When compared with the news, I find political economy to be a relaxing read, so I took on a fair bit of it during my trip to the island of Milos last month. And like the location, the reading turned out to be inspiring: Democratic economic planning is back.

This is a return which has been developing for a while. At our conference in Warsaw last autumn, ISRF Fellow Martin O’Neill prompted a great discussion of its reappearance in political philosophy following decades in neoliberal exile.

So during my swimming holiday, I read Kohei Saito and Aaron Benanav — two thinkers who develop planning as an alternative to markets and to command economies.

In the much-discussed book Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth (2024), Saito takes as his starting point the fact that economic growth still requires more fossil fuel use, ensuring more greenhouse gasses and more climate chaos.

This is because the predicted “decoupling” of growth from environmental damage hasn’t happened — and it won’t happen soon enough. Instead, reduced emissions in the global North come largely from displacing them to the global South.

The only way to save the planet, Saito concludes, is through steady-state economies, systems where production and the use of resources are maintained within ecological limits. His overriding question is how to get to this point. 

Enter Karl Marx… or specifically a late, eco-Marx who Saito has encountered through extensive analysis of unpublished manuscripts. It turns out Marx spent much of the last 16 years of his life reading the natural sciences and resituating his economics in a “theory of metabolism,” that is, of the relationship between economic activity and the natural world.

Saito claims that by the 1860s Marx had deep doubts about his own “productivism”—his argument that capitalism’s indispensable contribution to human history was a vision of development as ever-increasing economic output.

After the publication of Capital vol. 1 in 1867, Marx’s reading shifted him decisively toward economic sustainability. He also moved towards seeing the commons — the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society — as a model of managing this kind of economy.

This is a Marx who, in a late letter now published for the first time, praises the communal Markgenossenschaft of medieval Germanic peoples and the self-managed agricultural mirs in Russia. In this context, his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” in 1875 should be seen a brief for communal wealth.

For Saito, communism should be defined as producers jointly developing and orchestrating of the means of production as a commons. Communism does not require general nationalisation and the state ownership or control of property, rather property ownership is a secondary issue.

Saito prefers late Marx to existing degrowth theory because the focus is not on changing distribution or on reducing consumption but on transforming labour. Indeed, Saito’s core claim is that today’s world needs “to change the nature of labour to save the environment.”

So the big question becomes, change labour in what way? The answer won’t exactly shock you. Saito wants to democratise the work process in order to get rid of bullshit jobs (there’s more than a little David Graeber in this book).

The idea is to put socially essential work ahead of work focused on increasing the growth of consumption. “The highest-paying jobs right now,” Saito writes, “are in industries like marketing, advertising, consulting, finance and insurance, which makes these industries appear to be very important despite being almost entirely inessential to the reproduction of society”. These would get the axe, with people moved into jobs focused on “use-value as determined through social planning.”

The glory of the envisioned outcome almost makes up for the poverty of Saito’s means: An economy which would support the natural world rather than prey on it, addressing everyone’s fundamental needs through work that leads to the “all-round development of the individual.”

Health, housing, and education are fundamental needs, and so too is free sociality and self-realisation. Though it seems counterintuitive today, setting up work to support the latter would make it easier for society to achieve the former.

Some strains of Marxism have long developed the idea that self-management at work is a mode of continuous education that the Italian operaismo tradition called formazione, which creates the collective capacity to govern both work and society democratically. (See Gigi Roggero’s book, Italian Operaismo,for the full story.)

However, the poverty lies in Saito’s failure to address the mechanisms of democracy and planning. Capitalists have displayed a long-term refusal to give up any of their resources and power to a commons. Or even to today’s modes of representative democracy, which they already control. Saito is silent about what would have to be a massive, protracted political struggle while the earth burns.

Also, given the weakness of popular democratic practices today, it’s not clear how any collectivity can produce regular good decisions to which everyone willingly binds themselves.  Democracy involves adjudicating the interests of winners and losers through deliberations in which everyone is in a cognitive and social position to participate meaningfully.  We should all be able to interpret complex information about who will win and lose, what the overall benefits are, and which methods are likely to achieve them.

Planning is hard and today’s humans don’t obviously have what it takes: Few seem to possess the needed analytical patience, focus, and respect for people who don’t resemble them, let alone an interest in grappling with anomalous information that contradicts their beliefs or a will to accommodate divergent positions.

Exhibit A of this problem is UK democracy, which is unable to address core social problems as it steadily abandons a promising if still inadequate commitment to a green transition. Exhibit B is the university —usually operated as a managerial autocracy to which academic staff generally conform.

Given today’s knowledge failures, it’s hard to picture a democratic commons succeeding. Yet Saito, while mentioning some successful local experiments, offers no ideas about how they should be structured or run.

The leftist reluctance to plan for planning is the core issue in Aaron Benanav’s Beyond Capitalism—1: Groundwork for a Multi-Criterial Economy, the first part of a long essay which was recently published in New Left Review.

Benanav also invokes the urgent environmental need to stop endless growth, driven in his account by the one-dimensional pursuit of efficiency.  A non-capitalist economy that seeks multiple social goods would vastly improve society while also reducing damage to the natural world.

His main argument is that moving beyond capitalism can be achieved without socialising the entire economy but, instead, by socialising investment. As an early example of this idea, he discusses the National Investment Board that John Maynard Keynes proposed around 100 years ago.

Yet democratically planned investment requires functional democracy. Benanav addresses this issue directly… in the second part of the essay, which isn’t yet published! 

But in Part 1, he’s already raised the bar for democracy quite a bit by replacing maximised efficiency with multiple economic goals. This “multi-criterial economy” aims not only at pecuniary (common) wealth but also health, happiness, agreeability, sociability, relative equality, and so on. Non-capitalist society will need to juggle incommensurable features that “cannot be measured in terms of a common unit.”  Just how are we going to pull this off?

A starting point is confronting our intellectual stagnation. Western economic policy is stuck in the 19^th century, typified, for, Benanav, by the belief that “the sheer expansion of economic production made it seem less necessary to articulate specific social goods.”

Indeed, growth remains the US, UK, EU, Indian, Chinese, Argentinian, German, everyone's solution to the social and political problems raised by their unequal, unjust and destructive economies.  Yet this same growth ensures environmental catastrophe, as well as continuation of acute social and political problems economies. Yet this same growth ensures environmental catastrophe, as well as continuation of acute social and political problems.

Benanav makes it clear that the solution involves a transformed, universal economic education. He has a fascinating discussion of Otto Neurath’s work on how populations can become cognitively ready to deliberate economic questions in which complex information will lead to multiple right answers.

Democratic planning also means keeping society’s local details and irreconcilable aims at the heart the planning debate. It’s clear to me that the humanities disciplines have a central role in this process as they are immersed in details and singularities that they don’t reduce to unifying rules.

Decision-making must be understood as a process of composition. Selecting particular ways of integrating multiple goals, where each composition reflects a different way of handling unavoidable trade-offs across intrinsically worthwhile aims. My contribution is to treat the resolution of this composition problem as the central task of economic coordination.

Aaron Benanav

He’s right! We can’t simply add more diverse voices to deliberation, but must plan a system that allows for deliberation about incommensurable goals that leads to a stable, mutually agreeable accommodation.

This is currently beyond the capabilities of humanity, as our 19^th century stall-out suggests. We still aren’t ready to implement the ideas Neurath and Keynes came up with so many decades ago.

And yet a just economy and survivable world depends on developing these capabilities. The best way to get them is to build the processes in which these capabilities will be used.