The debate about a socialist planned economy seems to have definitively returned. Here, we present a small, selective excerpt from the German debate in order to perhaps provide some readers with an easy introduction to the discussions.
A few weeks ago, Die «Zeit» picked up on the planned economy debate and addressed it in its article “The Comeback of the Planned Economy” — albeit from a very technical perspective, and unfortunately the article is behind a paywall: https://www.zeit.de/zeit-wissen/2026/01/planwirtschaft-ki-branche-klimakrise-oekonomie-geschichte
Without barriers, you can read a newly published article on planned economy in german language on Wikipedia. It distinguishes itself from older articles that understand planned economy purely as a centrally administered economy — an important distinction that, in the German-speaking world, still leads to absurd misunderstandings: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planwirtschaft
The 2024 article “Planning Democratically, but How?” by Christoph Sorg also offers a well-structured overview: “The new planning debate seeks to make an economy beyond the market conceivable — concrete models show where the sticking points lie.” https://zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/demokratisch-planen-aber-wie/
For those who want to dive deeper, Johanna Schellhagen’s book “How We Fight for a Future on This Planet” is an excellent choice. Schellhagen examines how, through labor-time accounting as a form of decentralized planned economy, sufficient material power can be built to confront the climate catastrophe and the capitalist management of crises: https://www.buechner-verlag.de/buch/wie-wir-uns-eine-zukunft-auf-diesem-planeten-erkaempfen/
Finally, for the “Daily News,” we would like to point to the international network for democratic economic planning, INDEP. It has established itself as a central hotspot of the planning debate and now publishes new articles almost daily: https://www.indep.network/