Talk: Varieties of Democratic Planning – Shaping, Abolishing or Socialising Markets
This event will take place in English.
This event will take place in-person and online. To participate online, please register here.
This description has been taken from the event’s website:
Economic planning is back. Resurgent industrial policy, public companies and sovereign wealth funds, asset managers holding stakes across entire economies, and intellectual monopolies that organise markets from within all suggest that the age of digitalisation and climate collapse is also an age of planning. If planning is returning anyway, the question is no longer whether we plan, but who plans, how, and to what end. Can planning be organised democratically and directed at human needs within planetary boundaries? A fast-growing ‘new planning debate’ asks exactly this, but its models are technically demanding and hard to compare. This presentation offers a map.
It first revisits the socialist calculation debate and distils three criteria for assessing any planning model: coordinating interdependent decisions, doing justice to incommensurable values, and mobilising tacit knowledge. It then develops a typology organised around the relation between planning and markets. A technocratic form of planning that simply corrects market failures is contrasted with three varieties of democratic planning, which shape, abolish or socialise markets. Evaluating each against the three criteria, the article argues that market-socialising planning has become increasingly influential among advocates of planning because it was designed to address the blind spots of both market-shaping and market-abolishing approaches. It combines negotiated prices, socialised investment and the decommodification of labour. Finally, the article shows how the varieties, though incompatible as institutional blueprints, can complement one another as strategies of transition.
About the Speaker:
Dr Christoph Sorg is Einstein Independent Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences at Humboldt University Berlin. His research focuses on economic planning, with a broad interest in social reproduction, financialisation, digitalisation and socio-ecological transformation. Together with Jan Groos, he is co-editor of the special issue of Competition & Change titled ‘Rethinking Economic Planning’ and of the volume Creative Construction: Democratic Planning in the 21st Century and Beyond (Bristol University Press, 2026). His texts have among others been published in New Political Economy, Competition & Change, European Journal of Social Theory, Critical Sociology, Globalisations, Science & Society, Economic and Labour Relations Review, and Global Political Economy.