Campbell Jones Introduction: The Return of Economic Planning This issue proposes to raise the stakes of Left political strategy by returning, in quite dierent ways than might be expected, to the question of economic planning. This comes at a moment when Left politics are at the same time gravely endan- gered and in a phase of radical renewal. Such a moment requires going back to central ideas and rethinking, reworking, and reframing them anew. While the ambition of the issue is to expand, extend, and radicalize Left politics, it is argued that this can be done not only by reclaiming economic planning but further by shifting the grounds of discussions of economic planning. The point, then, is not simply to defend economic planning but to draw out new understandings of economic planning, and in doing so to make conceptual and moreover strategic interventions into contempo- rary economic, social, and political struggle. When Jacques Lacan spoke in 1955 of a “return to Freud,” he stressed that this was any- thing but a return to the commonplace reductions to which Freud had been subjected. As Lacan insisted, the return to Freud was not the “return of the repressed” but a return to the meaning of Freud, in terms of a renewal of the revolutionary gesture of Freud’s calling into question of that The South Atlantic Quarterly 119:1, January 2020 10.1215/00382876-8007617 © 2020 Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/119/1/1/750327/1190001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 2 The South Atlantic Quarterly • January 2020 which had been taken as truth (Lacan [1955] 2006). While it is possible to dream of a “return” to a world imagined to be integral and perfect, there is also a return that—with the deepest of respect for tradition—creates some- thing new out of the old. There is something quite distinct about the “resur- rection” of an idea or a practice that has been subjected to reaction or obscu- ration (see Badiou 2009: 62ff.). If we speak of a “return of economic planning,” then, it must be remembered that something that is resurrected can be dierent and even better than the original. Let us be clear then. The return of economic planning that we have in mind has not one jot of nostalgia for the visions of economic planning that so readily leap to mind: Five-Year Plans; misguided and perverse plans with pointless objectives; the radical depoliticization of the planning process; the monopolizing of planning by sectional interests at the expense of others; the systematic silencing of dissenting or alternative plans; the ruthless brutal- ization of those failing to meet the plan. We know all of this, and we refuse all of this, not only because of historical failures of certain versions of Left economic planning, of which we are painfully aware, but just as much because our daily lives under capital today in so many ways resemble this planned nightmare. That the horrors associated with economic planning are today so easily connected with communism and even the most modest socialist or social democratic eorts to rein in capital should make clear the eectiveness of the ideological oensive that has been waged against the very idea of economic planning. The eort to create this ideational switching was performed with genius by F. A. Hayek in his Road to Serfdom ([1944] 2007), but it has also more broadly become the staple fare of the ideological imaginary of economic planning, for both the Right and the better part of the Left. This war has been very successfully waged by capitalist economics, and so economic planning has come to be associated with everything even vaguely undesirable to the capitalist class. In economics the repudiation of economic planning is so fundamental that it orders the most basic conceptual grounds of the discipline. This gen- erally plays out through the conceptual trick of separating and then oppos- ing planning to “the market.” Indeed, the planning/market dualism is today so foundational and apparently intractable that it grounds the central catego- ries of capitalist economics even in its more apparently progressive strands. When leading economists even consider the prospect that there might be “alternative economic systems” or that there might be “fundamentally dif- ferent ways of organizing an economy,” this generally translates into taking Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/119/1/1/750327/1190001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Jones • Introduction: The Return of Economic Planning 3 dierent positions along a continuum between on the one hand a “market economy” and on the other a “command economy” (Samuelson and Nord - haus 2010: 8). While economists do concede that all actual economies today are “mixed economies” that involve a combination of market and plan, the opposition itself has done its work. On this continuum every society has to decide between terms that are so loaded that everything is concluded in advance. On the one hand, there is a command economy in which there are “those on top of the hierarchy giving economic commands to those further down the ladder” while, on the other hand, there is a market economy in which “individuals or enterprises voluntarily agree to exchange goods or ser- vices” (Samuelson and Nordhaus 2010: 8). It has long been known that pitting hierarchy against the market ignores the incredibly hierarchical nature of almost every business organiza- tion and what it means to live daily life subject to arbitrary managerial com- mand. This setup serves to occlude the very real powers of command that have always accompanied the rise and the continued expansion of capital and paints a fantastically egalitarian image of “the market” and the reality of coming face to face with massive corporations and the organized power of the rich and super rich. Capitalist power has of course rarely been satis¢ed to simply let the market do its magic, but rather has always carefully planned the extension of market forces, which it then withdraws or modi¢es when they are not achieving the desired ends. The capital-relation had to be forci- bly imposed through ongoing rounds of “primitive accumulation” through which capital created the space for its reign. Capital has always been accom- panied by the capitalist state, to which it turns when it is unable to eect its designs through the “voluntary” agreement of individuals and enterprises. In one sense the planning/market opposition is a politically motivated obfuscation that must be abandoned. At the same time, and in a deeper and more subtle sense, it is not that the market/planning binary needs to be deconstructed one ¢ne day, but rather that every eort to pit the market against planning is doomed to fail, bringing with it intractable conceptual and practical contradictions. One of the key things that many of us learned from Jacques Derrida some years ago is that the simple reversal of an opposi- tion leaves the terms and their opposition in place, while another form of crit- ical investigation is needed to interrogate what sustains the opposition and what the opposition occludes. This is a vital lesson with regard to economic planning. When faced with the massive destructive power of capital, many have been led to the conclusion that the solution is to replace the market with planning. Others, realizing that capitalism is already fully planned from top Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/119/1/1/750327/1190001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 4 The South Atlantic Quarterly • January 2020 to bottom, are led to the conclusion that the solution is simply to repurpose capitalist planning but this time to place us in control of the machinery. In speci¢c local situations, such solutions are vitally important and are worth ¢ghting for. But beyond these, a quite dierent set of options open up in the space between and beyond the market/planning opposition. Beyond the capitalist market and absolutist command there is a vast continent of alternative ways of thinking about and practicing economic planning. Many of our struggles in recent years have been precisely over developing various experiments in “counterplanning” or “planning from below.” These forms of economic planning rest neither on capitalist planning nor state planning from above, and have opened up new ways of thinking about what it means to plan. These practices have been described by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) as the constantly present “fugitive” element that bubbles up and manifests itself in a range of what they describe as “black operations.” Whatever name we give to the third term that sits outside of the ways eco- nomic planning has for so long been understood and unsettles the opposi- tions on the basis of which it has been conceived, the purpose of this volume is precisely to draw out these often unrecognized eorts of economic plan- ning and to think through their potential consequences. The Planned Economy While planning has always been fundamental to capitalism, contemporary capitalism is the most intensively and extensively planned economy ever known. Any intervention in economic planning must take this reality as its starting point. Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski (2019) have demon- strated a number of the ways in which almost all capitalist organizations of a certain size are thoroughly planned, and they therefore take organizations such as Walmart and Amazon as exemplars of capitalist economic planning. The presence of planning at the heart of the most powerful capitalist corpo- rations is palpable in the rule of bureaucratic forms of organization, and in the way that large organizations systematically bracket the market mecha- nism in order to increase internal predictability and control, and to avoid the “transactions costs” that many economists know accompany coordination of activity through the market.