Meet me in the middle? Democratic economic planning from macro to micro and back

Simon Tremblay-Pepin

Élisabeth Bruyère School of Social Innovation

Saint Paul University

Who is this guy?

Stuck in the middle with who?

What is the middle?

• When you stop focusing only on hypothetical marco models;
• And you do not either consider only micro and empirical questions concerning our current situation.
• Instead, you try to see how we could implement postcapitalist institutions in our current situation. Your question is: « How could these ideas be put into practice right now? »
• Then you are, stuck in the middle, as is the case I think with the two project that were presented.

From macro...

• Classic models of democratic economic planning are mostly interested in the macro economic and political institutions.
• Their question is the organization of society as a whole.
• They are also « end-game » models; they present what the world would look like after capitalism.
• At this level, they don’t delve into the details of many elements, including three issues that will be central here: data, experts and constraints.
• Both presentations you heard before me are located at other levels, without being cases studies of emprical reality, they are stuck somewhere in the middle.

...to micro?

• Walther and Jakob’s most original contribution is to use life-cycle analysis (LCA) to establish a link between individual consumption and achieving a "good life for all within planetary boundaries." They came up with a system where you could ‘budget’ your work time and your consumption because you know what each good or service weighs in terms of work time, raw material consumption, and GHG emissions. It’s a very micro measurement, but that ‘piles up’ to give us calculation capacity at the macro level.

...to meso?

The conceptual framework Iacob presented is mainly centered on one goal: trying to understand what is actually happening in the different sectors of a given economy (Québec’s economy) behind the veil of the market economy. Understanding the concrete materiality of the economy would, we think, enable us to foresee how we could plan this economy effectively if the population wished to do so.

The problems of the middle

The middle is always in tension

• Data: between too much and not enough
• Expertise: needed but dangerous
• External constraints: inevitable but undemocratic

A division by kinds

To resolve the tensions we face while working in the middle, we need to break down each problem into various kinds instead of thinking of it as a single issue.

The centrality of conflict

“For in every city are to be found these two opposed humours having their origin in this, that the people desire not to be domineered over or oppressed by the grandees, while the grandees desire to oppress and domineer over the people.”

—Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Generalization of conflict

If we use Machiavelli’s intuition as Claude Lefort (2012) does and interpret this as a reading angle for postcapitalist societies:

• It means that some people will want to have power over others and the capacity to decide where society is going.
• For them, the rules of society will be secondary; they will use them in a strictly strategic way.
• This vision takes us away from a pacified view of future society and makes us think about it more in continuity with what we know right now.
• This might help us rethink the tensions we are confronted with when working in the middle.

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Data, prices, processes

Data: between too much and not enough

• Laibman (2015) and regulation: from quantitative (digital) to qualitative (verbal).
• Being in the middle shows you have many more choices to make:
• How many data types to use?
• How is data (including prices) produced?
• How do data types interact with each other?
• Can data types be synthesized in general indicators?

Kinds of processes, kinds of data, kinds of prices

• Trying to find one unit that will be central to all economic processes, such as price in a capitalist economy, is a trap. It sets up on the track of the «perfect price » and a «readable dashboard ».
• We probably need a different valuation process and unit(s) for different economic processes.

Conflict, data and prices

How should we design a data and price system for a conflict-ridden postcapitalist society?

• First, we’ll consider that data conception and data usage can always be strategic, serving a purpose other than the one for which it was initially intended.
• This favors transparency and openness of information, as all models defend.
• But more than this, a variety of valuation processes diminish fetishization and might help focus on political conflicts:
• Day-to-day production and consumption (tokens?)
• Resource extraction (auction?)
• Investment (multi-criteria?)

Expertise and specialization

Expertise: needed but dangerous (1)

Expertise: needed but dangerous (2)

Working on adapting current institutions to a postcapitalist outlook raises questions about the classic solution:

• You are directly confronted with how much expertise and specialisation are needed.
• At the same time, we can see, in our day-to-day experience, how the advisory power of experts can be very real and effective political power (Russel and Tremblay-Pepin 2025).
• Transparency, education, and democratic constraint might help mitigate that impact, but cannot resolve the fundamental relationship between data, knowledge, and political power.

Kinds of specialisations

• Three kinds of specialisations:
• Technocrats, people who make decisions based on their knowledge;
• Experts, people who make recommendations based on their knowledge;
• Technicians, people who accomplish tasks based on their knowledge.
• We can agree with the calssical model against technocrats.
• We are still left with the power of technicians and experts.
• I don’t see how to solve the technical question other than with plurality and redundancy.
• The expert question needs us to focus more on the notion of conflict.

Conflict and experts

Experts and technicians can never be neutral in a conflict-ridden society. Their training, their goals, their milieu, everything around them is part of the conflict.

• An obvious solution is to have a plurality of experts and technicians on each subject, as the classical models suggest. This implies some forms of redundancy, and it has a cost.
• But even more, I suggest postcapitalist societies switch from experts « on » to expert « from ».
• In this vision, expertise would always be political and oriented; an expert would present the best case they can with the tools of their discipline to support the political option they defend.

Constraints and limits

External constraint: inevitable but undemocratic

Working on implementing postcapitalism shows that there are external constraints within which humanity must live:

• Some work is needed for humans to survive and fulfill their needs;
• Some resources are in finite quantity;
• Too much pollution, including GHG, will render the environment much less amenable to human flourishing.

Before Sutterlutti and Meretz (2023), the questions of constraint and what they mean was mostly avoided.

Kinds of constraints

• Humans can be constrained to do certain things through various means:
• Imposition, by force or law.
• Institutional or parametric regulation.
• Custom, culture, hegemony.
• The debate around constraint in postcapitalism has often been presented in dramatic terms. Either you force people to work or you let them be free. Since it is a fact that some work must be done for everyone to survive, the question is how we impose limits and obligations on ourselves. What kind of constraints, where?

Conflict and constraint

• Establishing constraints in a conflict-ridden society will always be a fight.
• This completely changes the point of view on constraint and takes us afar from the debate as it is posed around the Commonism proposal. It’s not an etheral "society" that imposes a constraint, it’s the result of a temporary political arrangement, a balance of power.
• Therefore, we need several place for this conflict to happen and to be made public and visible.
• I think three institutions we developed elsewhere can help with this: (1) one to establish basic needs, (2) one to establish the planet’s limits, (3) one where the fundamental institutions of society are discussed.

Conclusions

• Trying to apply postcapitalist models to concrete situations brings a new point of view on the problem.
• It takes the form of internal tensions regarding data, expertise, and constraint.
• We can understand these problems better if we divide them into kinds.
• Considering that postcapitalist societies will face as much conflict as ours can offer us paths towards resolving those tensions.

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