INDEP online Talk with Fernando Stroppa – Planning Hope: Building Version 0.1 of a Democratic Economy

This talk will take place in English.

In order to participate, please register here.

Critique can show what is failing and why existing institutions produce inequality and ecological damage. But any democratic alternative also has to answer practical questions about the future: Who will make economic decisions? How will labour and resources be allocated? How will local knowledge and technical expertise be combined? Which ecological and social limits will constrain planning?

The talk begins from an exploratory analysis of revolutionary political discourse, where critique and diagnosis appeared much more often than detailed proposals for future institutions. This leads to a broader question: can the construction of concrete institutions itself become a source of grounded political hope?

A deliberately incomplete model of a democratic economy is used to explore this idea. The talk focuses on work credits, mathematical optimisation for resource allocation and environmental constraints, and organisational models inspired by systems engineering and complex systems.

The aim is to make an alternative concrete enough to be examined, criticised and improved, and to ask whether this process of collective construction can strengthen the sense that another economy can actually be organised.