On Wednesday 12 February at 20:00 CET the Cybernetic Economy theme group of the Socialists (Netherlands) will be hosting its first digital meeting with an international speaker, Tom O’Brien. They are now coming to the end of our review of Foundational Principles of Communist Production and Distribution and will discuss in broad terms the themes […]

Struggles over investment have long been struggles for control of our economies. Investment shapes the trajectory of social development: it determines which sectors grow or shrink, influences regional development patterns, and drives overall economic expansion or degrowth. In capitalist systems, investment decisions are largely made in isolation by private company and bank management, often in […]

The Vanguard Method is a mangement and workplace design method for service organisations  to help them move away from a “command and control” to a systems approach. In democratic economic planning circles it’s being discussed (alongside with the Toyota Production System – see here, here and here) as an important tool for worker’s control over […]

On the 4th March, 7pm CET at the “Aquarium am Südblock” in Berlin there will be a book launch event for “Creative Construction – Democratic Planning in the 21st Century”. The event will include a conversation and discussion about the book with the book’s editors Jan Groos and Christoph Sorg with Joanna Klick. Afterwards there […]

(Description copied from the event’s website here) To register, please sign up here Moderated by Friederike Karla Hildebrandt from communia Co-organized with Christoph Sorg (HU Berlin) and Nils Rochowicz (TU Chemnitz). Part of „Socialization in Theory and Practice” Research Project led by Jacob Blumenfeld and Rabea Berfelde   Topic In this workshop, Cecilia Rikap will […]

This description is taken from the website of the Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation: “We are excited to host a LIVE episode recording of the Future Histories Podcast with Jan Groos featuring Prof. Cecilia Rikap. The live episode will discuss the intellectual monopoly of big technology companies, how these companies plan innovation and production beyond their company boundaries, […]

In this talk Simon Hannah will give an overview of his recently published book “Reclaiming the Future. A Beginner’s Guide to Planning the Economy”. The book aims to introduce a general audience to the ideas of and necessity for ecosocialism and democratic economic planning for combatting the unfolding climate catastrophe. We will also discuss the […]

After gaining an overview of various theories on democratic planned economies last year, this year we want to delve deeper into the topic of economic planning with labor time accounting. To this end, we will start with an intro to working time accounting at this meeting. After that, we will work more in the sense […]

Please note that this is a closed event. In the face of growing multiple crises, especially the climate crisis, it is becoming increasingly clear that the economies and societies of the Global North must not only be fundamentally restructured, but in many areas deconstructed. This implies not only overcoming capitalist structures and practices and a […]

Prof. Robin Hahnel is Professor Emeritus of economics at American University and has spent much of his career developing a “Participatory Economy” (also known as “Participatory Economics” or “Parecon”) as an alternative socioeconomic model to capitalism. The model of a Participatory Economy is based around democratic planning between federations of self-managing workers and consumers’ councils. In his […]

Every month the IDA (Initative demokratische Arbeitszeitrechnung – “Initative democratic labor time calculation”) is having an open pub meetup in the pub “Kleinod” in Neukoelln, Berlin. This is an informal gathering to get to know each other and discuss a bit.

Debates on democratic economic planning have hitherto revolved mainly around coherent, abstract models. These all-in-one proposals compartmentalize discussions in technical jargon and hide the political and strategic debates that lie behind them. Sophie Elias Pinsonnault and Simon Tremblay-Pepin propose to bring the field to think about democratic planning through a modular approach. Conceiving post-capitalist proposals […]