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:

  1. Can they be abolished instantly, even in poor or middle-income countries?

  2. If not, what concrete steps can AESS take to slowly eliminate wage-labor and commodity production?

  3. How would things like resource allocation, and estimating efficiency of production, work in a socialist society that no longer uses money?

  • Nagarjuna [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    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.

    • weshallovercum [any]
      hexagon
      ·
      4 years ago

      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?

      • Nagarjuna [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        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.