…one cannot accept the theory of workers' management...

Where?

Worker cooperatives by country[edit]
Europe[edit]
Worker co-operation is well established in most countries in Europe, with the largest movements being in Italy, Spain and France.
The European Cooperative Statute, which has been in force since 2006, permits worker cooperatives to be created by individuals or corporate bodies in different EU countries. It is a loose framework which devolves much detail to the national legislation of the country in which the European Cooperative Society (ECS) is registered. It permits a minority of shares to be held by 'investor members' which are not employees.
France[edit]
Workers' associations were legalised in 1848 and again in 1864. In 1871, during the Paris Commune, workshops abandoned by their owners and were taken over by their workers. In 1884 a chamber of workers' cooperatives was founded. By 1900 France had nearly 250 workers' cooperatives and 500 by 1910. The movement was to rise and fall throughout the twentieth century, with growth in 1936, after the Second World War, between 1978 and 1982 and since 1995.
In 2004 France had 1700 workers' co-operatives, with 36,000 people working in them. The average size of a co-operative was 21 employees. More than 60% of co-operative employees were also members.[24] French workers' co-operatives today include some large organisations such as Chèque Déjeuner (fr) and Acome (fr). Other cooperatives whose names are generally known include the magazines Alternatives économiques and Les Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace, the driving school ECF CERCA and the toy manufacturer "Moulin Roty".
Italy[edit]
The cooperative movement in Emilia-Romagna, Italy successfully melds two divergent philosophical currents: Socialism and Catholicism.[25] With more than a century of cooperative history, the region includes more than 8,000 cooperatives.
Norway[edit]
The employee-owned IT company Kantega has several times been recognized as one of the 100 Best Workplaces in Europe.
Spain[edit]
One of the world's best known examples of worker cooperation is the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation in the Basque Country.[26]
UK[edit]
In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party's enthusiasm for worker cooperatives was at its highest in the 1970s and 1980s, with Tony Benn being a prominent advocate. A small number of such co-operatives were formed during the 1974 Labour Government as worker takeovers[27] following the bankruptcy of a private firm in a desperate attempt to save the jobs at risk. However the change in ownership structure was usually unable to resist the underlying commercial failure.[8] This was true in particular of the best known, the Meriden motor-cycle cooperative in the West Midlands which took over the assets of the ailing Triumph company, although there were instances of successful employee buy-outs of nationalised industries in the period, notably National Express.[28] Meanwhile, many more worker co-operatives were founded as start-up businesses, and by the late 1980s there were some 2,000 in existence. Since then the number has declined considerably.
Co-operatives are typically registered under either the Companies Act 2006 or the Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies Act 2014 (IPS), though other legal forms are available. A number of model rules have been devised to enable cooperatives to register under both acts; for workers' cooperatives, these rules restrict membership to those who are employed by the workplace. Most workers' co-operatives are incorporated bodies, which limits the liability if the co-operative fails and goes into liquidation.[12]
The largest examples of a British worker cooperatives include, Suma Wholefoods, Bristol-based Essential Trading Co-operative, Brighton-based Infinity Foods Cooperative Ltd and the retail giant John Lewis Partnership (although it only uses the term occasionally).[29]

Yeah nah

Kek. They can operate in state capitalist countries too.

no, but you have to be wary of your 'revolutionary movement' becoming entrenched into the capitalist order and even enforcing it
see: socialist parties and trade unions

And it still wouldn't be socialism.

oxymoron, read Marx

Workers own the means of production in this economic model so it is. But thats not the point. State capitalism doesnt work and led to millions of deaths.

holy shit, can you not even read the dauvé quote I put in the OP?

Dont get triggered. Its about ownership not about planned economy vs market economy.

What are you talking about? You have not read a single word of his.

false dichotomy, a market economy is planned aswell

I haven't, but his workerism seems dumb. FALC is a dumb reddit meme, but automatization is fantastic.

Egoist Centralism when?

Titoist third way now.

No. Capitalism is a mode of production not management. Simply doing away with one set of managers to become the manager isn't socialism. The entire production process has to be altered.

...

The cooperative movement presses for far more than "joint participation" in management. It pushes for the dissolution of the capitalist class, and putting the workers in control of the means of production.

And if the crisis of capitalism is one of capital hitting its external limits, yes, I'd be quite willing to "save capitalism" for in that case, saving capitalism would mean preventing the destruction of the human race., i.e. all the people trapped in capitalism.

What's more, if your theory of socialism is one where there is not workers management, both in the realm of economics and politics, then I want no part in it. A clique of party vanguards will always be the "gravediggers of the revolution" to use Bordiga's own words.

this

I'll give you a TL;DR: Machines are just as much of an expression of capitalism as the rest of society. Technological progress won't save you from capitalism, only working class action will.

Also most people advocating automatization as the be-all and end-all are still trapped in capitalist categories like productivity and the distinction between work and free time. Dauvé actually has a lot to say about this.

Most current pro-coop people dont see it as a single thing that will bring communism but as a way to prepare the masses and make life more bearable.

if you literally just said the framework is either capitalist or state capitalist, it means that workers owning the means of production is not dominant.

Also communization owes a lot to autonomism which developed from workerism. Panzieri, Tronti, Negri etc are really worth a read.

funny thing is, both fascists and neoliberals have used this to describe their policies

I agree with this sentiment, however I think technological progress would move us away from market coordination within a market socialist framework.

Stop.

that's dumb. And you should feel dumb.

alright, I have to admit my ignorance on the subject

care to give me the quick rundown on workerism/autonomism? short essays especially appreciated

...

...

Yes you would get your planned economy inside worker owned cooperatives. Did workers of the soviet union own the means of production? No. The state and its parasitic bureaucrats controlled everything. Workers had no power over means of production and if they didnt obey their new slave masters they would be sent to gulag.

if it's "egoist centralism" then it's pure autism is what it is.

It's not. It's just anarchist-communist cooperation without idealist notions of 'left unity'

Cool but that isn't socialism in and of itself. Also the point of the OP quote is that forms of "worker management", like most radical ideas, can be recuperated and neutered by capital. It's a call to go beyond simple changes in management.
That's not what this is saying at all.

Bordiga wouldn't even work with anarchists and syndicalists against the fascists.

Bordiga isn't the whole of left communism. Not to mention that Bordiga's opposition to Anti-Fascism wasn't because icky anarchists were involved.

Perhaps not, but it's a much better plan for a transition to socialism than I've seen presented.

Companies already do all the things OP has pointed out, and that hasn't in anyway dissipated the radical nature of the cooperative movement. The fact is, the reason people call for a cooperative economy is because they are beginning to realize that profit is an expression of theft, and that if they do not have a say in their workplace AND ownership in it, the instability of capitalism will mean they'd probably be fired in the next crisis. It is more than a simple change in management, it is a structural change on the micro-level that fundamentally changes the position of labor in the economy.

It's always used as the argument by centralist fags for taking power away from the people.

And yet he's memed to death, even by the communization faggots. People are starting to take him seriously, along with his idiotic ideas.

I never said as such. I said he was not even willing to work anarchists and syndicalists against fascism. The liberals have nothing to do with this. Lenin asked him several times to work with groups like the Arditi Del Populo which were militantly fighting against the black shirts, even successfully defending a city from 20,000 fascists with nothing but a couple hundred men. He was so afraid of any leftist group so much as diluting the central power of the party, he was willing to sacrifice significant tactical advantages.

operaismoinenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/surplus-value-and-planning.pdf
operaismoinenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/capitalist-use-machinery.pdf
These two are essential for understanding Panzieri's and subsequent workerists' conception of machinery and planning under capitalism.

Tronti's Workers and Capital is a collection of essays originally released in the Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia, the principle organs of early workerist thought. They should give you a decent overview. Not all of it is available in English unfortunately.
operaismoinenglish.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/workers-and-capital-contents/

For Negri check Labour of Dionysus, Revolution Retreived, Books for Burning and Marx beyond Marx. The first three include many of his early-ish writings but also some more recent autonomist material. They're all available on libgen.
You can find a chronological overview of his writings at antonionegriinenglish.wordpress.com/negri-bibliography-in-english/

Also be sure to check out these
libcom.org/library/italy-1960s-70s-reading-guide
libcom.org/files/Wright S - Storming Heaven - Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism OCR.pdf
I haven't read the last one, but I've heard it's a decent summary of what workerism is about.

Bordiga's strength lies in his economical analyses and critique of productivism. Read Dauvé.
libcom.org/library/the-story-of-our-origins-dauve

Because some communization theory takes from some his ideas.
That wasn't the point of his critique of anti-fascism. He saw it as wasting time to protect bourgeois institutions. It didn't matter if you weren't arm-in-arm with a liberal or a fellow leftist.

So thanks to communization ancom/leftcom ship became canon?

And which ideas would those be?

And yet fascism became the bourgeois institutions you numbskull! They locked up all the socialists and crushed the worker's movement with state force. The fascists need to be fought just as much as the bourgeoisie institutions, for if they win, they will precisely replace them with more bourgeoisie institutions!

The bigger point was that even when faced with such a threat as italian fascism, Bordiga refused to receive the help of militant anarchists and syndicalists. Party vanguardism will always be the doom of the worker's movement if we permit such cancer to persist.

kinda this tbh

I still find myself in agreement with his ultra-left economic theory, but I like the concept of autonomy and decentralization too much
-t council comm

shig wrong flag

Things like anti-parliamentarianism, anti-antifascism, his criticisms of trade unions and workers councils, and his analysis of the SU. There's more but communization has a lot of different perspectives that pick and choose what works for them.
This wasn't some mystical event of transubstantiation. The same bourgeois institutions that so desperately had to be protected from their supposed fascist archnemesis handed their power over to the fascists to prevent the left from gaining any more ground. The problem is that you think it's a choice of democracy or fascism when in reality it's democracy and fascism. The two tendencies are employed by capital when conditions demand it.

could someone explain to me what Bordigist praxis would look like?

Ah so literally nothing but trash, with the exception of perhaps the shit on trade unions.

That's all true, but that's not to say they are the same thing. You're only limiting yourself if you analyze them as the same thing.

And yet they are not the same tendency! Not only is it a difference in ideology, but a difference in laws and logic of state authority.

Regardless, the point is that you have to fight both, I'm not saying you should fight one and not the other, and with all tactics available to us.By your own logic, by allowing fascism to succeed you are allowing bourgeoisie institutions to persist. If you defeat them, then guess what, the liberals don't have anyone to go to for the purpose of preventing the left form gaining ground. .

there's more to left communism than le fat italian man and there is more to le fat italian man than 'fuck narchos'

True, but almost all of Bordiga's other ideas were complete shit.

it's way better than siding with trotskyists that's for damn sure

1936 called
both anarchists and leftcoms realize there is nothing of value in bourgeois democracy

I'd like to know too. Leftcoms keep mentioning how Bordiga was very much involved in the labor movement, yet they also continue the armchair/doing nothing meme

nice strawman faggot.

He wouldn't ally himself with them outright but didn't kill them either in the name of left unity.

No one is saying Stalin is a role model here

But Bordiga's the role model of 21st century communisation.

Wanna go for another round of 20th century whataboutism btw?

?

...

care to explain the Bordigist ideas on how society would function?

yeah but you guys aren't exactly helping in ending that meme

I never claimed they were the same thing. For a guy who complains about strawmen you sure do like stuffing them.
And how exactly do you compartmentalize the defeat of all fascists without the left being seen as a real existential threat to capital before bourgeois society sacrifices itself at the altar of fascism?

That's retarded.
You're retarded.
Capital is tools, it's things. The actions of society are done by the people in it, things don't spontaneously act. The things can influence the behaviour of individuals that hold a certain relation with it, yes, but it's not a force.
You're mixing capital as tools with capitalism as in the economical/political system characterized by market exchange and private property rights.
Tools "perpetuate" themselves simple by virtue of being useful. I don't really understand what you're otherwise trying to say.
Please, define and explain what the fuck you're saying, because to me it sounds like infantile screeching.

neoclassical libshits get out

Referring to the capitalist apparatus as capital is pretty common in leftist theory. The context should tell you he isn't talking about tools or whatever bourgeois economic jargon you're mired in.

Not all mutualists/market socialists want socialized capitalism. Co-ops are a transitionary mechanism. The ultimate goal for most of us is still to dismantle capitalism.

Which texts of his talks about this?

In a communist society work is supposed to be transformed into something fulfilling, instead of being a burden that you are only free from in your free time.

What do you think about the scenario I imagined in the last post at archive.is/s9Yrl where automation does lead sort of "naturally" to a post-capitalist state? The future I imagine would be one where there's still a market, but where no one has to work to survive because of a comfy level of basic income, and also those who do work would mostly own the right to make money from their own creations, there wouldn't be a special class of people who own vast amount of capital and use it to pay others to do create things which the workers don't own.

In the scenario I'm imagining that would lead to this, there would still be a need for political activism to push for a basic income, along with something like a "public option" for manufacturing that would displace the newly-profitless private manufacturing (I wrote a little more about how that might happen in post no. 1570611 near the end of another dead thread at archive.is/4cNLA ). But neither would be strongly opposed to the short-term interests of the capitalists, so these wouldn't be as difficult a goal as a sudden revolution which takes away all capitalists' power in one go. If anyone can think of any big flaws or reasons the scenario could never work out I'd like to hear 'em

Abolish centralized governments, and turn society into a collective of councils and you and I might have a deal.

I 100% agree with this, but I don't quite see how refusal to fight fascism follows from it.

Memes may have fried your brain, because this was never suggested.

During the rise of fascist paramilitary forces, the Italian communists led by Bordiga were the first to strike back, if not simply because they were the first to be targeted. They never refused armed combat. What they refused was the United Front strategy exported by the Comintern during its turn to the right. Instead, the Trade Union Front strategy was adopted to keep the resistance to fascism as proletarian in character as possible, and every fight was not just a fight against fascist Black Shirts but against the cops of bourgeois democracy, too. Communists have always been the only ones to consistently do this, whereas for example not long before the Italian "socialist" party stood fully behind WW1, without mentioning a large portion of the anarchists who supported it on anti-German principles.

archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.176469

also if manufacturing is so easy why not just switch to a planned economy and abolish currency altogether?

"Joint management" isn't the same as "shared ownership".

fucking shitposting flag

It might evolve into a moneyless system long term, maybe the basic income would turn into each person just getting a share of raw materials (the output of automated recycling and mining plants) that that they could then plug into a home 3D printer or take to a local robot manufacturing plant to make any product design they found on the internet. But I was trying to think of how a transitional period between the current system and FALC might work, without the need for a global revolution to overthrow capitalists everywhere. It seems more likely to me that you have a transition to publicly-owned means of production via capitalists moving entirely into generating product designs (and other 'intellectual property') while outsourcing the actual manufacturing to others, as plenty of companies like Apple already do today, and then having something like a "public option" for automated manufacturing which grows to dominate as private manufacturing companies fail due to lack of profits.

seems nice

but I'd like to do away with intellectual property law stifling creativity

But what does that mean? How would we do that? I swear to god, I've read and I've read and I've looked for the answer to this question and nobody wants to give me a straight answer. Theorists are split down the middle between retarded utopianism ('everyone should magically split up into eco-communes' t. Bookchin) and shitty mysticism ('communism is a mystery, you just have to do it' t. Dauve) when they aren't shilling for the dogshit nightmare ML scenario where we hand everything over to the capitalists bureaucrats.

You! Same question as above! Don't tell me to read Dauve, or heaven forbid Tiqqun, I've already read them, it didn't help. We have to abolish the system of global production for exchange and create one of production for use. Right? So how do we do that? I get that it isn't me or you that will do it, it's 'the workers' (even though I am a worker, and come from a long line of workers).

Will there be some sort of system for deciding what resources go where to avoid waste, overproduction, or underproduction? If so, why are we forbidden from figuring out that system now? If not, how will we avoid waste, overproduction, and underproduction? Even if we dissolve the concept of productivity and the division between work and leisure and all the other things Dauve declares capitalist spooks, these will still be concerns, right? Because many geographically distinct people will still want to make things that require bringing disparate resources together.

How would you know? I'm assuming that you, like everybody else I've ever read, has no actual idea how socialism would operate. If that's the case, how can you say you know what would be the best precursor to socialism? We're lost in the forest and come to a fork in the road. Despite having only the vaguest idea of where we are or our destination, you confidently declare that you know one of the paths will get us where we're going. Why on Earth should such a declaration be taken seriously?

I've also never heard a good explanation for how this would actually work. Do you mean in the general sense that 'we would fully appreciate the social value our labour has and thereby experience fulfilment', or do you mean 'we would find a way to make cleaning sewers fun'? Or do you mean both? Or neither?

How the transition to socialism should work, exactly what post-capitalist society looks like, nobody really knows. There are countless variables involved and countless tactics and strategies to choose from, each with it's own distinct strengths and weaknesses dependent on the particular circumstances of any given scenario. Trying to create a version of socialism where you plan every single detail in advance is pointless because any plan you make has to be flexible enough to account for every theoretical problem otherwise it falls apart the minute you come up against an obstacle. Which means that your plan has to be, to some degree, free of the details of this kind of minutiae so that people can "improvise". In other words - it has to be somewhat vague. Hence the focus among leftists on "abolishing the present state of things" rather than trying to create a really specific system where everything happens in a predetermined fashion. Which is not to say we shouldn't think about these things occasionally, I've put a good deal of thought into tackling some specific problems scenarios that could occur under Mutualism for example. Most of us in the Left can and do partake in such speculation. But it's just more practical, as a general rule to use "broad strokes" for these discussions.

But if you absolutely insist that common leftist theories are specific enough about the precise details of post-capitalist society I would recommend looking into PARECON which is an attempt to do pretty much what you're asking for. But I suspect the labyrinthine complexity of PARECON will be tough to digest.

For what it's worth I think Mutualism is the most flexible system, and I have some knowledge of Mutualist theory so if you have any specific questions about it - I'll try to answer them.

I'd be inclined to do away with the idea of intellectual property in the long run too, like I said I'm just trying to imagine how a plausible transition might go, "plausible" because there's no specific step that capitalists would resist with all their might. They're more likely to go along with government-run manufacturing if they can't actually make money from manufacturing their products but still can make money from owning the designs to those products.

But then once that's happened, if there's also a basic income that allows a reasonably good living standard (likely since full automation would both cause a lot of jobs to be lost and cause goods to become much cheaper), the capitalist position would become much more unstable. Workers who make intellectual property usually don't need expensive means of production to do their work, the main reason someone like a software designer would take a salaried job rather than work on a creator-owned project is just that the project may take a while before the workers have something sellable, and in the meantime they need a source of income to live. But if they had a nice basic income, I think workers would just increasingly tend to work on creator-owned projects, and these would compete with the ones owned by capitalists who are paying others to work for them, so big concentrations of capital would erode over time. Once everyone can live lavishly on basic income and most work is creator-owned, you'd have better prospects for a collective decision to get rid of intellectual property, and you wouldn't have huge powerful interests opposing it like, at least not to nearly the level you'd have if you wanted to abolish intellectual property today.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA
Leftcoms love citing Zizek all the time, but they're just as bad as ML's and Trostkyists at leaving the 20th century behind.

Well we never seem to here anything of the differences, it's always, "B-but they're both capitalism."

Well, it doesn't really matter now does it. If you defeat the fascists before, then you win, if the liberals put them in power, well, you were fighting them anyway, so who cares. the Yugoslav Partisans did an excellent job at fighting the fascists once they took over, for example.

In the context of modern American politics, there is no more right wing alternative waiting in the wings to take power, I wouldn't quite call it fascism, but opposition to authoritarian reactionaries is for the moment the same as opposition to american capitalism, though of course we shouldn't make our critiques specific to Trump or whatever, but capitalism and the american state. Similarly, I would agree that antifa really is a joke, and we should dismiss them and their tactics at every opportunity, but there's no reason to not work with anarchists should they be willing.

If you don't tackle the power of the capitalist first and foremost, then they'll simply bring about UBI and public healthcare so they can perpetuate their place of power in the system, whereby the state, in true keynsian fashion, injects just enough demand to keep the system from collapsing.

Simply put, it's the only idea which credibly takes power away from the capitalists and puts in into the hands of workers on the most fundamental material base of society. Now, I don't know what socialism will look like. But I can tell you right off the bat, it's not going to come about through a vanguard clique taking control, or through simple maximalism of social democratic positions until the system can't take it and collapses, as Marx suggested. The only way I see a transition to socialism is if workers take authentic power for themselves, power which can't be so easily revoked by state fiat. Worker's councils does something similar, but has been antiquated, imo, with the decline of the factory model of production in the first world, although, if I see a worker council movement, that'd certainly be just as worth supporting.

I apologise, I must have given the impression that I haven't done a lot of independent research. I'm well aware of Mutualism and Parecon. I guess I'll divert through a quick rundown of why I find both of those proposals unsatisfactory before attempting to repeat my main point more clearly.

First, Mutualism. I agree that it's a flexible system - it ought to be, it's fundamentally indistinguishable from the supremely flexible capitalist system, retaining as it does the exchange of goods on the market according to their universal equivalent. I've attached a copy of 'Classical Econophysics' to this post, among other things it makes a very convincing argument that the mere presence of exchange value in an economy is what leads to power-law wealth inequality, even when the initial wealth distribution is completely uniform. Given this, I find that the failure to destroy that part of the capitalist system is not so much a revolutionary change as it is a doomed attempt to make capitalism humane. It should be noted also that Proudhon's model is a more detailed version of what Marx described as the 'lower phase of communism' in Critique of the Gotha Programme. I have the same problem with Proudhon that I do with this part of Marx - I simply fail to see how retaining the law of value will in any way get us closer to actual communism, ie, a society that satisfies the condition 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need'.

Regarding Parecon I have the same problem. It doesn't abolish the law of value and doesn't point the way toward its abolition. That's a big thing for me. It's my main point of agreement with the leftcoms, despite the bile I might spit at their mysticism the rest of the time. Without removing the fundamental feature, as far as I'm concerned you're just instituting capitalism with fetters. If there's one thing we know about capital though, it's that it abhors any barrier to its self-replication, and removes such barriers with startling efficiency. Just look at Russia, China, Yugoslavia, etc for the best example of this. On top of that, Parecon is an exceptionally unwieldy system. Between figuring out job complexes and filling out what would in practice be endless demand surveys, Parecon would be a bureaucratic paperwork nightmare in exactly the places that capitalism is most efficient.

This is my exact point. People largely seem to fetishise this lack of knowledge, refusing to make a serious attempt to work out how a society would operate. Without doing that, any plans for what to do in the here and now become ridiculous, like arguing over whether to take a bus or a boat before you've decided whether you're crossing a suburb or a sea. Those that do make some attempt suffer an equally contemptible failure of imagination, refusing to part with all aspects of the old system, even when those parts directly conflict with the stated goals of the movement.

This and things like it get repeated from all corners, but it strikes me as the worst kind of cop-out. It seems to suggest that communism is an extremely contingent and particular system, utterly unpredictable and largely indescribable. I don't think this is a reasonable way to conceive of communism. After all, it isn't the case with preceding systems, especially capitalism. No matter where you go, or at what point in its history you look, the fundamental operating principles of capitalism are the same. It didn't matter what kind of opposition it was overcoming, the broad features of a transition to capitalism were the same. Why wouldn't these same facts apply to communism? If they do, it should be possible to figure out the fundamental operating principles of communism in the same way that Marx figured out the fundamental operating principles of capitalism all those years ago.

I so hate this talk of automation leading to UBI or a rupture in the capitalist system. It won't do any of those things for the simple reason that it didn't do them the last time a reduction in the organic composition of capital led to an unacceptablly large decline in the rate of profit. Last time that happened we had two massive wars and blew up all the machinery that was fucking up the rate of profit so we could start the cycle all over again. Capitalism will gnaw its own leg off before allowing itself to be caught in the bear trap. Basic income is a fantasy that is anathema to the operation of capitalism - a jump directly to full communism is more realistic.

Well sure, but in what way are the workers actually in control of society just because they run production? They still exchange their products on the market, M-C-M' and the whole dastardly logic of capital still operate with full force. Workers in co-ops end up self-exploiting and replicating the behaviours of the most odious capitalists to compete (case in point Mondragon, but there is plenty of research that supports my position here). Why would a situation of mass self-sacrifice to the market lead to the abolition of the law of value? Frankly I don't think any solution proposed whether co-op, 'vanguard', or ballot box has any merit. None of you seem to be able to draw a link between your pet strategy and the actual implementation of communism. Until someone can do that I really don't see the point in the endless circular arguments you have with each other.

I agree that some people foolishly fetishize the "mystery" of Communism, but that doesn't mean we should just do nothing until every aspect of our project has been perfectly planned out in intimate detail. You seem to be setting an impossible standard here. We're not talking about a pasta recipe or something here we're talking about a complete transformation of human society. The task of trying to model an entire civilization in the abstract is simply far beyond (current) human capabilities. What we should be doing is trying to sketch out a rough path, while anticipating a degree of uncertainty in how things will play out. The benefit of having a flexible plan is that you can change it on the fly. So if some aspect of our plan is not working we simply change the plan. Whatever the problem may be, so long as we are sufficiently motivated and have a strong sense of overall direction we can adapt to whatever circumstances may arise. That's not necessarily a cop-out, that's pragmatism.

Do you use the same definition of "markets" that Mutualists do: "any exchange of goods freely conducted between independent parties". Are you aware that in Mutualism all exchange takes place either though gifts or through the remuneration of labor, and has nothing to do with the actual value of the goods/services in involved?

what woulud that be? im sorry, im just a poor theoryless brainlet.
prodcution for use instead of sale, and only by trade unions?

The capital cycle will of course continue and workers will become a sort of "super-capitalist" as you have it, but think about what that entails for a moment. The capitalist half of the workers in market socialism is then the half that actively perpetuates the capital cycle, that which reinvests into capital in order to stay competitive. Now, in terms of income, reinvestment means less of it going home for personal use on the part of the worker/capitalist. What pressure does this then create? The worker then sees that the capitalist portion of his responsibilities is draining his income, responsible for a decrease in his quality of life. In capitalist bourgeoisie democracy, it's money that ultimately has control, there's empirical evidence that the upper echelons of capitalists have a direct control of policy making. Replace them with the workers at large, and suddenly, you have a people in control who's direct material interest is to move beyond capitalism and profit.

Jesus christ, way to admit you haven't read Capital, or anything by Marx for that matter. You should really fix that before talking shit about things you clearly don't understand.

How about you make an argument instead, retard?

I too feel the compulsion to do something about the fuckawful system we live under, but what's the difference between doing nothing and doing a whole bunch of shit that's useless at best and counterproductive at worst? The last time people said 'well we can't sit here figuring out a lasting solution, let's just wing it' we ended up setting back the workers' movement by a full century. The shitty epoch we find ourselves in isn't the consequence of inaction on the part of socialists, it's the consequence of action never thought through.

In any case, I'm not setting some impossible standard. I don't want the entirety of future civilisation modelled in advance, that's a misrepresentation of my position. As I said before, what I do want is for communists to get together and figure out the basic principles by which a communist society is supposed to actually operate. All we have at the moment is sloganeering that redefines vague, and an endless number of proposed or enacted utopias that claim to be the path to communism despite a total lack of knowledge about what communism would actually be.

This is in reality what I am proposing we do. I am also trying to say that nobody has actually done that yet. The best 'rough path' anyone has is 1. Smash Capitalism (a bit) 2. Keep the fundamental operating principles of capitalism intact but, like, nicer 3. ??? 4. Communism (no more details). My point here is that figuring out what step 4 actually entails might help us figure out step 3, and that figuring out step 3 might tell us whether the step 2 we have makes any sense, given how it's already failed a bunch of times. My other point is that step fucking 3 is missing from everybody's 'rough path sketches'. The absence of a step 3 is in fact the one feature every existing tendency on the Left shares. I'm proposing we fix that gaping hole in our praxis.

"Our ultimate vision is of a society in which the economy is organized around free market exchange between producers…"
t. mutualists.org, home page, literally the fourth paragraph. I am aware of no mutualism that doesn't enshrine market exchange between producers. Fair market exchange demands a common unit of account. This must necessarily be labour time or a unit based upon it, since it's the only thing shared by every good. Exchange decoupled from 'the actual value of the goods/services' is a contradiction in terms. A gift economy is also either separate to or incompatible with an exchange-based economy. If you're arguing for a gift economy or transfers of goods without regard to their exchange value then you really ought to stop calling yourself a mutualist. Gets very confusing otherwise.

Yes
No restrictions on who produces - no division between work and leisure at all. If your next question is 'Well how the fuck is that supposed to work?' then welcome to my world - you can read forever and you'll never find anyone on the Left who has made a serious attempt to tackle that question. Maybe you'll be the first of a new generation of communists that finally breaks the cycle of deliberate ignorance?

You agree that it's not the upper echelons of capitalists that have the power, but your solution is to get rid of them anyway. I ask again, why would that fix anything? In the current system, the self-replication of Capital is the primary goal. Capital rules, and capitalists are its servants. Worker-'run' capitalism simply switches out capital's servant. Capital remains in the driver's seat. You say that workers will have the power and a direct material interest in deposing Capital once they 'run' things. I say they already have both of those things right now. Why do we need your system as a middle-man between the workers and their liberation?

I know why - you don't actually know how communism will operate. You've not attempted to figure it out. To cover up your theoretical weakness, you've proposed a stalling tactic. You hide behind your pet impossible-to-implement half-measure hoping that the real movement that actually abolishes the present state of things will eventually (passive voice) "get figured out".

Well guess what sport, communism won't just "get figured out". In the event of an actual revolution people will grasp at the first (to quote ) 'pragmatic' solution they can see. The solution they latch on to will be an unmitigated pile of shit, just like it was last time, and the time before, and the time before that. If we want to see the law of value abolished we're going to have to figure it out ourselves. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" isn't a feel-good aphorism, it's a set of design specs.

I never agreed as such. The upper echelons do have the power, I literally just said that is empirically provable.

Capitalists are embodiments of the position of capital. But it's still the capitalists themselves who set policy, not capital itself. Their personal opinions are what shape public policy, granted these opinions are informed by their material interests and experiences in capitalism. Capitalists have real power, people have real power. Capital only has power through society, and society can do away with that power if it so pleases.

Except they do not run things, they do not have the power to change things without massive collective action.

The worker's don't have power in our current system, capitalists do. Capital informs the capitalists position, but if workers were to take the capitalists position as well as maintain there own, the falling rate of profit and their experience as labor would inform how they exercise power. If you have a suggestion on how to better give workers power over their own society, I'll be glad to hear it.

I assure you I have. It would obviously be a society with only non-market forms of allocation, i.e. free use, made to order, or rationed products. Similarly, it would not have wage labor, and people would be free to pursue whatever labor is most satisfying to them, which, regardless of the memeing of falc, would require a large amount of automation and reinvestment (what you so decry of the capital cycle). I do take "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" as a blueprint, but for Marx, this was a blueprint of the higher stage of communism, which was preceded by a transition to communism through a dictatorship of the proletariat and the lower stage of communism. Let's get the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is workers seizing power in a way that will not immediately regress into capitalism first why don't we?

That mistakes have been made in the socialist movement is undeniable but that can't be used as a blanket excuse to discredit the entirety of socialist theories. By all means, give criticism where it is due then let's learn from the mistakes and try something else. I don't want another USSR any more than you do and I intend on doing everything possible to prevent it - but not for one second does that compel me to retreat from following my own vision of socialism with has nothing in common with that disaster. You say that I'm misrepresenting your views but you haven't clarified exactly what your expectations are here other than (seemingly) claiming that nobody has met them. To me, the theorists have provided more than an ample framework to begin with, but you seem to be implying that they haven't provided one at all. I can only assume you're exaggerating for rhetorical purposes but that doesn't help me to understand exactly what it is you're asking for. Unless you actually believe that there's literally nothing of value in socialist theory regarding transitional strategies.

That's wikipedia level of mutualist theory. Don't accuse me of being confusing if you're working off of resources like that. I get my definition of Mutualism straight from Proudhon who made it clear that "Mutualist" exchange was predicated on the cost of the labor necessary to produce it. This he called the rule of reciprocity, the core principle of Mutualist economies.

If you want to disagree with me, you first need to stop disagreeing with yourself. Every time you try to paint the upper echelons of the capitalists as the ones with true agency, you are immediately forced to contradict yourself. Let me illustrate.

Sure, but immediately before that you write
Which is it? Do capitalists do whatever their sociopathic whims dictate, or do they follow the path dictated by the logic of Capital for fear of losing their position as capitalists? I find the former case hard to believe. If it's the latter, calling capitalists the ones in control seems a stretch. You aren't 'in control' if your actions are constrained by the interests of another.

In your next reply, you say
An obvious enough statement, given that capital is inanimate. However, you go on to contradict yourself in the very next sentence:
Which is it? Do capitalists set policy according to their personal and highly variable opinions, or is policy ultimately dictated by capitalists' "material interests" - that is, the interests of Capital?

'Things' of course excluding all of the tools and machines that create and maintain human civilisation, right? That's the power I'm referring to.

I concur! I absolutely agree. Both of our proposals require massive collective action on the part of the working class. My question is, if we're in a scenario where the working class has risen up en masse and has the ability to reshape society according to their interests, why should they adopt the half-measure of being 'in charge' of the market? Especially when such control is ultimately illusory?

CONT.

CONT from

The way I see it, there are only two reasons why workers would cede ground to the counter-revolutionary influence of the market. One possible reason is that the productive forces are not sufficiently developed to ensure free access to goods and an end to scarcity. This was the position Marx argued from, given that a post-scarcity was highly unlikely in the mid-1800's. The world of today is very different, however. It is the height of absurdity to suggest that the productive forces are not yet sufficiently developed to support the communist mode of production. The second reason why a victorious workers' movement might cede their revolution to the market is because they do not actually know how to implement the communist mode of production. This is the exact problem faced by 20th century revolutionaries. It didn't end well for them.

Then they would be subject to the exact same restrictions on their actions that ensure the behaviour of the capitalists is so objectionable. Their enterprises would be forced to maximise profit at the expense of all other concerns to keep up with their competition. Their experience as labourers would inform how they exercise power, but only to the same extent as the natural empathy of the capitalist class informs how they exercise power - which is to say not at all when the logic of the market demands all other concerns be put behind the maximisation of profit. Workers can't make capitalism operate more humanely because capitalism is a fundamentally inhumane system. That's the whole point of Marx's Kapital - pointing out that capitalism is an inherently dysfunctional system even in vacuo. Putting workers in charge of capitalism can only be a holding pattern while we develop the understanding necessary to get rid of it entirely. If we can gain that understanding directly, why bother retaining capitalism at all?

Don't be disingenuous, I've been shilling for full communism this whole time. The fact that I can't adequately describe how that would work beyond the vaguest outline is the infuriating gap in Marxist theory that I've been raging against the whole time I've been here. Don't pretend a bad idea is good just because nobody has come up with an actually good idea. That's activism for the sake of activism. Our first task as communists needs to be figuring out how to organise the communist mode of production, given the vague things we understand about its major features.

When accused of not knowing the first thing about communism, you protest,
You say. And yet you go on to demonstrate your ignorance of the concept.
You say! Who rations the products? You say you know communism but immediately start talking about dictating the consumption rights of others. Doesn't sound very classless to me.
You suggest! Tell me, how are we supposed to 'reinvest' without wage labour, markets, or money? I build cars, how do I use the product of my labour (which is cars) to expand the production of cars? Do I exchange the cars for the means to produce more cars? Of course not, production for exchange is one of the cornerstones of capitalism.

This is exactly what I'm talking about when I talk about the ridiculousness of people acting like they know what path will lead to communism. You can't describe the first thing about it without recapitulating some aspect of class society, why would I ever take your suggestions on how to get there seriously?

I'm not doing that, I'm issuing a challenge to the Left. I'm telling them to fix their shit and provide a viable alternative to capitalism.

My demand is very simple to understand. Give me (or help me develop) a theoretical overview for a method by which a complex global economy can be organised without wage labour, markets, or money. You know, communism. I feel I have been very patient in trying to explain how systems that still have wage labour, markets, or money do not fulfil my request and are not communist.

About the only thing of real value in existing socialist theory is its assertion that a transition beyond capitalism is both possible and necessary. That and the general features of a communist economy. The Left is the only place you'll hear that assertion made. Beyond that, I think everyone needs to put serious thought into their strategy, because the "(mostly) smash capitalism → lol i dunno → Communism I guess" model is a dead end. My assertion is that the "lol i dunno" step needs clarification. Or, creation.

That is literally exactly the same thing that capitalist exchange is based on. Exchange values under capitalism converge on the socially necessary labour time required for their production. What you've said is also in complete agreement with the homepage of mutualists.org (which I simply chose to get a quick quote). You're the one who went off talking about decidedly non-mutualist stuff like a gift economy.

Actually, that's anything but simple. Bu your assertion that there exists nothing of value in socialism regarding transitionary strategy tells me that debating this with you is pointless.

First of all, I said nothing about a "gift economy" only gift exchanges. Pointing out that Capitalism "converges on" socially necessary labor time means nothing. Pointing out superficial resemblances between Mutualism and Capitalism isn't much of a critique. In Capitalism, the goal is to make a profit: that means charging more than what socially necessary labor time dictates. In Mutualism - it's the opposite. Mutualists make it a rule to charge only in accordance with socially necessary labor time and production costs. How you can take two ideologies, with opposite goals and methods, and say they are the same is baffling to me. To say nothing about the option of large-scale collectivization which even thinly-veiled-capitalist "free market mutualists" like Kevin Carson admit would be a significant part of the economy. Or we could talk about how mutualists want to redefine (or in some cases abolish) property rights and how that's exactly the same as capitalism.

A position you seem to take as axiomatic truth, without very robust justification.

Suggesting that the entirety of socialist praxis and history was one big thoughtless mess goes beyond even the bourgeois historians of the Cold War.

It's practical ignorance, which is much harder to address. Stop implying that it was at all deliberate.

You're not the first to notice, it's a excellent which has driven the entire socialist movement after Marx's death. History was made over trying to provide answers; that the answers don't satisfy you is merely evidence that they don't come easily.

This is what the cybernetics thread was created to address, in its own way. Unfortunately, and you'd know this if you read it, there are extraordinary gaps there for a number of reasons. Most pressing being the inability to experiment and develop a prototype communist mode of production, which will inevitably involve using mathematical and computer modelling to regulate production, without the massive resources available only to the capitalist class and the state. This is not a new problem – it is the oldest and most limiting problem, and this addresses your frustration succinctly: the only way we can figure it out is on an enormous scale, using the prior-developed methodologies of the capitalist mode of production – e.g. Operations Research, and so on – and it's social relations, which are then negated into a communist mode of production. The only attempt that achieved this even partially was the USSR, and much of that literature is obscure and inaccessible to Anglophones. We can hypothesize a great deal, as Cockshot and Cottrell have been doing for example, but until the rubber hits the road we won't know, proximately, what needs to be changed and how for these reasons.

It's because he doesn't see prior attempts as legitimate, or even intelligent. It's an arrogant position.

...

well I learned a lolt from this thread

*lot

Repeatedly pointing out superficial resemblance between MarSoc/Mutualist systems and Capitalism, then referencing out-of-context Marxist critiques to substantiate them is an incredibly unproductive method of debate. If you really want to have a viable transition strategy you have to at least be open to the possibility of one existing.

I'm fully aware it's not 'simple', in fact that's my point. It's not simple, but it's absolutely necessary. And history tells us that it isn't going to get any simpler if we leave it to the day after the revolution, as has been the exact strategy of revolutionaries so far. The half-measures speculated on so far have demonstrably not been up to the task. I'm not looking to 'abandon socialism', I'm looking to make it actually win. It is certainly possible to share the overall goal of communism while having nothing but scorn for the theories so far presented regarding how to get there. Theory isn't set in stone and closed to all debate. The people who came up with these theories are no more qualified than you or I - their conjectures on how to get to communism don't inherently hold any more weight than anyone else's. We can do better. We need to.

Tone down the hysterics there Sally, I'm still debating with you despite the fact that you're arguing for a wholesale abandonment of communism as the goal of the revolutionary movement in favour of nicer capitalism (Luckily this response works regardless of whether you're the mutualist or the market 'socialist').

OK, well please use more precise terms. In economic terms a 'gift' is an entriely different form of transfer to an 'exchange'. It doesn't make sense to talk about a 'gift exchange' except in the colloquial sense, but that's 'gifting' and an economy based on gifting in that sense would be a 'gift economy'. However, we've established that you're not talking about a gift economy which is for the best because as I have noted multiple times that would be as incompatible with a mutualist economy as it is with a capitalist one.

Oh god, please read some Marx. At least an overview of Kapital. These resemblances aren't 'superficial', they are fundamental. Both systems are predicated on production for exchange. Capital doesn't acquire its predatory and destructive characteristics from managers acting in bad faith, it's the direct logical result of a system acting under the Law of Value.

This is what capitalists do. That's the exact source of super-profits and crisis in a capitalist economy. When you innovate your productive process, your cost of production falls below the socially necessary labour time. You reap the difference as super-profits, until other producers catch up. If you're just going to describe capitalism at me while calling me a traitor to the workers' movement we're quickly going to run out of stuff to talk about. You can talk all you like about the de jure 'abolition of private property', but it's rather pointless if you're going to retain all the major features of capitalism that drive it toward inefficiency and crisis.

I am equally baffled at how you can assert that these two economic systems are somehow different despite operating by the same fundamental mechanisms.

Jesus, what's with the ad homs all of a sudden? It would have been nicer just to call me a cunt. And I never said socialist thought until now was 'one big thoughtless mess', I have simply been saying that a key section of it has been incomplete, and that it is incumbent upon us to rectify that.

I will when other leftists stop telling me that any attempt to figure out the operating principles of communism is 'utopian', or that we 'can't know what the revolution will produce'. For some socialists the ignorance is 'practical', but for a great many more it is very, very deliberate.

Yeah! Good! Why are you getting up in my shit for saying that the job isn't nearly done then?

Bitch I've been posting in the cybernetics thread since day one. Cockshott is my fucking homeboy. My entire presence in this thread is essentially trying to argue people into admitting that we all need to finish the job the cyberneticists started. I would disagree on very strong terms with your characterisation of the conclusions of that thread. If you'd read the thread you would have stumbled across this article:

nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/how-the-computer-got-its-revenge-on-the-soviet-union

which does a very good job of pointing out how the bureaucratic apparatus of the Soviet Union quashed any state-sponsored movement toward actual communism. Also, if you'd actually read Towards a New Socialism, you would have noticed that the kind of computing power they suggest is necessary to manage an economy with millions of products required a supercomputer in 1993. It is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that enterprising communist theoreticians couldn't run limited proof-of-concept simulations with the computing resources available to us today. As a matter of fact, the based posters in that thread already started sketching out algorithms for efficient resource distribution - exactly the kind of hard theoretical work I would argue needs to be done before we end up jumping into another USSR through our own lack of preparation. Relying on the capitalist state to develop the theoretical basis for the actual operation of communism is a ridiculous fantasy.

No, I take the absence of wage labour, markets, and money as axiomatic features of communism because they are axiomatic fucking features of communism. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" offers absolutely no room for wage labour, markets, or money. If you come to me with a system that fails those criteria, don't act like I'm the bad guy for pointing out that it isn't fucking communism. And if by 'prior attempts' you're referring to the USSR or god forbid fucking China, I'm not 'arrogant' for calling them illegitimate attempts to build socialism, I'm well within my rights.

The New Deal didn't change shit about the fundamental operation of capitalism, that's my entire fucking point.

I said it above but I'll repeat it for your benefit: These resemblances aren't superficial, they're fundamental to the operation of the system.

I am absolutely open to this possibility. Being open to the possibility of a viable strategy isn't the same as blindly accepting every bad idea I come across, though.

ALSO, where the fuck did the leftcoms on this board fucking well scatter to? I have beef with them on other points but the shit I've been arguing here is right up their alley. They're supposed to be like a third of the board.

Incompleteness will endure until the revolution. We are incumbent to the extent we organize in the real world as well as theorize for the future.

That has always been the case. Marx and Engels fought against it their entire lives.

You're acting like the rest of us, even theorists who noticed this long before you were born, and spent their lives actually doing something about it, are not only illegitimate (because their attempts failed) but were deliberately ignoring the very excellent they set out to answer. This is not the case.

Birth marks of the old society, comrade. They're inescapable. We do not start from nothing. We don't build an ideal-type model and then force it on the world.

Oddly enough, even the MLs would agree that communism was not achieved in the 20th century.

You are arrogant for dismissing their attempts as illegitimate, especially the USSR. Every communist failure is the result of people attempting to abolish the present state of things. Do not disrespect their sacrifices, or the sacrifices of those who endured their failure.

Pick a position. You're either in favour of keeping that gap in our theoretical understanding open until the revolution, or you're against it.

I fully admit that I'm presuming that the theory behind failed attempts to supercede capitalism can be treated as illegitimate and discarded, yes. What the fuck else am I gonna do, slavishly attempt to replicate a proven failure and hope it goes better this time? You're also conflating my criticism of the trend of socialists to deliberately avoid seeking clarification on the operating principles of a communist economy (there's a post in another thread, , which is emblematic of this problem) with actual attempts to generate revolutionary strategy based on an understanding of the underlying material forces involved. I am starting to find this conflation annoying.

That is some very nice imagery you have evoked there, but it isn't actually a reply to the thing you're quoting. I was criticising you for saying that the cybernetics thread had concluded that only the resources of a capitalist/'socialist' state could do the hard theoretical work necessary to build a working method of co-ordinating complex production chains without markets, etc. I was saying that it's stupid to suggest that capitalists (or socialist bureaucrats running industrial fiefdoms) would actually provide that funding, and in any case the resource cost isn't so great that it is out of reach for 'amateur' communist theoreticians like you and me. I am in wholehearted agreement with you on the point about not forcing a complete model on the world to which the world must fit itself - I argue that exact point in the cybernetics thread, pointing out that we are only trying to build the economic tools with which the workers can build communism. The implications of that statement being that we do not have those tools yet, and that it would be possible to build them through our own efforts.

Maybe you're right, but as a dyed-in-the-wool communist I'll militate against the death of freedom no matter what it clothes itself in. We shouldn't put failures on a pedestal. It's much smarter to pick what is useful from the wreckage and move on. Don't get all moralistic with talk of 'disrespect', petty moralism does more to dishonour the memory of the Bolsheviks far more than anything I've said itt. I'm trying to carry on their legacy by actually fucking winning.

You see a contradiction where there is none. I choose the third option: attempt to improve theory with the knowledge that whatever we might theorize will probably disintegrate upon impact. Just as it was with Lenin. There are limits to what we can know ahead of time.

There's a distinction between usefulness and legitimacy. The USSR was a legitimate attempt even if it failed, even if it will only provide relative instruction on how its failures can be avoided. The entire cybernetics thread would be pointless if the literature did not draw from the USSR's experience.

That understanding is largely broken, which is what happens when people either abandon Marx and Engels wholesale or gut the content of their critique in favor of a parochial interpretation (ideology). It's something I'm working towards resolving on a personal level.

Until we are dealing with the real world any "working" methodology will be a pure numbers game, an abstract model. It will change a great deal upon actual implementation, and the substance of that implementation will be the negation of capitalism – from that starting point alone will we build anything.

Whatever tools we create will be inadequate, but better inadequacy than nothing at all. There is perhaps some potential for small scale experiments but from my recollection of the thread even that seems utopian at the moment. Hopefully that much can be achieved. What I wonder is why it has not been achieved already, if it has been possible for decades. I doubt we are that original.

I'm not so foolish as to think I'm immune to or above value judgements. You were being disrespectful. I won't stand for the history we've earned being trashed as not our own, or the results somehow divorced from our own efforts, as if we stand apart from history itself.

First of all, checked. To continue.

But we don't know what that limit is, so our only realistic choice to to attempt to understand everything and bounce off of the unknowable once we've determined its ineffability. Retreating from trying to figure everything out because 'ooh it might turn out to be wrong later' is cowardice.

You're painting with too broad a brush here. There is a definite point after which it would be politically irresponsible to call the USSR a legitimate attempt at building communism. We could have a whole new and much more contentious thread over when that was.

I feel like you underestimate the degree to which the bureaucracy undermined the work, and also how much of the mathematical basis was developed in the capitalist countries.

Even an abstract model of a communist system would be better than the whole pile of nothing we have now. You seem to give up a lot before even starting. Has there been some scientific proof that communism is unknowable that I've never been told about? Even Dauve at his most mystical (let alone Marx) says quite a lot about the features of the communist mode of production. Weaving those scattered notes into something that hangs together as a coherent model would be a huge leap forward.

No offence, but your statements here make you seem quite young. I've been active on the Left for years and reading for longer, and it doesn't surprise me in the least that nobody has bothered to figure out how communism is supposed to work. I've torn through the work every left-wing thinker I can get my hands on in my search for even a hint at the answer to that question. I tried asking when the work will get done but I got no response beyond a vague 'during the revolution~', despite the fact that we've had a bunch of those and nobody managed to figure it out during any of them. I ask if it's maybe a little unrealistic to ask people to solve what is at least partially a very difficult mathematical/computational problem in the middle of a civil war and people look at me like I've got two heads. The 'we can't know anything about the future so we shouldn't try to find out' meme is all-pervasive on the Left - any attempt to, as I say, build the tools that will enable the workers to build communism gets you knee-jerk labelled a utopian or an opportunist. Between that and the circular firing squads, the idpol, the sectarian squabbling about stale historical questions, the unquestioning reverence for old theory, and people bending over backwards to justify paranoid dictatorships as socialism, it doesn't surprise me that nobody has tried to do something like this before. Given all that it frankly surprises me the Left has time to even go to useless 20-person protests.

You say I am painting with too broad a brush concerning the USSR, yet state we must understand everything. I think it is better to concentrate on what is knowable than to speculate on "everything". But this is a dead end in this particular discussion.

I agree, which is why I was vague.

On the latter, I do not – which is why I suggested (to your disagreement) that as a starting point. The bureaucracy is tied up with the larger debate over the USSR but I also agree that was a hindrance in many key areas, cybernetics being one of them.

Considering how far abstract models of capitalism have gotten bourgeois economists, you must understand my hesitation.
You are making a leap here. I'm not certain of its viability. As I said before, it's not that it's unknowable from what we've read. Like capitalism, communism will have general features which apply no matter the particular cultural or historical context – already much ink has been spilled over what comprises those features. It's that communism is unknowable as actual social relations and functioning production methodologies until we begin to abolish the present state of things. We can partially construct the kind of modelling we need ahead of time, I think, but not much more. I don't mean to belittle that task either, it would be a major achievement relative to the last 20 years or more. There aren't many people both willing to work on it and qualified to do so, which must be remembered.

I am young. Not as young as most of this board, however.
That's disheartening to say the least. At present, we're shattered from the previous failures and have devolved into warring sects. Marx was a great unifier and we do not have such a figure in our time, who is both pragmatical and theoretically brilliant.

I've understood it to mean two things basicaly:
1. As productivity increases, it will be possible to minimize and perhaps eventually eliminate the work that nobody really wants to do. Until such a time that kind of work will obviously have to be distributed in some kind of fair manner. Under a capitalist system, productivity increases means either increased production or lay offs and transition for layed off workers into some other industry. This won't happen under communism (people might still sometimes want to increase production of some goods, but producing more and more commodities won't be the focus of the entire economic system as it is now).
2. Work that is tiresome in capitalism because it has to be conducted under capitalist market conditions could be enjoyable if it was instead conducted in a communist system.

oops, misread, you're right

I think we're coming to a broad sort of agreement here (differing on a few political points, naturally). I just want to take a minute and appreciate that, it's not often a reasonable discussion like this happens on the internet. Thanks for challenging me and helping me refine my positions.

Certainly, but when I talk about an abstract model that demonstrates the operating principle of the system I'm thinking more along the lines of Das Kapital than any of the drivel shat out by the capitalist priesthood.

At this point all I ask of the Left is that it try to do at least this much. We may find ourselves surprised by how much we are actually able to achieve in the attempt, and whatever we did figure out would be a theoretical advance entirely unprecedented on the Left I'm sorry to say.

Which is why I shill for this to get more participation whenever I can. Going around the 'Should we abstractly defend/support X, where X is some horrible third-world dictatorship' carousel for the billionth time is where the Left currently spends the majority of its effort and talent. Even if figuring out the rudimentary principles of an operational communist economy turns out to be a complete waste of time it will still be better than wasting the same time on that other shit.

Besides, in an increasingly commoditised world left-wing theory is the last viable domain of the amateur enthusiast.

The very toppest of keks. The Left has been eating itself majorly since at least the Paris Commune, even Marx was famously forced to say "I am not a Marxist" by the dumb shit people were shilling for in his name. The best you can hope for is to cut through the bullshit and come up with something that is indisputably correct, like Marx did with Kapital.

It's not often I find someone willing to listen, so you have my thanks as well.

Right, but Capital reflected real phenomena, not proposed phenomena. There would need to be a lot of very clearly expressed caveats. Probably why Marx and Engels did not delve far into specifics.

A waste of time is a waste of time, but the former at least had a purpose, and, as you say, we may find things other than what we were looking for.

The efforts made by both Marx and Engels to polemicize against their (often pretentious) competitors resulted in their views being adopted, albeit not in unmodified form, on a grand scale. Kapital was an important part of that process but not the proximate cause. Having people do stupid shit in your name is part of the price of spreading your views.

t. Bookchin

can communization include communalists?

Syndicalism is just fancy French for trade unionism. It does not by definition mean "worker-controlled".
Probably not, from what I've seen of it. Communization was borne out of a French, ultra-leftist milieu in the early '70s that was explicitly Marxist and has always insisted on the historical invariance of Marxism as such. There is no room for model-type thinking.

If me and my hommies can get a free homestead out of this I wouldn't be upset.

fucking opportunist

LOL anti-antifa is a term in use by German Neonazis. Of course I don't expect a person who never leaves the house to know that.
SO BRAVE

Err, capital also refers to self-expanding value, which happens practically automatically and this pressure would not go away even if only co-ops existed.

Marxists are basically Christians: You have the goal of meeting God in heaven, and you are not allowed to visualize what God/heaven is like.

You are free to masturbate how will your perfect society look like, but don't expect reality will submit to it. Just compare how would a somebody from eg. early 90s imagine a communist society and how you imagine that.

And? What does that have to do with the lefcom critique of anti-fascism?
trade unions =/= radical unions

Need I remind you that Marx's criticisms were directed at CAPITALISM specifically. They apply only to Capitalism, not to any system you dislike. If you are going to keep bringing up Marx's critique of Capitalism the burden of proof is on you to prove that every aspect of every version of MarSoc/Mutualism actually fits within the framework Marx described. So far, you haven't even made an attempt, simply insisting without any cause that they're the same thing despite demonstrable differences.

Yes, the capitalist law of value, under Capitalism, does work the way you describe. You still have done absolutely nothing to show that the "law of value" exists in Mutualism/MarSoc or that, if it does, it operates in the same way as the law of value under capitalism. I have in fact, shown you evidence that it does not. All you're doing is pointing out superficial similarities and taking Marxist criticisms of Capitalism out-of-context without giving any justification for why they might apply here.

No, Mutualism does not produce goods/servcies for exchange value. The price of a good/service in mutualism is exactly equal to the cost of producing it. All that the producer can accomplish through exchange is recouping their losses.There is no profit to be had, and thus production cannot occur merely for the sake of exchange value.

This is a great point, and focusing on how this process could take place should be the focus of all leftist's studies.

not that poster, but I think that a critique of antifa is good, but anti-antifa is not what we need.

Bunkerman also wrote a book on the Yugoslav experiment with "worker self-management" as they dubbed it: marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/ebooks/yugoslav_selfadministration_a_capitalist_theory_and_practice.pdf

Some of ya'll might find it interesting.

Anti-antifa doesn't mean you shouldn't oppose fascists. In contemporary leftcom theory it's a rejection of the modern form of antifa and it's tendency to unite with liberals to rescue bourgeois democracy.

Hasn't changed much since then my status-quo supporting friend.

??? Never heard that claim about mutualism before (from a mutualist that is, I know Marx claimed that to be Proudhon's position, but I couldn't find any quote of P. showing that).

The development and the influence of the Internet is for example one of many small things that would make some difference between the two, without taking such things in the consideration such models would slowly get detached from reality and reconsidering it equals admitting you really can't visualize the finished and perfected model of communist society since the reality would sooner or later leave it behind.

Marx is correct, that is exactly Proudhon's position although he articulated it more in terms of "equivalent labor". And that of later mutualists like Tuffard as well. I could recommend some literature when I have time later.

But we already had newsgroups in the early 90s, my child.

Give a citation of Proudhon where he actually said that or stop claiming he did.

Why does everyone assume I'm asking for some perfect eternal model of communist society? My questions are never phrased remotely like that, and yet that's always the accusation levelled at me.

I simply have rudimentary questions about how the everliving fuck you're supposed to organise the efficient allocation and free consumption of goods across global production chains without the use of money, markets, etc. It's an economic question, not a political one.

I can't see a single reason why we couldn't come up with an answer to the question, but every time I ask it I come up against either the ridiculous resistance quoted above, or else a bunch of people proposing their utopian models that retain the key economic features of capitalism!

In all my years on the Left the cybernetics thread is the only group of people I've seen who are even tangentially trying to answer the question.

You would certaintly need some kind of way of limiting consumption, at least in the early stages. Marx proposed labor vouchers.

I'm well aware of the Critique of the Gotha Programme, I'm asking specifically about the 'higher stage' of communism that does away with exchange value entirely. It's my bad, I had written out "money, markets, wage labour" so many times itt. I should have known that the minute I decide to shorten it with an etc. someone would roll up talking about how the new system will use wage-labour.

It's a good question. For goods that are limited in quantity, perhaps people would be allocated some kind of quota or ration. Some people associate higher state communism with free access to goods, but i don't think that was ever in Marx.

Anyone with decent knowledge of Mutualism should recognize the law of reciprocity as a central tenet. It's even in the Wikipedia article. Asking me for quotes to prove that Proudhon believes in reciprocity is like asking for quotes from Marx that support communism. But for the sake of hopefully generating something of value from this debate I will provide several examples of Proudhon espousing his principle of reciprocity.

From "Philosophy of Poverty:

From "What is Property":

He repeats this idea dozens of times throughout all of his work - as do most Mutualists of any substance.

Read Proudhon's statement in context: Did he really claim that prices should be fixed according to labor time or that in a world without big monopolies and so on they would tend to be close to that? Marx claimed Proudhon wanted to regulate all prices like that, which is disputed.

Historically these "anarchist" types, with their co-ops and the like, have always ultimately sided with the reformists and reactionaries in revolutionary situations. It will not be a surprise when they do it again. Anarchism is a bourgeois ideology.

You're moving the goalposts here. It's obvious what Proudhon was advocating. He spoke of the rule of reciprocity as moral imperative, not as merely a result of the elimination of monopolies (as Tucker did). Now whether he advocated "regulation" to this effect is another story. His theory seemed to rely more upon the discretion of the individual, who being sufficiently educated, would refuse to engage in exchange that violated these principles.

Proudhon stringently opposed the existence of "profit", which he called "right of increase" (roughly analogous to Marx's concept of the M-C circuit). In mutualistic society there may not be any need to expressly "regulate" commerce so long as the majority understood, and held preference for, exchange based on principles of mutual aid.

I don't even know where to begin. Care to point out when anarchists sided with reformists and reactionaries?

Have you ever heard of the Russian Revolution

It sounds like Proudhon is just proposing capitalism with random bits cut out of it without stopping to consider whether or not those parts might be entirely essential to the actual functioning of the system.

Sure, profit ends up being morally bad, but before that it is the only measure by which an exchange-based economy is able to decide between productive processes.

Your system seems to rely on an awfully large number of "moral imperatives" and "people wouldn't do that because it's wrong"s. The horrifyingly resilient thing about capitalism is that it is an internally self-consistent system that builds outward from a simple set of core principles.

If you want to supersede capitalism you're gonna wanna miss me with that utopian 'markets but nicer' shit bruh.

Ah yes, the good old 'Kronstadt sailors were actually white guardsmen' meme
fuck off Trotsky

The way the trots always told it to me was that they were peasants fresh from the countryside, whose politics were accordingly petit-bourgeois (since the class interest of small landholders was naturally to become bigger landholders and acquire labourers, making them only fairweather friends to the working class whose interest was the abolition of classes).

I don't really care about the argument anymore though, because I think trots are useless and anarchists are smelly assholes (too many bad irl experiences) but yeah, nobody claims they were Whites except maybe the most hardcore Stals who'd call their own mother a White if the order came down from Moscow.

found the ML

Not even remotely true but sure, it's just like a different version of capitalism: except everything is changed and it has almost nothing in common with capitalism.

Firstly, mutualism isn't "exchange-based" (whatever that means) it takes whatever form arises naturally from following mutualist principles. Secondly, there are any number of ways we might be able to "decide" between productive processes such as: the needs of the community, the needs of the worker, or some combination of the two. But "profit" is not one of them. Profit is not even an option as it is entirely antithetical to mutualist logic.

No it does not. I only mentioned "moral imperatives" in response to your question about Proudhon's attitude. Mutualism itself relies on nothing but it's consistent internal logic. In addition to ethical and cultural pressures, profit-seekers would have to compete with an entire society of producers that, as a rule, provide the best possible products and services for the lowest possible cost. In accordance with the above, few people would be dumb enough to "break the rules" considering they would find it almost impossible to find "customers" while operating under inefficient and abhorrent free-market principles.

Principles which do not apply here. I will repeat here that Mutualism and Capitalism are not the same thing. The presence of money and markets do not imply similarity of their own accord. Money and markets also existed under Feudalism, but Feudalism is recognized by Marxists as distinctly separate from Capitalism. So too, is Mutualism distinctly separate from Capitalism, with money, markets and property taking on vastly different forms that are entirely unique to the Mutualist system.

No, I am clarifying my origninal intention. This back-and-forth started at this post (not me) which stated that:
>the price of a good/service in mutualism is exactly equal to the cost of producing it.
It is a relatively well-known claim by Marx that Proudhon made a fundamentally unworkable proposal: that prices are directly fixed according to time worked and that the system is very decentralized. I do believe it is possible to fix prices like that, but you need a strongly centralized system for that. It is the claim by the an Anarchist FAQ guys (which I am repeating) that Proudhon did not advocate this direct price fixing (which is not the same as describing prices being close to that as an agreeable state of affairs).

Instead of just declaring me an ML, could you explain how a small land-holder isn't petit-bourgeois?

So, if I'm interpreting you right your question is about directly fixing prices?
I talked about this a bit here:
To my knowledge Proudhon never advocated, nor did he expressly forbid, directly fixing prices in such a way. On that particular point Marx may have simply been making a logical (but not necessarily true) assumption. But that does not mean that Proudhon's principle is simply "an agreeable state of affairs" either.

Reciprocity is the foundation of Mutualist theory and the primary principle upon which it operates. Proudhon went as far as to claim that profit was the same as theft. In Mutualist society paying more for a good or service than it costs to produce would be like consenting to robbery. In these terms, it hardly seems necessary to "regulate" such behavior since no rational person would consent to being robbed. Universal recognition of these principles is a necessary prerequisite for mutualism.

Admittedly, this means that "exactly equal exchange" is merely an ideal and not always strictly the case, but through the application of Proudhon's principles we can create an approximation with prices deviating from that ideal, up or down, only slightly. Perhaps people might see fit to create some regulatory body to help uphold these principles, but Proudhon did not seem to see that as necessary.

most of the bolsheviks were petit-bourgeois, idk why you have to be such an autist about who is petit-bourgeois or not

Lmao
No workers means no consumers - the system collapses
Fucking read kapital god damn

archived
archive.is/CTsOk

The reason you haven’t been able to answer that question is because the concepts of work and leisure are antithetical. Work is literally performing the duty of reproducing each other, while leisure is the time off. You can’t have work separate from duties and responsibilities, and leisure can only exist as an opposite to time spent on work.
Work can however be transformed to encourage more play, creativity and communist behavior. The Silicon Valley types have figured this out, these are exactly the kind of behaviors they promote in their workplaces. Now if you think that sounds like something we ought to be striving for or nah is up to you.

I'd hardly call this as an example of breaking down the division between 'work' and 'leisure'. Silicon Valley is simply an industry soaked in money from investors desperate for a high rate of return on their investments in a world where interests rates are hovering near zero. Add that to the fact that the industry is highly constrained by the need for highly skilled labour in relatively short supply, and you're looking at companies that have to furnish their employees with lots of perks in order to attract talent. Even then the work/leisure dichotomy is strictly enforced. Google is famous for its 80/20 system where employees are 'allowed' to spend 20% of their work time developing personal projects - by complete coincidence Google gets to hoover up the money generated by successful side projects.Of course the same labour supply constraints don't apply to other workers in their employ, eg maintenance staff, manufacturing workers, and logistics workers - Silicon Valley is notorious for the way it shits on those sections of its workforce.

You are close to being correct when you point to software development as a place where the work/leisure distinction has been overcome, though. You simply weren't correct about the exact location. Free/open source software development is a sterling example of quite literally communist productive relations spontaneously forming in a place where the development of the productive forces has allowed them to flourish. Software developers in this framework necessarily see no distinction between work and leisure (since they aren't exchanging their labour for anything, and the productive act is recreational to them), they produce exclusively for use (since they don't exchange the product of their labour), and the production and dissemination of free software follows exactly the maxim 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need' - that is, people contribute code freely to the project, and end-users are free to use, modify, or redistribute the project as they see fit. Of course, you can trace the root material causes of the development of this little slice of communism directly to the development of the productive forces - specifically, the wide availability of computing power, information storage, and information transmission. As the marginal cost of information reproduction, processing, and transmission has fallen practically to zero, the communist mode of production has spontaneously followed - even though open source developers don't self-identify as communist.

As you can see the question I'm trying to tackle isn't so much 'what would the breakdown of the work/leisure dichotomy and the insitution of communist productive relations look like' - I know perfectly well what it would look like, communism has already struck the encyclopedia publishing industry dead, and it's hot on the heels of scientific journal publishing. My question is more "How the fuck is this supposed to work for physical goods?", which is a question nobody has a good answer for, as far as I have been able to determine.

Sure you’re mostly correct in your analysis, but I think you’re making a mistake simply attributing these workplace relations as a mere result of the development of the productive forces. Insofar as how we relate to each other in our workplaces, communism can obviously be implemented and the sensation of “leisure” (although I’m hesitant to use the word) achieved, even without changing how we relate to the finished product of our labor. Allowing workers to act out of own free will and choosing to cooperate when they want and working alone when they want, being creative when they want and doing monotone labor when they want, while in the same time letting them choose a field they are interested is what allows these communist relationships to flourish, and I don’t see how they can’t exist even if you don’t control the redistribution of your physical products.
Also like I said, and I think this is important, leisure (aka recreation), can only exist as an opposite activity to work, they can never be combined. Leisure is literally the resting period where you're regaining the energy for work. If we're talking about combing the two concepts then we have to redefine work and leisure all together (something I'm okay with).

I have literally never thought of this and it's really fucking interesting. Are there any other aspects of early communism in this stage of capitalism?

You know, reading back over my previous post I realise that I don't like the phrasing I had adopted. I think instead of 'removing the distinction between work and leisure' I actually want to say 'abolishing work', since the way I define the term 'work' all throughout is pretty consistently as 'labour expended on the production of commodities for exchange on the market'. This sort of definition handily accounts for the fact that people undertake a great deal of 'productive labour' in their leisure time, something that I think is missing in your definition of leisure time as time spent resting.

Overall, the distinction between 'profession' (work) and 'hobby' (leisure) is only really possible under capitalism - 'do you get paid for it?' doesn't make sense as a distinction if 'getting paid' isn't a thing people do any more.

Sadly the only examples I can think of are within information-based industries - I only mentioned it tangentially above, but I would include the rise of software and media piracy in this list of 'spontaneously communist' industries as well. It's an interesting case actually, since the capitalist industries under threat from free production and distribution are fighting desperately to stymie it by placing artificial barriers like DRM in place. What I find funniest about that is that it had always been said that capitalism abhors any barriers (eg regulations) to capital accumulation and will always adapt to and surmount them. In the case of the free distribution of media and software, it is the communist relation (in the guise of warez groups) that circumvents the barriers erected by capital. This is also an important point, because the key feature of a new mode of production is its ability to propagate itself through time.

As far as finding other places in which communist productive relations are starting to become recognisable in the womb of capitalism - I don't know of any. I would pay a king's ransom for any insight into how communist relations might be appear in the production of material goods! I think it's our job as revolutionaries to search low and high for these 'early signs'. Understanding how communism is already appearing under capitalism will best equip us to help it reach its fullest expression in society. The way I understand things, our task as revolutionaries isn't so much as the creators of communism, but as its midwives.

I think a better way to put it would be "eliminating the distinction between work and free time".

That probably would be the clearest formulation, but abolishing work sounds more Dauve-ian, which is who this thread was originally about, way back when.