Perm do both---Reparative justice is an essential component of anti-capitalist organizing---anything else reproduces racial and colonial divides.

The ‘Democratic’ in ‘Democratic Planning’ There is a long tradition of critiques arguing that capitalism conflicts with democratic principles, a framing strategy still popular in more recent years (Fraser, 2015; Streeck, 2011; Wolff, 2012). Proponents of varieties of ‘economic democracy’ have classically argued that the economy itself is not a particularly democratic place. Strict hierarchies mean that workers have to follow the command of a company’s owners, who reign workplaces like autocrats. This class power and the related wealth inequality also severely limit the potential of political democracy, with economic elites having disproportionate power to influence parties and decision-making processes. Fraser (2014) adds that capitalism’s particular way of dividing ‘the economic’ and the ‘the political’ places numerous pivotal political questions outside the reach of democratic decision-making, leaving them instead to be decided by capital’s laws of motion and power relations (p. 64ff). Such decisions are not made democratically by those affected by it, but the management of companies under the influence of competition and (extremely) unequally distributed purchasing power. The principles for postcapitalist planning outlined so far solve some of these issues. Societies no longer place their capacity for production and reproduction under the primacy of capital accumulation, but consciously plan what they produce, who produces it, how they produce it and for whom. But how to make sure that such planning is actually democratic? A popular understanding of economic democracy holds that cooperatives based on a ‘one-worker-one-vote’ principle should replace private capitalist firms. Such a principle works for issues related directly to a workplace, but the workers of a particular cooperative or sector are not the only stakeholders in economic decisions, so decision-making processes need to involve other actors, a plurality of scales, and status groups beyond the working class. Karl Polanyi for instance suggested a functional division into producer associations of different industries and a commune as the political community (Bockman et al., 2016). This system ensures a democratization of the production process via the production associations, while making sure that production aims at democratically established social goods via the commune. Prices are not set by central planners, but instead negotiated among producer associations and the commune. Commune and producer associations negotiate the ‘direction of production’ and the producer associations decide autonomously on the ‘technical-economic side of investment’ (Bockman et al., 2016: 407). Along similar lines, proponents of Parecon have similarly envisioned democratic planning as a bottom-up process linking worker councils to consumer councils on various scales (Albert, 2003; Albert and Hahnel, 1991). Samir Amin (2013), however, suggests socializing the leading global capitalist monopolies into public institutions, which are managed by representatives of workers, consumers, the state, local authorities and other units in the value chain (p. 136ff). So a transitionary stage of socialism would appropriate the structuring power of leading corporations and democratize them by placing multiple stakeholders within them. Indeed, there is a plurality of options to ensure different stakeholders have a say in the planning process. The guiding principle might be ‘all-affected’ or ‘all-subjected’. The former means that everyone gets to participate in decisionmaking to the degree that they are affected by the outcome. The latter argues that everyone subjected to a particular governance structure should be involved in its decision-making, transcending both a reductionist focus on nation-states and excluding notions of citizenship (Albert, 2003; Fraser, 2008: 411ff, 2013: 202ff). Either way, the new principle will need to reorganize the scales of politics by relegating different issues of politics to different, overlapping scales. On this issue cybernetic planning could profit from radically democratic traditions within cybernetics itself (Schaupp, 2019). Planning and decision-making need to happen on scales low enough to ensure self-management where possible and to avoid higher scales being overwhelmed with tasks and information. At the same time, issues that transcend local scales need to include higher scales to avoided exclusion of those affected by a decision. In other words: the construction of a library needs to include a different assemblage of scales than coordination to reduce carbon emissions. In addition to this, deliberative theories of democracy hold that decision-making cannot just aggregate isolated priorities into joint decisions (Rendueles, 2021: 256ff). In Saros’s model of platform socialism elaborated above, for instance, individual consumers register their individual needs in their needs profile and thus direct the production process. While the orientation of production toward needs is pivotal, the model leaves out the social process through which such preferences are established in the first place. So a planned economy would not only need socialist laws of motion, but a truly democratic culture featuring (online and offline) spaces for exchange, within which people can engage and in the process discover their preferences (Rendueles, 2021). A final question already implied in several issues mentioned above needs to be spelled out explicitly: how would a transition toward democratic planning impact capital’s ‘social production of difference’ (Lowe, 1996: 28; quoted after Virdee, 2019) and the related racism, sexism, homoand transphobia, colonialism, ableism, and other intersecting forms of institutionalized discrimination? Capital and the state segment the labor force to derive value from labor remunerated below its cost of reproduction and derive stability from the fact that said segmentation prevents the working class from developing consciousness of itself in its entirety (Federici, 2004; Roediger, 2007; Virdee, 2019). Abolishing value and endless accumulation would destroy this institutionalized need to produce and reproduce difference. In the case of racism, for instance, capitalist expropriation creates the foundation for the racialized marking of subjects as targets for oppression (Dawson, 2016; Fraser, 2016). Postcapitalist production units will thus need to be designed in a way that is not driven by competitive environments to reduce its costs by any means anymore, so that they will not reproduce capital’s racialized segmentation of the labor market and colonial expropriations of foreign resources and people anymore. However, with status-based hierarchies and colonialism being much older than capitalism, there is absolutely no reason to assume that postcapitalism would not inherit some of capital’s legacy of racism, colonialism and other forms of discrimination. Even more so since the social production of difference is not reducible to political-economic interests, but possesses a semi-autonomous logic embedded in politics of recognition (Fraser, 2013). While some forms of discrimination are related to both capitalism’s (gendered, classed, racialized, and imperial) divisions of labor and its politics of recognition, others such as of homo- and transphobia derive primarily from the latter. This means that democratic planning of the economy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of full liberation. Planning needs to be designed in a way that accounts for whom capital recognizes in their full humanity and who is excluded from such recognition. Concretely, the outcomes of planning need to remedy capitalism’s (and previous) legacies of injustice, it needs to be reparative in this sense. But in addition to this the planning process itself needs to be designed inclusively as well. Reparative planning would aim to heal capitalism’s unevenly experienced violence instead of merely applying a ‘universal’ perspective (Appel, 2020; Song, 2021; Williams, 2020). This is especially relevant for decommodified, universal basic services (Coote and Percy, 2020; Huws, 2021), the concrete content of which is not objectively given but needs to be subjected to democratic debate (Fraser, 2020). A reparative, abolitionist outcome would be more likely (but not certain) if those affected by planning participate in the planning process. The section on social reproduction already mentioned Parecon’s ‘women’s caucuses’ (supported by anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action), which need to exist for multiple currently marginalized groups. We can see the need for pluralism in social and technical design in recent work and technological discrimination and design justice (Benjamin, 2019; Costanza-Chock, 2020). If AI-based systems are trained with prejudiced data they will reproduce said prejudices. From AI recruiting tools discriminating against women to facial software not recognizing darker complexion, more and more cases illustrate the problem of design injustice. If cyber-communists plan to design ‘communist software agents’ to help with democratic planning (Dyer-Witheford, 2013), these need to take into account a plurality of needs and priorities, the minority of which has a voice under really existing capitalism. Of course the topic of design justice transcends the topic of socio-technical system design. For instance, planning in healthcare needs to be sensitive to the particular needs of women and sexual minorities, which are currently unmet. Urban planning among others needs to take into account racialized and classed histories of urban design and community construction, but also ableist design practices producing barriers to equal access. The list of examples for particular experiences of capitalism’s unevenness is long, so democratic planning needs to establish planning principles that ensure an inclusive planning process and egalitarian outcomes.