Planned economy
This highlights the central role of hierarchical administration and public ownership of production in guiding the allocation of resources in these economic systems.
[17] According to historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus was that Stalin appropriated the position of the Left Opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation.
[18] After World War II (1939–1945) France and Great Britain practiced dirigisme – government direction of the economy through non-coercive means.
Some decentralized participation in economic planning occurred across Revolutionary Spain, most notably in Catalonia, during the Spanish Revolution of 1936.
", Albert Einstein wrote:[21] I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
In 1959 Anatoly Kitov proposed a distributed computing system (Project "Red Book", Russian: Красная книга) with a focus on the management of the Soviet economy.
[23] In 1971 the socialist Allende administration of Chile launched Project Cybersyn to install a telex machine in every corporation and organization in the economy for the communication of economic data between firms and the government.
In their book Towards a New Socialism (1993), the computer scientist Paul Cockshott from the University of Glasgow and the economist Allin Cottrell from Wake Forest University claim to demonstrate how a democratically planned economy built on modern computer technology is possible and drives the thesis that it would be both economically more stable than the free-market economies and also morally desirable.
[28] Salvador Allende's socialist government pioneered the 1970 Chilean distributed decision support system Project Cybersyn in an attempt to move towards a decentralized planned economy with the experimental viable system model of computed organisational structure of autonomous operative units through an algedonic feedback setting and bottom-up participative decision-making in the form of participative democracy by the Cyberfolk component.
This is what happened in the Soviet Union during the 1930s when the government forced the share of gross national income dedicated to private consumption down from 80% to 50%.
[35] Whereas the former stressed the theoretical underpinnings of a market economy to subjective value theory while attacking the labor theory of value, the latter argued that the only way to satisfy individuals who have a constantly changing hierarchy of needs and are the only ones to possess their particular individual's circumstances is by allowing those with the most knowledge of their needs to have it in their power to use their resources in a competing marketplace to meet the needs of the most consumers most efficiently.
According to Tibor Machan, "[w]ithout a market in which allocations can be made in obedience to the law of supply and demand, it is difficult or impossible to funnel resources with respect to actual human preferences and goals".
Stalin's formulations of national plans in terms of physical quantity of output was also attributed by Daniels as a source for the stagnant levels of efficiency and quality.
[38] Furthermore, Hahnel states: Combined with a more democratic political system, and redone to closer approximate a best case version, centrally planned economies no doubt would have performed better.
[5][42] Decentralized planning has been proposed as a basis for socialism and has been variously advocated by anarchists, council communists, libertarian Marxists and other democratic and libertarian socialists who advocate a non-market form of socialism, in total rejection of the type of planning adopted in the economy of the Soviet Union.
[46] The possibility of a digital planned economy was explored in Chile between 1971 and 1973 with the development of Project Cybersyn and by Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Kharkevich, head of the Department of Technical Physics in Kiev in 1962.
[53] Trotsky had urged economic decentralisation between the state, oblast regions and factories during the NEP period to counter structural inefficiency and the problem of bureaucracy.
[54] Economist Pat Devine has created a model of decentralized economic planning called "negotiated coordination" which is based upon social ownership of the means of production by those affected by the use of the assets involved, with the allocation of consumer and capital goods made through a participatory form of decision-making by those at the most localized level of production.
Some decentralized participation in economic planning has been implemented in various regions and states in India, most notably in Kerala.
[57] Some decentralized participation in economic planning has been implemented across Revolutionary Spain, most notably in Catalonia, during the Spanish Revolution of 1936.
[58] The 1888 novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy depicts a fictional planned economy in a United States around the year 2000 which has become a socialist utopia.
