The main left-communist argument against AESS seems to be that they still have wage-labor and commodity production. I have a few qurestions about this:
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Can they be abolished instantly, even in poor or middle-income countries?
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If not, what concrete steps can AESS take to slowly eliminate wage-labor and commodity production?
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How would things like resource allocation, and estimating efficiency of production, work in a socialist society that no longer uses money?
During the Spanish Revolution, Aragonian peasants attempted to immediately end commodity production with mixed success. Some towns managed to move to gift and library systems while many ended up creating mutual currencies or labor voucher systems. I'm not sure if these were purely economic systems, or more akin to what Graeber terms 'social currencies,' but Marx would have called it capitalism.
I think this is a good indicator of the feasibility of immediately ending commodity production: you can make huge gains, but you can't take it all the way.
That said, I think ending commodity production is an incredibly important goal, and there are a few models we can look at.
In Venezuela, the commune system allows workers to formally and legally take control of aspects of the economy, but only after they've seized it themselves. So, for example, if workers started running their workplace collectively, rather than reinstate the old order, would formalize the arrangement and subsidize it.
The Haudenosaunee would allocate neccesary resources and then distribute them to families. They called it the longhouse. We call it libraries. In my neighborhood, most of us don't own power tools or bike repair stuff, but volunteer once a month at a tool library.
Buy nothing groups are a way to common day to day trades that happen outside big institutions, and again, there are ways we can incentivise participation in these institutions.
Ending the separation of labor is fundamental to ending the commodity form, as it forces the exchange of goods. Stalin's plan to give everyone a multi trade technical education is a concrete move towards ending that division.
The big thing though, is that rebellions are known for creating decommodified institutions, for example general strikes often create non violent police alternatives and kitchens that feed everyone. We can simply support and continue those institutions.
These seem like good ideas at the smale scale but what about big industries? To take an extreme, how would nuclear fusion research go on in a socialist society, or how are megafactories built and operated?
The leftcom answer would be to centralize it and have it have an elected government direct production rather than the market, and in the case of the Soviet Union, finish WWI, use the red army to depose the Social Democrats in Germany and then practice Gernan--Russian autarky while deposing capitalist governments across the world.
My answer is... different. As an anarchist I'd point out that we can meet human needs without either of those things, and that the hell of the factory isn't that it has a boss, but that it's a factory.
I mean i would say it would have to depend on the material conditions in each case. what works in spain will not work with US will not work with china will mot work with russia. its gotta be materially based and each citizen in a different country has a different relationship to the base
Ok, so taking the US as an example, suppose a revolution happened and a DotP was established, would you support immediately abolishing money, wage-labor etc or in a gradual way. And what concrete steps would you take in the gradualist position?
you’re jumping so many hoops with assume we have a revolution and then we have a DOTP. how? under what conditions? I don’t have the answers you want sadly, im not smart enough to forsee how itll play out because we just are that far away from any substantial left change. hate to use that as a cop out but its the truth. we need to build new theory that takes into account the structure of neoliberal core country based in consumption and never ending expansion.
Im saying we shouldn’t come into a analysis of how to restructure the US economy without first having a materialist understanding of US and our relationship to base. revolution isn’t cookie cutter imo and removing dogma when deciding how to approach any country is vital.
