Planning as Democratization vs Planning as Totalization

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"Friedrich Hayek famously argued that "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design" (Hayek, 1945). In his view, natural normalizing mechanisms such as money, language, and vote serve as spontaneous orders that enable decentralized coordination without the need for central planning. These instruments provide comparability and stability; they allow dispersed knowledge to be aggregated into workable, if ultimately provisional, metrics like GDP. However, when one attempts to codify all aspects of social life—reducing human existence solely to numbers and measurable outputs—the system becomes both rigid and dehumanized, a point echoed in recent critiques of neoliberal growth ideology.

At the same time, Deleuze disrupts the notion of any “natural” normalizing mechanism. For Deleuze, there is no essential difference between natural and artificial systems; both are products of social processes that are continually deterritorialized and reterritorialized. He emphasizes that the processes of overcoding and decoding constantly reconfigure meaning, thereby ensuring that any static, centralized measure—such as GDP—is inherently limited. In this framework, the idea of a fixed “general intelligence” or a stable, all-encompassing code collapses into a dynamic interplay of multiplicity and flux.

Antonio Negri further complicates this picture by arguing that capitalism itself, through its globalized, networked forms of control, creates conditions in which economic calculation becomes a matter not just of measurement but also of power. Negri’s concept of the “multitude” underscores that collective action and democratic planning cannot be reduced to centralized technocratic decision-making. Rather, the intersubjective negotiation of meaning—what might be called a “social choice” process—is essential for transcending the limitations imposed by static measures like GDP. As Negri contends, democratic practice must remain a “speculative science,” always open to reinterpretation and renewal, rather than a system of fixed rules and predetermined outcomes.

These arguments converge on a critical point: any attempt to reduce the complexity of human and social life solely to formal, quantifiable systems (what some call “codeable knowledge”) is doomed to overlook the irreducible, experiential dimensions of existence. As scholars have noted, “the system” that aggregates dispersed knowledge into a single, centralized order inevitably sacrifices the richness of intersubjective dialogue and individual creativity (see also Kuhn’s analysis of paradigm shifts and Quine’s critique of analytic-synthetic dichotomies). In other words, while natural normalizing mechanisms provide a necessary foundation for social coordination, they cannot capture the full scope of human subjectivity and collective agency.

Thus, the contemporary political-economic order—where GDP, interest rates, and inflation become the sole determinants of societal value—represents not a natural or eternal truth but a historically contingent configuration. This configuration, through its process of totalization (the aggregation of diverse inputs into standardized outputs), socialization (the intersubjective negotiation of meaning), and democratization (the dispersal of decision-making power), reveals the limitations of any attempt to achieve an absolute, unchanging order. Instead, what we call democracy emerges as a continuous, speculative process—a “flow” of collective negotiation that always leaves room for dissent, rearticulation, and the transformation of both economic and social norms.

In sum, while Hayek’s spontaneous order relies on natural normalizing mechanics to sustain comparability and coordination, Deleuze and Negri remind us that these systems are inherently unstable and subject to overcoding. They argue that true democratic planning, which does not merely reproduce technocratic control but rather remains open to continual reinterpretation and collective input, is the only way to approach the problem of incompleteness that Gödel and others have exposed in formal systems. Democracy, then, is not the static outcome of a perfected measurement system but the dynamic process of negotiating meaning and power in a perpetually unfinished world. This synthesis emphasizes that while standardized tools provide necessary coordination, the true democratic potential lies in the continuous, open-ended re-negotiation of meaning—a process that, by its very nature, remains incomplete and subject to change.

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• • References:**

Hayek, F. A. (1945). “The Use of Knowledge in Society”. 

Kuhn, T. S. (1962). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. 

Quine, W. V. (1951). “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. 

Deleuze, G. (1992). “Difference and Repetition”. 

Negri, A. (2000). “Empire”. 