Cybersocialist Planning

Just a quick post with a link from Jacobin about cybersocialist planning for readers who expressed an interest in the topic not too long ago.

At this point, we can guess what the connection between econophysics and cybersocialist planning is. The former allows us to explain that, compared to the market economy, the latter optimizes or adjusts the use of social information, considerably increasing our ability to adapt. Planning is cybernetically superior quantitatively and qualitatively. By getting rid of redundant information, it does what the market does (optimize costs and distribute work across industries based on demand) faster and more accurately. The possibility, opened up by information and communications technologies, of collecting, storing, and processing huge amounts of information in a viable way allows us to do without the market.

Planning is also clearly different and superior in qualitative terms. As Otto Neurath explained, thanks to calculation in kind and direct democracy, a new type of apprehensive rationality emerges from multidimensional factors, focused on the satisfaction of social needs. We would speak of a control system with the ability to consciously decide what to do and how. Plans are the conscious expression of the popular will at a given time through self-imposed goals and constraints. This can take the form of both expansions and retractions of different productive sectors, depending on what is considered. Why? Because by sweeping the capitalist class off the map and centralizing the means of production, social reproduction no longer depends on a certain employer seeing profit expectations in a sector or on poor monetary games; rather, the different areas of human life (health, consumption, ecology, etc.) would be managed, case by case, based on particular scientific studies and ethical-political considerations expressed in public deliberation.

For this new way of organizing the social metabolism, democracy — something quite different from the representative despotism of bourgeois parliamentarism, prostrated before the power of capital and whose essential task is to guarantee capital’s general conditions of reproduction — is not a rhetorical flourish. Only massive and recurrent popular participation can guarantee a social reproduction that is not turbulent, so long as it is consensual. Likewise, the target record — that is, expressible in a mathematical way — of social needs and, therefore, planning itself, is impossible without a fluid transmission of information from bottom to top.

There you have it.