>But what I was curious about was not the negative critique of
>capitalism but the positive critique: what is to replace it? What is
>the superior social calculating mechanism for planning production
>and distributing consumption? How to rearrange work so as to greatly
>shrink the realm of necessity and greatly enlarge the realm of
>freedom?
These are the $64,000 questions (in decommodified, nonalienated dollars, of course). My own strategy would be to be embarrassingly gradualist - to remove life, bit by bit, from the compulsions of money: guaranteed minimum incomes, decommodified provision of health and education, free child care, confiscatory taxation at the high end, greater worker control over the workplace, constriction of financial markets, forced opening of corporate books, etc.
>And don't tell me that the way to transcend desire is to abolish it
I'm not the guy who'll say that; though I'm convinced lots of consumption is a doomed attempt to compensate for alienation, I'm not for voluntary poverty and simplification, which is mainly a fantasy of the affluent. I like nice stuff.
But we've been through the desire debate on this list already.
Doug