Planning and Anarchy

by Jasper Bernes (2020) PDF

Central planning?! Computers can do it!!! Among the intuitions animating the contemporary left, we must rank rather high the felt sense that powerful new computing technologies now offer a solution to problems of calculation previously insuperable for the red-eyed central planners of “actually existing” socialist states. This is more or less the central thrust of Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski’s recent book, The People’s Republic of Walmart, recapitulating a line of argument expressed in prominent books like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future and Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism. Walmart and other corporations demonstrate that “economic planning on a massive scale is being realized in practice with the assistance of technological advance, even as the wrangling of its infinities of data . . . are supposed to be possible to overcome” (Phillips and Rozworski 2019: 39) . . .

source: South Atlantic Quarterly (2020) 119 (1): 53–73

The Free Machine

by Rob Lucas / New Left Review / July-August 2016

Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism is an ambitious book, spanning economic history and theory, the trajectory of socialism, diagnosis of the crisis-prone present and a strategic vision for the future. [1]It is also an unusual one, treating topics typically ceded to left antiquarians with a free spirit that aims to build a grandiose historical-theoretical construction out of insights from Mises and Marx, Luxemburg and Hayek, Preobrazhensky and Gorz. And a best-seller—a notable feat for a work that covers such ground; due in part, perhaps, to Mason’s high visibility as economics editor at the BBCand Channel 4. Born in Lancashire in 1960, the son of a lorry driver and a primary school headmistress, Mason claims to have become ‘a Marxist at 16, a Trotskyist at 19’. He studied music and politics at Sheffield, starting an academic career in music in the early 1980s before switching to journalism. By the time of the late-90s dot.com bubble he was deputy editor of Computer Weekly, then joined BBC Newsnight as business editor, his first broadcast discussing the economic fallout of the 11 September attacks. In 2013 he moved to Channel 4. In these posts he has become a household name in Britain, known for his ruffled pieces-to-camera from the frontline of global uprisings. But he has straddled the range of media from TV and radio to newspaper columns, blogs, with a prominent Twitter and Facebook presence, and a novel set in China’s Wild West. This year he went freelance to engage with the ‘space opening up where the left of social democracy meets the radical left, green and autonomist politics’, unbeholden to the constraints of mainstream media, and has been a prominent commentator on the UK’s successive crises. Mason’s political positions have been oddly ambidextrous: supportive of Corbyn, Occupy and student protests—yet also seeming to call for an upgrade of UK nuclear weapons against the threat of Russian submarines and for the bombing of Assad. If there is a systematic explanation for such eclecticism, he has not yet offered it.

Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism

Paul Mason gehört zu den wenigen Menschen, die es schaffen, im gegenwärtigen «Interregnum» den nur allzu notwendigen «Optimismus des Willens» aufrechtzuerhalten. Von seiner inspirierten Analyse der radikalen Demokratiebewegungen ab 2011 («Warum es überall knallt»), über seinen mutigen Journalismus während des deutsch-europäischen Putsches in Griechenland 2015 gelingt es Mason, in den Bewegungen der Zustände die wirkliche Bewegung zu entdecken, die es vermag, die Zustände aufzuheben. Nun führt er sein Projekt fort, in einem großen Aufschlag, wie man ihn seit Beginn der Krise kaum noch erwarten durfte: Während die Welt scheinbar ins Chaos driftet, findet er in den Tendenzen des Bestehenden die Saat eines Postkapitalismus. Der neoliberale Informationskapitalismus, so Mason, untergräbt die Möglichkeit seines eigenen Überlebens, während – in den Nischen der solidarischen Ökonomie und in den Staatskanzleien der europäischen Peripherie – andernorts das Neue schon im Entstehen begriffen ist. Natürlich stellt sich daraufhin die alte Frage: Was genau ist nun zu tun? Und wer zum Teufel tut es?

Moderation: Barbara Fried

weitere Infos/ further information: rosalux