Just read @evgenymorozov's piece for @NewLeftReview on socialism and the calculation debate. Lots to agree with. Non-market planning does not have to take place at an all-knowing centre. It can be a function of widespread, egalitarian civic deliberation.
newleftreview.org/issues/II116/a…
It's important to grasp the implications of this. Establishing an economic system that prioritises social need over the profit motive entails a programme of constitutional reform - ultimately it requires a new state form, in which civic participation is much more extensive.
The current order is supported by a vast effort of ideological persuasion through advertising, journalism, entertainment etc. - a legitimating background that sustains what exists and heads off alternatives. We are left looking for bargains on a burning planet.
This work of legitimation is held tightly in the hands of the few. Our task is to create fora of democratic deliberation that can make the capitalist order into an object of steady contemplation, and break the limits imposed on social reason.
These fora must have a constitutional character - they must be part of the state form. One way to think of them is as a revival of the assembly form in modern conditions - institutions and powers that permit collective sense-making.
New technology has an important part to play in 'articulating the assembly' , making high quality deliberation at scale possible. It isn't enough on its own, but it can be harnessed to the work of democratisation.
At the moment the state-media combine individualises and disorients us. The work of reform resides in establishing ourselves as citizens who make sense of current conditions and shape the future *together*.
(This will mean re-making the bureaucracy, too, so that its first loyalty is to the assembled citizen body, rather than to elected representatives. The model civil servant becomes the Machiavelli of The Discourses on Livy, not the Machiavelli of The Prince.)
Establishing socialism is in large part a practical matter of constitutional design; #mediareform and a post-capitalist political economy are indivisibly linked. Read this, in other words:
newsocialist.org.uk/the-constituti…
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