Recordings of Talks at INDEP’s First Conference in Montreal Uploaded

INDEP’s first conference Democratic Economic Planning for the Real World was held during SASE 2025: online on July 3rd and in person in Montréal, Québec, from July 9th to July 12th. The conference featured 14 panels and 39 presenters. INDEP’s first conference was supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Below is the schedule of INDEP’s conference, including presenter slides and a video recording of each talk; a PDF version is available at the end of the page. If you want to see the full SASE schedule, please visit this site. You can also view a playlist with all the recordings of the talks on our youtube channel.

The location of the event was at: Palais des congrès de Montréal, 1001 Pl. Jean-Paul-Riopelle, Montréal, QC, H2Y 0A3

Thursday, July 3rd, 2025 – Virtual Session

10 am to 11:30 am – Online
Three visions of democratic economic planning

Stefan Meretz – Dimensions of Planning in Commonism

Raphael Arar – How to Plan an Economy: Speculative Tools for Democratic Economic Planning

Antoine Jourdan: Democratic Economic Planning: Lessons from the French Post-War Experience

Moderator: Simon Tremblay-Pepin

Wednesday, July 9th, 2025

10:30 AM to 12 PM – Room 521B
Conceptualizing planning: Discovering language and tools for the problem

Gabriel Wainio – The Hungriest Thing In The World: Materializing Information Sovereignty Between Earth and Cloud

Mitchell Szczepanczyk and Jason Chrysostomou – Annual Participatory Planning: An interactive prototype (View the Presentation Slides)

Jan Groos – Playing Postcapitalism (View the Presentation Slides)

Moderator: Robin Hahnel

1:15 PM to 2:45 PM – Hybrid Room
Roundtable: Mapping the Democratic Economic Planning Ecosystem – Actors, Knowledge, Blindspots, Possibilities

Participants: Eric Meier and Raphael Arar

(This session was not recorded)

3 PM – 4:30 PM – Room 521B
Commons and Incentives: mediating between micro and macro scales

Dominique Arsenault – Making Plans and Planning Making: Industrial Commons and Democratic Economic Planning (View the Presentation Slides)

Ferdia O’Driscoll – Understanding Rewards in Socialism using Self-Determination Theory (View the Presentation Slides)

Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine – Social Participatory Planning on the Question of Climate Crisis (View the Presentation Slides)

Moderator: Tom O’Brien

Thursday, July 10^th, 2025

8:30 AM – 10 AM – Room 521B
Framing socialism: the place of planning in postcapitalism

Jan Groos and Christoph Sorg – Creative Construction

Thomas O’Brien – Planning vs Political Economy (View the Presentation Slides)

Ferdia O’Driscoll – Beyond the Misconception of Socialism as a “Planned” Economy (View the Presentation Slides)

Moderator: Leone Castar

10:30 AM – 12 PM – Room 521B
How to get there: investment and technology towards the democratization of the economy

Kyle Thompson and Joost Vervoort – Planning With the Trouble: X-Curved Chthonic Conjurations of Resonant Discomfort for Democratic Economic Planning (View the Presentation Slides)

Aaron Benanav – Constructing a Socialist Investment Function (View the Presentation Slides)

Alfredo Olguin – Democratic Computational Economic Planning: An Applied Perspective on the Economic Calculation Debate. Using neural networks to allocate resources (View the Presentation Slides)

Moderator: Christoph Sorg

1:15 PM – 2:45 PM – Room 521B
Information, Informatics, and Measurements: Things and their representations in postcapitalist information systems

Alejandro Ruiz and Julia Zimmerman – Information System Boundaries in Democratic Economic Planning

Alex Creiner – Problems With the Money Signal and the Necessity for Planning in Kind

Leone Castar – Social Eyes and Observables: Learning to See and Meet Human Needs in a Postcapitalist World (View the Presentation Slides)

Moderator: Jan Groos

3 PM – 4:30 PM – Room 521B
Participatory Economics in the real world

Robin Hahnel – A Participatory Economy in brief (View the Presentation Slides)

Mitchell Szczepanczyk – Computer Simulations of Participatory Planning: New Evidence for Environmental Protection (View the Presentation Slides)

Anders Sandström – Adding realism to the Participatory Economy Model (View the Presentation Slides)

Moderator: Ferdia O’Driscol

Friday, July 11^th, 2025

10:30 AM – 12 PM – Room 521B
Planning from the kitchen: Social reproduction, provisioning and economic democracy

Audrey Laurin-Lamothe – Planning from care: How the current democratic planning debate limitates the possibilities to plan from a social reproduction perspective (View the Presentation Slides)

Bengi Akbulut – Organizing the field of needs: Planning for Social Reproduction (View the Presentation Slides)

Sophie Elias-Pinsonnault – Bringing social reproduction in: informality, care work and provisioning systems

Moderator: Simon Tremblay-Pepin

1:15 PM – 2:45 PM – Room 521B
Planning history: what we can learn from past and current practice

Pablo Parellada – Insights from supply chain management in socialist planning (View the Presentation Slides)

Jean-François Colomban – From the Socialist Calculation Debate to Ecological Economics: an Intellectual Genealogy through Karl William Kapp (View the Presentation Slides)

Simon Sutterlütti – Economic Planning: Learnings from the GDR (View the Presentation Slides)

Moderator: Fikret Adaman

3 PM – 4:30 PM – Room 521B
Planning within planetary boundaries: economic democracy and the environment

Andrew Reeves – Lessons for Democratic Economic Planning from Ecological Macroeconomics (View the Presentation Slides)

Johannnes Buchner – The Strategic Triangle of AI for Ecological Economic Planning in a Circular Economy (View the Presentation Slides)

Moderator: Bengi Akbulut

5 PM – 6:30 PM – Room 521B
Planning in times of digitalization and climate crisis: On the return of economic planning in capitalism

Christoph Sorg – Planning in the longue durée: Why capitalist markets precipitate planning (View the Presentation Slides)

(unfortunately due to a technical issue there is no recording of Christoph’s talk)

Cecilia Rikap – From corporate and military planning to democratic planning for people and the planet: AI as a testbed (View the Presentation Slides)

Moderators: Jan Groos and Alejandro Ruiz

Saturday, July 12^th, 2025

8:30 AM – 10 AM – Room 521B
Prefigurative postcapitalism: real-life cases of economic democratization

Sam Bliss and Adam Wilson- The unplanned magic of actually existing non-market economies

Louis-Maxime Joly – Local currencies and inter-community monetary federalism as experimental spaces for decentralized democratic economic planning (View the Presentation Slides)

Moderator: Cecilia Rikap

10:30 AM – 12 PM – Room 521B
Towards a practical application of democratic economic planning: the question of operationalization and data

Iacob Gagné-Montcalm – A conceptual framework for understanding industrial sectors in Québec (View the Presentation Slides)

Walther Zeug and Jakob Heyer – Holistic economic accounting for a cybernetic planned economy A Conceptual model for a democratic planned economy to satisfy societal needs within planetary boundaries