With the advent of digitalization, the more techno-optimist among critics of capitalism have articulated new calls for post-work and post-scarcity economics made possible by new advances in information and communication technology. Quite recently, some of this debate shifted for calls for digital-democratic planning to replace market-based allocation. This article will trace the lineages of this shift and present these new calls for digitally enabled and democratic planning. I will then argue that much of the discussion focuses on capitalism’s laws of economic motion, while rendering less visible capitalism’s social, political, and ecological ‘conditions of possibility’. To remedy this shortcoming I will ask how these fit into the recent debate and suggest avenues to extend the discussion of democratic planning in that way. Concretely, I will discuss features of a postcapitalist mode of reproduction that abolishes capital’s subordination of non-waged and waged care work. The following part will focus on both planning’s need to calculate ecological externalities and consequently determine sustainable and egalitarian paths for social and technological development on a world scale. The last section will elaborate on the ‘democratic’ in ‘democratic planning’ in terms of planning’s decision-making, multi-scalar politics, and politics of cultural recognition.
Chapter 4 traces the history of transnational movements and campaigns
against what they termed “odious” and “illegitimate” debt in the Global
South from the 1970s to the 2000s, which constitute a direct reaction to
the debt crises in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of South
and Southeast Asia. The chapter introduces some of the actors, structural
constellations, repertoires, and discourses which have reappeared in the
recent crisis.
Chapter 5 argues that in response to the financial crisis of 2008 mobilization
around debt has spilled over from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa,
and South/-east Asia towards North Africa and the North Atlantic, where
conflicts around debt have increased dramatically since 2006. The chapter
first elaborates the financial, economic, social and political features of
the crisis and then argues that these features crucially shaped the field
of contentious debt politics. I then analyze how this critical juncture was
interpreted by established transnational movement networks and INGOs
in the field of contentious debt politics as threats to debtor countries and
affected citizens, but also as an opportunity to challenge neoliberalism
and hegemonic debt politics in new geographical contexts.
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