This is a letter I wrote to Proletären, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Sweden (K). The letter was published in issue 15, 9-15 April 2026. I cannot find it among the letters at proletaren.se at the moment (2026-04-20) and have therefore decided to also publish it here on the blog. The text is also available in the original Swedish. See the box to the right.
Proletären changed the title to "The climate requires careful socialist planning", which of course is true. But here I use the original title. The language is quite "short" due to space constraints. There is also likely some Swenglish that shines through in the translation.
This is not the first letter I have written in Swedish workers' press. I and David Zachariah wrote a letter to Flamman three years ago on a similar theme, but with more careful language so as to not frighten Flamman's left liberal editorial staff. That article can be read in Swedish here: Flamman | Vi behöver digital ekonomisk koordinering för att rädda klimatet.
Only a global planned economy can solve the environmental crisis
Since the end of the Soviet Union there has developed a notion among socialists that the future of the movement lies in different forms of market socialism. This notion is wrong.
The core of the problem is in-kind constraints, a point Otto Neurath made already in 1919. Neurath’s argument is based around incommensurability. Neurath asks whether it is better to dig up coal and thereby save labor power, but let people freeze to death in the future due to depleted coal mines. Today we would ask whether it is better to extract oil to save labor power, but let people die in environmental disasters in the future. Such questions cannot be reduced to a scalar quantity, but must be decided in physical terms, that is in kind. We can’t eat money.
Some socialists believe that it is possible to get around this problem via indicative planning. In practice this means that one puts a negative price on emissions. Thereby these gentlemen believe the issue has been resolved. But those who have read Capital vol II understand that changes in prices primarily affect distribution, not production. If one changes the price of gasoline then this only changes which people can afford gasoline. The oil continues to be extracted. Correct policy is to order a stop to oil extraction. This can not be done willy-nilly, but must happen in an orderly fashion. How production is to be changed cannot be decided at each workplace in isolation. Neither is it possible to arrive at a solution via meetings, for the workplaces are connected in billions of different ways. People have limited bandwidth and can only take into consideration a few things at a time.
It might be tempting to believe that it is possible to plan using aggregate measures, but Soviet experience teaches us that this is not the case. An apocryphal example is a nail factory that is ordered to manufacture a certain number of nails and of course only makes the smallest nails, or a particular mass of nails and therefore only makes huge nails. In reality fixed product proportions were used, but the problem remains the same. Aggregate measures cannot be disaggregated. Planning must happen in exquisite detail and it must happen quickly enough to be useful. The problem requires computerization.
Modern planning theory fetches insight from control theory. This text is too short for details, but in short it takes accounting, modeling and calculation in kind to handle problems in kind. Workers must input the utilization of use-values in each labor process into a global accounting system. Orders, receipts and so on must also be handled in the same system. These data can then be used to construct models of how each workplace functions, for example how much wood is required to produce a certain amount of kraft liner and how much carbon dioxide, electricity, heat and green liquor is produced as byproducts. These models can then be transformed into a system of linear constraints, for which we can seek the minimum of labor that is required to achieve a certain set of desirable effects, for example cookies and healthcare for all. We can thereafter convert this minimum into a set of entitlements and obligations in kind, that is bilateral orders. Beyond this, unexpected demand will arise, for which we can assign a smaller monetary budget to smooth out any errors. The point is that the basic industries, that is electricity, transport, steel and so on, are guaranteed their reproduction within politically established bounds regarding environment and society. This must happen globally, for the environment is global. All attempts at splitting up the responsibility will lead to a worse adaption than when the entire world’s basic sectors are managed as a unit.
I often see texts that focus on specific technical details such as wind and solar versus BECCS. With planning we can take the totality into consideration. This requires that we struggle towards quantifiability, which is not always easy. But data is always better than subjectivism. We cannot guess ourselves to sustainability.
Tomas Härdin, Umeå