Author here. For the record, this is neither a critique of participatory planning, nor is it a critique of gift economies. I’m an active participant in several examples of both. Now it might be a "critique" (or joke at the expense of) "the" gift economy, singular, depending on what work "the" is supposed to be doing. But the words "all encompassing" were put in the sentence because they really are supposed to be doing some work. (The post is certainly not an argument that "anarchism doesn’t work," since, after all, I think that it does.) As I wrote elsewhere: > I agree that every economy involves planning at some level. But the interesting questions have to do with things like how much different people’s plans have to be coordinated ahead of time, how many plans can be tried out simultaneously, who gets power to propose or to block which plans and on whom this is binding, who has to support the plans that make it through the process, under what conditions a plan can be reconsidered or abandoned, etc. So, for example, whether the "process" looks like freewheeling experimentation within an open-ended field, or whether it looks like a uniform, all-encompassing and endless series of board meetings. . . . But my joke above in the OP was about unitary-structure participatory-democracy planning processes . . . . I definitely agree on the value and importance of gift economies entangled with market relations, and for that matter participatory democratic planning etc. in an open-ended framework which is bottom-lined by experimental initiative, rights to exit and rights to meet minority demands on your own dime. I’m sacrificing a lot for brevity above, but I’d want to lay a lot of stress on the importance of "all encompassing" as the danger-word in the first problem, and [singular] "process" in the second one. Of course there are a lot of thoughts packed in here, and I might be mistaken on any or all of them. But if there’s oversimplification here, it may be in the reading, not in the writing. Hope this helps.

Some people, when confronted with a problem in keeping all-encompassing gift economies sustainable, think, “I know, we’ll start using a participatory planning process!”

Now they have two problems.

Over 400,000 victims of border laws were deported last year. Nearly half a million people in one year alone. Barack Obama’s treatment of immigrants is shameful.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/immigration-deportationn2348090.html