Contenu du sommaire : La planification aujourd'hui

In this paper, the aim is to sum up the main conceptual problems concerning the idea of economic planning. The central assumption is that the idea cannot be reduced to a mere technical question, that it involves political and anthropological aspects. We thus begin by focusing on some current issues related to the question of planning, before going on to discuss three key topics : the human subject, the social order, and institutions. For each topic, the intention is to isolate the kernel element in relation to its interpretation of the market, to Marx's critique of the market paradigm and, lastly, to the challenges which these topics constitute, in terms of the elaboration of a consistent theory of economic and social planning.

The system of centralized planning was established on the basis of a nexus of specific institutions (the one-party political regime, state ownership, hierarchical administration of the economy) and an official doctrine hostile to capitalism and to the market. The historical experience in the numerous countries where it was implemented offers some evidence of success in poor countries, in the initial development process, with ambivalent benefits deriving from the high degree of investment centralization. In comparison however to the classical faults of the capitalist system and of the market, centralized planning proved a relative failure, from the point of view of its main objective : to offer an alternative and progressive model for the coordination of the national economy.

The article outlines a critical political economy analysis of Chinese planning today. The implementation of planning is in line with a specific political temporality. It is subject to a specific set of control mechanisms, embedded in both state and party, which operate against the backdrop of a decentralised bureaucratic order. The programmes of reform and structural change carried out in the economy over a period of several decades have thus established a planning model aimed at influencing market outcomes. These programmes have taken the place of the earlier system of command-based planning. The exercise of public control over the largest concentrations of land, industrial and financial capital in China thus configures the planning model, while ensuring the availability of large-scale resources to be allocated to the task of achieving the objectives of the plan. Planning in its current form is conditioned by the ascendancy of the party-state in the realm of capital.

Participatory democratic planning, based on social ownership and negotiated coordination through a process of deliberative participatory democracy, aims to create institutions and processes through which the modern equivalent of the association of producers participates in a layered structure of decision-making and execution, defined by the principle of subsidiarity. It involves a participatory political democracy as well as a participatory economic democracy. Crucially, it deconstructs the concept of ‘the market' into the components of market exchange and market forces. The model retains market exchange at the level of the enterprise. However it substitutes for market forces a process of negotiated coordination at the industry and sectoral level, when dealing with changes in capacity through either investment or disinvestment.

Struggles over the nature of the state are profoundly linked to struggles in capitalism and to struggles of capitalism. In the recent period, the evaluation of public policies, habitually presented as a neutral and economically rational exercise, has become the principal instrument in the transformations of the nature of the state, whether through the volume and the nature of the evaluations carried out or the positioning of the social agents promoting it. This article demonstrates that, by way of the sublimation of the market and liberal values, public policy evaluation constitutes the main obstacle to the emergence of a true politics of planning.

At the end of the 20th century, economic planning appeared to be obsolete. In the opposition between the market and the plan, the market had won a decisive victory. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, debates about economic planning are however back, both in academic and in political circles. In this article, our aim is to point to the factors underlying the current revival of these debates and, beyond that, to argue that the new technologies of information – Internet, algorithms, big data – could in the future help us resolve some of the main deficiencies associated with economic planning.

Green growth strategies are proving powerless to respond effectively to current ecological and social crises. It is therefore imperative to invent a new institutional arrangement as an alternative to markets, one that will make it possible to allocate resources and investments in such a way as to meet the challenges of ecological and social transition. In recent years, there has been an abundant publication of planning documents in France in various fields. The lack of coherence between them, the culture of administrative and political secrecy, the poor quality of consultation and the structural inadequacy of funding are among the factors which have rendered this embryonic planning powerless. Effective planning should guide investments, develop commons and the economy of needs. To this end, it should break with the neoliberal functioning of the administration, while ensuring the participation of companies, associations and the public in the preparation and implementation of planning, under the responsibility of elected representatives.

How did our societies evolve, over a period of around two hundred years, from an industrial approach to war planning to a neoliberal logic of war planning ? The article proposes an interpretative synthesis of the evolution of war and its planning from a wider perspective. It emphasizes how technology, military bureaucracies, and the acuteness of the external threats, interact with imperialist projects and bellicose nationalist ideologies, and with factors related to the interests of the military-industrial complex interests. A knowledge of these mechanisms is essential if we are to understand changes in war planning, which also play a central role in the perpetuation of the social conditions enabling war to thrive.

In this interview Nicolas Tertulian recalls the beginning of his career as an academic in Romania in the 1970s. He also addresses his role during this same period in France as an intermediary in the reception of Lukacs' Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, notably among researchers in literary sociology at the EHESS. After an examination of certain aspects of his sustained engagement with Lukacs' philosophy, he goes on to comment on his exchanges with Marcuse and Adorno and, from his position as an observer, on the relations, critical but never indifferent, which Lukacs maintained with the Frankfurt School.

The text is the first French translation of Romano Alquati's study, an exemplary testimony to the work of collaborative research carried out with workers in Turin engaged in militant action in 1963. Alquati, who is here offering an immediate theorical appraisal of the « wildcat » strike, confronts the operaismo thesis regarding the autonomy of the working class to the form of insubordination manifest in what was then the largest Taylorist factory in Italy. He also proposes a synthesis of the operaismo reading of capitalist development as an alternation between a phase characterised by the organisation of struggle and one of technological restructuring. The analytics of effective subsumption formulated by Alquati is thus coordinated with an analytics of factory-floor conflict, in which he identifies its strengths, weaknesses and potentialities.

This article starts out from the limits limiting the social sciences in the genetic analysis of conflicts, an enterprise which requires that we cast light on the subjective and intersubjective dynamics at work in their emergence, prior to their crystallisation in an exceptional moment of collective mobilisation. The novel thus offers some vital keys supplementing sociological analysis, insofar as it frequently builds its social worlds from the points of view that are proper to the characters caught up in a process of reciprocal relation, thus presenting these worlds as being subject to a process of becoming. Here Martin Eden, Jack London's novel, offers an exemplary instance of this.

The intention in the article is to offer a reappraisal of Adorno's negative dialectics, refusing to reduce it merely to a dialectics from which the positive moment of synthesis has been amputated. Negative dialectics on the contrary obliges us to reexamine the very figures of synthesis and totality. It can thus be shown that certain strategies of Adorno in his reinvention of the dialectics (the critique of the synthetic structure of reflexive consciousness, dialectics as a logic of disintegration, the primacy of the object, the emphasis placed on the « somatic moment » of dialectical thought) are evidence of the reverberations within Adorno's work of those which had been set off against Hegel, within the writings of the young Marx. The perspective enables us to take up again, on a renewed basis, the question of the immanence of negative dialectics to the transformative praxis.