socialism

The reintroduction of the question of democratic planning into contemporary Marxist debates has rested on two conjunctural factors. First, the multiple crises defining our current moment make a socialist transition, if not an inevitability, then certainly a necessity if we are to counter the tendential death drives of contemporary capitalism. Second, the qualitative leap in the productive forces – especially data-driven computational technologies – are seen, by some, as addressing the technical and logistical questions raised by prior iterations of the calculation debate: primarily the complexity of real-time, global-scale resource allocation and incentive mechanisms. These technologies, particularly data-driven tools and adaptive machine learning are said to hold potential – if oriented towards socialist aims – to manage the scale and complexity of resource allocation effectively.

This article explores how Britain's Black Power movement challenged the political outlook of the anti-fascist left in the 1960s-70s. While the established left interpreted the National Front (NF) as an aberrant threat to Britain's social democracy, Black political groups foregrounded the systemic racial violence of the British state. By addressing intensifying racial oppression during a critical early phase in the transition to neoliberalism, they prefigured Stuart Hall's analysis of 'authoritarian populism'. The British Black Power movement especially criticised the high-profile Ant-Nazi League (ANL) for its singular focus on the NF, which was framed as a revived Hitlerite peril. For British Black radicals, the larger strategic problem was the populist racism, inflected by imperial nostalgia, which propelled Thatcher's New Right to power. Instead of narrow Nazi analogies, they related the re-emergence of white nationalism to British social democracy's racist treatment of Black immigrants, as well as its neo-colonial role abroad.