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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Yep, that's definitely what happened. No need for further analysis, let alone investigation. Another layer of journalistic lacquer on what happened in 2019, and we're left with half-formed questions and a vague sense that something untoward is going on. theguardian.com/books/article/…
Gosh, why would that be, and what does it tell us about the recent behaviour of both the duopoly parties? Fragmented and politically complex in what ways? Again we are left surrounded by question marks, like a concussed duck in a Loony Tunes cartoon. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
A great deal of centrist and centre left political commentary seems determined to skirt round the politics of any given situation in its haste to put on a kind of satyr play, in which stock characters deliver the lines their readers and listeners have come to expect.
Reform won 2 councillors in a Conservative borough this week, & lost their one councillor in a Labour city. The Greens beat Labour in every ward in central Bristol. They're the real opposition to Labour in many places, where's their BBC piece??bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…
Labour were also defeated in many places by independents, some of whom are former Labour councillors. Again, they look like a much more plausible "real opposition" than Reform. Where is the reporting on this, and on its implications for the general election?
Labour is looking to win the GE via a Conservative collapse. It's an approach that infuriates many in their 2015-2019 coalition and it depends crucially on the existing forms of political reporting, which fixate on the right and dismiss or downplay the left.
We should never get tired of repeating that politics and the media in this country since the financial crisis has been monopolised by people who think that everything is basically fine, and that those arguing for an alternative to Thatcherism are dangerous extremists.
This means that the pool of competent people to draw on to populate government and political journalism gets shallower all the time. Since 2010 our PMs have been a daft posho, an authoritarian weirdo, another daft posho, whatever Liz Truss was, and now a libertarian nitwit.
Meanwhile the media has constantly had to pretend that they didn't want this parade of incompetent freaks and the catastrophic mismanagement and venality they presided over, even though they themselves lied through their teeth to head off any and all alternatives.
"As we did at the end of the 1970s, we stand at an inflection point ..." There's a bit of rote Democrat-copying going on here as usual: Reeves is referencing Thatcher as Obama referenced Reagan - working with the grain of media-induced amnesia ... theguardian.com/business/2024/…
But it is useful to remember what Thatcherism was: a carefully planned project to revive the investing class at the expense of the working majority. It was given space by the refusal of the centre left to recognise the limits of postwar social democracy, and move beyond them.
This project to revive capitalist control of society was masterminded in the UK by the likes of John Hoskyns, who set out the plan in the seventies in a series of "stepping stones" memos, in which the need to break the power of the trade unions was repeatedly stressed.
The UK Chancellor today is doing what Chancellors always do in the face of economic stagnation and declining living standards: giving state subsidies to private investors. The stated purpose of this is to encourage them to invest more and so improve productivity, wages etc. 🧵
The problem is that UK private investors aren't interested in, or good at, directing real resources towards domestic projects that will increase living standards for the majority who work.
The UK’s rich got rich through land rents and through unequal trade with the rest of the world, enforced at gunpoint by the Royal Navy. They are still helping themselves to land rents, and now operate offshore under the wing of the US Empire.
The current mainstream debate on the economy mostly revolves around whether the BoE was too slow to raise interest rates, which sounds much like one 18th century doctor complaining that their rival waited too long before starting to bleed the patient.
Inflationary pressure isn't coming from the great majority of middle and low income earners. Increasing the mortgage interest payments of people who are already have less discretionary spending won't do much to dent inflation caused by supply shocks and corporate price-setting.
The pandemic has greatly increased the wealth of high earners and of those who own property and other assets. To the extent there is a monetary issue, it can be addressed through wealth taxes - a Post-Pandemic Readjustment Act should cover it.