All economies are planned. The only difference is who is doing the planning.

But for real, a huge amount of very effective central planning is already done by private interests for the sake of profit. Big companies like Wal-Mart control huge amounts of the economy, and while they’re not in total control of everything, they are centrally-controlled within their sizeable boundaries. If planning didn’t work, Wal-Mart wouldn’t exist as we know it. The important question isn’t “does central planning work?” or “is it the most efficient/effective way?” it’s “who should be in control of the planning?”

If you want a really interesting view on central planning, look up Project Cybersyn. It was an experiment in a sort of hybrid centralized-decentralized planning of Chile’s economy using management cybernetics and early computer systems.

Sure.

You’ve probably been told all your life “Centrally planned economies don’t work! They’ve always been a catastrophic failure!” which is simply untrue.

• the USSR industrialised at record pace, went from a backwards joke that was jealous of its Western neighbours to the undisputed 2nd-most-powerful country in the world, launched mankind into space, defeated Hitler, electrified and industrialised the whole country

• unplanned economies have been disasters: Russia under shock therapy in the 1990s. Thatcher closing down coalmines, GW Bush (and Greenspan) deregulating everything and causing the biggest financial crash in 80 years

• Look at the history of Britain’s economy, did great under planning with people like Clement Attlee, worse when the free-market ideology took hold: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=iH6ur0X4wMI (you should watch the whole thing, but from 14:20 has a bit on Britain’s planned economy). War economies are often centrally planned and do in-kind accounting, and war economies stimulate growth.

• look at how much better China and Vietnam perform at growth and poverty-alleviation than Friedmanite countries

• The boring ‘Walmart’ argument: there are already massive country-sized planned economies with in-kind accounting. Called Amazon and Walmart. Amazon runs an economy the size of Australia (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-tech-giants-worth-compared-economies-countries/) and does it by databases that manage supply-chains, logistics, just-in-time ordering, modelling future demand, etc.

Two caveats –

• Marxists don’t “believe in” doing things a certain way, that’s Utopianism. Marxists believe in practice. Various things work at various times in various doses. That includes market mechanisms, like the Chinese economy today, or Vietnam with its Đổi Mới policy. Giving a template and demanding it be followed is anathema to “scientific socialism”

• Marxism ≠ centrally planned economies. Marx mostly critiqued how capital was a means of exploitation, and said lets do ‘something else’ that doesn’t rip workers off so much. That leaves room for a lot of noncentrallyplanned methods. Which one is best? A stupid smallminded question. Like asking which food is the best food to eat, or which medicine is the best medicine to take. Depends on the context.

You may say you don’t believe in centrally planned economies. Do you believe in a centrally planned economy to provide tap water? If it works for tap water, why not for other things? It works for public housing too. It works for transport infrastructure. It works for railways. Why is it such a stretch to think that what you probably already believe in for water, railways, roads, education, housing could also run some clothing and furniture factories?

This was kinda written in a hurry, I can add references or answer questions if needed.

Yeah. I think they’ve worked pretty well in the past. Others have mentioned the USSR already, but the UK was pretty quick to adopt central planning for farmers when they needed to massively boost food production during the war. I don’t usually link to videos, but there’s a great edutainment program that covers it in a lot of detail. I highly recommend it! The farmers initially didn’t like it, but by the end of the war, they definitely had an appreciation for it, and you can’t argue with the results.

There’s also been the argument that Walmart is one big centrally planned economy in and of itself. Sears on the other hand infamously tried to implement a free market internally.

EDIT: Damnit, I took too long to write this and all of this has now been covered. Oh well, I like my links.

EDIT2: Damnit, his instance blocks us anyway.

My opinion on this is a little complicated. The classic definition of Socialism is a system of production for social good, where the banks, factories, and industries are publicly owned and run for the betterment of society; as opposed to being privately owned and run for profit, and production organized to serve the profit motive under Capitalism. This implies on its surface that a centrally planned economy is socialist, while a market economy is capitalist, but things get messier than that in the real world. State Capitalist countries like South Korea, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia had centrally planned economies for decades, but they ran them for the purpose of building successful capitalist economies.

And no Socialist country has been purely planned- even the Soviet Union allowed farmers to sell food from their private plots at prices that the farmers chose. In the aftermath of World War 2, returning Soviet veterans often combined their savings to build cooperative factories that produced needed products, like consumer goods. The workers often elected a chairman of the factory, and paid him a much larger salary because they valued their leadership, or because he had the idea. These cooperatives were later nationalized by Khruschev, almost certainly to the detriment of the Soviet economy. When the cooperative sector of the Soviet economy was nationalized, economic planning became extremely complicated, and a lot of “grey market/second economy” behaviors popped up, like factories hitting their quotas early and continuing to produce goods to sell at their own prices on an unofficial market. In the end, the Soviet economy consistently struggled to meet the demand for consumer goods, which it might not have done if Khruschev hadn’t nationalized the cooperatives. I could go on and talk about the success China has had since it pivoted to a mixed economy with a big market sector, starting with their success with the Household Responsibility System, but I don’t want to ramble any more. My overall point is that centrally planned economies can accomplish a lot of impressive things, but having the state own every single little business can cause problems. I think a mixed economy can work well under Socialism. Personally, I like the idea of using what Richard Wolff calls Workers’ Self-Directed Enterprises for sections of the economy that might not work well under planning. I also think a company like Huawei provides a potential model for how worker-owned companies in a market sector might be run under socialism.

Of course, everything I just said about the Soviet economy occurred in an era before supercomputers, so who knows if a similar economy would run into the same problems today.