Communizing

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)