I recently finished reading a book that came out Oct. 2022, Hahnel's “A Participatory Economy.” In it, the author makes a keen argument for the failures of the market based economies, and proposes a radical alternative to both market based economies and Soviet style centrally planned economies.
To summarize, the proposal was that we have Consumer Councils on neighborhood, city, county, region and national levels (with representative democracy as we get less local) that we participate in. The consumer councils determine (mostly by surveys, requests and inquiries and data on consumption in years past) what goods and services the citizens wish for the economy to produce that they can consume them, and Worker Councils (organizations of workers who have great degrees of autonomy on their own workplaces) make proposals about how they can fulfill those needs and what publicly owned goods (like printing presses or cement trucks) they're requesting to fulfill those needs.
Obviously that's a really simple summary for a ~250 page book. But it's a keen criticism of market based economies that sets out to move the conversation forward on what we should replace capitalist markets and its oppressive structures of work with. It's a concrete, well outlined proposal, including details about anticipated pitfalls to avoid and how it structures long term planning and the necessary course corrections to be made by Consumer Councils.
Has anyone else here read it? What do you think?
You could get it from AK Press if you're interested: https://www.akpress.org/participatory-economy.html