Data: Mércores, 6 de marzo de 2024
Hora: 11:00 h
Lugar: Online
Enlace para retransmisión online aquí
Resumo do relatorio (asbstract)
Postcapitalist Planning and Urban Revolution
Yousaf Nishat-Botero (University of London) & Matthew Thompson (University College London)
Planning, Space, Desire
The idea of economic planning has reappeared as an object of interest for critical research on the co-articulation of anti- and post-capitalist alternatives in, against, and beyond capitalism. Missing from much of this renewed debate are several critical issues, including questions of urban space, libidinal economy, and actually existing experiments as they unfold through everyday life, set against more speculative modelling or theorizing. Through what kind of spaces, then, might postcapitalist planning emerge? How will the process of wresting collective control over the relations of production and reproduction, and over our metabolic exchange with (the rest of) nature, unfold through struggle? What role do the vicissitudes of desire and drive play in binding subjects to capitalist forms of social metabolic re/production?
In seeking answers to such questions, we review the literature on democratic economic planning and make the case for a renewed engagement with issues of space and the urban through neo-Lefebvrean theory. We argue that, to date, the economic planning literature has tended to focus on overcoming abstract labour time rather than abstract space – an oversight that prevents us from fully apprehending the urban form through which capitalism produces and reproduces its conditions of possibility and carries the seeds of its own destruction and potential supersession.
We start from the idea that democratic economic planning is the process of collectively governing and coordinating the plans and counterplans of a heterogenous mosaic of alternatives, embedded within broader agendas of commonly determined ends – that is, a spatialized process of collectively planned social metabolic re/production unfolding through the interlinked alternatives of the oikos, the household in an expansive sense. Engaging with recent critical theorizing on questions of planetary urbanization, the logistical state, and the origins of the town-country(-wilderness) relation, we argue that postcapitalist forms of planning will arrive, if at all, through an urban revolution, through struggles over the urban everyday. We suggest that future investigations into the possibilities for a democratic economic planning beyond capitalism should attend to the libidinally-charged and materially-grounded dimensions of actually existing struggles over the urban – understood as the mediator of capitalist relations – and look for inspiration to historical and contemporary examples of municipalist praxis aiming to reinvent the commune.