Communizing
= Key Thesis: "There will not be a mixed or an intermediate mode of production between capitalism and communism." [1]
Description
The Friends of 4 Million Young Workers:
"There will not be a mixed or an intermediate mode of production between capitalism and communism. The period of transition and, before that, the period of rupture, are characterized by the contradiction between absolutely communist methods on the one side and, on the other, a reality that is still completely imbued with mercantile ways. It is in this phase that a society of abundance and freedom must confront the problems of poverty and power.
…
Communization does not mean, therefore, only the demonetization, but also the rapid transformation of production."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231213141)
Discussion
Pedro Nardelli:
"A necessary path for the communist mode of production is communizing/communization in-against-and-beyond the value-form field. Once again, Bernes (2018) indicates key issues for this, especially in how to reorganize society and agriculture for food production, which is necessary for any future mode of production, considering that key social relations and production should be stable enough without market and other monetary-like mediations, as well as without any other type of direct or indirect pattern of power. Sutterlütti and Meretz (2023) also present a similar approach in their critique of capitalism and different visions of socialism/communism, and thus, supporting commonism as a new mode of production based on the commons.
Our proposition is to enable A World Without Money: Communism, as beautifully posed by the series of pamphlets with the same title written in the early seventies in France by The Friends of 4 Million Young Workers (2020). In particular, our approach is an attempt to think about the social function of the recently advanced ICTs in our struggles in-against-and-beyond the capitalist mode of production to enable social relations of communization. The idea is “replacing” capitalist social forms by liberating the richness of social production to fulfill human needs, opening the realm of freedom to all. As it should be clear at this point, our aim is to think of a way to jointly eliminate money and offer an immanent alternative to enable a non-exploitative social form without universal mediators or third-parties (like commodity, money, State, and Law).
Robert Kurz, in a short text also called A world without money∗ (written in 2004) poses the main challenge in the struggle against money:
- The utopian thought always toyed with the idea of abolishing money. In general, however, such reasoning fell short of its object because money is just the surface phenomenon of a determinate social form. Money, according to Marx, is the appearance of a social essence, that is “abstract labour”, and of value (the valorisation of value). Any attempt only to do away with the superficial phenomenon without touching the fundamental deep structure will cause havoc rather than liberation. If in a commodity producing society money is divested of its co-ordinating capacity, let alone money is abolished as such, its regulative function has to be replaced by a totalitarian bureaucracy.
While his concern is correct, we aim at the money-form as the heartless heart of capitalism, following (Holloway, 2022) and the many indications by The Friends of 4 Million Young Workers (2020). In this sense, the cyber-physical system for communizing must consider the already cited concerns by Bernes (2020); we need to build a way to enable a type of planned anarchy, or simply planarchy, that would enable to produce and reproduce this new, communist (or commonist), society in a relatively stable manner.
Our proposed approach to tackle this aspect is to offer a general guiding framework—in contrast to universal solutions—that would offer socio-technical tools to design and govern actual deployments, capturing the relevant attributes of both physical processes and social impact. This general guiding framework would be especially worthwhile for situations and infrastructures that require coordination and potentially conflicting resource allocation. It is important to indicate that our approach tries to focus on the specific of each different case, avoiding having universal mediations, being them market-based incentives (or any kind of abstract nudging or reward scheme) or central planning with compulsory execution (including the obligation to perform labor in order to access the produced goods). In summary: unlock the access, create new commons, and let’s communize.
In many senses, this differs from the socialist planning literature, which is well summarized by Groos (2021). Our approach for the cyber-physical system for communizing is closer to Ostrom’s commons than types of central planning as in, for instance, (Cockshott and Cottrell, 1993) or (Saros, 2014), because we explicitly attempt to construct a pattern of social relations where the political and economical instances are not particularized. This process of particularization (or nucleation) is a cornerstone of the State derivation debate that defends the position that a clear-cut distinction of (i) the political instances that define rules for society around the State power and (ii) the economical instances that refer to the access and allocation of resources and produced goods are phenomena of the capitalist mode of production, where those social forms are derived from the commodity-form. As explained by Holloway (2022), the particularization of those relatively autonomous instances is a necessary condition for the existence of the value-form as such. At the same time, we are not proposing a regress to other exploitative relations from the past based on direct power or metaphysical hierarchies. An interesting comparison is presented by Sorg (2022) when showing two tables that describe the foreground and background transformation required to move away from capitalism social forms while establishing new communising forms."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231213141)
What Communizing means in practice
Pedro Nardelli:
"Consider different production units that are self-organized whose participation is voluntary. Member of this type of productive club can determine the activities of each member based on their own set of abilities and availability. Different units directly indicate their possible plans for production forecasts, as well as what is needed for them to be accomplished. Production forecasts are defined as a function of predicted demand (to be described later) and level of storage. Production is to be planned in a distributed manner, but higher level coordination and adaptability are necessary.
Computationally speaking, this type of allocation problem is combinatorial at the higher levels, while the generation of feasible plans for the smaller units might be of different types. Therefore, no specific optimization method is to be excluded beforehand, including the ones employed for centralized planning, as in (Cockshott and Cottrell, 1993). As a matter of fact, the type of linear programming defended in the New Socialism can be certainly useful for different type of in-kind exchanges; however, the definition of the problem and the role of the computational tools, in our understanding, needs to be clarified. This is especially important for two reasons: (i) in communist society, productive activity is not compulsory to access the social wealth and (ii) the actual demand is expected to be different from the capitalist one where “economic growth” is mandatory for social reproduction. In our vision, the communist mode of production would lead to a much lower level of energy and raw material consumption while the productive activities would be more direct and pleasurable.
Let us now turn our attention to the mode of producing and distributing dominated by communizing practices. At a personal level, one can have abilities to offer, which might be prioritized. Let’s consider a period of one week. For example, a person called Socrates may be willing to teach philosophy and discuss about life for nine hours every day. His colleague called Plato is also willing to teach philosophy and would be available five hours per day to do it; but he also likes sports and would like to teach wrestling for four hours per day. Other member of this society only called Hefasto likes to build and to do handwork, and he is willing to do any kind of such an activity for four hours per day; but he is also willing to learn philosophy. A woman called Athena is willing to offer at most three hours per day of her activities to work with the ICT system that is employed to match the in-kind offers and demands, and that also produces suggested schedules for activities. Other colleagues called Dionisio and Harmonia are not willing to perform any productive activity; but they nevertheless access whatever society has to offer. Apolo and Aphrodite want only to do cross-fit exercises like carrying stones, and can do it for six hours per day, while they request special meals for muscle building. And this could go on and on. Those persons interested in doing similar things usually self-organize themselves to perform their activities and offer them to all (i.e., to social use). Tools, from books to complex machines, are used in common but their utilization is managed like libraries. Requests of use are taken place, as well as their maintenance is handled by persons interested in doing so. It is also possible that some activities like cleaning or traveling to support agricultural activities are needed and there will be a call of volunteers. It is also possible that the individually preferable plans are unfeasible but the planning procedure needs to do both: (i) offer a socially acceptable solution and that are also good for the individuals and (ii) use the knowledge of the limitations to flag the social need so that the necessary productive activity could be “open” for persons to add in their plans. For instance, Socrates will teach philosophy for the referred week with the maximum time proposed by him, while Hefasto will participate in his class. Plato will not teach philosophy but will teach wrestling to Apolo and Aphrodite for two hours every second day. All have access to basic needs like food and shelter, as well as to available spaces designated to free and cultural activities.
This microscopic thought experiment could go on, also pointing aspects related to more complex activities or tasks that are highly undesirable. Nevertheless, they need to be accomplished and it is expected that volunteers would emerge because of the communizing constitution of the mode of production, and its reproduction. Although those points are fundamental to solve in reality, our aim here is simply to provide an intuitive vision of how “supply” and “demand” in general could be handled without the value form and other surrogates like vouchers of working time. One could of course point to pitfalls of this vision, also judging it as unfeasible, at least considering the modern way of living and our constitution as atomized subjects. We also acknowledge that our proposal offers a contrast to many strands of the planning literature, because we are not focused here in the minute details in the operation but rather in the structuring form that organizes the mode of production. In these senses, our proposal might appear utopian or too abstract, but so is the capitalist mode of production if we consider it in the vision of a utopian liberal writing in the seventeen century. In summary, if the communism is to emerge and take place, similar dynamics that we just presented shall probably need to be solved in practice, and thus, the communist mode of production can be identified as such, i.e., it can be actually produced and reproduced."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231213141)
Case Study: Communizing Distributed Energy
Pedro Nardelli:
"We revisit the technical specification described by Nardelli et al. (2021) that offers a clear design for a decommoditization of an electrified energy system through its communization. This means that energy production is not subordinated to monetization, and access to energy is open to all. In our view, this would be an intentional path-breaking in the commodification tendency taken in electricity markets, as studied by Apajalahti and Kungl (2022).
The communization of the electrified energy system is to be deployed in such a way that it can at the same time
(i) weaken the self-reinforcing mechanisms that sustain markets and for-profit energy generation-transmission-distribution and
(ii) enable other stronger self-reinforcing mechanisms that are necessarily capable of supplying the energy demand.
It is possible to foresee different paths toward this being implemented, but the communizing structure desired would benefit from organizing the physical grid as networked microgrids. For non-industrial demand, many actions could be taken: retrofit targeting energy conservation in buildings, flexible demand management when needed, use of heat pumps, increase of small-scale renewable sources at the distribution side (closer to the end-user), and integration of storage units. All these should lead to lower overall energy demand.
However, for technical reasons, the supply and demand of electricity in the grid must match closely to real-time. To match supply by the intermittent (but in many ways predictable) renewable sources and demand by controlling storage units, heat pumps, and other flexible loads like saunas and dishwashers, a cyber-physical packetized energy management is proposed by De Castro Tomé et al. (2020); Nardelli et al. (2019) and further extended in (Nardelli et al., 2021), from where the technical details can be found. Although these solutions could, in principle, be integrated into the existing market structure (at least many parts of Europe, as illustrated by the idea of energy communities as reviewed by Gjorgievski et al. (2021) or peer-to-peer sharing reported by Klein et al. (2020)), the proposed idea explicitly aims at treating energy as a commons, or in the terms used here communizing energy. The proposed governance approach is mainly highlighted by Giotitsas et al. (2022), as well as by Giotitsas et al. (2015, 2020). The key idea is that open access to energy based on needs without payments and organize the operation of the cyber-physical energy system based towards managing scarcity moments via a rule-based scheme open for community deliberation. Therefore, the planning is decentralized in many senses: community deliberation of operational constraints of how to handle scarcity of supply, multi-agent BitTorrent-type of energy multiplexing through virtual packetization, and the possibility of coordination of individual, regional and global elements towards a shared goal. The iterative stages of bottom-up and top-down of the multi-agent approach of I-EPOS offers one scalable possibility to perform decentralized planning to enable a widespread of communization in-against-and-beyond the value-form.
We present a case that illustrates this approach. In an electricity grid network, for example, every household has its own preferences for the consumption schedules but these preferences have a collective impact on the performance on the grid as a connected network where supply and demand must match in very low time scales for operational reasons. This affects, for example, the electricity that can be shared, the peak load, and the transmission line capacity. I-EPOS can be used to balance those local (individual, agent’s) usage preferences and the overall grid (global) quality requirements by optimizing the tradeoff between the global cost and the local cost. I-EPOS also performs this optimization in an unsupervised and decentralized manner by collectively learning and combining the agents’ plans, while maintaining privacy and autonomy (agents’ schedules do not need to be shared).
In specific terms, let us consider that every household has: (i) solar generation capabilities, (ii) battery as a storage unit, (iii) electric bike with small battery, (iv) electrified thermal loads like heat pumps, heaters, fridges, and freezers, as well as sauna, (v) appliances that can operate flexibly to accomplish their functions like washing dishes and clothes, and (vi) baseload that does not offer flexibility. Following Nardelli et al. (2021), each household can be virtualized as part of a software-defined energy network that determines a cyber-physical system to operate the energy system as a virtual microgrid based on the operational needs of matching energy supply and demand, as well as managing the batteries. This problem can be posed as an inventory management problem not mediated by money. Every agent defines their own priority plans for usage considering the appliances types (iii)-(v); (vi) is given, but predictable. The distributed generation by solar and the battery are managed as a virtual power plant, where the distributed generation and storage units are virtually aggregated to operate the system. We could call every household as an Energy Client in the software-defined energy network, while the I-EPOS would be the algorithm that runs in the Energy Server; batteries and thermal loads are the Energy Buffers. I-EPOS goal is to build up schedules of use based on explicit request and politically-determined prioritization (e.g., what is more important as a load, an electric bike or a heater or a sauna) that are both acceptable by the agents self-determination and operational for the physical grid. This sort of solution already exists in some places, being compatible with the strict electricity market regulations but, most usually, money mediation takes place. Our vision is that this approach can displace the market if it could be scaled up, creating a self-reinforcing mechanism based on commons (virtually aggregate common pool of resources), following paths of the energy transition posed by Apajalahti and Kungl (2022).
The main limitation of this case study is that it focuses on residential and small commercial building demand, and thus, it should be adapted to be employed for large industrial facilities, transportation, and logistics. As a matter of fact, the proposed communization of energy can only be thought of considering as part of the communization process of the mode of production as a whole. Here, we are (in spirit, but not in practice) reminded of Horvat (2020) and the self-managed socialist enterprise and association of associations. The Yugoslav self-management, shaped by the material and geopolitical conditions, is not a monolithic body of theory. Going back to (Todorovic 1965), we see that the intention to do away with the value-form immediately (or any time soon) is referred to as “socialist romanticism” and dismissed from consideration. The acceptance of the value-form and associated market mechanisms by Kardelj and others was challenged continuously. Echoing Bavcar et al. (1985) via (Kirn 2010), the paradoxical position of workers taking the structural position of a capitalist in the production is not an abolition of capital in any meaningful way. The bureaucracy form that is shaped in this relation to manage the economy allows for the value form to keep existing, as (Hamza, 2016) notes, between the state and the party. In brief, we do not believe that the Yugoslav self-management had abolished value form in any way, and we are skeptical of the potential to do so in the direction it took; where we declare ourselves related in spirit is merely the insisting on the distributed approach, but through the roads not taken–some of which Todorovic would have listed in the romanticist treatise.
In this sense, we claim that by organizing the existing large-infrastructures in a similar manner following the guidelines presented by Nardelli (2022) and indicated by the “clinical” question presented in Table 1. Scaling and passing the critical thresholds of communes has been an oft-cited issue with commons; at the same time, degrowth advocates have issues with large power production systems “because an energy-intensive society based on increasingly sophisticated technological systems managed by bureaucrats and technocrats will grow less democratic and egalitarian over time” even in the case of “green megastructures like high-speed trains or industrial-scale wind farms” (Kallis, 2017). In this sense, there are also issues related to raw materials like copper, iron, and other metals needed to produce electronic appliances, solar panels, and batteries as necessary components of the power grid material infrastructure that need necessarily to be solved in a sustainable non-exploitative manner, both socially and environmentally. Those points are of utmost importance, but require studies that go beyond our aim in this section, which is to show that communizing energy is operationally feasible and, in our view, a necessary (but not sufficient) step for the emergence of a mode of production based on commons as a social form, against value."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231213141)
Examples
Pedro Nardelli:
- "One example that follows this cyber-physical system design is the distributed energy resource allocation through virtual microgrids, as presented by Nardelli et al. (2021); Giotitsas et al. (2022). The socio-technical proposal in those articles is to communize an electrified energy system, indicating ways to both repair existing hardware and operate the grid considering the necessary balance of supply and demand of electricity (also including storage and flexible loads).
- In more concrete terms, Mashlakov et al. (2021) develop a simulation-based example of how peer-produced energy could be communized and distributed across different users using the I-EPOS algorithm at the decision layer based on the information obtained from physical attributes at the data layer, while evaluating the impacts on the physical layer."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231213141)