Salong Marx

The worsening climate situation reveals the inability of the market system and of economic policy to deal with what conventional economics calls ”externalities”. We are faced with hard material constraints that any viable alternative to capitalism must be able to deal with. For example, we must produce a diverse basket of basic consumption goods, a certain number of hospital beds, and so on, while maintaining 10 gigaton per year net carbon dioxide sequestration. This challenge bears many similarities to problems considered in the study of cybernetics. One qualitative change from the socialist calculation debate of the 1920’s is the invention of the digital computer and the internet. The rising computer-literacy in the population enables democratic computerized planning that can coordinate individual workplaces on a large scale. Our aim with this talk is twofold: on the one hand, to spark renewed interest around the potentials and challenges of cybernetic planning, and on the other hand, initiate development