44 Planning

Organising production and consumption without the market.

Roberts on Cockshott

The only way humanity has a chance of avoiding a climate disaster will be through a global plan based on common ownership of resources and technology that replaces the capitalist market system. In a new book by Scottish Marxist economists Paul Cockshott, Alin Cottrell, and Jan Philip Dapprich, entitled Economic Planning in an Age of Climate Crisis, the authors take up this issue.

Tthe major innovation in this book is to consider how to plan for environmental needs as well as production per se in a non-market economy.

There are two main parts to the planning of resource allocation and production. The first is the macro allocation for social needs eg investment in capital goods, health care, education, transport, public services and basic consumer goods – free to all at the point of production. But second, there needs to be a mechanism for allocating other resources for personal consumption beyond the ‘social wage’. These personal consumer needs will be determined by the labour time used to produce them and individuals will ‘buy’ them based on the ‘labour time vouchers’ issued to to a worker for the individual contribution to overall production in labour time.

The authors propose an adjustment to that model based on the economic category of opportunity cost. “To specify the cost of a product, we must thus determine what else could have been produced instead. Moreover, we must be able to measure this on a common scale so that costs of various products can be compared.” So if the planners ‘priced’ products with an extra constraint on greenhouse gas emissions that they generate, this require a higher ‘opportunity cost’ valuation for high emission products. This would result in a shift of demand towards low-emission products. “Rather than simply reducing the economy’s overall output to abide by emission constraints, the composition of output is changed to emphasise green products.”

This book offers a further development of technical feasibility of socialist planning that incorporates the climate crisis. It further enhances the advantages of the planning mechanism for human organization over the anarchic, crisis-ridden, exploitative capitalist market economy that is failing to deliver the needs of humanity and is destroying the planet. It offers yet more powerful arguments for planning over the market.

Roberts (2022) Planning not Pricing](https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/12/15/planning-and-the-climate/)