Category: Books
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New book provides an anarchist critique of cybersocialist theories and visions
Academics Rhiannon Firth of the University College London and John Preston of the University of Essex have published a new book Utopia in the Factory: Prefigurative Knowledge Against Cybernetics that critiques the theories and visions of techno-optimistic socialists that are based on cybernetics, automation, artificial intelligence and Industry 4.0 for being unable to include human…
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New Book Explains how to Transition to a World of Radical Abundance
Drawing on their work building public-common partnerships through the action research organisation Abundance Kai Heron, Keir Milburn, and Bertie Russell have written the exciting new book Radical Abundance: How to Win a Green Democratic Future.
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New book on workers’ self-management and worker-recuperated enterprises has been published
Marxist sociologists Dario Azzellini and Marcelo Vieta have just published a book Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work: When Workers Take Over with Routledge. After examining theories of workers’ self-management, the rest of the book analyses a contemporary example of this phenomenon in the form of worker-recuperated enterprises in Latin America, Europe and the rest…
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French wide-audience book on ecological planning
Mathilde Viennot, an economist working at the Haut-Commissariat à la stratégie et au plan and co-founder of a think tank called the Institut Avant-Garde, just published a book entitled La planificaton écologique (Ecological planning). The book is published in the famous collection Repères of the La Découverte composed of short and accessible introductory books on…
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A new Handbook on Degrowth mentions economic planning
Anitra Nelson, activist-scholar affiliated with the Informal Urbanism Research Hub (InfUr-) at University of Melbourne, Australia, recently edited the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth. This collective work comprises 35 chapters, covering both theoretical issues and case studies. Even if the question of planning is not the central issue of this handbook, it is mentioned in several…
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Two chapters on democratic economic planning by Martín Arboleda newly translated
Two chapters of the book Gobernar la utopía. Sobre planificación y el poder popular by Martín Arboleda, associate professor of the School of Sociology and Director of the Social Transformations Laboratory at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, have recently been translated. Alexandra Alván and Rodrigo Ferradas have posted on the website Critical Theory Under Pressure:…
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Tony Smith’s new Book “A Socialism for the Twenty-First Century” published
Marxist theorist Tony Smith just published the book A Socialism for the Twenty-First Century Towards the ‘Full and Free Development of Every Individual’, at Brill. After outlining a Marxist critique of capitalism, the rest of the book outlines a proposal for a 21st century republican socialism, with it extensively discussing its political institutions as well…
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Tim Platenkamp proposes a new model of democratic economic planning
Tim Plantenkamp, a trade unionist, just published a book The Constitution of Socialism: A World without Capital, at Brill. The book is divided into two main sections: Diagnosis and Remedy. In the first, Plantenkamp reviews theoretical models and practical experiments of socialism. In the second, he proposes how a Socialist Republic could function. For the…
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A new book on “The Future of Revolution” includes some elements on economic planning
Jasper Bernes, a professor in the English Department at UCLA, just published a book entitled The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising at Verso. The book aims to explore how a communist society can be created through a social revolution in the 21st century. As part of…
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A book on socialist economic systems now available in paperback
The book “Socialist Economic Systems” by Steven Rosefielde is now available in paperback from Routledge. The book offers very short and readable comments on 22 socialist economic systems. Here’s an excerpt of the back cover: The book opens by surveying pre-industrial utopias from Plato to Thomas More, and libertarian communal designs for superior living. It plumbs all aspects…
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New PhD Thesis on Democratic Public Ownership
The PhD thesis of Thomas Matthew Hanna titled “Advancing the Concept of Democratic Public Ownership” has been published on the website of the University of Glasgow. Here’s the abstract of the thesis (highlighting done for this post): “This thesis examines and refines the concept of Democratic Public Ownership, which has emerged in both theory and…
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David Kotz’ new book presents his vision of democratic economic planning
David Kotz, an emeritus professor from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, just published a book entitled Socialism for Today: Escaping the Cruelties of Capitalism. The book, published by Wiley, has a full chapter on what socialism should be like. According to an interview offered by the author: My view closely follows the model of socialism in…