Postcapitalist Planning and Urban Revolution

Abstract

Through what kind of spaces might postcapitalist planning emerge? How will the process of wresting collective control over the relations of production and reproduction, and over our metabolic exchange with the rest of nature, unfold through struggle? In seeking answers to such questions, this article reviews the literature on democratic economic planning beyond capitalism and makes the case for a renewed engagement with issues of space and the urban through a closer reading of Henri Lefebvre’s work on planetary urbanization and the production of space. We argue that, to date, the economic planning literature has tended to focus on overcoming abstract labour time rather than abstract space – an oversight that prevents us from fully apprehending the urban form through which capitalism produces and reproduces its conditions of possibility and carries the seeds of its own destruction and potential supersession. Engaging with recent critical theorizing on the logistics revolution and the logistical state, we argue that postcapitalist forms of planning will arrive through an urban revolution, through struggles over urban everyday life. We suggest that future investigations into the possibilities for a democratic economic planning beyond capitalism should attend to actually existing empirical struggles over the urban – as the mediator of capitalist relations – and look for inspiration to historical and contemporary examples of municipalist praxis aiming to reinvent the commune.

Introduction

It seems increasingly necessary to gain collective control over a planetary system of capital accumulation that through its compulsive self-valorization is plundering natural resources, extracting value from lifeworlds, exhausting ecologies and ‘cannibalizing’ its own conditions of existence (Fraser 2022) in a geological-historical era characterized as the ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore, 2015). Capital is enabled to wreck the planet in its thirst for exponential growth because we have no obvious way to stop it. Yet capital is our own creation; it is alienated labour – dead labour – set in motion (Charnock 2010). Capital misrepresents itself as a thing, successfully hiding its true reality as a social relation. In this process of fetishism, capital prevents people from seeing and thus gaining control over the relations that go into its production behind their backs. This requires capacities for rendering the vaster social totality, and our position within it, politically intelligible and navigable (Toscano and Kinkle 2015).

Thankfully, once again, democratic economic planning is a burgeoning field of critical-theoretical enquiry seeking answers to these questions of collective control (Benanav, 2020; Groos, 2021; Jones, 2020; Nishat-Botero, 2024; Sorg, 2022). Yet renewed interest appears not to draw energy from political issues of organization in the face of domination by capital so much as from new calculative possibilities presented by synergistic leaps in the predictive and coordinative powers of computing technologies reopening interest in the socialist calculation debate. Much of this renewed interest – notes Sorg (2022) – takes its cue from figures like Cockshott and Cottrell (1993) and the more recent advancement and reconfiguration of capitalism according to algorithmic and platform logics to speculate on the progressive potential of ‘digital socialism’ (Morozov 2019), ‘red plenty platforms’ (Dyer-Witheford 2013), ‘communist entrepreneurship’ (Nieto 2021) and ‘platform socialism’ (Muldoon 2022). Big data, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, platform infrastructures and algorithmic technologies are held up as the basis for dynamic economic calculation and coordination at scale, replacing market price signals as the mediating mechanism between individual preferences and systemic response, between demand and supply, consumption and production – thereby, finally, providing an answer to Hayek in the socialist calculation debate.

Counterposed to this technological and calculative trend in economic planning debates is a strand emphasizing political and organizational aspects. The grand battle between the Plan and Market, argue Mandarini and Alberto (2020: 13), can be seen as the ‘opposition between two modes of neutralisation of the political’: between suppression of worker agency under the command economy of state planning and the ‘immunisation of the domain of market transactions from collective control’ – a choice between personal and impersonal forms of domination (see Roberts 2017; also Mau 2023 on the impersonal economic power or ‘mute compulsion’ of capital). Bernes (2020) suggests that (democratic) planning must satisfy two essential conditions for it to overcome what can be restated as personal and impersonal forms of domination: that it be both transparent, in lifting the veil of commodity fetishism, and tractable, in enabling both clear sight and control by workers and citizens over the means of production, social reproduction and circulation. Transparency of allocation decisions tackles the problem of impersonal domination of the market; tractability of production decisions the personal domination of the workplace.

Missing from much of this renewed debate are several critical issues. First, urban space represents a form of mediation often overlooked in economic planning debates, which tend to focus on the mediation of time – abstract labour time. Indeed, visions of both planned and marketized societies presuppose questions of space (Huber 2013: 120; West 2020). ‘With abstract time’, as Jason W Moore (2015: 70) highlights, ‘comes abstract space’. This raises questions about the urban forms implied by postcapitalist planning – just as it does the space configured by capitalist relations. Second, the role that embodied knowledge and desire must surely play in a democratic planning, in which people have genuine control to shape space according to their needs and desires, is also often overlooked in favour of the potential of enhanced calculation and information-sensing in algorithmic technologies (see Neilson, 2020).

Third, an inattention to actually existing experiments as they unfold through grounded, contextualized struggle in everyday life, set against more abstract or speculative modelling or theorizing. Utopian visions and radical-revolutionary programmes for economic planning beyond capitalism are all essentially ‘writing recipes for the cookshops of the future’ (Marx quoted in Clegg and Lucas 2020: 96). Indeed, as Clegg and Lucas (2020: 97) highlight, ‘[e]verywhere we find the same uneasy relation between a relatively arbitrary concrete and a hazy speculative horizon’. An attention to the production of space, we argue, provides the necessary mediating relation between concrete struggle and this speculative horizon.

The common thread through these three overlooked aspects is urban everyday life. Building on existing work in this direction (Benanav, 2020; Bernes 2020; Devine 1988; Federici and Jones 2020; O'Neill 2003; Neilson 2020) we take the heterogenous potentialities of the urban everyday as the foundation for postcapitalist planning futures. We argue that the growing field of economic planning needs to be brought into conversation with ‘open’ Marxism, and especially Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) theorization of the production of space (Charnock, 2010; O’Kane, 2018a). These bodies of work provide important insights for honing economic planning debates, drawing on notions of freedom from the impersonal domination of the fetishized forms of capital, and for usefully situating planning within capitalist mediations, by drawing on dialectical form-analysis to focus our attention on struggle and social praxis as the animating moments in any transformation of capitalism.

In this article, we start from the idea that democratic planning is ‘the process of collectively governing and coordinating the plans and counterplans of a heterogenous mosaic of alternatives, embedded within broader agendas of commonly determined ends’ – that is, a spatialized process through an ecology or ‘oikology’ of interlinked alternatives to the state and market (Nishat-Botero, 2024). Like Silvia Federici’s arguments for a ‘counterplanning from the kitchen’ (Federici and Jones, 2020), we point towards a counterplanning from the ‘urban everyday' (more on which below). We first review some of the literature that grapples with abstract labour time, to highlight how space is missing. Second, we explore the most fully developed historical-materialist articulation of how democratic economic planning might transpire through struggle in, against and beyond the abstract space of capital. Third, we suggest how a closer engagement with the work of Lefebvre can deepen and extend this analysis in ways more alive to how struggle unfolds in an urbanized capitalism. Finally, we highlight empirical examples of an urbanized economic planning, exploring how the new municipalist movement, in particular, is attempting to reinvent the commune as the urban form of postcapitalist planning.

Abstract plans against abstract labour time

Much of the literature on economic planning takes an uncritical, non-dialectical approach to understanding capitalism and its social forms. Capitalism is treated as a closed system, centred on production and defined by the wage-relation. Indeed, the literature on economic planning tends to address the economic issue of time – that is, labour time – while overlooking space. Various planning proposals attempt to transform money, the concrete abstraction of labour time, or the social relation wage-labour – one of the fundamental social forms of capitalism (see Browne 2011) – into something else entirely. For economic planning to truly free us from capital’s domination and enable genuine collective control, this alternative to money must minimally be no longer mediated by value or the market, as value-driven markets act to subjugate both the sellers and buyers of labour power to a force beyond their control but which their actions cumulatively create – a phenomenon described as alienation – dominating our actions and making us incontinent in the face of price signals that appear to have a life of their own (Roberts 2017).

Thus, one of the most ‘sophisticated and detailed elaborations’ (Sorg 2022) of democratic economic planning is a framework for ‘socialist laws of motion’ envisioned by Saros (2014) which inverts the production cycles of capitalism by putting consumers in charge of production by choosing what they wish to consume from a ‘general catalogue’ of use-values uploaded to their digital ‘needs profile’ – therefore ‘planning’ production (see also Groos 2021). Organized through self-managed worker councils, workers receive ‘credits’ for consumption – explicitly not money, as they cannot be traded and are not based on performance or productivity. As Sorg (2022) notes, drawing on Fraser’s (2014) quadripartite definition of capitalism, this schema successfully manages to abolish three of its four conditions – private property dividing society by class; competition driving endless accumulation; market mechanisms regulating production and allocation – but leaves one, arguably the most significant, altered but fundamentally intact: the ‘double’ freedom of workers, freed from feudal subsistence to sell their labour power on the market and to starve if they fail to do so – a ‘freedom’ underpinning the wage-relation and abstract labour time. In Saros’ (2014) programme, therefore, workers still exchange their labour time in some form or another for credits to access goods.

Struggling with this thorny issue of time is a common concern in the history of economic planning. The European interwar council-communist movement produced a number of proposals for transforming capitalism beyond abstract labour time, not least The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution written in 1930 (see Bernes 2021). Bernes shows how this treatise makes a novel distinction between production of goods for individual consumption, recompensed by labour-certificates rather than money, and production of goods for general use, freely distributed to all who need them. The aim of the plan is to move societal production progressively from the former to the latter, so that more and more goods, from food and clothing to housing and healthcare, can be freely provided rather than exchanged, with labour-certificates eventually transcended altogether, as a transitional stage to communism. The extent to which such transitional plans can transcend labour time – through consumption credits or labour-certificates, or ‘coupons’ (Cockshott and Cottrell, 1993) – and thus abolish the law of value becomes the first of Bernes’ (2021) two tests of communism (the second is collapsing the gap between producers and consumers, for a ‘classless, moneyless, stateless society; freely associated workers meeting their needs with the means of production under conscious and planned control’).

Time – abstract labour time – is thus the primary target of economic planning, and for good reason (see Browne 2011). But what about space? What about economic planning and its concrete historical geographies of life (Moore, 2015: 301)? Capitalism operates not only through the freezing of human time within the alienated form of labour but also by secreting space in its own image, for its own reproduction (Moore, 2015: 26). Yet the production of space remains conspicuously absent from economic planning debates.

An agricultural or urban revolution?

A recent special issue proclaiming ‘the return of economic planning’ (Jones 2020) represents perhaps the fullest engagement with space to date. Many of its contributions are concerned with how planning might contend with the growing power of logistics and supply chains as they are spatially configured in a globalizing capitalism (Bernes 2020; Clegg and Lucas 2020; Federici and Jones 2020; Mandarini and Toscano 2020; Neilson 2020; see also Mau, 2023: 273–295). The challenge resides in how to democratize these new digitalized and spatialized technologies of capitalism – a challenge fraught with problems. These problems are spelt out by Bernes (2013, 2018, 2020) in a series of essays on the logistics revolution. Logistics is framed as a technological form as opposed to spatial or urban form of capital – and this has critical implications for how overcoming their domination over human life is imagined to unfold.

A technological reading of logistical capitalism tends towards the reconfiguration thesis – the idea that capitalist technological infrastructure can be reconfigured and repurposed for anti-capitalist ends. Bernes holds Toscano (2014) accountable as an advocate, for believing capitalism’s planetary system of logistical infrastructure to be malleable and salvageable and therefore ‘potentially reconfigurable’ (Toscano) rather than ‘constitutively hostile’ (Bernes) and unreconfigurable. First, Bernes claims that the holistic design of logistics as a technological totality for producing profit and suppressing resistance by exploiting uneven development and polarizing wage differentials, generating surplus by decreasing labour costs rather than increasing labour productivity, through what Bernes (2013) describes as ‘absolute surplus value masquerading as relative surplus value’, is simply inimical to being harnessed instead for organizing life beyond capitalism.

Second, Bernes poses the question of scale: the planetary scale of logistical infrastructure, and the tightening multi-scalar, trans-local integration of production nodes within a complex system of circulation, not only imposes huge operational barriers to breaking down this unwieldy totality into manageable parts, but also entails an overwhelming complexity, opacity and illegibility for collective action to assail, such that its reconfiguration would fail the test of transparency. The alienation experienced by democratic planners would far surpass the transhistorical alienation from the product of one’s labours, argues Bernes, taking on a monstrous quality, as the concrete materialization of the law of value.

Finally, Bernes builds a practical, strategic case against reconfiguring logistical infrastructures based on the historical record of actually existing revolutionary struggle. Struggle has only ever occurred in one place or another first, before spreading into a revolutionary wave, but never universally all at once, which therefore presents practical problems for the need to seize the entirety of distended global supply chains in order to ensure survival or else develop productive capacities locally for all needs. This important point speaks to the need to look to emerging empirical practices as well as historical struggles for inspiration on how to plan; a point we come back to below.

The taught logic with which Bernes refutes the reconfiguration thesis leads him to the inexorable conclusion that any postcapitalist society must seek autonomy from the grid, building alternatives locally in piecemeal fashion with the aim of connecting them together through new regional relations. Bernes (2018) argues that food is the fundamental factor for finding autonomy from the grid, without which revolutionary action will surely fail, as it has countless times for this reason. Food production has become so fully integrated into other technical systems of capitalism – energy, transport, advanced manufacturing, finance – that merely feeding revolutionaries cut off from global supply chains becomes a huge challenge for any necessarily place-based revolution. This leads Bernes (2018: 354-5; our italics) to the claim that an ‘authentic twenty-first century revolution, breaking with capitalism and all class society, will likewise have to be an agrarian revolution’ – revolutionizing food production by localizing supply chains and healing the urban-rural divide and the metabolic rift opened by capitalist urbanization; ‘making it much harder for [people] to be subjugated by a bureaucratic layer, a hostile power or an emergent attempt at capitalist restoration’ (Bernes 2018: 359).

This position is broadly shared by Clegg and Lucas (2020), who argue that any transition to postcapitalism will necessarily be an agricultural revolution – following the Neolithic revolution, which subjugated hunter-gatherers as tillers of the productive grains that fed enlarged agrarian empires and brought the state into existence as a social form, and the Capitalist agricultural revolution beginning in fifteenth–sixteenth century England in which commoners were forced from the means of subsistence into industrial cities to sell their labour, bringing wage-labour into existence as a social form (a form of exploitation, argues Moore (2015), only made profitable by first extending the frontiers of appropriation across Europe and its Atlantic colonies). Driving each revolution was not technological development of the productive forces – not the plough and domestication of animals, or crop rotation and mechanization, although these did play a propulsive part – but rather transformations in relations of production, in property relations and social organization. While the Neolithic revolution tethered previously ‘free’ hunter-gatherers to the land, as domesticated peasants under the personal domination of early agrarian states, and the capitalist agricultural revolution loosened this tether, cutting people free from the land and feudal bonds and tethering people anew to a different form of domination, the impersonal domination of wage-labour, then the third, postcapitalist agricultural revolution must necessarily cut the tethers of impersonal and personal domination once and for all.

Capitalism’s dominance, it is assumed, rests on a spatial separation of people from the means of subsistence – a ‘profound deprivation’ that invites exploitation or domination by those who do control their means of subsistence (Clegg and Lucas 2020). The agricultural revolution thesis builds on this insight to make the convincing case that any kind of large-scale, state-mediated form of economic planning, leaving global supply chains intact, commandeering them through democratic socialism, ‘merely reinforces the tethers of the state while substituting impersonal for personal domination’. Simply shifting how the agricultural surplus is redistributed will always reproduce forms of alienation and domination. Communism thus mends the metabolic rift(s) opened by capitalism and reunifies people with the means of subsistence. What might this look like in prefigurative practice? Struggles for food sovereignty in and around Barcelona and Rosario, for instance, that are developing alternative logistical infrastructures, gesture at such a postcapitalist social metabolism.

The solution, therefore, is closing this gap and bringing people back into direct contact with survival processes, not least food production. For Bernes as well as Clegg and Lucas, this means closing the gap, opened by capitalism, between town and country, urban and rural. Some kind of spatial synthesis through a renewed relation to the land, to food and to energy sources is the key to superseding capitalism. This, Clegg and Lucas (2020) maintain, is not some ‘apocalyptic abolition of the city’ but rather a qualitatively transformative synthesis of urban and rural practices, starting with urban farming, localized food supply chains and greening the city. Likewise, Heron and Heffron (2022: 126) call for an abolition of the hinterlands based on ‘intricate matrices of urban and rural land uses’, which is contrasted with the land-sparing spatial practices of Vettese and Pendergrass’s (2022) socialist planning for ‘Half-Earth’.

Such a vision provides an answer to the conundrum, astutely posed by Bernes, plaguing all attempts at instituting democratic economic planning from within capitalist social relations: how to motivate and incentivize work and production. Under capitalism, the compulsion to sell one’s labour power to procure the goods required for survival ensures people work: a form of impersonal domination or ‘mute compulsion’ (Mau 2023). Under centrally planned societies, such as state socialism, people lack this compulsion, under guaranteed employment and welfare needs, with no means for ensuring compliance with production except through coercion or violence. In a postcapitalist society, in which all forms of domination are abolished, what will provide the source of motivation and incentive to work?

Baking and breaking bread together is one solution offered by Clegg and Lucas (2020) and Bernes (2020) – an image evoking the full breadth of activities constituting our necessary and collective metabolic exchange with nature for our survival. If we buy this argument, however, why stop at basic subsistence? Surely, human life amounts to more than this? For postcapitalism to be worth fighting for, to motivate people to organize, it must surely promise more than mere subsistence. It must recognize, as Mau (2023) puts it, that needs do not always override social mediations. Indeed, the vicissitudes of desire and drive imply that nature, human or extra-human, must, therefore, also be thought of ‘as incomplete, thwarted or shot through with antagonisms’ (Heron 2021: 501). This involves disentangling need and desire from the logic of the commodity-form, for forms of communal luxury (Ross 2016), public dépense (D’Alisa et al. 2014) and collective enthusiasm for shared goals (Adler 2022). As we argue below, the idea of the ‘urban everyday’ (Beveridge and Koch 2019) might just provide such a spring to action for the radical transformation of everyday life.

As Toscano (2014) argues, human needs go beyond the basic biological; subsistence alone is not enough to bring people together in solidarity and spontaneous organization – nor to meet the specialized needs of modern society. Toscano’s disquiet about this proposal appears to revolve around the ‘re-ruralization’ of everyday life and the simplification of complex social forms into more immediate relations. ‘Postcapitalism, or communism, is not the absence of social form or social synthesis but another form or synthesis, another mode of regulation’ (Toscano 2014). All modes of regulation of complex social synthesis require mediation. The point is, therefore, to experiment with and develop new social mediations, animated by forms of social praxis that do not conflate the critical embrace of abstractions with the uncritical celebration of capitalist imperatives for speed and scale (Dinerstein and Pitts 2021: 165-167).

The reduction of struggle to subsistence in the agricultural revolution thesis overlooks the mediating role played by the urban, both in the production of exchange value for capital accumulation and in our metabolic exchange with nature for the production of use-values. It therefore does not go far enough to apprehend the mediating form that value takes spatially – the urban – that produces and animates the technological and infrastructural networks underpinning agriculture. As articulated in urban political ecology, urbanization is the ‘metabolic unity of human and non-human entities that is socially and technologically mediated by the value relation’ (Arboleda 2017: 368). Town and country, urban and rural, are treated by the agricultural revolution thesis as separate spheres divided and then brought back together by capitalism rather than contradictions within the dialectical totality of the urban. To transform planetary urbanization, we must work in and through this spatial rendering of value – not seek to escape or negate it, but to identify and create points of ‘excess’ that open possibilities for postcapitalist futures (Dinerstein and Pitts, 2021: 167).

At the heart of this problem is the question of social metabolism, which is fundamentally interwoven with urbanization. Usually used to refer to the biological process in which the body converts matter into energy, metabolism plays an extraordinary role for humans, whose organs are perhaps uniquely amongst animals located outside the body, what Moore (2015: 11) characterizes as ‘distinctive extroversions’, including ‘clothing and shelter as external fur’ and ‘community as external womb’, which might be extended to include all the tools, technologies and infrastructures that sustain human societies, from housing to money to logistical networks. The urban can be read in this light as essentially a vast extroverted, exoskeletal system of human metabolism; the infrastructure through which matter from nature is converted into energy for human life and social organization. Building on Moore’s (2015) concept of the oikeios – the dialectical ‘double internality’ of the ‘web of life’, of humanity-in-nature/nature-in-humanity – economic planning can be read as an ‘oikology’ – that is, an ecology of practices regulating oikos, the household in an expansive sense, for an oikonomia serving human and non-human nature’s needs, through a more-or-less collectively planned social metabolism (Nishat-Botero, 2024). The urban becomes the mediating process and social form through which metabolism occurs between humans and nature. It really matters, then – for rebalancing our metabolic relationship with nature in the ecocidal Capitalocene (Moore, 2015) – just how human settlements are (re)configured.

The agricultural revolution thesis is arguably the most historical-materialist and spatialized interpretation of how democratic economic planning beyond capitalism might develop – the analysis most alive to the grounded, material conditions for struggle and transformation – but it does not go far enough to apprehend the urban form through which this revolution must dialectically unfold. In treating the technological infrastructure of capitalism as unreconfigurable, it risks reifying it from content to form. Does such an uncompromising rejection of capitalist technology – and urbanization – misapprehend the dialectical nature of totality as comprised of contradictions, generative of its own opposition and transformation into something else? Our actions are dominated but not determined by the systemic totality we create through human labour – an open, not closed totality (Goonewardena, 2018; O’Kane, 2018a). The urban is a concrete abstraction – an abstract social form made concrete as an appearance and material practice that shapes but does not determine social reality; a form of mediation, able to mediate social complexity and difference and bring people together into more sophisticated and potentially emancipatory organizational formations than ever before. The totality of capitalist urbanization therefore carries within its spaces of possibility the seeds of its own supersession.

We can go further to extend this line of thinking. Recent developments in value-form theory led by Juan Iñigo Carrera and Guido Starosta (see Arboleda 2017, 2020) posit the production of scientific consciousness in labour, as the forces of production develop, as capital’s constitutive contradiction, planting the seeds for its supersession. On this reading, postcapitalism develops immanently through the capital-relation radically transfiguring itself as it is shaped by labour through resistance and struggle. Humans and nature – including technology, as transformed and alienated nature – are radically interlinked, each dialectically determining the development of the other. ‘Such encounters’, writes Arboleda (2017: 369), considering the entanglement of human and technology, labour and capital, ‘enable the possibility to hack and repurpose technology in such a way that it does not serve the abstract imperatives of capital, but the embodied needs and potentialities of use value (i.e. the material life process)’. If we extend this analysis to urban space – seeing the urban form as a technology, as alienated nature (see Charnock, 2018) – then our fate is written into the production and transformation of urban space. Or, as Lefebvre inferred: ‘To change life, however, we must first change space’.

Just like money and the state, the urban must be grappled with directly, reconfigured or transformed into a social form that no longer mediates capital. Within money is the idea of the universal equivalent, which enables as much as it disables and alienates (Konings 2015). Within the state is the idea of constituted power, which likewise enables complex social organization as much as it forecloses other configurations and entails violence and alienation. The urban can be seen in a similar light. We must work with and through the excesses of these social forms to find transformative formations in, against and beyond rather than outside capitalist social relations. To understand where to look for such transformations, we turn to Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space.

Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space

Following the form-analysis of an open Marxist critical-theoretical reading of capitalism (Dinerstein and Pitts, 2021; O’Kane, 2018b) and of the work of Lefebvre (Charnock, 2010, 2018; Goonewardena, 2005, 2018; O’Kane, 2018a), we can build a picture of how capitalism reproduces itself in spatial form. Form-analysis enables us to see in conceptual, abstract terms the invisible social relations that hold society together as a totality. The abstract social forms that operate behind the backs of producers – the commodity, the state, property, law and, also, the urban – take concrete form as objects that appear as things to us, divorced from their dialectical-relational production. This mystifying process of relations appearing ‘thing-like’ is that of fetishism; it is the role of critical theory to demystify the fetishization of social relations (Charnock, 2018), as part of struggles to discover and develop humanity’s species-general knowledge and capacities.

Lefebvre (1991, 2003, 2009) aims to demystify the urban and the process of urbanization. The urban form of capitalist modernity is the concrete realization of abstract space, just as money is the concrete abstraction of labour time. Abstract space is, for Lefebvre, the socio-spatial form that capitalism takes to ensure its own reproduction, one which ‘guarantees the everyday domination of the linear time of labour and accumulation over the rhythmic time of biology, ecology and art’ (Charnock, 2018: 1456). Labour time is thus articulated into urban form through abstract space; the process of urbanization is the spatial form of mediation that reproduces the socio-ecological relations of capitalist re/production (Napoletano et al. 2020). Abstract space seeks to flatten all qualitative differences and homogenize space to create a series or grid of quantitative equivalence for the ‘exchangeability of all its component parts’ (Lefebvre 1991: 341) – inscribing into space the logic of the commodity-form itself. This is materialized and made concrete in the endlessly repeating patterns of the sprawl of speculative suburban housing plots, vertical housing units, motorway lanes congested with commuters, the port and airport infrastructures for containerized commodity transportation, planetary logistical networks that connect nodes in global value chains, and the supercomputers and data centres that power the algorithms coordinating just-in-time production circuits.

For Lefebvre, abstract space is inextricably bound up with the state form, or the ‘state mode of production’. Toscano (2014) reconstructs Lefebvre’s ‘state mode of production' concept in the context of the ‘logistical state’, which ceaselessly intervenes to ‘lay out the space of stocks and flows for the optimal reproduction of capitalist relations’; to plan, control and programme space in its own image and that of the commodity-form; a space made both homogenous, evacuated of any difference that cannot be commodified, and broken or fragmented into multiple parts, the lots and sections of interchangeable commodities and bureaucratic codes – that is, ‘difference-through-sameness'.

This state-facilitated process of ‘planetary urbanization’ unfolds through a double movement captured succinctly by Lefebvre with a powerful metaphor borrowed from atomic physics: ‘implosion–explosion' (Brenner 2014). Whilst implosion describes the ‘tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban reality’, explosion is that ‘immense [...] projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space’ (Lefebvre 2003: 14). This process is articulated most fully by Wilson and Bayón’s (2016) metaphor of a universal physics of ‘black hole’ dynamics, symbolizing the ‘unobservable presence-absence’ of Marx’s theory of value, ‘in which immense gravitational forces of agglomeration are intertwined with dramatic expulsions of energy and matter; a process that is both destructive and creative, and that forms a structuring principle of space in its totality’ (Wilson and Bayón 2016: 363). The explosion–implosion movement effects the global subsumption of abstract space (Charnock, 2018).

Although some strands of Frankfurt School critical theory imply this expansive colonial process of commodification as endless, until everywhere is subsumed, the dialectical dynamics of urbanization might rather suggest that an ‘outside’, a frontier zone, underpins the functioning of capitalist accumulation as argued by Nancy Fraser (2014, 2022). However, following an open-dialectical understanding of totality (Goonewardena 2018), Fraser’s (2022) background conditions of production – sources of value extracted rather than exploited from spatial peripheries at various scales: the home, the colonial frontier, political processes, non-human nature – are not ‘external’ to planetary urbanization but constitutive and co-productive parts of the social totality (Conroy 2022: 19-10; Saito 2022: 15-16). This brings us closer to Moore’s (2015) holistic conception of capitalism as a world-ecological system – co-constituted with ecology in which capital accumulation in capitalized zones of exploitation of wage-labour is dialectically dependent on a rising rate of appropriation of non-capitalized, unwaged and unvalued work by ‘cheap’ human and non-human natures (for a critical synthesis of Fraser and Moore, see Conroy 2022). Such a perspective suggests how spaces of appropriation, seemingly external but immanently foundational to capital, are just as if not more important a site of resistance to, and reconfiguration of, capitalism as spaces of exploitation.

We can see the abstract form of implosion–explosion play out concretely through contemporary capitalist urbanization, which, as Danyluk (2021) notes in his exposition of ‘supply chain urbanism’, is defined by a dialectic of flow and fixity: long-distance trade and globally integrated supply chains only made possible by dense agglomerations of fixed capital and urban activity at particular nodes, and vice versa; each fuelling or propelling the other. Danyluk (2021: 2152) cites Toscano: ‘this makes the growth of the city inseparable from the rise of logistics’. But cities are not simply conduits or transistors for the faster flow of capital; their density, congestion, social complexity, diversity and alterity also present ‘a major obstacle to circulation’ (Cowen, cited in Danyluk 2021: 2152), resisting the smooth circulation of capital and sometimes blocking the circuit entirely. We might suggest that this revolutionary aspect of the urban form – made concrete as the commune – contains the seeds of sublation of capital circulation into something else.

The urban, then, is the field of mediation between use value and exchange value, between capitalist enclosure and postcapitalist commoning, a dialectical ‘totality’ containing contradictory parts and opposing tendencies and counterforces. In his open-dialectical-totalizing reading, Goonewardena (2005, 2018) highlights how Lefebvre sees the urban as the mediator between structure and agency, the universal and particular, homogeneity and difference. Lefebvre proposes three ‘levels’ which can be used as a heuristic to understand the dynamic unfolding of urban life. The ‘global’ level, G, describes the structural processes of capitalism’s dual tendencies towards private enterprise, private property and market liberalization, and state technocracy, control and planning – the ‘abstract space’ of globalizing state capitalism (Wilson 2013). The ‘private’ or ‘habiting’ level, P, constitutes the domain of lived experience, of the intimate internal spaces of the home and imagination, extending out to the everyday life of neighbours and communities. Mediating these two ‘levels’ is the crucial ‘urban’ or ‘mediate' level M, the intermediary level through which the global and private interact: ‘“projected” by the level G […] level M also introjects the contested dynamics of the vital one “below” it: “level P.”’ (Goonewardena 2005). Whilst this frame may appear a crude representation of territorial scales, Goonewardena highlights how Lefebvre never meant it so rigidly, but sees all levels interacting together at multiple scales, in constantly evolving dynamism, coalescing in the most intensely mediated site of struggle, the urban. In fact, these ‘levels’ of reality put forward in The Urban Revolution are the groundwork for Lefebvre’s more commonly cited spatial triad; G, M and P reflected clearly in the three dialectical dimensions, respectively: conceived, perceived and lived space.

Conceived space is ‘the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers…all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 39). This is composed of ‘mental’ abstractions – those intellectual, technocratic and scientific discourses, theories, plans, models, maps, logics and programmes that construct analytical and rational representations of social reality to order and regulate it as abstract space – imprinting itself onto lived space, in the ‘devastating conquest of the lived by the conceived, by abstraction’ (Wilson 2013). The democratic appropriation of conceived space is fundamental if postcapitalist planning is to forestall the instrumentalization of planning thought and the homogenization of the lived spaces of everyday life.

Lived space is ‘directly “lived” through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of “inhabitants” and “users”’ (Lefebvre 1991: 38-39). This is the most physical, ‘pre-rational’, imaginative and affective space (Pierce and Martin 2015) – re/producing urban everyday life; the realm of memory, mythology, superstition, imagination, intuition, desire, art, poetry, music, play, eroticism, festivity, intoxication, excess (Merrifield 1995). For Lefebvre, this is the very essence of the urban: creation through simultaneity: the concentrated interaction of people, ideas and cultures through rich social encounter (Merrifield 2013). In much of the planning literature, such dimensions of socially embodied knowledge and desire remain under-theorized, given the tendency to conflate the epistemically richer concept of knowledge with the concept of information (see Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2017).

Lived and conceived space form two of three ‘moments’ in Lefebvre’s spatial triad; dialectically interacting to produce ‘perceived space’ or spatial practices – Lefebvre’s third, unifying dimension in the triad. Spatial practices ‘secrete’ society’s space through accumulated multiple ‘daily realities’ of individual routines, behaviours and habits; the ‘urban reality’ of ‘routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, “private” life and leisure’ (Lefebvre 1991: 38-39). This productive ‘secretion’ is a kind of spatial projection: plans, visions, interpretations, dreams and desires are projected into space and play out in physical and social practices, through combined daily movements of inhabitants through the material form of the built environment (Pierce and Martin 2015).

A second dynamic structuring the urban form (of capitalism) is the conflict between the difference emerging from lived space, in which diverse humans dream, desire and interact spontaneously and unpredictably, and the homogeneity deriving from how the state mode of production harnesses conceived space to design, plan and control an abstract space. If abstract space is the projection, petrification and penetration of abstract labour time into the spatial practices of society, sustained by yet suppressing human encounter, then that which resists and escapes the grip of abstraction presents the promise of a postcapitalist ‘differential’ space (Wilson 2013). Differential space seeks to reconnect that which abstract space divides – ‘divisions between work and product, between repetitive and differential, or between needs and desires’ (Lefebvre 1991: 291). Such a dialectical countermovement for the re-appropriation of urban space as dis-alienated resonates with Bernes’ (2020: 70) notion of ‘planarchy’, a vision of planning that embraces the ‘self-directed, spontaneous, and creative character of human action’.

Differential space implies precisely this aspect of invention and innovation: difference-as-novelty. Lefebvre (1991: 372) distinguishes between ‘produced’/‘maximal’ difference – radical change – and ‘induced’/‘minimal’ difference, ‘generated by iteration or recurrence’, such as the ‘diversity between villas in a suburb filled with villas; or between different “community facilities.”’ Induced/minimal difference is the system reproducing itself through empirically distinct, though conceptually continuous, variation. Produced/maximal difference, in contrast,

Presupposes the shattering of a system; it is born of an explosion; it emerges from the chasm opened up when a closed universe ruptures […when] a given set gives rise, beyond its own boundaries, to another, completely different set. (ibid)

It is the implosive–explosive dialectical dynamic of the urban form itself – in bringing so many diverse individuals together in collective encounter, organized in complex and creative ways – that propels the production of differential space and maximal difference. ‘Once groups and classes succeed in meeting face to face, once they come to grips’, writes Lefebvre, ‘a free dialogue explodes under the dialectical impetus’ (quoted in Charnock, 2018: 1457); suggesting the struggle for differential space comes not from outside the urban form, but from within; as much from urban spaces of appropriation as from those of exploitation.

We must thus look to materialist struggles over urban everyday life, historical and contemporary, as the fount of democratic planning – as a metabolic oikology – of an economy beyond capital. Lefebvre placed hope in practices aiming for autogestion – collective self-management of urban life, and therefore social metabolism (Napoletano et al. 2020). Where can we find actually existing or emergent movements for autogestion of the urban? One promising place to look is ‘radical municipalism’ (Roth et al. 2023), a global urban social movement, partly inspired by Lefebvre’s (2003) ‘right to the city’, attempting to reinvent the commune – the urban form of differential space. Radical municipalism is the more politically ambitious and radical-revolutionary, rather than merely progressive or reformist, strand of the new municipalism – a recent reinvention of counter-hegemonic praxis in which the urban and the local state are privileged as the strategic entry points for democratically transforming the patriarchal, colonial, capitalist state (Roth et al. 2023). As such, municipalism is also grounded in the lived experiences, embodied knowledge and affective desires of urban everyday life, which, as our engagement with Lefebvre’s work highlights, must surely play a vital role in any successful praxis for democratic economic planning. Indeed, a democratic economy must be a lived, libidinal economy (Nishat-Botero, 2024). The next section explores these connections.

Municipalist experiments in differential space

In their expansive survey of the planetary operation of capital, Mezzadra and Neilson (2019: 243-4) conclude that the only realistic option to contest its hegemony is a dual power strategy of ‘reinventing the soviet’ – the commune – by constructing a ‘stable system of counterpowers’ alongside directly attacking constituted power:

[S]uch a strategy is the only one we see as viable in the face of competing proposals – for example, the ‘let it rip’ attitude of accelerationism or the quietude of postcapitalist economic experiments, which [each] labor under the hope of reaching an eventual tipping point where capital begins to crumble without ever having been subjected to a direct political challenge.

That challenge is to be found in struggles consciously contesting the social forms of capital, not least the commodity, the state and the urban. Contemporary movements that consciously adopt a dual power strategy of attempting to transform these social forms while nurturing counterpower are thus most promising.

Prevailing contemporary tactics of revolt against planetary urbanization, however, tend to take a negative form, to disrupt or blockade the physical flow of commodities through global supply chains, targeting chokepoints and critical nodes – such as Occupy Oakland’s blockade of Oakland Port in 2011. Such resistance may be interpreted as a variation on the theme of ‘riot’ in Joshua Clover’s (2019) identification of a renewed era of riot, replacing the primacy of the strike in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, following the shift of value’s locus from the point of production to circulation. These are necessary but not sufficient forms of resistance. Toscano (2014) suggests such tactics fetishize the physical objects of circulation rather than transforming the social form that animates these objects; he asks a pertinent question: ‘What would it mean to struggle not simply against material flows but against the social forms that channel them’?

As recent critical theory has begun to articulate – for instance, Verónica Gago’s (2017) concept of ‘neoliberalism from below’, Martijn Konings’ (2015) ‘emotional logic of capitalism’ and Richard Seymour’s (2022: 144) reflections on the libidinal affections of fossil fascism – capital’s social forms are deeply entrenched in the affective and emotional bonds of everyday life, in psycho-social attachments and anchorings in social reality, that they profoundly structure lived space and cannot be so easily abolished without some alternative or equivalent form of mediation. Money – the ‘common currency’ of daily existence – is a good example. Konings (2015) makes a convincing case for the iconic and affective power of money in popular culture, deeply interwoven into the (late-capitalist) social fabric, an insight ‘progressives have missed’ and continue to ignore to their huge disadvantage – a much-needed corrective to progressive assumptions, often rooted in Polanyian thought, that people automatically feel ‘dis-embedded’ or alienated by capital’s social forms. Thus, in the words of Mezzadra and Neilson (2019: 241; our italics), ‘it is also necessary to work towards the building of a system of counterpowers that can confront neoliberalism and the operations of capital at the level of daily life’.

In the history of attempts at building such a ‘system of counterpowers’ in everyday life, various movements for autogestion – from the Paris Commune to the soviets of revolutionary Russia to the interwar council-communist movement in Germany and Holland and post-war revolutionary councils of Hungary (Muldoon 2021) – tended to focus on worker control of production to the neglect of social reproduction. The history of Yugoslavian self-management and ‘social ownership’ replacing state property, following Tito’s break with Stalin, more fully incorporated social reproduction, with Organisations of Associated Labour interconnected with Self-Managing Communities of Interest – before devolving into market socialism, presaging the bloody disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia (Kirn 2019).

Across these movements, a functional and spatial separation between production and reproduction – following capitalism’s ideological separation of economy from society – placed the greater power with workers’ councils, risking sliding into syndicalism. Recent attempts at building the commune have tried to control for this by foregrounding social reproduction. In Chavez’s Venezuela, ‘communal councils’ were developed from 2006, bringing together co-ops and assemblies into more formal organs for collective control, with ‘social property enterprises’ nested within this federated structure and reinvesting their surpluses into the commune (Ciccariello-Maher 2020).

Similarly, in the post-Yugoslav space, municipalist movements are today building on more recent activism around the commons and the right to the city, to ‘commonize’ the state. In Zagreb and Belgrade, these movements are fighting hard against decades of neoliberal, ethno-nationalist and clientelist urban politics to reinstitute and renew Yugoslavia’s historical forms of self-management (Milan, 2023; Sarnow and Tiedemann, 2023). Likewise, organizations like Decidim Barcelona (We Decide Barcelona) are taking some first steps in integrating digitally enabled connectivity and collaboration within the existing fabric of municipal institutions, neighbourhood associations and the broader social solidarity economy.

In controlling for the tendency towards syndicalism, however, such attempts often risk falling into the opposing trap of bureaucratization and capture by state machinery. Before his death in 2013, Chavez talked of a – paradoxical perhaps – ‘communal state’ (Ciccariello-Maher 2020). These two tendencies – syndicalism versus statism – appear to mark the history of attempts at building council communism (Muldoon 2021). One vests control with workers, creating a labour aristocracy and productivism that ignores the needs of society and rest of nature; the other with bureaucrats or technocrats, who take decisions across firms on behalf of society and nature, through the state. The history of Yugoslav socialism can be read as a series of counteracting reforms, oscillating between decentralized market socialism – less syndicalist than managerialist – and centralized state socialism (Kirn 2019). Where the former reproduces a fetishism of the economic – under capitalism’s ideological separation of economy from polity – the latter contains a fetishism of the political; one collapses into the impersonal domination of the Market, the other into the personal domination of the Plan (Mandarini and Toscano 2020). For a dis-alienated democratic planning, the economic and political must be resolved together.

An alternative communalist-municipalist strand in the history of council communism emerged where struggles in the workplace converged with those of the household and neighbourhood, in the development of houses of the people. Described by Mike Davis (2018: 103; 101) as ‘authentic proletarian cathedrals’, the ‘ultimate symbol of proletarian public life in most cities’ of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries inhabited by the industrial working class, these were, significantly, physical buildings and spaces constructed by and for the people, home to diverse functions and activities spanning production, reproduction and exchange, from cooperative workshops and assembly rooms to libraries, theatres and café-bars. Margaret Kohn’s (2003) historical study demonstrates the importance of the houses of the people of Emilia-Romagna as sites for popular encounter, self-provisioning, mutual aid, cooperative production, political education, collective festivity, recreation and identity-formation – becoming symbols in the communist fight against fascist collectivism and bourgeois individualism.

Municipalist houses of the people were inspired by the Paris Commune, in which economic planning was underpinned by embodied knowledge, affective attachment and popular participation encompassing everyday life. In Communal Luxury, Kristin Ross (2016) shows how the Paris Commune was fomented in the countless ‘revolutionary clubs’, the reunions, associations, salons, bars and committees that sprung up across Paris in the years preceding 1871: ‘buzzing hives’ of subversive political activity for a ‘quasi-Brechtian merging of pedagogy and entertainment’; ‘schools of the people’ – and ‘schools of disturbance and depravity’ – in which labourers, artisans, artists and intellectuals encountered one another and radical new ideas. For 72 days of autonomous self-government, the Parisian Communards institutionalized ‘communal luxury’, over competitive scarcity, partly though a pioneering programme of universal education in the founding of crèches and schools in which specialization was shunned for more holistic, artistic, humanist pedagogies (Ross 2016). These were crucial sites of learning for the formation of democratic subjectivities versed in the skills and values of self-government, socially useful industrial design and cooperative production. The Communards demonstrated through spatial practices what the concept of the commune might look like in lived, affective and material terms, deeply impressing upon Marx’s conception of communism and Murray Bookchin's (1992, 2014) ‘communalism’ – the theory of democratically confederated communes motivating new municipalist movements today.

A communalism rooted in everyday life, in which decisions taken at the neighbourhood level in people’s assemblies are scaled up through democratically delegated federations of assemblies at greater spatial scales, is currently being rediscovered by actually existing municipalist experiments such as the ‘autonomous democratic confederalism’ of Rojava in Syria (Van Outryve d’Ydewalle 2019). Communalism begins with Bookchin’s idea of politics invested in the ‘polis’ – in popular assemblies of face-to-face democratic-deliberative decision-making – rather than in ‘statecraft’ – professionalized, technocrat institutions of government. Where issues transcend the scope of the polis, assemblies delegate decisions to members of higher-scale councils, federated at regional and, potentially, global levels. This confederal network of councils is purely administrative, delegating authority to the assemblies. Following Otto Neurath, such institutional conditions potentially open space for the co-articulation of a plurality of plans, enabling ‘forms of economy of various kinds to co-exist without being forced into competition’ (quoted in O’Neill, 2003: 195).

Building on mechanisms developed in the Paris Commune, delegates – contra elected representatives – are mandated, recallable and fully accountable to the assemblies (Van Outryve d’Ydewalle 2019). The relationship between the assemblies and their delegates, and the experts and professionals they commission to administer and execute their proposals and plans – what Bookchin calls, respectively, policymaking and administration – is constantly negotiated and renewed through iterative feedback. A tension between upholding the assembly’s sovereignty and the space required by professionals to exercise their technical expertise is expressed in the dangers of creating a technocratic ruling class pulling against the need for maintaining effective management of complex allocative and coordinative planning decisions. It is in this space that the practical operations of democratic economic planning need working out in practice, in materialist experimentation through praxis, deliberation and collective learning. One avenue for exploring this is through cybernetic thought, according to which loosely coupled systems can maintain local autonomy without sacrificing economy-wide cohesion (West, 2020).

By bringing into conversation Lefebvre’s theory of urban everyday life and Bookchin’s communalism with contemporary municipalist struggles, we may begin to see what democratic economic planning might look like in practice. Central to municipalist praxis is a deeply practical strategic approach to transforming ‘all levels of social practice, including the agencies of coordination’, in Lefebvre’s (2009: 148) expansive sense of autogestion. Working through the urban form itself, municipalist praxis harnesses the implosive power of agglomeration and simultaneity, assembly and encounter, to bring people together to collectively coordinate their shared material interests through distinctly urban institutions that tap into desires, jouissance and the libidinal economy of the urban everyday. We follow Beveridge and Koch’s (2019: 147) politicized conception of the ‘urban everyday’ as the ‘(re)shaping [of] urban space through collective activities residing in the everyday’; ‘using or appropriating urban space or resources for everyday needs’, from squatting housing to reappropriating water flows; and/or ‘establishing alternative urban systems of the everyday’, from social centres to time-banks – practices cohering around the municipalist commune and its associated institutions, notably co-ops and assemblies. But the commune is only one aspect of the urban and of municipalist dual power; the other aspect is working within existing structures of the state and capital to contest and reconfigure these technologies of power to support the flourishing of the commune (Roth et al. 2023).

We must therefore look across the planetary landscape of extensive urbanization, up and down global value chains, for struggles that attempt to contest or harness logistical power for municipalist ends. In contradistinction to Danyluk’s (2021) identification of ‘supply chain urbanism’, we should look to the emergence of what we might call a ‘supply chain municipalism’. Recent struggles in cities such as Rosario, Argentina, point to the embryonic development of municipalist alternatives to capitalist logistics (Minuchin and Maino, 2023). Here, networked cooperative federations of family farmers and municipal food companies are working to not only localize supply chains but ‘democratise technical knowledge and substitute mercantile processes of valorisation with cooperative economies’ for ‘improvised, autonomous infrastructures [that] contest discourses of efficiency, profitability and surplus, to construct and promote, through counter-logistical arrangements, a different territorial organisation structured around open and democratic supply chains that value environmental resources, cooperative economies and the sustainment of life’ (Minuchin and Maino, 2023: 20). Similarly, Terra Pagesa (translated imperfectly as Peasant Land or Farmers’ Land) is a supply chain municipalism of sorts, led by the Catalan Union of Farmers and supported by Barcelona City Council, working to re-localize Barcelona’s food system. These struggles represent the potential socialization and municipalization of the metabolic infrastructures that give structure to the urban.

Minuchin and Maino (2023: 11) highlight Bookchin’s stark opposition between municipalist politics and logistics: ‘If the distinction between policy making and administration is kept clearly in mind, the role of popular assemblies and the people who administer their decisions easily unscrambles logistical problems from political ones’ (Bookchin, 1992: 247). This is where we see the limits to Bookchin’s undialectical thinking; something that engaging with Lefebvre can overcome. If logistics as currently spatialized under planetary urbanization is insulated from the political by capital’s separation of economy from polity, then a municipalist supply chain strategy would aim to re-politicize logistics through a dual power approach of extending the logic of the commune over existing global value chains, where possible, coupled with building autonomous circuits of value.

Conclusion

In this article we have sought to contribute to current critical debates in democratic economic planning by considering the role that the overlooked aspect of space must necessarily play in any creative construction of postcapitalism. First, we reviewed what we see as the most fully articulated conceptualization of spatial issues in the literature – one focused on planetary logistical infrastructures as state-capitalist technologies of exploitation and control (Bernes 2018, 2020; Clegg and Lucas 2020). This thesis presents such infrastructures as intrinsically resistant to reconfiguration for postcapitalist ends, arguing for a third agricultural revolution to transcend the impersonal domination of globally integrated supply chains. Next, through engagement with open Marxism (Charnock, 2010; O’Kane, 2018a), we suggested how this thesis of agricultural revolution misses the crucial mediating role played by urban space as a social form of capitalism as a totality – both in its dominating and emancipatory dimensions. We then synthesized the work of Lefebvre on planetary urbanization and the production of space to explore how abstract space dominates our lives and yet carries, in the differential spaces of urban encounter and assembly, the seeds of its own potential overcoming. If planning has been historically associated with abstract space and the logistical state, with personal and impersonal domination, a Lefebvrean perspective suggests possibilities for a dis-alienated and democratically planned autogestion. In this way, we argued that any democratic economic planning capable of challenging capital must activate, and be animated by, the collective desires and enthusiasms embedded in everyday life. What is wanted, in other words, is the discovery and invention of new forms of social mediation grounded in the actually existing material struggles and experiments of the ‘urban everyday’.

Finally, we pointed to historical and contemporary examples of such struggles as they have unfolded in syndicalist, council-communist and radical municipalist movements. Future research in economic planning could usefully attend to urban-rural struggles around municipalist counter-logistics, as counter-movements to ‘supply chain urbanism’ (Danyluk 2021). When combined with the digital technologies of ‘platform municipalism’ (Thompson 2021) – such as Barcelona’s Decidim platform for citizen participation in planning – how far can such a counter-logistics be brought under collective control through confederated assemblies channelling the urban form of the commune? This would constitute a different kind of ‘counter-logistics’ than that articulated by Bernes (2013) – proactively building counterpower in and through urban social forms. Through a dual power strategy, might it be possible to connect municipalist experiments trans-locally, confederated at regional and global scales, in a process that slowly removes dependency on capitalist logistics and just-in-time production, and builds a postcapitalist alternative in the shell of the old? If the spaces of possibility of the urban everyday are to thrive and give rise to an expanded autogestion, planning will have to be understood in praxis-oriented terms, something irreducible to the optimization and rationalization of the web of life.