Central Planning is Techno-Managerialist
Okay, so we’re against the market. But we’re also against central planning. And by central planning I don’t mean just the crude, authoritarian form of central planning that existed under Stalinism in the Soviet Union.
There are also proposed economic programs that we would call “democratic central planning,” such as the proposal of Castoriadis in Workers Councils and the Economics of a Self-managed Society or other proposals that involved giving power to craft a plan to a body of elected representatives, with advice from expert planners. The problem is, we believe that such a system would also have a tendency to lead to the entrenchment of a techno-managerial ruling class.
That’s because, as long as there is a separate expert planner group who make the plan, apart from the workforce and the general populace, the relationship of the plan-making group to the workforce becomes a relation of order-giver to order-obeyer. We believe this relationship is implicitly authoritarian, and will tend to lead to the replication of internal hierarchy within the production groups themselves, because the central planners will find it more efficient and easier to deal just with one person at the head of a production facility, who can assure enforcement of the plan.
Further, being in a position to make the plan means the planning group would amass knowledge and expertise not available to others, which would make others dependent on them. The relative monopoly over “human capital,” expertise and knowledge, is the basis of a techno-managerial class.
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