Often times we’re a bit lost in relating proposals that don’t call themselves “planning” or where “planning” takes a shape that is not immediately recognizable to us to the more established “core discourse” of DEP. I think we need conceptual tools to map these possible relations, make sense of them and help us navigate them. I’ve recently listened to this podcast episode with Malcolm Harris about his book “What’s Left? Three Paths through the Planetary Crisis.”. In this book, Harris gives an overview of what he sees as the three main strategies currently on the left to combat the climate crisis. He names them “Marketcraft” , “Public Power” and “Communism”.
To summarize, marketcrafting is different from market fundamentalism, in that it does not think that “the superintelligence of the market will figure it all out, every intervention only distorts it”, but that it accepts that there are desireable social outcomes that we can cognize and politically decide upon and that markets are simply one tool among others to get these outcomes. So, market as instrument not as primordial. Harris counts for example Saule Omarova and her proposal for a national investment board (and therefore I guess the idea of credit guidance for investment), as well as calls for price controls by Isabella Weber into this “camp”,.
Public Power is basically “let the state invest in things, build and run them directly”. Think public infrastructure projects for electricity or transportation.
Communism in this conceptual trio is less obvious (I haven’t read the book yet though, only listened to podcasts about it), but it seems to be something like “seizing the means of (re-)production and making direct decisions over parts of our economic and social life.
Harris makes clear that these three are not to be thought of as “either-or” options but as possibly complementary puzzle pieces (both acting simultaneously, as well as in a transitionary step-wise sense) in a strategy to combat the climate crisis from the left. I think we can recognize forms of what we discuss as planning in all three of these (e.g. credit guidance) as well as use them to make sense of proposals (e.g. price controls) and their strategic relation to advocating for and transitioning to more expansive forms of DEP. I think this conceptual trio or something similar like it can help us immensely in making sense of the ecosystem of ideas, proposals and actors we find ourselves in - both to get differences and boundaries more clear, but also to find possible alliances and see where maybe one piece fits into the other, without having to find consensus (a big topic on my mind in general, how decentralized political strategy that doesn’t rely on consensus as its primary condition can be possible and how it can look like).