Two chapters on democratic economic planning by Martín Arboleda newly translated

Two chapters of the book Gobernar la utopía. Sobre planificación y el poder popular by Martín Arboleda, associate professor of the School of Sociology and Director of the Social Transformations Laboratory at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, have recently been translated. Alexandra Alván and Rodrigo Ferradas have posted on the website Critical Theory Under Pressure: Building Networks for Transnational Dialogue (CritUP) a translated version of the chapter entitled Trajectories of a Radical Idea and Towards an Internationalism of Planning. These two chapters are where Arboleda engages more with the planning literature in his book. For the moment, the rest of Gobernar la utopía is only available in Spanish.

Here is a translated version of the summary of the book:

The succession of crises that began in 2008 and reached its peak with the coronavirus pandemic revealed a categorical truth: despite what the prevailing wisdom dictates, the planetary deployment of capital is a deliberately planned process. The mirage of an efficiently self-regulating “free” market, with which neoliberalism sought to bury forever discussions of social management of the economy, vanished in the face of the evidence of an activist State that redistributes wealth upwards through tax exemptions, subsidies and bailouts to large companies. The rise of mega-corporations like Amazon, Google and Walmart was made possible by public-private strategic schemes so methodical that they have been compared to those of Gosplan, the Soviet Union’s central planning agency. But if late-capitalist planning brought about an era of mass extinctions and extreme inequality, why not return to contesting the design and execution of plans, and even the very meaning of planning?

To read Trajectories of a Radical Idea: https://www.critup.net/translations/trajectories-of-a-radical-idea/

To read Towards an Internationalism of Planning: https://www.critup.net/translations/towards-an-internationalism-of-planning/