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)