What is social economic planning?

The attempts to build post-capitalist societies in the twentieth century all used variations of the material-balances economic planning procedures developed first in the USSR. Most advocates of transcending capitalism came to accept the idea that the desired new society could operate only with some variation of such an economic planning tool. One part of the current thorough reconsideration of how to build a human-centered post-capitalist society is reconsidering how it should carry out, in a way consistent with its goals, the social economic planning that all systems of production require. This brief work first addresses a number of misconceptions and myths connected with the identification of planning for socialism with the material-balances planning system. After that, and connected to real-world experiments now going on in a few countries in the world, the work considers if the required social economic planning could occur through conscious control of markets, for countries attempting to build a socialism that uses markets for both the necessary articulation of all the steps in its many production chains and for the distribution of consumer goods.