recover but it happened at a slow pace. In fact, FDR began to reverse his policy towards austerity again in 1937 and threatened the economic recovery.

Then, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In less than three months, by February 1942, all automobile plants in the United States had been converted into war production factories.

The Federal Government had taken control of all industrial production in the country, literally telling private enterprises what they can or cannot produce.

The Federal Government seized all essential raw materials including gasoline, rubber and metal like aluminum and diverted them toward war production. In fact, if you had owned a car back then, it’d be very difficult for you to find gasoline for sale. Many essential daily items like food (sugar, coffee, meat etc.), clothing (shoes etc.) and paper were heavily rationed.

Unemployment dropped to zero - the Federal Government literally forcing everyone to go to work, and telling you what to do in your job.

In just a few years’ time, the US economy grew so much that not only did it pull the country out of the Great Depression, wages grew so much that (and with consumer goods still rationed) people were having too much money, which led to inflation. The Federal Government had to create the War Bonds to take the excess money out of circulation. (Contrary to popular narrative, War Bonds were not created to finance the war. It was created to take money away from the people whose income grew so rapidly without taxing them!)

By the end of the war, the US was the industrial giant of the world (also helped by the fact that Europe was completely ruined by the war), accounting for 50% of the world’s industrial output. In fact, the end of the war signaled peril as the drop in demands for war materiel would mean industry downsizing and a lot of people going unemployed again - a recession was on the horizon.

This was where the Marshall Plan came in. To the absolute horror of the French, the US decided to rebuild Germany by sending them all the dollars, for three main reasons:

1. To get Europe to become addicted to the dollar, thereby ensuring its status as a global reserve currency
2. To prevent a recession at home, as the Europeans will use the free money to import goods from American factories
3. To accelerate the reconstruction of Europe as a US ally to curb the influence of Soviet communism with huge sums of financial aid, without which the Western European countries would have had trouble keeping up with the rapidly growing socialist economies in the East

The war economy (read: centrally planned economy) was the reason for the American prosperity in the 1950s and 60s. No matter how much they try to revise the narrative after the fact, the war economy in the US from 1942 to 1945 was unequivocally a centrally planned economy (that saved capitalism).

Wages were growing and labor movements were expanding, civil rights were fought for, until the 1970s when neoliberalism took over and ended real wage growth, trade union expansion and the curbing of labor and civil rights - consequences that we are still enduring today.

In the meantime, there was also another centrally planned economy that started in the 1920s, and in a single generation, transformed a country full of illiterate peasants to a space-faring nation - the USSR. An unprecedented feat in the history of humanity, but that’s a story for another day.

My opinion on this is a little complicated. The classic definition of Socialism is a system of production for social good, where the banks, factories, and industries are publicly owned and run for the betterment of society; as opposed to being privately owned and run for profit, and production organized to serve the profit motive under Capitalism. This implies on its surface that a centrally planned economy is socialist, while a market economy is capitalist, but things get messier than that in the real world. State Capitalist countries like South Korea, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia had centrally planned economies for decades, but they ran them for the purpose of building successful capitalist economies.

And no Socialist country has been purely planned- even the Soviet Union allowed farmers to sell food from their private plots at prices that the farmers chose. In the aftermath of World War 2, returning Soviet veterans often combined their savings to build cooperative factories that produced needed products, like consumer goods. The workers often elected a chairman of the factory, and paid him a much larger salary because they valued their leadership, or because he had the idea. These cooperatives were later nationalized by Khruschev, almost certainly to the detriment of the Soviet economy. When the cooperative sector of the Soviet economy was nationalized, economic planning became extremely complicated, and a lot of “grey market/second economy” behaviors popped up, like factories hitting their quotas early and continuing to produce goods to sell at their own prices on an unofficial market. In the end, the Soviet economy consistently struggled to meet the demand for consumer goods, which it might not have done if Khruschev hadn’t nationalized the cooperatives. I could go on and talk about the success China has had since it pivoted to a mixed economy with a big market sector, starting with their success with the Household Responsibility System, but I don’t want to ramble any more. My overall point is that centrally planned economies can accomplish a lot of impressive things, but having the state own every single little business can cause problems. I think a mixed economy can work well under Socialism. Personally, I like the idea of using what Richard Wolff calls Workers’ Self-Directed Enterprises for sections of the economy that might not work well under planning. I also think a company like Huawei provides a potential model for how worker-owned companies in a market sector might be run under socialism.

Of course, everything I just said about the Soviet economy occurred in an era before supercomputers, so who knows if a similar economy would run into the same problems today.

I would like a fractal-like arrangement of cybernetic organizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_cybernetics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocybernetics

There would be a central body for planning but it wouldn’t be the top-down organization that is typically associated with centrally planned economies.

Probably, but I would have to ask what do you consider a centrally planned economy to give you a more accurate answer.

I trust the big computer

I support a planned economy in order to manage ecological constraints, prevent economic recessions, efficiently apportion resources, and take into account long-term interests. I think you could plan in a more distributed and less hierarchical manner, but I also think it would be unwieldy. I’m open to discussion though. Either way, there should be some sort of democratic process involved so as to reflect the people’s desires as well as to ensure the people have a stake in the system.

Hello, I bring a comment from @WhatWouldKarlDo@lemmygrad.ml They say this link is the most important part of the comment and that the rest is less important https://tubitv.com/series/300007658/wartime-farm?start=true

Yeah. I think they’ve worked pretty well in the past. Others have mentioned the USSR already, but the UK was pretty quick to adopt central planning for farmers when they needed to massively boost food production during the war. I don’t usually link to videos, but there’s a great edutainment program that covers it in a lot of detail. I highly recommend it! The farmers initially didn’t like it, but by the end of the war, they definitely had an appreciation for it, and you can’t argue with the results.

There’s also been the argument that Walmart is one big centrally planned economy in and of itself. Sears on the other hand infamously tried to implement a free market internally.

EDIT: Damnit, I took too long to write this and all of this has now been covered. Oh well, I like my links.

EDIT2: Damnit, his instance blocks us anyway.

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For everything except treats.

There’s no choice but to have an intelligently designed economy due to climate change.

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