"Capitalism isn’t working. But is there a plausible alternative? The Blueprint lays one out: a system where workers control every lever of production, and competitive markets and state planning coexist side by side. Drawing on the history of socialist experiments and the economic debate over planning and markets, The Blueprint confronts the hardest questions about what went wrong in the past—and why it can go right in the future. The result is a socialism worthy of the twenty-first century."
Endorsements/Reviews
"The Blueprint takes the question of how socialism might actually work seriously enough to venture an answer. The argument is rigorous but not airless and is honest about the tradeoffs involved. A genuinely useful book for how to exit the current labyrinth." —GREG GRANDIN, author of America, América "It is rare indeed to find a book that so keenly matches the elegance of its arguments with the passion of its politics. Here we have an alternative economic blueprint for our time, a shining antidote to the crude bestiality of a fading and failing Trumpian regime." —DAVID HARVEY, author of The Story of Capital "Nothing is more urgently needed in our troubled world than a blueprint for socializing capital, democratizing workplaces, restoring the commons, decommodifying basic goods and harnessing markets to society’s needs. This book has arrived with perfect timing." —YANIS VAROUFAKIS, author of Technofeudalism "What would it mean to actually live under democratic socialism? This visionary book takes this critical and too-often-ignored question seriously. The result is thought-provoking, informative, and surprisingly entertaining." —ASTRA TAYLOR, author of The Age of Insecurity
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I look forward to reading it.
I have to express puzzlement though over how little writing I see on the left about the role of future a.i. This is all the more ironic given that,
a) a.i. might solve Hayek's information problem, the argument made against central planning by highlighting the inaccessibility to central planners of information about economic demand, the only solution to which, Hayek averred, was price signals in a market.
b) Even the staunchest evangelists of a.i. (see the Moonshots podcast, e.g.) speculate on how a.i. could deliver a post-capitalist economy. Artificial general intelligence or, further up a speculated a.i. capability gradient, artificial super intelligence, might make almost all human labor redundant and produce (so they hope) minimal cost abundance for everyone. (How this happens within environmental constraints is a question the Moonshots show hosts never deal with.) At least one left writer in Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto is thinking along these lines.
At the moment, however, the capitalists behind a.i. are their own worst enemy. Examples of data center water/air/noise/light pollution, eminent domain removal of people from their homes for data center construction, environmental damage, etc., are piling up, revealing another example of how capital arrogates to itself the right to trample communities and non-market values with impunity. This trend line of capitalist destructiveness and arrogance seems more consistent with a future techno-feudalism than a new age of a.i. mediated abundance.
If the a.i. bubble doesn't irrevocably crash into the ground, leaving further a.i. progress uncertain, do we really want people like Elon Musk at the "commanding heights" of an a.i. driven economy?
