Optimal Planning: A Radical Critique

This article focuses on the relationship between the construction of socialism and the use of sophisticated optimization techniques to formulate and execute a plan in a planned socialist economy. Many economists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have advocated reform of the planning mechanism from the perspective of promoting a more efficient use of resources through the increased use of techniques such as linear programming. It is argued that linear programming techniques may improve upon rule of thumb approaches to plan formulation and execution in some local situations. How ever, the extension of such techniques to an entire economy in an integrated fashion, often called optimal planning, obscures one of the fundamental problems of socialist political economy — the relationship between the planning mechanism and the construction of socialism.