A new book about control over our ways of life as an alternative to market and planning

A new book by Fabrice Flipo, who teaches at Institut Mines-Télécom, is now available online. The book, written in French, is entitled Changing our Ways of Life (Changer les modes de vie) and published at éditions du croquant.

Here’s a translation of the summary:

The market is to blame for the ecological crisis and the rising inequalities; hence, we need economic planning! But how can we plan for a society that has yet to be invented? After a fairly detailed assessment of both liberalism and the models of socialism that seek to overcome markets, following the example of the Yugoslav experience, the thesis developed in this book inspired by Rudolf Bahro and Otto Neurath is that the challenge is not to plan or socialize the market but rather to control our ways of life and enable human beings to make their own history consciously. This presupposes a move away from “economism” (which reduces the discussion to prices and quantities) to instead prefer a dialectical grasp of the development of collective trajectories and an exploration of the future. To this end, we need to rely on the materialist and collective search for the truth in all its complexity. Also important is the rejection of three great forms of fetishism and power relations: domination, exploitation and alienation. Changing our ways of life involves different actions than those implied by a political change (taking power) or an economic change (allocating resources).

You con learn more about the book and buy it online here: https://editions-croquant.org/hors-collection/1020-changer-les-modes-de-vie.html