Is a Planned Economy in Our Future?

Production for use instead of for profit.

I loved the way that sounded in a contributor’s 2005 column I edited for a monthly leftist newspaper I helped produce in those days.

I later learned it was a longtime Democratic Socialist framing of their doctrine. As a description of socialism, it was simple and relevant -- and instead of the foreboding feeling of ideology, it evoked the familiarity of barn raisings and bookmobiles.

So I asked this contributor if he’d consider taking his belief in replacing capitalism with production for use to a more mainstream audience.

A Louisville TV station (this was the tail end of analog days) had just put out a call for guest opinions from qualified spokespeople to pepper their own editorials. And our paper’s contributor was a longtime union labor activist and member of our city’s human rights commission -- the perfect person to bring production for use to the next level of discourse.

I told him I sensed the time was right for the channel surfers of average America to hear a suggestion for a new way to make their cars, medicines and sink cleansers -- one which would end unemployment right now and end pollution and racial inequality soon enough.

photo from Remy Gieling

He thanked me for my proposal, but passed on it. I don't know his specific reasons, but I grasped that among viewers of mainstream TV stations, production for use instead of for profit was too audacious and disorienting.

That was 2005. Gasoline prices were stable, sub-prime mortgages non-controversial, tiny houses were for Barbie dolls, and John Kerry was as far to the left as the mass public mind was allowed to roam. The idea of producing for use and for social good, instead of for profit was the stuff of coffeehouse discussions.

Fifteen years later, 20 percent of the U.S. population says socialism is a better idea than capitalism, and 40 percent of those leaning toward the Democratic Party prefer socialism. And the surge to those ratings came about because of the personal situations of today’s youth and young adults, not ideological immersion.

And whereas the right wing can demonize the word “socialism” as brutally as ever, they can’t stigmatize it as long as they maintain oppressive student debt, unlivable minimum wages and payday lender traps -- and as long as the billionaires’ PACs block legislators from changing those conditions.

Contrast this strain of capitalism with the one that not so long ago paid real interest on savings, offered pensions and wanted to pay wages high enough so its products could be afforded. The transformation from that era's reasonable degree of economic equity, political pluralism and emphasis on education to the dictatorial plutocracy of today fits Karl Marx’ analysis of capitalism outliving its once great usefulness.

So, is production for use, via a planned economy instead of the marketplace, in the offing? Will it arrive inevitably -- or would we have to create it? And how -- would it be made by revolution or legislating prompted by activism, as in the manner of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act or the ban on child labor?

Michael Harrington could see 
a planned economy coming.

Many on the U.S. left, including Michael Harrington, have seen Marx as evolutionary and a democratic socialist. Others say that co-opts Marx’ vision into a state capitalism, instead of class-based struggle. This underscores the principal hindrance to leftward movement -- sectarianism. Dozens of clashing and uncompromising ideologies call themselves socialist.

Would a planned economy be statist all around, or planned like highways or mass transit lines -- with bids let to competing contractors to build the things we need? The state’s involvement could be limited to placing the production facilities wherever they are needed to achieve full employment, as well as setting wages and prices.

And if you have a proliferation of people at a certain job skill level in a specific area, you produce things there that match that level.

Of course, “things” don’t describe our production these days nearly as much as services, finance and software. Could a planned economy possibly produce today’s tech that is in demand? Perhaps a more bourgeois variety of a planned economy will come that will be geared to restore the old American system of affordable education, housing and health care, but leave a have-have not (or have less) split.

But making tech? Seriously? That's
 a tall order for a planned economy.

I have come to favor a sort of “floating” ideology -- that means we build a genuine political democracy (a first for the United States) and then see where that takes the economy, be it to socialism or capitalism. This democracy would be achieved by enforcing the equal protection guarantees of the 14^th Amendment (which preclude the Money is Speech notion), and just as importantly, enforcing the laws that declare corporations to be licensed entities.

A corporation is publicly controlled and required to operate in the public interest. The corporate license is granted to a for-profit company, but so that public goals can be achieved. But because of several horrible Supreme Court decisions giving corporations the people’s 14^th Amendment rights, we live under corporate control of our foreign policy, colleges, elections and more.

As for the screams of “totalitarian” and “tyrannical” socialism, it is the capitalist U.S. that has fatal no-knock police entries, false confession machines railroading black youth, and a state disinformation media. All while economic opportunities vanish and the U.S. imprisons more people than any other nation (and not because of any war on crime, but the mass incarceration of non-violent offenders).

Though we don‘t know exactly where into the realm of a planned economy we should go, capitalism that operates like this creates a consensus that we certainly don’t want to stay where we are.

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     Brian Arbenz is a writer, editor and researcher living in Louisville, Ky. USA