Aaron Benanav on Associational Socialism and Democratic Planning

A

podcast

URL

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e10-aaron-benanav-on-associational-socialism-and-democratic-planning/

Series

Future Histories

Featuring

Aaron Benanav

A world without scarcity is possible for everybody! Aaron Benanav shares his idea of how we could achieve this associational utopia, today.

post-scarcity.

References How to Make a Pencil.

~00:08:59 Problems with e.g. market socialism and the inability to deal with capital strike.

~00:14:28 Critique of universal basic income. Mentions the positives of it - benefits should be universal, noone should live in poverty, etc. I think the gist of the critique being that UBI deals with distribution only, it doesn't touch the engine of growth, the organisation of production. It is a transformation of welfare that won't change things dramatically.

~00:27:34 Static vs dynamic planning.

~00:32:47 On incorporating non-financial / economic concerns in to planning. When you do, it becomes a political question that requires debate and consensus, not one that is just treated as having some technical optimum.

~00:56:30 Democratic planning is an alternative to the polar opposites of markets and central planning. Also - it's only on the big things, on the world changing decisions that we have to negotiate. This is similar to Half-Earth Socialism I think.

~00:59:50 Associational socialism.

~01:19:50 A bit of a mention of universal basic services.

~01:32:58 Abolition of money as a general equivalent. A different set of quantitative indicators.

~01:34:49 Mechanism design.