1. Planning for Future
The prohibition on thinking concretely about the future has expired. An ecological and democratic concept of planning beyond capitalism is now necessary for planetary survival.
The more unstable the present becomes, the more necessary it is to plan for the future. While some forms of planning are regaining attention, like war planning, industrial planning, or urban planning, one kind of planning remains treated with suspicion: economic planning. Early critical theorists, following Marx, sought to empirically investigate the material conditions for the socialization of the economy. But as hopes for a future beyond capitalism dimmed under the shadow of fascism and the failures of twentieth-century socialism, such investigations were largely abandoned. Speaking concretely about the future became suspect, and conceptual tools for post-capitalist planning were quietly shelved.
The prohibition on thinking about the future is no longer tenable. The prospect of planning an economy for ends beyond private gain is not only possible, but necessary for planetary survival. Against the ravages of blind accumulation, some kind of coordinated economic planning – concerning what (and what not) to produce, how, and how much, why, where, and for whom – is indispensable for securing human needs and ensuring ecological flourishing in an ever more chaotic world.
But not all planning is the same. Some forms of planning preserve the status quo, while others seek to transform it. The varieties of democratic-economic and social–ecological planning provide a real alternative to capitalist planning. A genuinely self-reflexive form of planning learns from the experiences of capitalist and socialist planning in order to develop an emancipatory form of planning beyond capitalism adequate to the present.
Current debates on planning stand within a long historical tradition and are inseparable from disputes over knowledge, values, and coordination: from the socialist calculation debate between Otto Neurath, Ludwig von Mises, Oskar Lange, and Friedrich Hayek to contemporary controversies over ecological limits and algorithmic governance. Planning has been defended as the conscious organization of economic life and denounced as epistemic hubris; it is celebrated as a vehicle of democratic will-formation and feared as a precursor to technocratic rule. But what exactly does it mean to plan an economy? Can it be done rationally, and what does rational mean in this context? How does an emancipatory understanding of planning differ from the economic planning that already exists within capitalism today?
2. Algorithmic Planning
Advanced computational tools can support democratic planning in well-defined domains. They cannot, however, replace political judgment.
Recent technological developments have revived the question of whether advanced computational tools might overcome the traditional problems associated with socialist economic planning. Proponents of algorithmic coordination argue that large-scale data collection, machine learning, and cybernetic feedback systems could process vast amounts of information about production, consumption, and resource flows, making complex economic coordination technically feasible and democratically governable. According to this view, the coordination function traditionally attributed to markets – aligning supply with demand through price signals – could increasingly be performed by computational systems capable of modeling economic processes in real time through statistical and cybernetic feedback technologies. Algorithmic planning would make it possible to anticipate shortages, optimize logistics, and allocate resources more efficiently than decentralized market mechanisms.
Cybernetics — the science of self-regulating feedback systems — aims to reduce complexity and enhance efficiency by automating decisions and suspending practical reason. While there is nothing inherently wrong with automation and efficiency, there is certainly a tension with democratic decision-making. Future discussion should not be about cybernetic vs. non-cybernetic decision-making in general, but when automated decision-making is appropriate and when a deepening of democratic deliberation is needed.
Automation can be extremely useful in areas where goals are clearly defined and where rapid responses to changing information are required – for example in energy grid management, transportation logistics, or material flow monitoring. But not every interaction within a complex economy can – or should – be rendered fully computable. There are physical and informational limits to calculation: not all preferences, contingencies, and local conditions can be formalized without remainder. Attempting to pre-structure every exchange risks epistemic overreach and institutional rigidity. Certain forms of interaction – between individuals, among small firms, within local networks – may remain partially unplanned or proceed through direct exchange, informal coordination, or small-scale markets. Democratic planning need not absorb every micro-decision into a comprehensive accounting system.
At the same time, existing technical infrastructures, such as artificial intelligence systems, cannot simply be repurposed for emancipatory ends. Contemporary machine learning systems are trained on datasets generated within capitalist economies and optimized according to logics of profitability, surveillance, and competitive advantage. Their architectures encode assumptions about efficiency, optimization, and behavioral prediction that reflect these origins. A democratic planning project could not merely use such systems differently; it would need to appropriate and reconfigure them – rebuilding datasets, redesigning objective functions, and subjecting model construction to public oversight. The question of planning and AI is therefore not simply technical, but institutional and political: who designs the systems, which values are embedded in their optimization criteria, and how their operation remains contestable.
3. Without Models
Models of post-capitalist economies are indispensable, but they are not enough. Planning cannot be modeled all the way down: it requires self-reflexivity, the politicization of ends, and sensuous human practice.
The chief defect of all hitherto existing planning is that the economy is conceived only in the form of an object of contemplation, not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. The new debate on economic planning since the 1990s has been carried out mostly by socialist economists building models of post-capitalist economies using digital technologies, environmental knowledge, and large data sets to address problems of economic coordination and ecological accounting that previously appeared insurmountable. These models explore different combinations of participation and representation, centralized and decentralized organization, as well as political and technical means to construct a variety of options for how to plan beyond capitalism without falling into bureaucracy, authoritarianism, stagnation, or collapse.
Model building, however, is not the only way to think about planning. Though they are useful as tools for projecting possible futures outwards from the present, models may also get in the way of thinking about the future if grasped too closely. If the point of modelling is to show that a post-capitalist economy is not only imaginable, but feasible, then concrete blueprints for the socialized economy might be necessary as examples. But developing the grounds of planning requires more than examples, it needs both the critique of the present and critique of models as solutions to the hard problem of planning as the politicization of the economy.
New tools for planning – such as material flow analysis, large-scale datasets, and economic forecasting – can inform decisions about possible futures, but they cannot determine which futures are desirable in themselves. For that reason, critical self-reflection on values and ends, as well as on institutional design and political conflict, must be built into the planning of planning itself.
Furthermore, any planning that does not confront the separation of the given spheres of production and reproduction threatens to reproduce ideology of what counts as labor and what does not. Planning cannot rely only on models to objectively map economic futures but must also be seen subjectively as sensuous human activity, as practice embedded in social institutions and the natural world. In that sense, questions of motivation, spirit, need, dissent, and change are just as important as questions of supply and demand, markets and prices, calculation and innovation. It is obvious that the social surplus needs to be re-invested for satisfying collective needs and enabling future development; but there is no obvious way to do so. That is the joy of collectively planning futures.
4. Knowledge, Rationality, Planning
Any planning that ignores its own epistemic limits is pseudo-rational. Rational planning proceeds experimentally – treating uncertainty as a shared political condition, organizing institutions for learning and self-correction, and remaining perpetually open to revision.
Debates about economic planning have often been framed as disputes about knowledge and the limits of reason. What can we know? And how should we act when we do not know enough? To act as if we possessed complete knowledge when we do not is the height of what Neurath called pseudo-rationalism. Any planning that ignores its own epistemic limits risks becoming pseudo-rational in this sense.
One of the central difficulties of planning is that many economic decisions do not have a single optimal solution. Given multiple possible ways to allocate labor, resources, and production capacities, there may be no uniquely rational answer discoverable through additional data or calculation. Instead, decisions involve trade-offs between different criteria: ecological sustainability, autonomy, efficiency, health, leisure time, equality, and many others. These values cannot always be reduced to a single metric. Planning therefore cannot simply optimize outcomes; it must openly confront conflicts among incommensurable values and disparate ends. Rationality in such contexts consists less in discovering perfect solutions than in eliminating clearly worse options and making collectively justified choices under conditions of uncertainty.
If enough data were available, it is sometimes assumed, decisions could be perfectly rational. Both Neurath and Hayek challenged this assumption in different ways. Hayek argued that the knowledge required to coordinate economic activity is dispersed throughout society and embedded in the everyday practices of millions of individuals. No central authority could ever fully collect or process this information. Markets, in his view, function as mechanisms for communicating fragments of this dispersed knowledge through price signals.
Yet markets do not simply reveal knowledge. They also obscure the social and ecological processes underlying economic activity. Prices summarize complex relations of production, conflict, and resource use, but they do not explain them. They translate scarcity and power into seemingly neutral metrics, often masking the structural conditions that generate them. Coordination already occurs within capitalism through elaborate planning structures – corporate strategies, financial forecasting, logistical systems, and algorithmic infrastructures – yet these forms of coordination remain largely opaque and unaccountable.
Democratic planning begins from a different epistemic position: it acknowledges that human knowledge is partial and provisional; that uncertainty is a permanent feature of social life; and that coordination is inevitable, whether consciously organized or not. A self-reflexive rationality does not promise certainty but instead treats the limits of knowledge as a shared political condition. Institutions can be designed to elicit local knowledge, foster deliberation, incorporate feedback, and remain open to revision. Planning, understood in this way, becomes an experimental process: open to discovering new needs and new desires, while also allowing new conflicts to arise that challenge the rigidity of its own pretensions.
Critiques of markets should therefore not lead to an uncritical faith in planning. Planning itself can fall prey to the illusion of comprehensive knowledge, calculability, and foresight. For this reason, any emancipatory conception of planning must remain reflexive about its own epistemic limits. Rather than claiming perfect knowledge, a self-reflexive planning is organized around continuous learning, institutional self-critique, and an awareness of the partial and situated character of the information on which decisions are based.
5. Planning Nature
Nature cannot simply be planned. Ecological systems have causal powers and dynamics that exist independently of human intentions, and any planning that ignores them risks undermining the very conditions of social life.
Any project of democratic economic planning must recognize that human societies are embedded within natural systems whose dynamics cannot be fully controlled or predicted. Under capitalism, nature has often been treated either as a “free gift” to production or as an externality whose costs can be ignored until they appear as economic disruptions. Even attempts to correct this tendency frequently rely on the monetization of ecological processes, translating ecosystems, biodiversity, and atmospheric stability into financial assets. Such approaches risk reducing nature to a single quantitative metric and overlooking the complex and irreducible qualities of ecological systems.
Post-capitalist planning approaches nature differently. Rather than treating the environment as a passive resource to be exploited or priced, emancipatory planning takes ecological systems as both conditions and constraints of economic activity. Human production depends on finite stocks of resources and limited capacities of natural systems to absorb waste and regenerate themselves. Such planning therefore needs to incorporate ecological knowledge from the outset, anticipating environmental pressures and respecting thresholds beyond which ecosystems may be irreversibly damaged.
This does not imply that nature constrains economic planning in a purely deterministic way. Ecological thresholds are real, but the ways societies respond to them remain open to political choice. Democratic planning must therefore integrate scientific expertise about environmental processes while recognizing that such knowledge is always incomplete and subject to revision. Precaution, experimentation, and adaptability become central principles when dealing with complex ecological systems. Planning under ecological constraints is necessarily anticipatory. It seeks to coordinate social metabolism – the flows of energy, materials, and waste – within the regenerative capacities of the biosphere. Doing so requires institutional arrangements capable of integrating ecological information into economic decision-making while preserving democratic oversight and contestation.
Emancipatory planning thus becomes a form of environmental governmentality capable of coordinating human activities with the material constraints and cycles of natural systems. The aim is the reorganization of the social metabolism in ways compatible with the long-term flourishing and sustainability of both human and non-human forms of life.
6. The Goals of Planning
Democratic planning does not impose unified goals: instead, it establishes shared thresholds – minimum conditions to be secured across ecological, social, and labor dimensions – within which plural visions of the good life can freely conflict and unfold.
“Societies do not have goals, they solve problems” (Jaeggi). But one of the problems of capitalist society is the inability of most people to shape the future at all. Post-capitalist planning begins here: as a continuous, dynamic process of reflection, not a static mechanism for deciding once and for all how needs should be met. It is an inherently future-oriented practice of directed, rational action which changes both material conditions and the self-understandings of those who undertake it. Democratic planning works through socializing the process of political deliberation, not about which future to choose, but about which conditions must be guaranteed so that many futures remain possible. Whereas economic rationality forecloses options that collide with profitability, collective determination of shared thresholds – ecological, social, political – holds them open. The point is not to design how people live, but to secure the ground on which they can live freely.
Planning entails orientation, institutions, and feedback mechanisms; democratic practice provides revision and correction. Together, they politicize the future by institutionalizing the contestation of ends. This is not something that happens spontaneously, nor can it be engineered from above. It is the reflexive organization of change under conditions of uncertainty, directed, but never closed. Every social order already projects a vision of the future through its practices; democratic planning simply makes that vision explicit, disputable, and negotiable.
Real life encompasses multiple, often incommensurable ends. Post-capitalist planning provides institutional forms through which such plurality can be expressed and negotiated, without being collapsed into a single overriding objective. Its work lies in holding open a space where competing visions of the good life can coexist, conflict, interact, and inform decisions about investment, infrastructure, and social priorities. Planning thus extends beyond the economic coordination of needs and into ethical and even aesthetic questions about which futures to invest in. The genre of post-capitalist planning is social science fiction, for it requires both technical-aesthetic judgement and political-ethical imagination to co-determine how to live well together in a shared world of multiple, entangled and conflicting futures. There is no single answer, no one optimal solution for which possible future is the best; no prompt or plan can save us from the burden of human freedom.
7. Capitalist vs. Post-Capitalist Planning
The real opposition is not between planning and markets, but between planning in the service of accumulation – reactive, crisis-prone, profit-driven – and planning oriented toward multiple, collectively determined ends.
The often-assumed opposition between capitalist market allocation and economic planning obscures more than it reveals. A central insight of the contemporary planning debate is that planning is not the antithesis of markets and capitalism but one of its constitutive modes. Large corporations and monopoly powers coordinate complex production chains often with limited reliance on price signals. Financial capital shapes the future morphology of infrastructures and social life through investment decisions. Meanwhile, states intervene in the economy via industrial policy, regulatory standards, and fiscal steering. Most capitalist innovation builds upon publicly funded research and development. Capitalism does not lack planning, but rather institutionalizes specific forms of it.
Capitalist planning is structurally anti-democratic because it derives authority from private ownership, not public legitimacy. Capital plans in order to maintain class power. There are many different kinds of capitalist planning, but what unifies them is an underlying rationality: capitalist planning operates under the imperative of competitive accumulation. Decisions are filtered through the criterion of profitability, enforced by inter-capitalist competition and the assumed generalized ‘scarcity’ of money and investable resources. Even state planning is structurally mediated by this horizon: it seeks to secure growth, stabilize expectations, and maintain attractive conditions for private investment. The temporality of capitalist planning is predominantly ex-post: performance indicators, return metrics, and macroeconomic feedback loops retrospectively evaluate outcomes. Adjustments follow in iterative cycles of correction, which can take the form of financial bubbles bursting or market collapse.
Post-capitalist planning, on the other hand, operates according to multiple criteria rather than one. For post-capitalist planning, resource efficiency remains indispensable, but the telos shifts from realizing surplus value to satisfying social needs. Preferences, needs, and resource constraints are not left to be “revealed” through market exchange; they are proactively integrated into collective decision-making processes, which makes the temporality of post-capitalist planning mainly ex-ante and thus less crisis-prone.
Investment retains a driving role in post-capitalist planning, but its meaning changes fundamentally. It no longer denotes the advance of capital in expectation of monetary return. Rather, investment becomes the collectively authorized allocation of labor, material resources, institutional capacities, and research toward multiple, socially determined ends. The distinction between capitalist and post-capitalist planning is then not between planning and its absence, but between planning subordinated to accumulation of value and planning oriented toward multiple, collectively determined ends.
8. Planning, Freedom and Choice
Planning redistributes and reconstitutes freedom. By collectively securing material independence, it shifts freedom from an individualized possession exercised under structural precarity to a substantive capacity grounded in mutual recognition.
Planning and regulation are routinely attacked as denials of freedom. In capitalist societies, freedom is often packaged as consumer choice: a veneer of autonomy layered over structural dependencies. It is framed as the absence of coercion by laws, regulation, and collective coordination. Yet the range of options available is always mediated by purchasing power, by differential access to wages, credit, and property, and by infrastructures that channel desire into particular forms of consumption. Housing, energy, healthcare, and even time itself is commodified, their availability contingent on individual ability to secure them. Under such conditions, the freedom of consumer choice is inseparable from the lack of freedom over the choice of what and how to produce in the first place: freedom is exercised in its very denial. Preferences are “revealed” by consumption patterns, while the basic conditions of survival remain exposed to market fluctuation. Freedom is exercised within constraints that remain socially unchosen and structurally opaque.
By socializing control over essential infrastructures and securing baseline provisions independently of market outcomes, planning transforms the landscape on which choices are made. The goal is not to prescribe or constrain lifestyles, but to ensure that experimentation, self-determination, and the pursuit of personal or collective projects are not perpetually shadowed by precarity. Planning thus redistributes and reconstitutes freedom rather than curtailing it. The decisive question is not whether freedom is limited, but whose freedoms are restricted and whose are expanded. What appears as a loss of wealth and power for the few can amount to new sources of security and leisure for the many. Here, planning enlarges the domain of substantive freedom by providing material independence without which formal liberties remain hollow.
Democratic planning must, however, consciously safeguard civil and intellectual liberties: freedom of expression, association, scientific inquiry, artistic experimentation, and the right to nonconformity. Greater coordination must be accompanied by the institutional strengthening of individual rights, enforceable even against administrative power. The alternative to bureaucratic domination is not the free market but the construction of legally protected spheres of autonomy within a planned framework: spaces of dissent, plural institutional forms, and mechanisms that prevent the concentration of unchecked authority.
Planning does not abolish individual choice or self-determination. It constrains the capacity of private purchasing power to dictate collective outcomes, while preserving broad domains of personal discretion. In doing so, it shifts the focus from negative freedom – the mere absence of interference – to positive freedom: the collectively secured capacity to pursue individual and shared projects without the constant threat of deprivation. “The discovery of society is thus either the end or the rebirth of freedom” (Polanyi). Planning demands a new concept of freedom adequate to this discovery.
When existential security is collectively guaranteed, freedom expands beyond the market to influence the shape of society to come. Planning, then, redefines the meaning of freedom: from an individualized possession used against one another to the mutual recognition that we depend on each other.
9. Planning, Transformation and Socialization
Production is already constitutively social. Converting private ownership of productive resources into common ownership is therefore not an external imposition on capitalism but a latent potential within it – one that transforms the former objects of planning into its subjects by the very process of its realization.
Property relations determine the distribution of decision-making power long before any formal planning apparatus is invoked. While capitalism cannot be reduced to private property relations alone, the concentration of ownership over productive resources constitutes a decisive structural obstacle to emancipatory planning. Control over land, energy, money and other productive capacities shapes whose preferences are realized, whose needs are met, and whose visions of the future are financed. Socialization transforms this landscape by converting rights of exclusion into shared capacities for determination, creating arenas where decisions about use, maintenance, and development are collectively deliberated. For post-capitalist planning to work, it must also break with the form of private property in productive resources, financial assets and material infrastructure, and move towards common ownership of basic goods. Socializing what is already socially produced means aligning the future possibilities of planning with the contradiction at the heart of capitalist property relations: productive resources are already constitutively social – dependent on collective labor, shared infrastructure, and accumulated common knowledge – yet remain under private control. It is this gap between the social character of production and the private form of ownership that makes collective ownership not an external imposition but a latent potential within capitalism itself.
Socialization does more than redistribute who owns what. It shifts the power to shape material conditions away from large property owners and democratizes it. But even this understates the transformation. Socializing basic infrastructure affectively prepares people for exercising collective control over conditions of daily life from which they have been structurally excluded. It brings questions of needs and ends, usually considered part of the private sphere in a liberal democracy, into public debate. Socialization, on this account, can be understood as a transformative experience, changing the kind of person we are in the process. That is why the prospects of rational planning cannot be fully determined in advance since the subjects of planning themselves change through it.
Socialization thus initiates social transformation through the very experience of its implementation; it frees time and opens space for learning practices of common deliberation about incommensurable ends, and in this way provides the precondition for large-scale post-capitalist planning and economic democracy. However, visions of democratic economic planning need to be part of the socialization process, giving it shape and direction.
10. Democratic Planning
There is no institutional blueprint for democratic planning. It must be continuously reinvented – guided by principles of plurality, transparency, subsidiarity, and institutionalized conflict – while political and legal structures remain in place to protect individual freedoms against the administrative power it creates.
Private property relations also create a distinct separation between the economic and political sphere. This means that the economy – referring both to production and social reproduction – is in large parts excluded from democratic deliberation. An emancipatory transformation therefore requires rearranging the relation between economy and politics. Democracy cannot simply be “implemented” through an institutional blueprint. It is inherently contingent and must be continuously renegotiated. The question of who plans which sectors of the economy is therefore never definitively settled. Depending on the society in question and the sector to be governed, different institutional configurations may be appropriate: representative, lottocratic, council-based, or hybrid forms. Likewise, different sectors will require varying degrees of technical expertise and technocratic input.
Who gets to decide what — who has the necessary expertise, and who should be included as directly affected — is one dimension of the problem. But there is also the question of subjectification: what individual and collective critical capacities does self-governance require, and how can they be cultivated? Democratic planning means institutionalizing a collective power that does not exist yet. The future has to intervene in the present to bring forth the necessary capacities for transformation blocked by the domination of the past.
Yet although democratic institutionalization remains open-ended, certain normative principles can guide the design of democratic economic planning bodies. These include the plurality and diversity of representation, the active inclusion of marginalized voices – not only those directly affected, but also those with a specific political stake – an institutionalization of conflictuality, that is, procedures that make divergent interests explicit and contestable within deliberation; transparency in decision-making; reflexive openness and the capacity for self-questioning, including mechanisms that render institutional arrangements revisable; and subsidiarity, enabling decisions to be taken at the lowest feasible level.
Nevertheless, politics, i.e. political democracy, cannot be completely absorbed into the economy. Democratic economic planning still requires political institutions, such as courts, constitutions and civil liberties to ensure comprehensive democratisation. For instance, if democratic majorities choose ecologically destructive paths, then how does this get resolved without sacrificing either autonomy or sustainability? The point is that there are trade-offs in any scenario, and no single value criterion or form of rationality can resolve a hard choice without political contest over ends. It is the freedom to determine those ends that is lacking today.
11. Limits of Planning
Limits are unavoidable, but only through democratic planning can they be confronted consciously, rather than imposed in catastrophic form. Failing to plan is planning to fail.
Planning unfolds in a world bounded by material, ecological, and historical constraints. Energy systems, transport networks, digital architectures, and urban forms are not neutral backdrops but sedimented histories, products of past decisions that structure present possibilities. Ecological processes impose thresholds that cannot simply be negotiated away, and the knowledge we possess about them remains incomplete and often contested. The consequences of collective action are frequently irreversible. Yet these constraints do not justify inaction; rather, they define the field within which action must take place. Effective planning therefore requires improvisation and judgment with a sensitivity to context. The temptation to treat limits as purely technical parameters, solvable by experts insulated from public debate, risks narrowing the horizon of democratic agency and subordinating political judgment to the policing of boundaries. A more adequate approach situates expertise within democratic processes that acknowledge uncertainty and inequality.
Geopolitical limits further complicate the picture. Democratic planning does not occur in a vacuum but within an uneven and interdependent world economy shaped by global supply chains, capital mobility, and geopolitical competition. National or regional planning projects confront external constraints they cannot fully control. The scale at which democratic coordination is possible rarely coincides with the scale at which economic and ecological processes unfold. Any serious project of democratic planning must therefore struggle with asymmetries of power beyond its immediate jurisdiction, even as it seeks to expand the scope of cooperation across borders and institutions.
Planning becomes, in this framework, a practice of navigating freedom without guarantees: it does not assume omnipotent mastery over the future, nor does it retreat into resigned humility before structural constraints. Instead, emancipatory planning asks how inherited capacities can be redirected, how ecological sensitivities can be respected, and how the burdens and benefits of transformation can be redistributed across society. Limits, on this account, are both real and historical: they frame possible futures without determining them.
The decisive question, therefore, is not whether planning encounters limits. It always will. The question is which limits will govern collective life. Refusing to plan does not suspend planning; it delegates it to the imperatives of capital accumulation. What presents itself as freedom from planning is in fact submission to an opaque and unaccountable form of it — one that accelerates ecological destabilization, entrenches inequality, and forecloses democratic choice.
Democratic planning will inevitably generate intense conflicts and unintended consequences. Yet the limits imposed by the absence of socialized planning – such as climate breakdown, infrastructural lock-in, technological domination, and the erosion of shared conditions of life – are more severe. No plan is free of contradictions or constraints. But only by planning the future together can limits be confronted consciously, rather than imposed in catastrophic form.
Berlin, March 2026
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