I’ll start with a text by Benanav in the most recent issue of the New Left Review:
Beyond Capitalism—1: Groundwork for a Multi-Criterial Economy by Aaron Benanav
In the first instalment of a major contribution to the reconceptualization of a post-capitalist social order, Aaron Benanav marshals insights from a long century of socialist thought and practice—Cabet, Marx, Preobrazhensky, Neurath, Keynes—to lay the theoretical foundations for his own multi-criterial model.
Abstract
This paper examines the convergence of digitalization and ecological sustainability within the framework of “digital eco-technocracy” analyzing its implications for legitimacy. We first elaborate the reasons why we believe that adaptation is increasingly becoming an essential leitmotiv of social integration and transformation. We then argue that the convergence of digital and green has the potential to fundamentally reshape the relationship between politics and society in terms of political legitimacy. In doing so we claim that the integration of digital and green agendas may transform liberal democracies into adaptive, technocratic systems focused on depoliticizing ecological conflicts via digital technologies. Drawing on critical theory, particularly Claus Offe’s work on technocratic dilemmas, we then propose a “negative dialectic of technocracy,” where efforts to stabilize society through technocratic solutions risk further legitimacy crises, but in doing so further strengthen technocratic trajectories.
The disregard for Bettelheim’s work in today’s debate may illustrate just how far removed our present moment is from his, when transitional social formations were still accessible for direct study. However, Bettelheim’s contributions remain highly relevant – not only because he offers a framework for considering postcapitalism through the lens of value-form analysis (which provides an important bridge between current discussions on socialist/democratic planning and contemporary value-form theory debates) but also because he makes an important contribution to the question of strategy, which is perhaps more salient for us today than the question of transition. His critical analysis of the limitations of postwar socialist plans offers valuable guidelines for navigating organisational and strategic issues in our present context. These insights could serve to temper the appeal of certain paradigms which have become hegemonic in socialist strategic thinking, namely nationalisation, workers’ control, and technological utopianism.