How to plan an economy

Concept

“The incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience.” Fredric Jameson wrote these words after encountering Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, a study of how people navigate physical spaces through mental maps [1]. Jameson extended this insight to consider what kinds of maps might help us navigate the complexity of contemporary social and political systems [2].

If mapping the current system proves difficult, how might alternatives be mapped? Democratic economic planning faces the perils of this flavor of abstraction. Conversations often float in theoretical and academic space, disconnected from lived experience. While this is not necessarily by choice but rather by circumstance—experiments this radical are difficult to resource—ideas remain abstract precisely because the tools to make them concrete do not yet exist.

How to Plan an Economy proposes that democratic planning needs more than theory. It needs things we can see, touch, and imagine ourselves using—artifacts that can serve as small subversions of what Mark Fisher termed “capitalist realism” [3].

This project consists of four sets of artifacts: planning diagrams, cultural ephemera, software prototypes, and meta-tools for planning. Each attempts to make the abstract tangible enough to critique.

Planning Diagrams

The first set of artifacts visualizes existing theoretical models for democratic economic planning—Participatory Economics, Negotiated Coordination, Cybercommunism, and others [4,5,6,7]. These models exist scattered across books and papers, embedded within academic prose. Rendering them as design artifacts with a consistent visual language invites comparison and critique.

Each diagram is literally a cognitive map, translating specialist prose into something that can orient someone new to planning. They also surface questions that prose can hide: Where does conflict resolution happen? What occurs when communities disagree?

Participatory Economics - Robin Hahnel, Michael Albert

Towards a New Socialism - Paul Cockshott, Allin Cottrell

Negotiated Coordination - Pat Devine, Fikret Adaman

Cultural Artifacts

What would the cultural landscape look like if democratic planning were as ordinary as voting? What materials would circulate to encourage participation, explain processes, or celebrate planning achievements?

These artifacts draw from visual history, mining archival forms that might serve new purposes. Posters, handbooks, advertisements, and ephemera borrow aesthetics from the past—a 1960s Spanish savings bank ad, a 1969 anti-war poster, an American tax guide—and repurpose them for imagined planning futures. A design language that once encouraged private accumulation or individual consumption now promotes collective participation.

Each serves as design fiction: not predictions or prescriptions but provocations. They surface both possibilities and pitfalls, making visible the mundane cultural infrastructure that any realized planning model would require.

Software Prototypes

Technology has become central to contemporary life. Digital tools might embody the values embedded within democratic economic planning—but what would those interfaces look like?

These prototypes visualize digital infrastructure for various planning models: a General Catalog interface for Saros’s model that mirrors familiar e-commerce patterns but replaces prices with planning points [8]; a Participatory Economics app where users toggle between private consumption plans and public project voting; an Agreements dashboard for Negotiated Coordination that tracks bilateral production agreements between cooperatives.

Each interface embodies different assumptions inherent in the models they represent. They also surface challenges: Will people engage with annual planning? Can interfaces handle this complexity without overwhelming users? Do these tools democratize planning or simply digitize bureaucracy?

Participatory Economics planning app

Digital Socialism planning app

Meta-Tools

The prototypes above visualize existing models, but the field of democratic economic planning remains small. What if communities could design their own planning systems?

Praxis is a speculative interface that presents canonical models—Participatory Economics, Negotiated Coordination, Amazon Socialism, Cybercommunism—as repositories in the spirit of open-source software. Communities can adopt them wholesale, fork them to create variants, or select specific components to compose hybrid systems. A simulation sandbox allows stress-testing before implementation.

The platform carries an internal logic: economic planning should be democratized all the way down to system design itself. It also points toward something more ambitious—a model-of-models, where different communities using different planning systems might still coordinate through shared protocols. Perhaps the best planning model has yet to be written, and perhaps it won’t be a single system at all but a pluriverse of approaches connected through shared infrastructure.

Praxis

Artifacts as Dialectical Objects

This body of work attempts to create what Jameson called for: maps not of capitalism but of what might replace it. Each artifact makes navigable what was once abstract—not prescriptive blueprints but provocations for thinking through present possibilities.

The artifacts surface gaps, making visible inherent challenges: Will people want to engage with annual planning? Can bureaucracy be avoided? How might efficiency be balanced with meaningful participation?

Where fascism aestheticized politics to obscure domination, these artifacts politicize aesthetics to reveal possibilities. They don’t make planning look easy, but they help make it look possible.

The path from capitalist realism to democratic planning runs not only through better arguments but through better maps—maps that can be co-created through experimentation.

References

1. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. MIT Press.
2. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press.
3. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
4. Hahnel, Robin, and Michael Albert. 1991. The Political Economy of Participatory Economics. Princeton University Press.
5. Cockshott, W. Paul, and Allin F. Cottrell. 1993. Towards a New Socialism. Spokesman Books.
6. Hahnel, Robin. 2021. Democratic Economic Planning. Routledge.
7. Adaman, Fikret, and Pat Devine. 2002. “A Reconsideration of the Theory of Entrepreneurship: A Participatory Approach.” Review of Political Economy 14, no. 3.
8. Saros, Daniel E. 2014. Information Technology and Socialist Construction: The End of Capital and the Transition to Socialism. Routledge.