On Planning and Popular Power
* 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. Martin Arboleda
URL = https://www.critup.net/translations/trajectories-of-a-radical-idea/
Contents
Martin Arboleda:
“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.”
(https://www.critup.net/translations/trajectories-of-a-radical-idea/)