Cyber-Physical Decentralized Planning for Communizing

* Article: Cyber-physical decentralized planning for communizing. By Pedro HJ Nardelli, Pedro E Gória Silva, et al. Competition & Change. Special Issue: Rethinking Economic Planning

URL = https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/10245294231213141

Abstract

1.

"This paper proposes a decentralized planning constructed as a cyber-physical system to jointly manage supply and demand, including aspects related to production and circulation, without the mediation of money. Our aim is to provide a concrete technical solution for a future society based on communizing and commons-based resource allocation as an attempt to move in-against-and-beyond the value-form, which is the social “force-field” that characterizes the capitalist mode of production.

This contribution is divided into three articulated parts:

(i) a review of the elementary forms that jointly determine the capitalist social organization,

(ii) a defense of the proposition that the money-form must be destroyed to enable a new mode of production based on communizing, and

(iii) a proposal of a cyber-physical implementation of a jointly decentralized production planning and resource allocation over large infrastructures that enable a multilevel polycentric governance as a variation of the Interactive Economic Planning and Optimized Selections (I-EPOS) algorithm when coordination is needed."

2.

"This article defends the acts of communizing as the basis of a new mode of production, where social coordination is enabled by some of the recent advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs), in many ways aligned with (Groos, 2021; Bernes, 2020; Sutterlütti and Meretz, 2023). Our focus will be on a specific decentralized planning method called Interactive Economic Planning and Optimized Selections (I-EPOS) developed by Pournaras et al. (2018); Pournaras (2020). ...

The rest of this paper is organized as follows.

• We first present the elementary social forms of capitalism as a purified scientific (ideal) object defined by a totalizing social force-field determined by the value-form, from where intrinsic vulnerabilities shall be found.

• Then, we present a new conceptualization of cyber-physical systems introduced by Nardelli (2022) that is helpful to both reject solutions that resemble capitalist forms and support the communizing-based political economy.

• As a step further, we present our vision of a fully demonetized future based on decentralized planning following polycentric governance for communizing, similar to the decentralized solution for energy systems first presented by Giotitsas et al. (2022); Nardelli et al. (2021)."

Excerpt

Value-form as a social force-field

"Since his own time, Karl Marx’s writings have been a fertile ground for heated debates, both between persons or groups identified as Marxist against non-Marxist and among Marxists themselves. In this section, we follow the approach taken by scholars like Elbe (2013), who classify different Marxisms. Until the seventies, there were two principal readings: Orthodox Marxism, supported by the Soviet Union, and Western Marxism, associated with young Marx. The first one is usually associated with “economicism” and the second with “humanism.” Although these strains are still relevant within different groups both in academic circles and communist parties, a New Reading of Marx dealing with rigid patterns of social relation, or simply social forms, emerged in Germany motivated by then-forgotten Soviet writers from 1920s; they are Evgeny Pashukanis and Isaak Rubin, both victims of the purges during the late 1930s. Roughly speaking, the key to understanding Capital is the recurrent (almost naturalized) forms of social relations like the market exchange of equivalents mediated by money and wage labor. The Value-form Theory, associated with the first chapters of Capital, becomes the cornerstone of this approach, which is pedagogically exposed by Heinrich (2021).

A specific line of research affiliated with this reinterpretation of Marx is the State derivation debate, where the State and the Legal Subject are also derived from the commodity-form. The logical formulation follows a chain where the elementary form of wealth in the capitalist mode of production—the commodity—is the basis to derive other necessary forms that constitute the capitalist mode of production as such. It is worth highlighting that the capitalist mode of production, as indicated here, is a purified scientific object, which is constituted historically, and, thus, is not eternal. The specific difference between capitalism, on the one side, and the other past and possibly future ways to organize societies and social practices, on the other side, can be then explicitly characterized through social forms.

Holloway (2022) schematically presents the derivation of the capitalist social forms (or the form-determination chain), constituting then the links in the chain of destruction [that] are difficult to break. The derivation sequence, as presented in Chapter 19, goes as follows: (a) if commodity, then value; (b) if commodity-value, then labor; (c) if commodity–value–labour, then money; (d) if commodity–value–labour–money, then identity; (e) if money, then capital and exploitation; (f) if capital, then state; and finally (f) if commodity–value–labour–money–identity–capital–state, then destruction of nature–pandemics–global warming–extinction. In this sense, the logical core of capitalist sociality is constituted with money being the universal social binding, or as the title of Chapter 28 puts Money rules. Money is the serial killer destroying us all.

Holloway’s argument is constructed based on the hope-against the capitalist forms that restrain the overflowing of social practices (or doing, or concrete-labor, or productive human activity), which are always more than the logically imposed constraints byproduct of the social form. By focusing on the immanent antagonisms and on the fact, shown in detail by Paraná (2018), that capital is mostly fictitious (credit money), with a huge gap of what can be actually materially produced, hope can emerge. In summary, the negative of capitalist forms, especially the demonetization of the social relations, is the hope-against capitalism, the concrete utopia against wishful thinking; the struggle is then to be located at social forms and their immanent overflowing, not in the logical links that indicate the chain of destruction."

Cyber-physical system design for the distributed energy resource allocation

"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. Although those works are not boldly claiming for a new mode of production based on communizing, they provide a clear illustration of the ambivalence of ICTs to govern large-scale shared infrastructures like this electrified energy system as a commons that will be presented in more detail later. Note that the term “ambivalence” here is borrowed from Feenberg (1990) who argues that technologies, despite being produced in favor of capitalist existing relations, also offer a place for struggle. Following our argument, some ICTs could be appropriated as a tool in-against-and-beyond the value-form, and this is so because it is ambivalent."

The I-EPOS as a General-Purpose Decentralized Collective Learning Algorithm

Pedro HJ Nardelli, Pedro E Gória Silva, et al. :

"The I-EPOS algorithm and how it is capable of allocate resources in the previously described vision of the communist mode of production, capable of enabling a polycentric commons-based governance system.. I-EPOS was proposed by Pournaras et al. (2018) as a general-purpose decentralized collective learning algorithm. In I-EPOS, distributed elements called agents in a network self-determine a set of viable options for themselves, for example, resource consumption and production schedules. Each of these options, or “plans,” has an associated “local” numerical quantification referred to as cost following the literature in the field that represents the agent’s preference for that plan. Moreover, these plans collectively have a system-wide impact that is modeled in terms of a “global cost.” Note that cost here is a mathematical function that might represent money (as monetary expenses or profits), but they can also represent other parameters of interest as well, for example, fairness, environmental impacts, emissions, and deviation from desired states. These latter ones are what interest us most. The I-EPOS algorithm is capable of optimizing the global cost alone, implying full cooperation and thereby selflessness; the local costs alone, implying no coordination and thereby selfishness; or their mixture, implying a tradeoff between selflessness and selfishness.

A rigorous mathematical analysis of I-EPOS can be found in articles by Pournaras et al. (2018); Pournaras (2020); here, we only give a brief non-technical explanation. Consider a network of distributed agents; all the agents have a finite set of feasible plans that represent the resource allocation. For example, consider a network of machines in a modern manufacturing industry that can communicate with each other via an Internet of Things network. These machines have to perform certain processes to manufacture a product, and they can do this independently or by coordinating with each other. For such a machine, a plan could be “2.145: 1.339,2.132,1.534,3.685,1.876,4.81,” where 2.145 represents the local cost, that is, the energy consumed by the machine over a 6-h process schedule (given by the energy consumed per hour, kWh). The machine proposes several such plans, each with different preferences (or costs). Every such machine, or agent, is connected to each other in the network, and all of them have their own plans corresponding to their individual schedules and energy consumption. I-EPOS determines an aggregated response by summing up (element-wise) the selected plans and their costs. Thus, the selected plans of all the agents form a global response vector with an associated global cost. The overall objective is to cooperatively select plans that minimize the global cost. Note that this kind of cooperation is particularly useful when the agents’ choices depend on each other. Moreover, in I-EPOS, agents’ and system’s preferences, that is, local and global costs, can be balanced.

I-EPOS has been shown to work well in scenarios involving collective sharing and usage of resources. For example, consider the case of bike sharing that was studied by Pournaras (2020). Here, users visit a nearby bike station to pick up a bike and then deposit the bike in a station close to their destination. For bike sharing scheme to work well, it should always be possible for the users to pick up a bike in a station and return to another, without the station exceeding the capacity of parked bikes, or having stations without bikes when users need them. By using I-EPOS, Pournaras (2020) showed that I-EPOS can reduce the number of manual bike relocations that are materially needed to avoid the problems mentioned above. In addition, the I-EPOS collective learning algorithm has been shown to obtain near-optimal solutions to other scheduling and resource allocation problems such as load balancing in energy demand-response as in the work by Pournaras et al. (2018), uncertainty-based grid planning and operations by Mashlakov et al. (2021), and tasks involving drone swarms by Qin et al. (2022)."

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/10245294231213141)