StoryBorn more than a century ago and abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the idea that a State could organize the economy more efficiently than the market alone is reappearing thanks to fears aroused by the emergency climate change and the stalemate of the war in Ukraine.
The term “planning” emerges from the limbo in which the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 buried it. The idea that a state could organize the economy more efficiently than the “spontaneous” operation of the market seemed to have demonstrated its inanity on the empty stalls of Moscow shops. But to summarize the idea of planning in its Soviet variant is an optical effect caused by the Cold War, when it was a question of opposing the liberal “model” to the communist “model”.
If the concept reappears today, decked out with the qualifier “ecological”, in the program of the New People’s Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) as well as in the title of a general secretariat attached directly to the Prime Minister, it is because that it seems to be a possible response to the predicted environmental collapse. When it settled, during the 1930s and 1940s, in a large number of countries, both authoritarian and democratic, it was to ward off other collapses: that of the liberal economy which had entered the “great recession”. after the financial crash of 1929; that of the international order shattered by the Second World War.
Planning then becomes an operational reality: depending on the country and the period, it is a matter of compensating for the failure of markets and companies incapable of ensuring economic life, of organizing production in order to direct it entirely towards war effort and the supply of the mobilized population, to rebuild and modernize the productive apparatus and the infrastructures destroyed by the war.
Violent debates
The methods are varied, from the coercive plan imposing on companies deliveries of given quantities at fixed prices – as in the USSR or Germany in the 1930s -, to “incentive” planning where, as in France 1947 to 1957, the State sets a growth target, negotiates in the key sectors with companies and unions the application of this target and ensures the consistency of the major economic aggregates (budgets, external balance, monetary circulation) with these goals. Through the American Victory Program which, from 1942, brought together large companies and officials of the Roosevelt administration to negotiate the quantities, prices, wages and organization of the production of equipment for the Allied armies while continuing to produce (almost) normally for the civilian population – a similar model works in the United Kingdom.
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