The ICEA (Instituto de Ciencias Económicas y de la Autogestión/Institute of Economic and Self-Management Sciences), an INDEP partner organisation, will be giving a talk on the relationship between markets, democratic economic planning and self-management at the 20th Critical Economists Conference in Bilbao from Wednesday 11th June to Thursday 12th June.
A summary of what the talk will cover can be found below:
ICEA will participates in the 20th Conference on Critical Economy with a talk that puts self-management at the center of the debate on the return of planning.
Labour cooperatives, companies recovered by their workers and experiences of workers’ control share a tension that is rarely addressed openly: do they coordinate their activity through the market or through democratic planning? The talk that we present from the ICEA argues that this tension is not a simple management problem, but a fundamental contradiction experienced by any self-management organization when it operates within a market economy.
To address it, the research discusses three great traditions of critical economic thinking—the Marxian root, that of the commons of work and the one of anarchist inspiration—and brings them into dialogue on the same issue: the concrete forms of democracy in the workplace. Instead of celebrating or ruling out self-management without nuances, it aims to map out how the literature of the past two decades has understood — or evaded — the disjuncture between market and planning.
The central question is simple to state and difficult to answer: how has recent academic debates understood the tension between market and democratic planning in the theory and practice of self-management? From there, its social, productive and territorial dimensions are explored. The goal is not to prescribe a model, but to outline the state of the issue and open an agenda on the limits and possibilities of democratic planning as a way of organizing work.
The talk will be on Thursday, June 11 at 17:00.
You can find out more about the talk here and more about the conference here.