Postcapitalist Planning and Urban Revolution
* Article: Thompson, M., & Nishat-Botero, Y. (2023). Postcapitalist Planning and Urban Revolution. Competition & Change, 29(1), 101-120. doi
URL = https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231210980
"this article reviews the literature on democratic economic planning beyond capitalism"
Abstract
"Through what kind of spaces might postcapitalist planning emerge? How will the process of wresting collective control over the relations of production and reproduction, and over our metabolic exchange with the rest of nature, unfold through struggle?
In seeking answers to such questions, this article reviews the literature on democratic economic planning beyond capitalism and makes the case for a renewed engagement with issues of space and the urban through a closer reading of Henri Lefebvre’s work on planetary urbanization and the production of space. We argue that, to date, the economic planning literature has tended to focus on overcoming abstract labour time rather than abstract space – an oversight that prevents us from fully apprehending the urban form through which capitalism produces and reproduces its conditions of possibility and carries the seeds of its own destruction and potential supersession. Engaging with recent critical theorizing on the logistics revolution and the logistical state, we argue that postcapitalist forms of planning will arrive through an urban revolution, through struggles over urban everyday life. We suggest that future investigations into the possibilities for a democratic economic planning beyond capitalism should attend to actually existing empirical struggles over the urban – as the mediator of capitalist relations – and look for inspiration to historical and contemporary examples of municipalist praxis aiming to reinvent the commune."
Excerpt
The Grand Battle between the Plan and the Market
Matthew Thompson and Yousaf Nishat-Botero:
"The grand battle between the Plan and Market, argue Mandarini and Alberto (2020: 13), can be seen as the ‘opposition between two modes of neutralisation of the political’: between suppression of worker agency under the command economy of state planning and the ‘immunisation of the domain of market transactions from collective control’ – a choice between personal and impersonal forms of domination (see Roberts 2017; also Mau 2023 on the impersonal economic power or ‘mute compulsion’ of capital). Bernes (2020) suggests that (democratic) planning must satisfy two essential conditions for it to overcome what can be restated as personal and impersonal forms of domination: that it be both transparent, in lifting the veil of commodity fetishism, and tractable, in enabling both clear sight and control by workers and citizens over the means of production, social reproduction and circulation. Transparency of allocation decisions tackles the problem of impersonal domination of the market; tractability of production decisions the personal domination of the workplace."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231210980)
Overcoming Abstract Labor Time
Matthew Thompson and Yousaf Nishat-Botero:
"Struggling with this thorny issue of time is a common concern in the history of economic planning. The European interwar council-communist movement produced a number of proposals for transforming capitalism beyond abstract labour time, not least The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution written in 1930 (see Bernes 2021). Bernes shows how this treatise makes a novel distinction between production of goods for individual consumption, recompensed by labour-certificates rather than money, and production of goods for general use, freely distributed to all who need them. The aim of the plan is to move societal production progressively from the former to the latter, so that more and more goods, from food and clothing to housing and healthcare, can be freely provided rather than exchanged, with labour-certificates eventually transcended altogether, as a transitional stage to communism. The extent to which such transitional plans can transcend labour time – through consumption credits or labour-certificates, or ‘coupons’ (Cockshott and Cottrell, 1993) – and thus abolish the law of value becomes the first of Bernes’ (2021) two tests of communism (the second is collapsing the gap between producers and consumers, for a ‘classless, moneyless, stateless society; freely associated workers meeting their needs with the means of production under conscious and planned control’).
Time – abstract labour time – is thus the primary target of economic planning, and for good reason (see Browne 2011)."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231210980)
Overcoming the Planetary Scale of Logistical Infrastructure
Matthew Thompson and Yousaf Nishat-Botero:
"Bernes poses the question of scale: the planetary scale of logistical infrastructure, and the tightening multi-scalar, trans-local integration of production nodes within a complex system of circulation, not only imposes huge operational barriers to breaking down this unwieldy totality into manageable parts, but also entails an overwhelming complexity, opacity and illegibility for collective action to assail, such that its reconfiguration would fail the test of transparency. The alienation experienced by democratic planners would far surpass the transhistorical alienation from the product of one’s labours, argues Bernes, taking on a monstrous quality, as the concrete materialization of the law of value."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231210980)