The public’s takeover of the economy from private hands to collective control is the most “reclaim the power” question in politics possible. That is why we were made to believe that it doesn’t exist

And one of the main questions of the new design of civilization is, of course, the design of the economic system. Some will think: “What’s wrong with the market? Stylish, fashionable, youthful” – but at this stage of the natural progress of market relations, the market itself provides the main propaganda of seditious thoughts against the market since it asserts the logic of competition. This leaves us with an obvious question: “Are there any competitors to the market?”

In fact, there are. The replacement of the market economy was developed, tested and successfully applied on the scale of entire countries back in the 20th century – this is a managed (planned) economy. And, although by the beginning of the 21st century, almost everywhere except China, the planned economy was put out of action – contrary to rumors about its complete demise, it has simply been pushed to the side.

The biggest secret of the planned economy

The biggest secret about the planned economy is that it has never lost the economic competition to the market economy, has not been refuted, its inefficiency has not been proven and it was not the cause of the collapse of the USSR and the socialist bloc in the 20th century. On the contrary, it is precisely in the field of economic tasks that the planned economy has proven both its efficiency and effectiveness, winning in comparison with the market economy

• as a competition in numbers: modern China is the absolute leader in the rate and duration of growth of the real economy in history, ahead of the previous leader – the USSR during the industrialization period of 1929-1955.
• and competition in principle: a market economy by its nature is obviously uncontrollable and incapable of fulfilling tasks (otherwise it would become planned), and a market economy is also incapable of solving problems caused by a market economy.

Therefore, when society faces a specific task: for example, to provide almost the entire population of a country that was only yesterday an agrarian country with modern urban housing, to restore normal life, infrastructure and economy destroyed by the most severe war in the history of the country, or for the first time in history to bring human expansion to the frontiers of space – then, of course, you can sit and wait for the weather by the sea, praying to the invisible hand of the market and hoping that it will somehow steer itself to solve the necessary tasks, but if society still needs a result, then there is nothing left to do but take supreme leadership of the economy, set specific tasks and manage their implementation. And even if this method were as ineffective as public opinion on this issue, formed solely by propaganda, claims, humanity still has no other choice: if you do not do them with difficulty, then the only thing left is not to take on big tasks at all.

Even from the position of pure logic, not trying to take conscious control of the economy for the sake of adhering to the ideological dogma of a pure, untouched, “free” market is neither logical nor even somehow humane – but in the spirit of medieval prohibitions of the church to violate the purity of religious dogma with its science with its dirty experiments.

However, in fact, the application of a managed economy is an empirical reality given to us in the form of the most large-scale economic achievements in the history of mankind over the past 96 years (in 2029, the practice of a planned economy will turn one century): Soviet urbanization, Soviet industrialization, post-war reconstruction, the USSR space program in the 20th century, and the industrialization, urbanization and development of the space program of the PRC, which is continuing in the 21st century.

In fact, the managed (planned) economy lost the war, not the economic one, but the political one. And for a meaningful conversation about the technocratic side of the managed economy, it is necessary to make a mandatory historical digression:

Why does everyone believe that “the planned economy does not work”

In short: because the collapse of the USSR is explained by the collapse of the Soviet economy. And the Soviet economy really did collapse — but the reasons for the collapse were non-economic.

The problems of the Soviet economy, which was built and developed as a managed economic machine, were, accordingly, “engineering” in essence: refining the design, modernizing components, increasing productivity and developing new functionality. Right at the time of the transistor revolution in the 1960s, the Soviet economic machine was in dire need of a large-scale modernization. Incredibly, the industrialization of the 1930s and the post-war restoration of the national economy in one five-year plan, smoothly transitioning into the beginning of the conquest of space in the 1950s, all of that was carried out through an economy controlled by means of a telephone, paper document flow, accounts and abacuses.

Computerization opened up cosmic prospects in every sense for the development of a machine-controlled economy in the USSR. Economists and engineers were burning with enthusiasm to apply the growing, in accordance with Moore’s law, only formulated in 1965, exponentially, technological capabilities to transform the transistor revolution into an economic one—the creation of a controlled economy 2.0. The reasons why it was not given a go are political. The Soviet nomenklatura was less and less interested in what the Soviet economy could do for the Soviet people and the progress of humanity with each passing year, and more and more—in what the Soviet economy could do for the Soviet ruling elite.

The Soviet Union was inexorably moving towards the restoration of capitalism not because the planned economy could not cope with the needs of the national economy and the general enrichment of the Soviet population, but because the ruling class was increasingly interested in their own enrichment. By the 1980s, the enrichment of the corrupt management of Soviet enterprises and union republics had reached a critical point: the constant increase in the scale of the share of wealth created by the Soviet economy in the state economy siphoned off into personal pockets inevitably led to a systemic conflict of the “pincers” type:

1. On the one hand, beyond a certain threshold, the growth of corruption in the system leads to a change in the system. Figuratively speaking, you can endlessly take out small things from the plant, but if you increase the scale of the removal, then beyond a certain point, the removal from the enterprise will turn into the transfer of the enterprise itself. That is, corruption led to systemic changes. The prospect of a qualitative increase in the scale of personal wealth was a carrot.
2. On the other hand, while the old system was in effect, the growing systemic pressure of corruption became incompatible with the USSR Criminal Code. Large-scale investigations of corruption cases in the 1980s were a stick.

Together, the trajectories of the stick and the carrot came to one point: the return of private property. There would be no need to take anything away from the plant if the plant itself could be appropriated—and there would be no need to fear criminal prosecution if it became possible to appropriate the plant by law.

The problems in the Soviet economy were indeed growing – but not because “the system was unviable”, but because if it was modernized and computerized, it would work better, not worse – and the issue of restoring capitalism would be resolved by itself. If the machine of the Soviet economy was not modernized, then the accumulating architectural and engineering problems, which are quite solvable in themselves, would sooner or later turn into a systemic collapse, and a change of system will be its solution. This is what happened during Perestroika – the more “market” was added to the Soviet economic machine, the worse it worked, until what was left seemed easier to completely transfer to the market.

Thus, both those who were in power in the late USSR and the new authorities in the post-Soviet republics benefited from the planned economy breaking down and making the breakdown look irreparable, caused by the very principle of the planned economy. And the engineers and economists who were not allowed to make a computer revolution and build a managed economy 2.0 had no voice in the late USSR, and after the USSR, their voices were no longer interesting to anyone, and they themselves had long been surviving as best they could.

At the same time, on the capitalist side of the Cold War front, there were even less people willing to question the economic nature of the Soviet collapse. After all, it was the economic structure of the USSR that threatened the private wealth of the capitalists – therefore, it was in their interests to discredit the managed economy, so that even the possibility of nationalizing private business could not be discussed.

So it turned out that the interests of the ruling class in the West, primarily in the USA, and the Soviet nomenklatura, which itself wanted to live “like in the West”, completely coincided in the practical destruction and theoretical discrediting of the managed Soviet economy. And, since the ruling class in the West did not change after 1991, and in the former socialist countries was formed by the beneficiaries of the restoration of capitalism, this motivation remains in force to this day. In other words, both in the countries of the former USSR, starting with Russia, and in the West, especially in the USA, all real branches of power – business, which has all the money, the bureaucracy, which has all the levers, and the media, which has all the attention – benefit from maintaining the myth of an “ineffective plan”. But there is no money to expose this myth, and with it, there are no resources for either scientific work or media work.

Because of this one-sided balance of power: all the money (business and finance), all the power (the state apparatus) and all the propaganda (the media) are on one side, no great effort was required to theoretically substantiate the plan’s non-viability. And today the level of discourse on this topic is disgracefully low: Yes, the masses believe that the Soviet system has lost economically. But this confidence is a thin enamel, which is maintained simply due to the absence in the mainstream of any noticeable challenge to this entire mythology.

At the very first encounter with an informed position, absolutely all existing arguments in the dispute “plan versus market” for the market and private property versus a managed public economy crumble to dust—and we will get to this in the following publications.

The State of Research on the History of the Planned Economy
The history and experience of the Soviet economy are one of the most important legacies of the 20th century, one of the most valuable gifts to humanity from the communist experiment—and to utilize it, it is essential to preserve it. Today, outside of China, only a few enthusiasts study this civilizational experience. Russian historian and economist Alexei Safronov is one of them. His work continues to be one of the most important formative sources of my interest in the planned economy, my understanding of its place in Soviet and world history of the twentieth century, and my perspective on its role for the future of civilization.

Safronov’s book, “The Big Soviet Economy: 1917-1991” is, so far, the only complete guide to the Soviet history of the planned economy, that combines his own research as a historian with the critical perspective of a scholar.

Published in 2025, “The Big Soviet Economy: 1917-1991” is currently only available in Russian.

The economy of the future is an engineering task

Leaving behind the obligatory historical block, the political component of the economic question can be taken out of brackets and the task of organizing the economy on the scale of society, or better yet – human civilization, can be looked at as an engineering task.

After all, that is what it essentially is. Not only in the literal sense of the digital infrastructure of the economic machine, but also in the philosophical sense: how should the “work collective” of humanity consisting of several billion people be organized so that humanity can step onto the next level of progress — and catch up with the images of the 21st century in the optimistic science fiction of the mid-20th century — the world of “Star Trek,” the world of “High Noon,” and not “Blade Runner” or “Judge Dredd.”

Technologically, everything for this already exists. It is the old economy that is not up to the task. In the big picture of civilizational progress, the market economy and private property are a stage, not a constant. And the market and private property have already completely exhausted their creative civilizational potential — i.e. the need to move to a new stage has matured. And until this transition occurs, the old relations that have worked themselves out not only do not bring any benefit, but also cause direct harm, gradually beginning to threaten not only progress, but the preservation of civilization in general.

Between today’s world, which is already beginning to burst at the seams, and the fully automatic space communism of “Star Trek”, there is only the invisible hand of the market:

On the other hand, humanity already has everything necessary not only technologically, but also intellectually, theoretically, to abandon blind faith, helpless hope in the “invisible hand of the market”—and to take control of the collective economy and labor in its own hands.

The internal mechanics of the existing economic organization, determine the limits of its capabilities. The basic idea is simple: if you get stuck in a hole, you can confuse the rotation of the wheels with forward movement for some time – but real economic progress and the next step forward at the level that civilization made together with capitalism will no longer spontaneously occur and will require conscious engineering and organizational efforts at the level of countries and all of humanity.

The technological progress of civilization has reached the threshold of a qualitative transition

Today, with the help of technology, a person can overtake any animal, dive deeper than fish and fly higher than birds—but, having become the first in the animal world, a person on Earth does nothing that evolution could not do without the participation of people: roughly speaking, technologically, man has reached the limits of what is accessible to living nature – from the depths of the ocean to atmospheric heights. By artificial means, man has made up for the missing millions of years of evolution in order to catch up with and overtake birds in the sky, fish in the sea and cheetahs on the ground. A further increase in the speed and range of our vehicles will not fundamentally change anything. Augmenting natural capabilities with a motor, wheels, and wings is no longer enough to overcome the evolutionary threshold: conscious efforts and a fundamentally new way of moving are needed.

With the invention of the rocket and the beginning of space exploration, man stepped into a sphere where nothing that unites us with animals (from physiology to psychology) matters, and the only thing that distinguishes us is important: knowledge and consciousness. Social progress went hand in hand with technological progress: man moved from the horse of feudalism to the train of capitalism, but the social superstructure still remained limited by the capabilities of the market economy mechanism rooted in natural relations. And in the same way, overcoming the evolutionary threshold requires stepping over everything “natural” and relying only on knowledge and consciousness.

In this sense, further progress of civilization is completely an engineering task in the sense that natural landmarks become useless, and man will need to invent something that does not exist and could not exist in nature, to follow a path untrodden by any earthly life form. Social relations must be approached as scientific and engineering problems. This does not mean that technological progress will now replace social progress – a popular “technocratic” fallacy. The idea of an engineer trying to build while ignoring the properties of the material is absurd. On the contrary, this means a deep study of social relations, studying and analyzing the history and mechanisms of social relations to the same foundation of material reality, to which, through the study of evolution, it has disassembled human physiology.

And the question of economics—or, more precisely, the question of how best for the “labor collective of humanity” to organize itself – directly depends on which side of this technological threshold humanity is on.

Up until the invention of airplanes, technological progress worked to expand the capabilities of the human body, and economic relations were, in fact, a continuation of the evolutionary process in a new environment: competition, adaptation, survival of the fittest, etc. up to the monopolization of market niches with subsequent degradation, just as some species manage to capture a biological niche, and, having destroyed its ecological balance, destroy themselves.

But the guiding star of progress has always been not to become “the strongest beast in nature”, but to free oneself from natural limitations uncontrollable by man: to leave the food chain, to defeat diseases, to learn to stop natural disasters – up to the most terrible that the Earth has faced so far: the asteroid threat. And, finally, having hacked your “original” genetic code — take control of your own evolution.

In other words — subjugate human reality from the environment to your own bodies — to the human mind.

From this point of view, if you look again at the issue of economics, it becomes obvious that the almost superstitious archaism of the idea that a person who is fighting for conscious control over his own biology and physiology down to the genetic level cannot try to manage only the economy — i.e. the relations between people themselves — is too difficult and too scary.

In fact, it is not difficult, not scary, moreover, at the current historical period it is already urgently necessary. In fact, humanity is not afraid to take the organization of collective labor under its conscious control. Only 1% of humanity, which now owns the majority of the material wealth of human civilization, is afraid of losing it. The interests of this 1% are behind the propaganda of superstitious fear of doing in the economy what a person does in all other spheres of human reality – to take it under the control of the mind.

But in the darkness, where the light of consciousness is not allowed – the demons of the unconscious roam. The longer humanity is not allowed to take conscious control of its conscious labor activity—the more severe will be the consequences of the rampage of the demons of human nature.

Guest essay from Egor Kotkin. Support Egor’s work on Substack and Patreon. Follow him on Twitter and YouTube.