View source for Jasper Bernes Critique of Planning-Oriented Cybernetic Socialism

=Discussion=

Anitra Nelson:

"This is where works of certain other critical social theorists intervene. Political economist Gareth Dale (Fleckenstein and Dale, 2023) recovers Marx's thought from Promethean readings as ‘ultimately, a belief in the ability of the human species to collectively define and keep redefining its own “species being”, including its relationship to the environment’. 

'''Critical theorist Jasper Bernes criticises planning-oriented cybernetic socialism, Soviet-style planning, and socialist democratic imaginaries of planning as alienating and inefficient. In many such models a fetishised plan ‘chosen by no one, stands over and against everyone, a fateful force determining their life-chances’''' (Bernes, 2020: 66). In contrast ‘true collectivity’ where people ‘banding together, collectively transform the world and themselves in order to meet common objectives’ is closer to the spirit of socialism (Bernes, 2020: 66).

Bernes points out that Marx and Engels envisaged decentralisation as ruralisation, a union of the urban and rural, with ‘the breaking up of big cities, the localisation and dispersal of food production, so that it was close to where people actually lived, and the dispersal of industry throughout the countryside, so that its polluting effects were mitigated … something that Marx and Engels referred to continuously from 1848 on, taken up by many of the socialists they influenced’ (Bernes, 2018: 340). Here direct control and local access enhance autonomy and, thus, liberation (Bernes, 2018: 362). Of course, broader scales of organisation are required for production and distribution of, say, water (Bernes, 2018: 362) with appropriate technology such as tractors and trucks operating alongside more traditional and permaculture techniques (Bernes, 2018: 363). Such an approach accords with the convivial technology, food self-provisioning and collective sufficiency approaches of degrowth activists (Nelson and Liegey, 2022) and anarchist permaculture hybrids pointing towards postcapitalist gift economies (Leahy, 2011, 2021: 128–169)."

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19427786241237434)


=More information=

Bernes J (2018) The belly of the revolution: agriculture, energy, and the future of communism. In: Bellamy BR, Diamanti J (eds) Materialism and the Critique of Energy. Chicago: M-C-M Publishing, 331–375.

Bernes J (2020) Planning and anarchy. South Atlantic Quarterly 119(1): 53–73.

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