Participatory Planning

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>From Paul Phillips:
I was quite pleased to read Barkley Rosser's posting on this
issue because I think he clarified something that bothered me in
a couple of the exchanges -- that is, we don't all mean the same
thing when we talk about participatory planning.  The particular
problem is what we mean by participation.  In the Yugoslav utopian
model, participation meant democratic decision making at the
Basic Organization of Associated Labour (BOAL) which, for
comparison purposes, would be at the department level in a
university.  Decisions at this level would be amalgamated at
the faculty and then university level, then at the municipal level,
the province (republic or state) level, and then finally at the
federal level.  At each level some attempt would be made to
reconcile supply and demand for both outputs and inputs.  The
time consuming problem was not the technical accumulation of data
or even of its transmission aggregation and reconciliation, but
the *decision making process* of setting priorities for
discretionary spending (wages, distribution between wages and
investment, distribution between money wages and collective
spending, distribution between income elements and research and
development, wage differentials, etc.) at the basic level.

Given these problems (and related ones such as asymetric
information between workers and managers, between COALs and BOALs,
between the enterprises and banks, state apparati etc.) I come
tothe conclusion that this kind of participatory planning with
the object of creating a master input-output matrix to guide the
economy is, as I suggest above, utopian even if every unit in
the economy has a sophisticated computer and the knowledge of
how to use it.

That, however, does not rule out other forms of participatory
planning, nor does it rule out particpatory planning at the
level of the enterprise.  Macro planning can take place through
a combination of French type indicative planning and Swedish type
distributional planning which involves the *collective* participation
of workers (unions) (See also the Australian "Accord" which,
whatever one thinks of the outcome, was (is) an attempt at macro
allocative (distributive) planning.

My experience at the sectoral level (as chairman of the Manitoba
Milk Control Board) indicates that sectoral planning is also
possible in that we could, with the participation of primary
producers in the decision making process, determine prices and
quantities and allocate quotas, etc. that also provided
incentives for productivity increases that equalled or exceeded
those in the unregulated market sector, while at the same time
stabilizing the market and raising producer incomes.

Finally, my investigations of Mondragon and other producer co-ops
have convinced me that it is possible to have participatory planning
at the enterprise level (providing the playing field is level)
and providing that the macro economic climate is reasonably stable and
the state does not intervene to favour the autocratic private
enterprises.  (Mondragon's productivity record and employment record
also gives evidence that participatory planning is no barrier to
innovation, even labour-saving innovation.)

Already, this posting is too long, so I will not go on further
except to say that IMHO the hidden agenda behind devising a
workable planning scheme is the allocation of the various rights
bundled into what we collectively call property rights.  I have
tried to deal with some of the issues this raises in my article
"Functional Rights: Private, Public and Collective Property",
_Studies in Political Economy_, 38, Summer 1992.  Within the
Yugoslav system, we have tried to deal with it critically in
Phillips/Ferfila, _The Rise and Fall of the Third Way: Yugoslavia
1945-1991_ (Halifax: Fernwood, 1993) -- with specific reference
to the conflict between a utopian decision making system within
a non-functioning etatist planning system.

University of Manitoba
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