Workshop: The Algorithmic Road to Socialism?
(June 3, 2022 - 2:00 pm - 7:00 pm)
In July 2021, readers of the Financial Times may have been surprised to read an op-ed calling for central planning to meet the challenges of global warming. While the article’s proposals were hardly as radical as recent calls for a renewed “war communism,” it is remarkable enough that a liberal newspaper was considering economic planning in the first place.
Elsewhere, however, the debate over the affordances of economic planning has been going on for a while, often by way of a return to the so-called “socialist calculation debate” that begun in the 1920s. While it is often acknowledged that Friedrich Hayek won the debate with his 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” more recent developments in information and communication technologies suggested to some observers that increased computing power could render possible an effective coordination of production and distribution, after all.
In recent years, a number of contributions have served to revive the calculation debate and reflected on the possibilities of a “digital socialism,” the relationship between information technology and socialist construction as well as “Planning and Anarchy,” and the feasibility of a “Society After Money.”
The English Department at Christian-Albrechts-Universität invites you to a workshop in which contributors to the “Socialist Calculation Debate 2.0” (Jan Groos) and other scholars will present and discuss their research on (digital) technologies and postcapitalist imaginaries.
The workshop will take place in-person only, but the presentations will be recorded and made accessible at a later date.