Socialist Investment, Dynamic Planning, and the Politics of Human Need

Building on the work of Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine, this essay considers the social presuppositions for the construction of a socialist investment function. When it comes to investment, people care about many issues: not only efficiency but also work satisfaction, fairness, sustainability, and so on. Investment decisions therefore need to be structured to make people feel that their voices can be heard across the wide range of their concerns. Facing this complexity and potential for conflict, socialist investment would likely be structured as a negotiated political-planning process in which not only workers take part but also individuals organized into a variety of civic associations, including political, cultural, scientific, and religious. This essay questions how such associations would acquire the resources needed to carry out their activities and proposes a possible solution in social provisioning.