ÂNGELO NOVO'S PAGE

I hold on to the view that the soviet revolution (understood as a broad European movement) was defeated in the early 20's and thereafter - for various historical reasons of which the insufficient development of the productive forces is prominent - was completely unable to fulfill the transitional tasks in Russia: separation of intellectual and manual labor persisted, work was totally conscript and alienated, commodified relations (wage, prices, market, etc.) persisted, the state was solidly in place throughout.

Basically what occurred there was a mere juridical (superstructural) change, a transfer of the property of the most important means of production. This is, of course, a gross simplification but I need to make that story short here. The S.U. was a grand and progressive political project and it's imprints are all over in this century, most notably on the political emancipation of the colonized nations. But it didn't even start to engage in any of the tasks of the transition to communism. Lenin was certainly aware of this problematic and made important theoretical contributions to it. On his last writings one can sense a growing anxiety over it. After his death, the problem was completely falsified and a revisionist orthodoxy took hold on the CP apparatus.

Capital is not a thing (a very common error on economicists and all sorts of social democrats, from Stalin to the market socialists). It is an historically determinate social relation and process. Simple expropriation or nationalization doesn't even starts addressing the problem of transition. Property (or appropriation, control, etc.) is a mere expression of the given relations of production, not the other way around.

Althusser once said: "le socialisme, c'est la merde". We Marxists are communists and communism is what we aim. Communism is not an utopian pipe dream. Much to the contrary, communism is our immediate task. It is very much on the order of the day despite the fact that very few people realize it.

Present day structural unemployment is caused by technical change, that is (under capitalism), the rise of the organic composition of capital. This process is running against the existing relations of production, through which only living labor can valorize capital. As Marx predicted, profit rates are falling. The bourgeoisie tries to enlarge its profit margins by attacking the overall remuneration of labor (real wages, welfare, etc.). But this can only lead to crisis of underconsumption and difficulties on the reproduction of the labor force. Capitalism goes from crisis to crisis engaged in a vicious circle. Soon enough it will be unable to feed the present levels of population. Mankind will have to be downsized to fit its needs.

The answer to this trend is that we should work "all of us, less, differently". For that we need to engage in a break with the capitalist relations of production. And that can only begin to be accomplished through political revolution and the seizure of state power worldwide by the international proletariat.

For a long time, we would still have wages, prices and market. Work would still be (economically or otherwise) compulsory. But, due to the acceleration of the technical revolution, work schedules will be decreasing steadily (20 hours a week, 15, 12, 8...). The "free time" thus gained will be engaged in free, creative activities by the workers (and not wasted in commodified leisure). Much of this activities are, of course, productive, but completely liberated from the capitalist relations of production. It will be communist work. No division of labor subsists there and, therefore, no relations mediated by value or money as the general equivalent.

A fierce battle (and cooperation) between these two modes of production unfolds then, under the guidance of the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the end of the process, the subsistence and progress of human society will be entirely based on the free, associated and creative activity of the workers. It will be an economy (or, more aptly, a post-economy) of affluence and gift, over which no coercion (maxime, the state) whatsoever subsists. No money, no fetishized relations. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The reign of freedom triumphs over the reign of necessity.

Of course, these are all generalities and I can't detain myself on details right now. But if you think this is hopelessly utopian, you'd better take a closer look because it might start unfolding before your very eyes. All I can say is that we are in a dire need to work out anew, from scratch, the theory of transition, or we may soon find ourselves, totally unprepared, burdened with its concrete tasks.

All this process is, of course, not certain to occur at all. I don't believe in any iron historical determinism. What we have, is a damn fine chance of getting there over the next century or so. The rest is up to us.

The old man was often wrong at political short term analysis and some minor technicalities. But his profound grasp of capitalism's internal logic and structure (product of decades running and ruminating through "das oekonomischen scheisse") made of him the most powerful of all historical visionaries. Pure genius.

Brian:
Perhaps Ângelo would help the discussion along by elaborating how the various transitional tasks could be and should in the future by effected? Especially interesting is the liquidation of the division of mental and manual labor. Any thoughts, Ângelo?

Lets start by my own personal experience on the division of mental and manual labor. I have a job - totally unproductive and quite despicable, as a matter of fact - as legal adviser in the City Hall of Vila Nova de Gaia, near Porto, or Oporto as the english call it. Now, typically this means studying some volumous and confused dossiers and add another piece of paper to them with my legal opinion and signature. Hopefully, the dossier then gets carried to another desk somewhere else. Some just keep coming back... My colleagues do this the following way: they write their information and hand the manuscript to the "meninas" (low qualified, usually female, administrative employees). The "meninas" will type it in on their computers and hand it back to the lawyer to check for any mistakes. Then it goes back to the "meninas" for correction and again for the lawyer for signature (sometimes, new corrections or additions, etc.). I do it differently. I go for the "meninas" room (where the computers are) and, while chatting amicably with them, type my own information, correct it, do the lay-out, print it and sign it. They are delighted. My colleagues, of course, have only contempt for such cross-class sociability. But I do this only partly out of ideological conviction. The fact is that this way it's incomparably more quick and efficient. Of course, this is all very nice but, under capitalist relations of production (and if the City Hall was guided by economic rationality), the generalization of my work habits would tend to get the girls downsized sooner or later. They would have to find a new job selling hot-dogs on the shopping centers or taking care of pet animals. Luckily, my colleagues' (majoritely female, I must say) class arrogance and prejudice will probably prevent this from happening for a long time.

This is not merely anecdotal. It's happening all around, as anyone can see. This new syncretism of intellectual and manual tasks is imposed by the most advanced technologies. There are many industries (software, electronics, etc.) where virtually no exclusively manual labor is hired anymore. This is even reflected in bourgeois managerial theory, where soft and supple structures are the new hype, as opposed to the rigidly hierarchical and top-down paradigm of taylorism.

I think the workers of the future will be probably constituted mostly of engineers supervising and optimizing complex systems and making themselves all the necessary adjustments and improvements. An immense majority (and then all) of mankind's time will be freed from compulsory labor. Of course, the creative and free activity of all will constitute the cultural environment from which progress in the productive field will arise. So, the borders of productive and unproductive work will tend to be blurred. Work, art, science and sport will be everybody's common occupation. Lets just say that we will all work by randomly philosophizing aloud, with our minds and our hands. And, of course, the cumulative and combined effect of all this individual and collective activity will be "government" if that concept still has any meaning.

I don't have a complete "blueprint" of how we can get from here to there. I merely stated that this is a field where urgent theoretical work is needed. Luckily, some comrades are already doing it. But most of us are simply too confused, demoralized and (or) faithless to engage in such "advanced" tasks. Others still will tend to rely exclusively on Stalinist and Maoist established theory. In my opinion, these will simply not do. Again, I don't want to engage in a discussion on the merits of the soviet and chinese revolutions. Lenin and Mao Zedong were great revolutionaries and their teachings as such are invaluable. In addition, they were both communists (which is more than I can say of both Stalin and Trotsky). But the transition to communism wasn't really engaged anywhere, as yet. Not in Russia, not in China, not in Cuba.

We most certainly will be needing:

1) Dictatorship of the proletariat worldwide;

2) A giant reallocation of resources away from commodity based production or sectors that only make sense under its logic (armaments, luxury items, publicity, automobile, financial, etc.) and into the satisfaction of people's basic needs, education and training;

3) Distribution of (economically or administratively) compulsory work by all, on a lighter schedule. Some estimates (1) establish that, after 2) above, and to maintain the present level of production, we could begin immediately with a 20 hours a week work load for all. As productivity levels rise, weekly work hours would be decreasing, tending to zero;

4) Meanwhile, the communist mode of production would be thriving, based on the free activity of all workers. As it satisfies more and more of current human needs, commodified production becomes ever more circunscript to isolated purses of resistance;

5) Under the political leadership and vigilance of the proletariat, all commodified production is finally extinct. Wages, prices and market are things of the past. Offer and demand are in constant contact by myriad channels of instant electronic communication. No more anarchy of production. Social classes are abolished and the state withers away.

At this stage, I cannot say much more than this. Ultimately, only concrete class struggle can fill the empty spots and complete the picture. However, I think we already have elements to start working on a theory of transition along these roughly defined lines. Theory can and probably will be a material force and a decisive element on arising class conscience and combativity. Our message to the proletariat and the masses (mostly in retreat and demoralized) should be: there's plenty of hope ahead, strike on and break through.

Ken:
The nature of the transition between capitalism and communism is of course a key question of revolution. You oppose sterile debates on whether the Soviet Union was capitalist in favor of getting a more concrete picture of the transition period. You are trying to reorient the method of discussion. I sympathize with your disdain for some of the debates that go on in the various internet lists. No doubt, when I see various of the other articles in the thread on the "theory of transition", I will sympathize even more with your complaint. I too think that it is not just a question that various wrong views appear in these debates, but that a different method of approach has to be found.

Yes, I believe a different method of approach has to be found. Particularly one that is not anchored in petrified dogma bequeathed by the various participants in these historical events and their petty sects of devoted followers today. A certain "return to Marx" is in order here.

Ken:
However, I think the question of whether the Soviet Union was state- capitalist or socialist is important. From the theoretical angle, the assessment of the revisionist regimes is one of the key questions of 20th century history revolutionary history. This is something new, and whether Marxism stands or falls depends in large part on the assessment of these regimes. The proletariat, when it rebuilds revolutionary parties, will be immediately faced with the question: Did socialism collapse at the end of the 20th century or state-capitalism?

I have no doubts in my mind that the Soviet Union was capitalist since the end of the civil wars (and wars of imperialist intervention). That is, the transitional tasks were not even fully addressed, ever. Lenin made a tremendous effort, in extremely rough historical conditions, but ultimately he was very confused himself. We don't have a coherent Leninist approach to it.

Ken:
It might be said that the Stalinist definition of socialism gives up the communist goals and dresses up some transitional features as socialism. This is an aspect of the truth. But the criticism of Stalinism and of the revisionist regimes has to go further than that. It is not just a question of the theoretical view of socialism given by the revisionists but of whether these regimes were in fact in transition to socialism or were actually building up state-capitalist orders. Did the revisionists remain our erring comrades, or did they cross the class lines.

I believe they did, very obviously, crossed that line. When (who) and why have they done it remains (and will probably remain for a long time) subject to debate. Whether we can scientifically address this debate remains to be seen. It all seems to rest ultimately on assumptions about the intimate subjective convictions of the political leaders in charge. The trotskyists will say that line was crossed when their master was kicked out of the S.U., the maoists will point to the exact date and hour of the deaths of Stalin (for the S.U.) and Mao (for China), etc. But the leaders could be still in good faith and the process have already - quite flagrantly - derailed beneath them. Is Fidel Castro a crook or a D. Quixote? I have recently read a book which had a chapter about Lenin's last years entitled "the dreamer on the Kremlin". The problem is a question of social structure and dynamics and it has to be studied according to the laws of historical materialism. But History is a science that just can’t be studied “contemporaneously”. We need distantiation. We can now establish (more or less) when and why the transition was made from feudalism to capitalism, but the transition to communism (our present task) doesn’t have a charted road. Lenin was clearly not an opportunist leader, but was he on track for communism? Only History will tell, when it can be made objectively.

Ken:
So a comparison has to be made between revisionist society and transitional society, and not only between revisionist society and socialist society. The transitional society has features which are not simply the same as those of socialist society. Nor is the transitional society simply part way to socialism in some quantitative sense. For example, the role of the revolutionary party drops out of classless society altogether. So does the class struggle, and the state itself. In fact the economy looks radically different from the transitional economy.

I use the term socialism (when I use it at all) as synonymous of transitional society or, when considered on its political features, dictatorship of the proletariat. The transition we're talking about here is to communism. So, you have capitalist societies, then post-revolutionary (or socialist) societies and finally communism. I don't believe in "building socialism". In my view, this is precisely a revisionist ruse. They meant to say that they were building something that wasn't quite communism yet (keep cool, folks). But then they intermingled socialism and communism in a confusionist way and nobody was sure anymore if they were still moving towards the goal or if, well, that was it already. Ultimately, they were hoping to brush the question under the carpet as a conceptual trifle. Or they would say -a classical revisionist act - that the movement was everything and the final goal nothing.

On my view, what we have to build, in a post-revolutionary society, is communism. So, in examining the revisionist regimes, we have to compare them to a sound assessment of the transitional tasks towards communism, as we can understand them today with (at least some) hindsight.

Ken:
In this regard, although capitalist and socialist elements are mixed in the transitional economy, I don't think this can be understood as that part of the economy is fully communist and another part capitalist and they fight. The socialist or communist forces in the transitional society certainly do fight the forces of retrogression and capitalism, but the communist forces are not organized in the way classless society is:
* A classless society has no party and no government; and yet the communist parts of the transitional society support the proletarian dictatorship and the proletarian party.
* The working class seeks to develop a social control over production in the transitional society; and yet there is no separate working class in a classless society.
* A classless society has no class divisions, and a transitional society does. Can one say that one part of the transitional society is classless and another part class-divided? Wouldn't that be like saying that a working-class suburb today is a nucleus of classless society because the bourgeoisie lives elsewhere?
* Can one part of the economy have a standard 40-hour week, and another part a standard 20-hour week? And how can one part of the economy be entirely free of money and commodity production while some stubborn parts of the economy are still based on commodity production: how do they exchange products?

I don't think you have fully understood my picture of the transitional society. First, I must stress that this is a purely conjectural sketch. It has happened nowhere, as yet. And it depends on the existence of high levels of productivity and a certain amount of affluence.

In my view, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a work week FOR ALL. Lets say, a 20 hours week. Nobody works 40 hours anymore. Everybody - including the remaining capitalists - works 20 hours, for a wage. With that wage, people can purchase goods that are still produced and distributed through mercantile mechanisms. However, since people have lots of free time they start (under the guidance and control of the workers' power) engaging in free community work. The product of this work is distributed freely.

Lets suppose I work on a computer factory. On my free time, I cultivate oranges just for fun. You will have to spent part of your wage to purchase my computers but you can have my oranges for free. Or you will have the choice of buying oranges still produced on a mercantile basis, if they look better to you or if you’re a die-hard bourgeois ideologue. The dictatorship of the proletariat will supervise all this process. It will direct the resources from one sector to another. It will repress efforts of the capitalist class to enlarge the reach of the mercantile relations or recover political power. A certain amount of competition exists then, between a capitalist and a communist sector. The dictatorship of the proletariat will see to it that it develops on the right direction. Private capitalism is only tolerated where and as long as it is necessary to provide certain goods.

As productivity levels rise, work for wages begins to shrink. Say, after 50 years, we can impose a 15 hour week FOR ALL. Maybe we can now put a end to all private capitalists, placing all means of production under social ownership. Maybe we can reinforce social control of all units of production. We are all proletarians now, as wage workers, and SIMULTANEOUSLY, we are all communist producers. Since we have still more free time, more goods can now be produced and distributed entirely free of the circuits of capital. At the end of the process, say in 100 years, ALL PRODUCTION is communist. No distinction of classes subsists. The state withers away. In my view (and this is where our views diverge) no separate administrative apparatus will be needed to regulate the economy. In fact, there is no economy. This is the part where instant electronic communication enters, balancing the offer and demand of goods. The allocation of productive resources is automatically channeled to where people freely place their demands most. It is "anarchic" in the sense that nobody has power to direct and control the free initiative of the producers. However, remember, this is not capitalist offer and demand we’re talking here. There is no market and the law of value was abolished. This is entirely free production and distribution. It just means that society will self-regulate itself. It will produce and consume according to its free will and design.

Ken:
This brings up the question of what social planning and planned production is, how it differs from the bourgeois conception that a tyrant tells everyone what to do, and why--in a classless society--an overall administration of things is not the same thing as a government. These are among the central issues of both the classless society and the transitional period.

Planning is an indispensable tool during the transitional period. Market mechanisms will function in it too, in the progressively shrinking interstices left to it. But I have problems accepting a separate body of planners in a full communist society. For as much democratic control is exercised over it, a tendency will always be present for it to constitute itself into a new oligarchy. And the danger exists that this body of planners will build pressure for de facto appropriation of the means of production.

I know you mean to say that ALL OF SOCIETY will do this planning, so there is no separate body of planners at all. But I see no way this can be done, unless through (electronic) instant democracy mechanisms. Since we are talking of the allocation of resources (or the mere "administration of things") can I assume that your view is not that distant from mine after all?

Ken:

The question of planning in the future, fully communist society seems to be of these issues in which we are trying to figure out what each other means. You have certain questions about what I mean by planning by all of society, while I don't understand how planning can be done simply through instant electronic communication.

It's true we're still trying to figure out what the other one thinks about communism. But then this has been true ever since there is a communist movement, and that goes a long way back from Marx and Engels. People have been fighting for communism for millennia, and nobody ever has had a clear idea of how it would work.

Communism is such a compelling idea, that everybody just assumes that it must be feasible. Or is it a recollection from another - perfect - world, before the fall?... I'm not a religious man. If communism is not a religious illusion (and that is still an hypothesis), then it must be a powerful collective intuition.

On scientific work, when you can imagine a mathematical equation of great beauty and symmetry, people will say: This is so devastating, IT MUST BE TRUE. And it generally is.

Marx was not a religious man either. But when he wrote the "Critique of the Gotha Program", he was clearly on the borderline of science and visionary prophecy.

My whole idea is that, we are now entering a stage in capitalist civilization where we can not only imagine communism (and the picture gets clearer and clearer), we can actually begin to see little bits of it popping up spontaneously. Our duty is to study these matters in detail and start filling the gaps. At the end, we will no longer have just a vision, but a very concrete and detailed political programme for transition. We can show - with facts, figures and graphics - that there's a way to go from here and communism is just around the corner. Only then, probably, will the proletariat rise for a definite account settling with the bourgeoisie.

Ken:

Actually, I think there will be some type of administrative apparatus. Will they be "separate bodies"? Yes and no. They will NOT be separate bodies in the sense that they are not alienated from society as a whole; they are not separate from and above society; there will not be a separate class of people that serves on them and rules over the excluded people; and they will be linked to actual practice. But they ARE separate bodies in the sense that they actually exist as an administrative apparatus, as actual bodies.

I have many problems with this. It breaks the perfect symmetry of our vision, and so far this is the best guaranty we have. It also runs against some of the most established features of communist society: the abolition of social division of labor and of the distinction between mental and manual labor. A separate administrative body will create its own "separate" science and methods of direction. There will be "separate" academies for it. This means common people will be alienated from important aspects of the decision of their lives. It's a matter of time and we will end up falling back into a class society.

Ken:

The key question of communism, on which it rises or falls, is whether such coordination can be achieved without oppression. The capitalists say no, and thus communism is unrealistic and utopian. Marx and Engels said yes--if the means of production are social property, if the class division in society is eliminated, the coordination and administration of production can lose their political character and become an administration "of things" and not an oppression of people. Marxism says that it isn't the existence of the administrative apparatus itself that creates oppression, but the division of society into classes. The anarchists say no--anything but direct democracy is oppressive, and they don't realize that they are thereby enchaining the masses to the marketplace.

After reading this, I have the impression that your anti-revisionism hasn't gone quite deep enough yet. With this, we could easily find ourselves in the same old revisionist shit-hole again. You go from the social "property" of the means of production to the elimination of class division. This is exactly the Stalinist approach.

But the class division of society is not a function of the property of the means of production. It's rather the other way around. A certain class division in society (product of certain RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION) creates this form of appropriation of the means of production. Propriety is a mere juridical (bourgeois) concept. If we are to move away from capitalism, we cannot just proceed by expropriating the bourgeoisie and keep an eye on the enemy within (two line struggle). We must transform the relations of production. And this can only come about when the forces of production are mature enough for it.

Sure enough, large-scale production is coordinated effort. But how will this effort be coordinated? If we coordinated it by traditional bossing methods (through a separate body of planners), we haven't moved away an inch from the capitalist relations of production. The correspondent appropriation patterns will follow soon enough. You can scream and shout and make a thousand and one "cultural revolutions". This will come about inevitably.

And how will this "administrative apparatus" restrict itself to the "administration of things"? What do you (or rather Engels) mean by that? Will "things" just start moving around upon hearing the voice of the administrative apparatus? Doesn't it need to command people to do this and that work, after all? It's decisions (however democratic and participatory), aren't they enforceable? Doesn't it need a repressive apparatus to ensure obedience then? Isn't this a State? So there you have it: a State in your "classless" society. This paradox stems from a flawed approach to the transition, that is, we are still stuck on the revisionist marshes.

Ken:

For example, you had talked of "offer and demand" being placed into contact. I can understand how this takes place in a marketplace between buyers and sellers. This method is suitable to establishing a marketplace connection between a multitude of small producers. But I don't understand how "offer and demand" can actually run the entire production of a classless society or provide conscious planning.

The general idea (don't ask me for too many details) is: available at home, on your monitor (integrated TV, net, video-phone, etc.) you'll have a detailed report of all of societies needs and demands, as expressed by all comrade citizens. You can input your own demands on the system through your own home terminal. The system will then analyze the available resources and tell people where does society have excess capacity for the demands registered, and where it is running short of them. As people are nurtured with cooperative values, they will tend to shift their occupations away from where they are not wanted anymore to where they are most needed. As people are highly educated and productive activity is simple (it constitutes mostly on supervising and improving automated chains of production), changing occupation is free, simple and easy to do. There are no material rewards for it. People will just tend to act that way out of desire to be useful. A new equilibrium is thus reached. It's the invisible hand, communist style. "Conscious planning" is the result of all this.

Ken:
But how it can plan what type of water conservation programs to use? Whether certain methods of production are relatively harmful and should be replaced? What the patterns of land use should be? What global action should be taken to prevent global warming or the destruction of the ozone layer or the overfishing of the world's oceans? These are tasks that are not only necessary but also excite many people and arouse their enthusiasm. Can you give me a more concrete picture of how these things might be accomplished by the methods you envision? I know I am asking you to do a lot of work, even if thinking about future society is a labor of love. But could you imagine such a typical economic problem in the future society and describe to me how it might be settled in your conception?

The system will tell you, where and why we are beginning to have problems and how to solve them. This "system" is, of course, not just a communication medium like today's internet. It is a highly complex and powerful information treatment device. The data from all observation posts (on earth, submarine, satellite, etc.) is feeded to the system, like in today's "intelligent houses". It will be instantly available to everyone. The experts, or any informed people, will read this data and make their analysis. The arguments will be fought over and over again. Conclusions will be easier to reach than today, not only because the instruments will be more precise but (above all) because the experts won't be corrupted by capitalist interests. When we have a fairly clear picture of the alternatives at play, the subject is posed to a universal vote. So if you are a agronomic engineer, or someone who can express an articulated view on these subjects, you can alert the system (and all comrade citizens) for what is, in your opinion, an inadequate use of the land. Your opinion is immediately available to everybody. The subject is discussed. The conclusion reached is that your opinion is a little exaggerated. There is a certain amount of depletion of land but the alternative use won't give us quite enough food supply. The alternatives are put as clearly as possible (with graphics and stuff). People will vote. Of course, this doesn't guarantee a good decision. We (or our children) may still regret it later. But it has been fairly decide upon, and all the participants had exclusively the public good in view.

Ken:
One could of course vote on such issues. And electronic communications allows the rapid counting of votes. But voting on an issue is not the same as balancing offer and demand; they are two very different things. Voting presupposes that the result of the vote will be regarded as authoritative by the people, whereas the idea of balancing offer and demand seems to imply that there will be no need for any type of authority. Voting assumes that society can implement the vote. It requires that, if there is a vote for a rail network, that the required steel production and construction work and research into improvements and so forth will be carried out, and carried out over a protracted period of time. The balance of offer and demand, on the other hand, varies from moment to moment. And, if it is to be informed voting, voting even requires that everyone think about the issue and have available to them good information. The balance of offer and demand does not require that people have any viewpoint other than their immediate needs.

This is a very important point. Once a decision is reached on an important social investment, this decision needs to be implemented of course. Is this to be done without coercion? Yes. Plans, locations, technical solutions will be offered, debated and voted upon. After which, people will simply volunteer to do the work. By the mechanisms of the invisible hand depicted above, people will come from where they aren't needed to implement this project. If they don't show up in sufficient number and qualification, then something is wrong. The people has decided something that it is not really interested in implementing. Another solution must be reached.

Ken:
It seems to me that the issue of separate bodies is related to the issue of direct democracy vs. representative democracy. Once the number of people involved becomes big enough, direct democracy becomes all but impossible.

I think you're wrong here. We will have soon enough the technical means to make direct democracy an everyday habit for all. Of course, to put them to use, we will first have to chase the bourgeoisie from power. After that, the problem I see is another one. Will everybody have the time and the patience to study and vote in conscience all the problems that are constantly requiring decision? This is the real problem. Even with very limited and free work schedules, people's attention span and capacity for treating information are limited. I can imagine a kind of democratic stress. People are interested and motivated, but there is simply no way they can participate in all the important decisions. They'll want to have some fun too.

Many of the smaller problems will probably have to be decided by the minority of those who took interest on it at the time. The problem is then to find a way of filtering the information and the problems that are indeed essential for people's lives. This will, of course, be done by the individuals themselves. I may choose to be aware of all local problems, or of all global environmental questions, and so on. A good level of education will ensure that people WILL BE INTERESTED in the really essential problems. There will be nothing like present day mass alienation. Everybody will have a fair chance to participate in every decisions who may have some impact on their lives. However, since they cannot possibly participate in absolutely all of them, their lives are likely to be somehow affected by decisions made without their participation. This is not a perfect world after all.

Ken:
However, when I talk about planning being done by society as a whole, I don't just mean that planning bodies are selected by society. And I don't agree that central planning means a single planning body decides every detail, which is then enforced by appointed agents that go to every enterprise and say "do it exactly this way". At every level, the people involved must have their own consciousness and initiative (as well as having their share in contributing to the overall decisions); they will take a myriad of decisions on their own; but the local decisions will be within the overall plans.

Look Ken, you're just stating a big mountain of your best intentions here. But this road has been tried before and it never worked. There's nothing new here. We have had some of the best and most gifted communists leaders of this century pursuing this path, followed by a wave of tremendous popular enthusiasm and emulation. And they all failed. What makes you think it will work now? Because now we have studied revisionism and we are prepared to face it when it comes? Because we're going to try harder?

The fact, however, is that when you embark on this road, you are already defeated. You're assuming that there will always be directors and directed. The first will decide the allocation of productive resources (including human labor), and the seconds will obey and cooperate all the way, filling the little details (like the today’s workers on toyotist "quality circles"). But this is the essence of class society, on its nucleus. This is the essence of the capitalist relations of production. As long as we follow this road, THE CAPITALIST PRIVATE APPROPRIATION OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION WILL ALWAYS STRIVE TO REAPPEAR AT THE SURFACE. The capitalist relations of production will be enveloped in a institutional overcoat that doesn't suits them. That's why state-capitalism is unstable. It works, somehow, but it doesn't work as good as plain capitalism. When they realize it, all "communist" leaders (however heroic and honest) become revisionists pure and simple. They will typically start taking measures such as: freedom of action for enterprises, then a little market, then privatization pure and simple.

Ken:
Thus I don't believe the problem of linking planning to the whole society (or preventing an oligarchy) is solved simply by the formal fact that the representatives are chosen democratically. The heart of the question of the transition period centers, in essence, on how to increase the ability of the working class to actually carry out this planning.

Indeed it does. And the answer is: on the transition period, they will freely elect (and destitute) all planning bodies, controlling and participating at all levels in all planning decisions; on the communist society, they'll do all planning themselves, by moving freely from occupation to occupation and by conceiving and deciding all social investments.

Ken:
Marx and Engels held that, after the working class seizes power, it at first transforms the means of production into state property. It does this as a step towards having the society as a whole runs production. Thus nationalization of the economy is an inevitable part of the transitional period, but this doesn't mean that any nationalization is therefore a step towards socialism. It is only such a step when it is carried out by a proletarian government and moreover, only when it serves to increase the actual ability of the working class to take control of production.

I agree with what you say here, with some reservations. When the workers take power they don't just use the state as they found it, they smash it and erect a different political apparatus in its place - the dictatorship of the proletariat. Of course, you know this only too well: it's the ABC of the Marxist theory of the state. Then the workers must proceed at once with assuring control of production and the revolutionizing of the relations of production. And this is indeed where the class struggle will be centered on the transitional society. An enormous amount of energy and imagination must be invested here.

The fact is, our current political language (and this is not just your case) plays tricks on us. When you use concepts such as proletarian "government", "nationalization" of the economy or state "property", you must be aware that you are using concepts embedded with bourgeois meaning and heavy with revisionist reminiscences. Workers don't just form a "government", they don't just "nationalize" the means of production transforming it into state "property". Something much more deep must be happening here. This state is no longer a state (or a government) in the classical sense, and the appropriation doesn't take the (typically bourgeois) form of property. The appropriation pattern changes in content and not only in its subject. And a fierce struggle must be engaged to constantly transform the relations of production (and, consequently, all this institutional architecture) leading them in the direction of communism. Otherwise we will be following straight the revisionist path. I'm sure you will agree with all this. It's just that we don't have a readily available new vocabulary.

I'm not sure you will agree with what I'll say next. I think Lenin made a fabulous work of regeneration of the Marxist theory of the state. But on the economic sphere, I think he was still caught in the evolutionist view, typical of the II International orthodoxy. He tended to see state capitalist monopoly as the immediate threshold of socialism. All things were already on its proper place, all you needed was a workers' state and expropriation. I think this is wrong and it accounted for many of the theoretical difficulties he found later when confronted with the practical tasks of assuring workers' control of production. The socialization of the economy (large scale production, etc.) under capitalism is made on a capitalist logic and for capitalist use only. Upon taking power, the workers must smash the bourgeois state, but they must also smash the bourgeois *enterprise* (or the paradigm of capitalist organization of production). Without that, they cannot transform the relations of production and, inevitably, its political rule will be corrupted and will vanish like a castle of sand. Of course, to take on the tasks of revolutionizing the relations of production, the forces of production must be mature enough and, so to speak, by themselves cry out for such a transformation as a liberation. I think this is beginning to happen now. But it probably wasn't yet the case in Lenin's time (and this wasn't just a case of Russia's relative backwardness then). There were no technical (and, consequently, cultural, political, etc.) conditions for consolidating workers' rule. I think that, ultimately, this was the single most decisive factor in the defeat of the soviet revolution.

Ken:

Perhaps your idea is that these panels of experts or informed people differ from an administrative apparatus in that there could be both formal and informal panels, there can be competing panels, anyone who is especially informed can enter the panel, etc. etc. But all this is similar to my idea of an administrative apparatus. Anything you can describe for your panels can be duplicated in my idea of an administrative apparatus, because it is simply a question of a different name for the same concept. (It is not a question of whether anyone trusts my assurances about this, any more than it is a matter of whether anyone trusts your assurances. Whenever there is a relatively free system, various of these safeguards are already used--the question is to find the economic conditions under which they will be effective.)

The point is that you recognize that, while people can switch from one occupation to another, at any one time there are some people who are informed on electrical generation, others who are informed about chemicals, and still others who are doctors, etc. The fact that there are no class barriers to switching operations doesn't mean that everyone does everything at the same time. Hence your talk of "informed people".

In my view, there will only be informal panels of experts, to use your terms. So, in my opinion, I don't think they add up to form any kind of apparatus. The thing is, everybody can and will become an *expert* on something. Of course, there will be people more talented than others. Solely on this base, some people will therefore tend to specialize on little and simpler tasks and some others on more global or complex problems and issues. Everybody will thus naturally find his own field and range of competence and *authority* (in the sense found by Engels in the gentile society), based solely on the quality of his own ideas, opinions and craftsmanship. The sum result of all this will be kind of an administration of everything by everybody.

No issues, however, will be decided by the *experts*, let alone restricted panels of them. Under communism, social matters are much too serious to be left for the pernicious tyranny of experts. The *authority* of the experts will be restricted to the (free and open to everyone) discussion of the problems and the selection of alternative solutions. There, the arguments will fight each other openly and may the best win the day. Once, by this process, a clear picture of the problem is formed, the alternative solutions must be expressed in a clear and comprehensible way for everybody. Then the issue is taken to a vote where every interested person (experts or not) will have a single vote.

This is all very sketchy yet, but I think we can have direct democracy on all fundamental issues, however complex they might be.

Ken:
The issue you raise of "democratic stress" is indeed very important. But filtering the information, deciding what is major and what is minor, and so forth, is not a mere technical function. It is not automatic. Whoever does this is really making major decisions. So long as this isn't done by everyone (which would go against the whole idea of filtering and which is impossible if you consider the millions and millions of economic decisions that have to be made each year), it is being done by some form of organization. People might vote on what kind of organization would do the filtering or whether mistakes had been made in the filtering, but then they are voting on the type of organization to be used and on its performance, rather than deciding all the issues by direct democracy.

The issue of filtering information is indeed a very important one. Let me very clear here. All filtering that is not totally free and exclusive self-filtering is absolutely intolerable. No organization, however democratic, filters anything to anybody. Everybody will have absolute and total sovereignty over what issues he/she chooses to be aware and informed of. Since nobody (not even *God* or Laplace's monster) can possibly receive and analyze all the information available on the global reseau, this is the only solution. It’s not just that central planning is coercive and ineffective. As society gets more and more complex, it will be virtually impossible.

How filtering will work is actually quite simple. Everybody will simply *tune in* to whatever is of more direct concern to him/her. They will participate in the forums and the decisions taking place there. Of course, since there is a high degree of social consciousness, the more important and global problems will tend to be followed by everybody.

Ken:
One ends up with a complex system to decide the claims of different areas. And yet, this system of deciding issues is irrelevant, unless it is assumed that the decisions will have some binding effect. If every binding decision requires a state and a repressive apparatus to enforce it (which I *don't* agree will be the case in classless society), then so does the decision to enforce the veto on all relevant factories and enterprises. Moreover, such decisions as those to ban DDT because it is poisoning various areas, have to be enforced on health organizations and pesticide producers hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

This is a really important issue: how to enforce bannings. I would say, by pure means of spontaneous social reprobation. You must remember that in a communist society, all work is voluntary. If you don't want to do nothing, you can lay down and do nothing. You will have all the socially available means of consumption and recreation at your disposal just the same. You don't get *richer* out of your productive initiative. If people work, it is by natural compulsion, by the pure desire to be useful, and also (and most importantly) by a desire of social recognition. People will want to be admired by their work. It is the expression of one's capacities and personality. So it is a very weird phenomenon indeed for a person (or a group of persons) to engage in a productive activity only to be universally despised and condemned. Nobody would use their products. It would be proof of a seriously deranged personality. I wouldn't say these people will be locked away, for there probably won't be any mental asylums left. Everybody is entitled to his own madness, as long as it's not socially harmful. But they will surely be a very marginal phenomenon. On the limit, a neighborhood collective might decide to dismantle and seal their hazardous and useless factories. There won't be any need for a repressive apparatus to take care of these cases.

Ken:
The point I am raising is this. You try in theory to avoid organization and simply have each individual relating to an almost invisible information network which functions automatically without human intervention. But each time you consider a concrete problem, you seem to add another layer of organization to your future society in order to deal with it. In theory, you want to have an "invisible hand". In practice, you end up with the need for *conscious human intervention* (and this requires organization) to solve one serious problem after another.

When I talked of an *invisible hand*, this was kind of a private joke. In fact, all productive decisions are *conscious human interventions*. There is no anarchy of production. People will have a very clear picture of the current social needs and freely decide to satisfy them. No *organization* (in the sense of superior direction) will be required for this. Lenin's national wide (in our case, world wide) accounting and book-keeping is performed and permanently kept current over the internet, or its successor. We could call it Vladimir Lenin Resources Data House, or something like it. Everybody has access to this information. It will available to all, as will an analytical description of all socially expressed demands. (In fact, we already have software capable of doing this. Capitalists use it - on their “lean and mean” enterprises - to keep their inventory costs at a minimum and provide a quick reply to shifts in consumer demand.)

When people decide what to do, they will bear this in mind. Planning is made by the sum of all individual or otherwise autonomous productive decisions, for these will be all socially *conscious* ones. Everyone takes upon himself the role of planner and plan executor.

Ken:
The need for coordination and an administrative apparatus in the future society is something referred to by Marx and Engels; it springs from the very nature of large-scale production. They did distinguish between the state and repressive authority on one hand and that type of authority that would exist in a future society on the other. This means, by the way, that they differed from the anarchists not just in their way of getting to the future society, but in their picture of it as well. The anarchists tend towards the view of a glorified society of individual producers; the Marxists, to a giant co-operative society based on large-scale production but liberated from its capitalist chains.

From what I have depicted above, appearances to the contrary, there are no *individual producers* in my communist society. It's rather a cooperative society in the Marxist sense, but one in which the information necessary to coordinate it flows *all around* multilaterally and not in a pyramidal scheme. It works perfectly coordinated, but people in it are not just pieces in a machine whose general direction and purpose escapes them. They know the all picture and move consciously within it.

Ken:
Engels draws the conclusion that "it is absurd to speak of the principle of authority as being absolutely evil, and of the principle of autonomy as being absolutely good. Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society. If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other;..." (Friedrich Engels, “On Authority”)

EXACTLY SO. Authority (by consent) can have its place in various specific and localized productive systems. If you'll have a railroad system of some sort in the future society, it's working will be coordinated by an elected body. If one freely chooses to take part in this *enterprise*, so to speak, one has better adjust to its technical requirements and, when necessary, take instructions and comply by them. If you're not prepared to do this, you'd better go somewhere else. This particular work involves people's security and the workers must be of maximum reliance.

However, I'll say two things here: 1) Society as a whole won't be coordinated by authority methods, even in this sense; 2) As production gets more and more automated, authority will became an exception and total autonomy will be the norm everywhere. Clogs in a wheel type of work will tend to be performed... by real clogs. We can produce all kinds of "intelligent" clogs for it. Real people will tend to do only creative work, for which autonomy is essential.

Ken, quoting Marx:
"The labor of supervision and management is naturally required wherever the direct process of production assumes the form of a combined social process, and not of the isolated labor of independent producers. However, it has a double nature.
"One the one hand, all labor in which many individuals co-operate necessarily requires a commanding will to co-ordinate and unify the process, and functions which apply not to partial operations but to the total activity of the workshop, much as that of an orchestra conductor. This is a productive job, which must be performed in every combined mode of production.
"On the other hand...this supervision work necessarily arises in all modes of production based on the antithesis between the laborer, as the direct producer, and the owner of the means of production. The greater this antagonism, the greater the role played by supervision. Hence it reaches its peak in the slave system....
"In the works of ancient writers, who had the slave system before them, both sides of the work of supervision are as inseparably combined in theory as they were in practice. Likewise in the works of modern economists, who regard the capitalist mode of production as absolute...."
But Marx believed that these two sides of supervision could in fact be separated. Pointing to various experiments with "co-operative factories", he claimed that: "In a co-operative factory the antagonistic nature of the labour of supervision disappears, because the manager is paid by the labourers instead of representing capital counterpoised to them."
(Capital, vol. 3, Part V "Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-bearing capital", Ch. XXIII "Interest and Profit of Enterprise", pp. 383-4, 387. Actually the whole passage pp. 383-390 is fascinating.)

Right on, Karl. If I understand it correctly, through the successive class societies in History, coordination work has tended to lose some of its more despotic character. At the end of the line, supervision and ordinary work will cease to be antagonistic in a classless society. Then (my conclusion), supervision disappears pure and simply, as technical advances in automation and robotics render it technically useless. Or rather, what actually disappears is the supervised human work. Supervision (plus conceptual design and engineering) will continue but over the work of the machines.

Ken:
You said that you also support planning, and that I and others have misunderstood your position. (...) The issue involved is not simply whether one recognizes the need for planning in general, but whether planning is compatible with the type future society one conceives.

Planning, as we know it, is certainly an indispensable tool for the transitional period. But as the control of production is socialized, and workers' power deepens through all social fabric, political and economic decisions start to be devolved to more local levels. At the end of the process, they are entirely left to autonomous groups or individual producers. But, as I've said before, this will be a long process probably taking centuries to develop fully. No anarchist day dream. This process is so much inevitable as the sheer volume and complexity of information necessary to run society will render any attempt to do it by centralized methods useless. Indeed, it is already so now (on a purely national level) and it will be many times more so in the future, as population grows, productivity and technological sophistication explode and the national social formations merge into a single global communist society. No single mind (or even articulated groups of minds disposed hierarchically) will be able to master this accelerated process of social development in any meaningful way.

Ken:
Thus at one point, you described social planning as "an indispensable tool during the transitional period", implying that it will not be necessary afterwards. At other times, you have said that planning will exist indefinitely, but have described it as being simply the sum of everyone's decisions, with the coordination among them being simply that the autonomous individuals and units are all socially conscious. ("Planning is made by the sum of all individual or otherwise autonomous productive decisions, for these will be all socially *conscious* ones.") You originally described this sort of planning as the "invisible hand"; later you said that this term "was kind of a private joke", but in fact I think it is a vivid and appropriate term. The original "invisible hand" of Adam Smith was the sum of decisions by individuals and autonomous enterprises; your planning is a similar sum, only you assume that everyone is socially conscious, while Smith assumed that they were seeking their own advantage. In both cases, there is a conscious planning of a sort-- each individual or enterprise definitely makes plans. But this type of individual planning cannot overcome the anarchy of production. When Marx and Engels talked of planning, they meant overall social planning. There is no separate overall social planning in the "invisible hand" concept of planning as simply being the sum of the decisions of individuals and autonomous units. Social planning vanishes.

Social planning is possible, in my opinion, as a result of a multitude of economic decisions taken independently by free producers. The question is that these decisions are, as I said, "socially conscious". This will be communism. It has nothing to do with anarchist fantasies of suppressing authority and money overnight, as you have depicted in the spanish experience. It will occur after a long period of dictatorship of the proletariat, during which the relations of production are radically altered. Mercantile mechanisms of exchange, social classes and the state are vanquished and perish.
The hand that regulates economic life under communism may be invisible (from the point of view of the whole society) but it certainly isn't blind (from the point of view of the individual producer). The point is that the information necessary for taking socially useful economic decisions circulates widely and people will be able to "do the right thing" without being ordered to by any central authority.

Ken:
Yes, you are certainly correct that "the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production" involves directing the work of people. But obeying a decision to break strikes or burn down rain forests is one thing, and obeying a decision to preserve so much land for wetlands precisely here and not there is another. It is true that both types of decisions concern the activity of human beings. But there is a big difference between decisions that involve class oppression and those that don't.

Historically, state coercive authority (enforceable by a superior power) has always been linked to class societies and established privilege for the few. On classless societies what we have known is a system of natural and spontaneous adherence to the influence for the elder or the wiser. I believe this will be what will happen in a future communist society, only this time authority (in this sense) will be totally devoid of all mithological/religious justification and be totally based on free scientific inquiry and on the clarity and usefulness of ones ideas and example.
Of course, representative workers' democracy (and hence state authority of some sort) will be in force for a long, indeed very long time in the transitional period. This will still be a class society, although one in which the class in power is intent on ending (and not on perpetuating) all privilege. As classes vanish and the communist relations of production take firm hold on the whole of the global society, I believe representative democracy will slowly dissolve itself and all power will be devolved to the represented, that is, the workers themselves. Coercion will no longer be necessary, as everybody will have equal technical means to make himself heard by all others and natural authority of the better is widely accepted.

Ken:
Today the decisions taken by governments and corporations are decisions to impoverish the majority, the working classes, and enrich this or that section of the bourgeoisie. Political decisions are, at base, about who will be impoverished and who will be enriched. These decisions naturally require a repressive apparatus to enforce them. But when the decisions are not about profit, but about how to "administer things" so as to achieve common goals, why should such decisions require an oppressive apparatus to enforce them?
But in your criticism of the "administration of things" you do not make this distinction between different types of decisions in diffferent types of societies. Your criticism strikes at any general or "enforceable decision". But if so, is this not repudiation of any "enforceable decision" involving anything--whether banning environmental poisons, ensuring the preservation of rain forests and wetlands, or even guaranteeing people individual rights? All these things involve regulating the actions of people (even guaranteeing a person's rights, such as the right to free speech, means denying the right of other people to interfere with these rights). If Engels's administration of things is inevitably a state, because there are certain general or enforceable decisions, doesn't this also extend to any planning whatsoever on behalf of society as a whole? Doesn't it prevent any social planning whatsoever, or even any guarantees of people's rights, for fear that this will lead to a state?
A good deal of your theorizing seems to revolve around how to resolve this contradiction. You want to preserve the benefits of planning without having any social planning or social authority. I think that the solutions you have come up with are unrealistic.

I do make a distinction between politics in a class society (e.g. capitalist) and in the transitional society (see above). The decisions are enforceable by coercion in both cases, but whereas in capitalism the coercion is directed against the proletariat and the toiling masses in the dictatorship of the proletariat the coercion is directed against the bourgeoisie and their efforts aimed at restoration. Of course, the democratic decisions of the workers are binding upon themselves and this could involve, at this stage, a certain amount of coercion.
My only difference with you is that you are saying that, in communism, social planning will continue to be made "on behalf" of society as a whole. I'll say it will be done BY society as a whole. This is how things will be administered. By the free initiative of all social actors.
In communism there won't be any "people's rights" to be guaranteed. Everyone will have absolute freedom to express and expand his personality to the limit of his capacities. This must sound a bit scary to you because you seem to assume a pessimist view of human nature, a kind of hobbesian "homo lupus hominis". If everything is permitted, then the strong will "naturally" oppress the week, etc. But there's nothing natural in this view of human nature. It is a social construct of millennia of class societies. In a classless society the free initiative of the individual will be a blessing to all and will (just as "naturally" as in the class societies it did the opposite) accrue the social wealth and the collective well being.
As you know, people's rights, human rights, etc. are juridical fictions invented by the bourgeois ideologues. They had a negative content. Their purpose was to delimit a minimum space of freedom against the arbitrary intervention of the established powers. Under communism there won't be any need of such guarantees, or indeed of any laws, courts and justices. There won't be any "right of free speech" or fifth amendment under communism. Everyone will just do it, as there won't be any power capable of interfering with it. Of course, there could still exist problems on the level of personal relations (physical violence, abuse, sexual harassment, etc.). These could be dealt with on a neighborhood basis. But no problems of oppression will subsist on a more general, social level.
As for environmental problems (fossil fuels, depletion of nonrenewable resources, etc.), I think they are largely a creation of capitalist civilization, particularly in our own century. I would say a future communist society will most certainly have done away with them, as indeed we could start doing right now if we weren't bound by the capitalist relations of production. A communist society will probably use solar, eolic and sea energy. Land use will be rationalized and technically improved (reforestation could begin). Fishing and hunting will be replaced by the breeding in captivity of all animal species suitable for human nourishment. Etc, etc..
I don't want to avoid discussing the political problems of defending the environment under communism by a facile optimism. But that's my opinion and I think you tend to be too much focused on present problems and technological realities when imagining the functioning of a future society that is probably centuries away from us.

Ken:
For example, you contrast informal and formal methods, and try to ensure that everything is done informally. No doubt the realm of informality will vastly increase in future society. Nevertheless, the contrast between informal and formal is not the distinction between freedom and oppression. Historically, even slavery and murderous raids between villages were carried out "informally" prior to the establishment of the state. Nor is the power of public opinion liberating just because it is not a state authority: it can be extremely oppressive and intolerant.

On slavery and murderous raids, just forget it. We’re talking about a society where these concepts are going to be explained (with great difficulty) to the children on History classes. On the power of public opinion, I don't see how it can be oppressive under communism. There won't be any "minorities" problems under communism. You can be gay, vegetarian or a religious freak and propagate your views by all means available (and there will be plenty). The opinion of the majority will be rule as to the definition of the general trends in social development but it will have absolutely no power to oppress the minorities. These will have all the chances of being heard, including of course the possibility of, by persuasion, actually becoming the majority one day.
Again, the dissenting views and alternative outlooks don't need to be "protected" by any benevolent authority. They exist and express themselves to the extreme limit of their actual strengths.

Ken:
You also suggest that in the case of a serious environmental threat, there will be bans, but these bans will be enforced by the total unanimity of the entire population. No one would use the poisoning products harmful to Bangladesh because to do so "would be proof of a seriously deranged personality."

No, this is not what I said. I said nobody would use these products because they are known to be produced by harmful methods. If the producers keep on making them knowing that nobody wants them, then they are acting strangely. Most people in this society will do things out of desire to be useful and (also probably) to be admired for it. But these people can act as strangely as they want without fear of being labeled or marked by public ignominy. The problem is one public safety.

Ken:
I think this idea contradicts the idea that the Bangladeshi people should be given a veto. If everyone in the world would agree not to use such a product, then why bother saying that the Bangladeshis should have a particular veto on the issue?

The bangladeshis could "veto" this enterprise in a million ways. By campaigning against this product and promoting alternatives, by collectively denying assistance and exchanges with these producers, etc., etc..

Ken:
But moreover, I think that it is a serious problem if a society has no way of resolving problems except to label people who disagree with the majority as "seriously deranged." I think such a society would be a horribly oppressive place. It is far more liberating to have "enforceable decisions" combined with the right for a minority to dissent, then to have the idea that no one but crazy people can disagree with how things are being carried out.

People can do whatever they want without fear of labeling. I have even said that there won't be any mental asylums in a communist society. Insanity and weirdness are free, as long as they are not socially harmful. I'm opposed to all kinds of jails and, particularly, a staunch anti-psychiatrist. I'm sorry to tell you this but I think you are creating a straw man here.

Ken:
Sometimes I think you just rename authority. You think that if one talks of bodies of informed people, rather than of an administration or of a "separate body of planners", that you have avoided authority. In your system, you imagine that a vast computer network, a "system", will replace an "administration of things". The advantage it will hold over the "administration of things" is that it will automatically and independently of any decision by anyone provide information to people and sum up their decisions, rather than exercising any authority. But you recognize that, in practice, that there will be a good deal of human intervention and human decisions in running this "system". "Experts" and bodies of "informed people" will have to read the data from the network and make their analyses, as most people will not be able to interprete the raw data. Moreover, the people as a whole can only consider a tiny fragment of the decisions needed because an economy requires thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of decisions every year. You raised the important issue of the "democratic stress" that will result from trying to keep up with this flood of decisions. So what the people decide on will have to be "filtered". It seems to me that what one ends up with is a representative democracy, where the people set up an apparatus of informed people and only decide on a small number of questions of general significance, leaving the great mass of decisions to separate bodies.

It's absolutely impossible to have a system where everybody decides on everything all the time. It can't be done. So you have filtering. Filtering the information one accedes to and the democratic forums on which one chooses to participate will be a major part of citizenship on a communist society. The average citizen in a communist society will probably spend three to five hours a day working and a similar amount on study and recreation. The rest will be spend searching information on the global network and participating in the democratic decisions taking place there. He can't possibly be informed of everything and take part on all decisions. So he has to make choices.
But this has nothing to do with the question of direct or representative democracy. All decisions are taken by direct methods of consultation. There is no separate apparatus of experts to decide things by delegation. All participants in any forum will have a equal vote on the matters in discussion. The special influence and "authority" that the "informed people" will have on these forums will have to be earned by the power of their arguments and the wiseness of their opinions.

Ken:
I will save for later going into some of these points in more detail. What I would like to point out, however, is that this isn't just a discussion over what society will look like two or three hundreds years after the revolution. This discussion of planning affects the immediate orientation for the socialist revolution.

Quite right.

Ken:
You hold that expropriation of the bourgeoisie is not a real transitional measure, nor is any type of nationalization under any conditions whatsoever, nor is developing workers' control over the overall economy. You undoubtedly hold that some of these measures are necessary, but you don't regard them as transitional measures. You don't regard transitional measures as those that serve to help develop the ability of the working class to control production as a whole. You see only the building of such an autonomous communist sector, of a communist or classless enclave in the transitional society, as the basic transitional task.
I think this view of the transitional measures is related to our discussion of planning. Although you specify that the dictatorship of the proletariat will have social planning, this is for the sake of regulating the competition between the communist and capitalist, not apparently for planning the communist sector. The communist sector of the transitional society will internally have a system similar to that which you have been discussing for the future. Moreover, you apparently don't really see building up the social planning of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a true transitional step, but just a sad necessity.
Marxism has a very different theory of transition, which I believe is far more realistic. It doesn't see a fully communist sector existing from the start. Instead the working class has to work to transform itself and develop its abilities to run the entire economy through a period of struggles. While there will be parts of the economy that are more directly under working class control and others that aren't, no part of the economy can be fully communist so long as major sections of it are still under the old system. All this means that Marxism sees organization as both an essential part of the classless society and the only way to overcome capitalism. This is why it recognizes transitional measures that help build up such a new type of organization. You tend to see organization and social planning as inevitably being "bossism", as an "oppressive apparatus", and thus being a state. These are two different views of future society, and they are reflected in two different ideas of the tasks of socialist revolution.

This is, no doubt, your tougher question and the most decisive issue of our discussion. I must admit the feeling of being caught without my home work completely done on these matters. I'm still working on this, progress is slow and the supporting references very few.
Lets just make some exploratory remarks on what you say here:

1) Yes, I hold that communism must be built since the very inception of the revolutionary society and that this was a major fault in all socialist enterprises of this century. Nationalization and workers' control are instrumental political measures that must be guided by the overall purpose of transforming the relations of production in the direction of communism. Left to themselves they have proved time and again that they won't bring us anywhere nearer to our final objective.

2) You talk of "measures that help develop the ability of the working class to control production as a whole". These are certainly transitional measures in the sense I apply this expression. The building of communism will be made by the emergence of a strong communist sector in the economy AND (indeed mostly) by the development and deepening of the democratic processes of workers' control on the other sector still burdened with the mercantile relations inherited from capitalism. These two sectors don't just follow separate and parallel roads, one fighting the other. They collaborate on the task of satisfying all human needs and, under the control of the dictatorship of the proletariat, they are to merge lately in a single, fully communist society. So the bulk of the efforts at transforming the relations of production will be directed at this sector, which is also the one where all the class struggle in this period unfolds.

3) Of course, the communist sector won't be subject to planning, in the sense that it won't be subject to imperative orders for the allocation of resources within it. But it's products are subject to accounting and taken into account on the overall social planning of the transitional society. If you have, say, an output of computer software made by the communist sector sufficient for the whole society, you don't make any further social investments in this field. And, when superfluous, you can liberate resources from the mercantile sector into to communist one, thus promoting the development of the later. In this sense, workers' control embodied in the dictatorship of the proletariat does extend itself to the whole of social production.

4) Social planning under the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a sad necessity. It is an indispensable tool in the development of the struggle to overcome the capitalist relations of production. Of course, I understand social planning not in a technocratic sense but as a deeply political instrument in the hands of the working masses. Without social planning, in this sense, there is no way of moving further in the development of communism. You must remember the stress I've put on the declining weekly horary of work, which is undoubtedly a measure of social planning. And the whole process of progressive empowerment of the workers in the social, economic, cultural and political fields will, of course, be done under social planning. Last but not the least, it will be under social planning, that the proletarian state apparatus will start to wither away and power is slowly devolved to the free initiative of the masses under communism. My problem is not with the role of planning in the transitional society, but with a conception of planning that doesn't engage it in the transformation of society and is in fact (as in the late Soviet Union) an instrument of stagnation and consolidation of class privilege.

Ken:
With respect to the issue of planning, it seems to me that you describe that a certain type of planning won't exist in the future, classless society, but that this society is several hundred years away. A good part of your answer seems to be insisting that there will be planning until this time, and to eliminate planning right away would be an "anarchist day dream". But in fact, you also hold that planning can be eliminated right away in part of society, the "communist" part of society. You divide the transitional economy after a revolution into a "mercantile part" and a "communist part".

I must insist on this: there is not a "part" of society that is already communist and another part that is not. At least in a physical, geographical sense. In the transitional society, EVERYBODY must work for a wage on the socially or (residually) privately owned means of production. So everybody is subject to the democratic planning on their main activity. The communist "sector" is what the workers will produce and distribute as gift - totally outside the still reigning mercantile relations, law of value, etc. - ON THEIR FREE TIME. This free time is indeed the embryo of communism. It's expansion (as weekly time of work steadily declines from, say, 20 hours to 15, 10, etc.) will mark the pace of the transition. Communism is the liberation of the worker's time from all political and economic constraints. And as the mercantile sector shrinks it will also transform itself through progressive workers' empowerment and autonomy. Finally the two "sectors" are indistinguishable and will merge.

Ken:
More importantly perhaps, you don't describe how your picture of the planning and organization necessary during the transition period differs from that of other conceptions. For example, I have written about why I think revisionist nationalization is state-capitalism, and how this differs from the Leninist plan for a transitional society and the use made of nationalization in this plan. But you generally reduce the criticism of state-capitalist society to simply that nationalization isn't socialism. True, you say nationalization is necessary, but you have no criteria as to how the nationalization that you would like differs from the nationalization in the revisionist economies. To have such a criteria, it doesn't suffice to say that this nationalization should help destroy capitalist relations while the revisionist examples don't. It is necessary to show how this nationalization should help destroy capitalist relations as opposed to what revisionist nationalization does.

As yet, I don't have this matter studied in detail and thought of thoroughly. But there's one thing I can advance. You won't move an inch in the revolutionizing of the relations of production if you accept late capitalism's organizational and economic racionalization forms as basically sound and suitable for socialism. And that's indeed what you seem to be doing. You won't advance workers' rule over the economy if you keep top-down command and control structures unchallenged forever. Decisions on the top must be participated by the workers themselves through increased mechanisms of direct consultation and decision making. And this can be done if the economic information gathered in the center is made available to all workers at home through computer networking. Global planning must increasibly be turned into every workers' business.

Ken:
In your picture of a transitional society, the society is divided into a capitalist ("mercantile") sector and a "communist" sector. The communist sector is composed of autonomous enterprises and individuals, and is supposed to have done away with capitalist methods in its internal relations. How does the communist sector differ from the autonomous sectors set up in the Spanish Civil War by the anarchists? Why will the communist sector able to establish connection between its autonomous components via mutual consciousness, while the Spanish toilers failed to establish a viable link through "mutual aid"?

First of all, my "picture" of a transitional society assumes the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat not in small parts of a country at war but worldwide. Indeed (and this is an immense subject we should perhaps discuss further), far from seeing it as a "sad necessity", I think social planning will be absolutely indispensable. First of all, for balancing the levels of development on a world scale. In a way, this is just another way of putting the problem of abolishing the distinction between the "city" and the "country". How could this be made without planning? How could we ever dream of building communism without bridging the huge gap in accumulated wealth and resources that will, no doubt, be bequeathed on the proletarian revolution by the functioning of the capitalist laws of unequal and combined development? Planning then, lots of it and for a long time.
How will the communist producers communicate with each other and with the consumers? By electronic devices, no doubt. Communist producers are men and women who have done their jobs on the mercantile "sector" and find themselves with some free time to engage (collectively or individually) in productive tasks of their choice. They can make finished products by their own or they can, of course, form productive networks. They are put in contact with one another by means of electronic communication and use socially owned means of transportation. The final products are offered informally to interested persons or put on display for free in communist "shops".
The thing is, you don't have ALL of the society engaged in an economy of "mutual aid", as was envisaged by the spanish anarchists. For a long time, the bulk of the economic activity will be mediated by money. The communists producers themselves will purchase on the market (or from the state) most of the items they need, including probably some that they will use in the manufacture of the artifacts that they will later give away for free. Abolishing money at once is an anarchist pipe dream. But creating and progressively expanding a room for communist production (while maintaining the bulk of the economy under social planning) is not.
The weekly horary of work here in Europe will tend to be settled around 35 hours by the end of this century. Can you imagine the amount of social wealth that could be produced right now, if workers were encouraged to dispose of their free time in a creative and productive way, instead of squandering it in commodified and alienating "leisure", most of it directed at reinforcing the ideological grasp of the capitalist relations of production? And how much more satisfaction and personal fulfillment the workers would have gained?
Now, suppose we chase the bourgeoisie from power and a socially planned economy is installed worldwide. Instead of the five or six hundred million workers we have today, the entire adult population of the world would have access to work at modern levels of productivity. That must be some 4 billion people today. Resources and human labour wasted on the military, financial institutions, and all kinds of industries and "services" that only make sense in a capitalist society would be reallocated in the production of goods and the education of the most backward work force. The amount of wealth thus created would be enough to cover all human needs and the horary of work could be reduced to, say, 20 hours a week for a start. Now, what would all these educated and resourceful people do on their free time? They could produce still more social wealth while enriching their lives and building the foundations of communism. Of course, they will also want to enjoy the pleasures and wonders of life (love, art, knowledge, etc.). But these are simply other forms of accruing the social riches of a communist society, on which all material scarcity will have been vanquished. Ultimately, the borders of productive activity and pure contemplation will tend to be blurred.
You ask me for details of the relationship between the mercantile and the communist sector. The main idea is that the mercantile sector will assure the basic needs of survival, reproduction and well being of society, while the communist sector points to the future: to new forms of sociability and human development. It will create a new world, into which the old one will finally merge and dissolve itself.

Ken:
Now on to some issues about the final, future society. You say that in your model of this society that there is no need for guarantees of rights. Yet, when describing how a decision to ban an environmental poison might be become universal, one of the methods you describe is "denying assistance and exchanges with" those who are trying produce the offending chemical. This is coercion. If factories and laboratories can be forced to shut down by being denied their raw materials, this is real coercion, whether it is done by the state or by someone else. Such coercion can be used to stop people producing something they think beneficial, or stop saying something they think important, or stop acting in some way they feel proper. Thus coercion will still exist in the future society organized on this basis. This contradicts your assurance that "there won't be any power capable of interfering" with the people's rights.

When I spoke of denying "exchanges" with producers of dangerous materials I wasn't referring to economic exchanges. Under communism, there will be no way of denying anyone the use of socially available products. The producers themselves will have no such power. What I was referring to was other kinds of exchanges of a more convivial nature (social intercourse of ideas, emotions, personal aid, etc.). You cannot call coercion the fact that people are simply not willing to talk to you. People cannot be coerced into doing it if they simply don't like you. And they can express their collective disgust in an organized way. That can be very effective (without in the least violating any of your freedoms) because communism is a society based on comradeship and enjoyment of the others' sociability.

Ken:
You imagine that so long as there is no state power, that there is no power capable of interfering with people's rights. But this is simply not true historically or logically. State power is only one of the methods of coercion known to humanity.

Yes, there are many kinds of "coercion". If you love a woman desperately, she can coerce you into doing many stupid things. This will continue to be so under communism. Personal ascendant of strong personalities over weak ones will also continue. As I've said, extreme cases of personal abuse can be dealt with informally, on a neighborhood basis. What you don't have anymore is institutional coercion.

Ken:
You believe that there will be "direct democracy". But I still think that you simply rename things that have nothing to do with direct democracy. Direct democracy means that everyone involved in a decision decides, everyone. A decision that involves the whole world must be taken by direct discussion of all the billions of people; a decision that only affects a city of several million must be taken by the discussion and vote of all several millions; and only decisions that affect only a handful can be taken by that handful.

Exactly.

Ken:
For direct democracy to work, not only must everyone be involved, but everyone must have direct and personal knowledge of the issues involved.

Naturally. Of course, some will have a more detailed knowledge, but everyone will have an equal vote.

Ken:
You however describe a "filtering apparatus" for future society--that is, a way in which future society avoids having to decide the millions of decisions facing it every day, every hour by having smaller groups do this for most decisions. You describe this filtering process, and claim that when a small forum (compared to the size of the entire world) take decisions that affect everyone, it is "direct democracy" because "all decisions are taken by direct methods of consultation". Nonsense. If people are being directly consulted, then why aren't they part of the forum? If they aren't participating enough in discussing the issue to be in the forum, then how can it be described that they have an equal voice in the decision? Well, you write that "All participants in any forum will have an equal vote on the matters in discussion." So what. This only applies to those actually in the forum, and the equal vote of the members of a body happens in most representative democracies, even in the present-day American Congress. Even if we add in the existence of alternative and competing "filter groups", with the whole society voting on which filter group it supports, we have not gone one inch beyond representative democracy. In present-day bourgeois democracy, the voters vote on which party (group of experts) will dominate the "filtering body" which takes various decisions by means of "an equal vote".

I think I have confused you with this "filtering" stuff. The filtering isn't made to decide who participates in this or that forum. EVERYONE CAN PARTICIPATE AS MUCH AS HE WISHES IN ANY FORUM THAT IS OF INTEREST TO HIM. There is no filtering of people into the forums. What there is is a filtering of the forums into people's naturally limited attention span. Since you can't possibly participate on all forums (because you simply don't have enough time for it), you will have to decide for yourself which are your personal priorities. You're worried with environmental problems? Tune in on these forums and have your say. Of course, while you're doing this, another forum may be deciding what to do with your favorite baseball team and (damn it!), you missed the discussion and the vote.
You don't have representative democracy with these forums scheme. This is direct democracy. But, of course, you can't possibly have everyone simultaneously deciding everything all the time. Some people are deciding some things, while other people are deciding other things. BUT IT IS ON YOU THAT RESTS THE DECISION TO CHOSE WHERE YOUR VOICE IS GOING TO BE HEARD. You can't possibly be filtered out of a forum you wish to participate on.
Of course, when you have a forum of millions (or even billions) of people, some procedural measures will have to be taken to render the discussion possible in a organized way. You will have to create sub-forums. And, to render the discussion productive, a restricted panel of more valuable participants will be elected to participate on the main technical discussion group. There could some measure of representative democracy at play here. Of course, everyone can has access to what's being discussed in the restricted panel but the non-elected can't participate (otherwise this would turn into a huge mess). But they can participate in the broader forum and try to form currents of opinion in favor of one or another of the arguments being played out in the panel. The participants in the broader forum can, at all time, destitute a participant in the restricted panel and elect another in his place. In the end, the decision will be taken on the broader forum by the vote of all participants.

Ken:
You might insist that the difference is that anyone can join one of these forums, which is not true of Congress. But as far as I can see, any forum is autonomous and could decide who can join and who couldn't join.

No. Everyone who decides to participate will be admitted. Let me just clarify a few points. The communist forums I envisage will have a very simple set of rules agreed upon by all participants and an elected (and dismissable) body of chairpersons who will sum up the discussions and put the issues on vote. Whenever a participant violates these rules (or otherwise behaves himself obnoxiously) he won't be excluded. As I've said, nobody will be barred from participating in any forum. What will function here is a system of internal filtering. Since you, as a participant, will probably have no time to read all messages, you will regulate your software in order to admit only the messages of the participants you value most. And from these you will naturally chose which ones you will actually read. Since you have access to the selection of the other participants, you can regulate your system in order to admit new valuable participants (chosen by people whose opinion you judge valid). And when you are disappointed with one participant, you can exclude him from your screen from then on. The result of all this is that (without any need of formal exclusions) respected and insightful participants will tend to have a very broad listening, while the clueless and the assholes will be left mostly talking among themselves. Of course, in the end they will have a vote on the issues nonetheless.
If this system works well, maybe we can even dispense with the election of a restricted panel as I have depicted above.

Ken:
When I raise various issues, you suggest that they will already be solved in future society. For example, you say that "As for environmental problems..they are largely a creation of capitalist civilization, particularly in our own century. I would say a future communist society will most certainly have done away with them,.... I think you tend to be too much focused on present problems and technological realities when imagining the functioning of a future society that is probably centuries away from us."
It is true that it is capitalism, and not technology per se, that is ravaging the environment. But to inspire people with what a future society could be, we have to show how it will be able to deal with these bleeding ulcers of today. We have to show what the possibilities are, and what reason we have to believe that future society will make use of these possibilities. I don't think that it is the image of discussing matters for several hours a day that will inspire people, but the prospect of transforming the environment or dealing with other burning problems.

I couldn't agree more. Of course, I also believe the discussion of the problems in communist forums is only a step in the direction of concrete action.

Ken:
But moreover, environmental issues will not go away in the future. When today's rape of the environment is over, future society will seek to further and further improve and transform the environment. For example, when grossly harmful chemicals are banned, humanity will turn to assessing mildly but still harmful chemicals (and there is hardly an industrial chemical for one which one doesn't have to balance its benefits versus its detrimental effects). The environmental is constantly changing; how humans look at the environment is changing; and these issues will remain. What one century has achieved, the next will criticize.
The end of class oppression will not be a period of stagnation, where everything has already been settled, and there is nothing to do and no controversies to engage people's interest. It will open up vast new prospects for humanity--I believe that somewhere Marx and Engels say it will be the start of real human history. Humanity will constantly be concerned with discovering new things, exploring new places (underneath the oceans? space? far more careful exploration of various ecosystems?), etc. There will also be social changes. If the problems I raise are those of the present, the future society will have those of its own. To think that all this will be done with 100% unanimity is absurd. But your picture of future society again and again requires this unanimity.

I agree. Of course there will be problems to solve and tough choices to make. But that's the all point about the communist forums. There won't be constant unanimity and communist society won't be ruled by consensus. But, on the other hand, there won't be any class domination, organized selfishness, power politics and the struggle of all against all for material benefit. And that makes a big difference. We can hardly start imagining the whole extent of the difference this will make.

Ken:
Communist classless society will maintain individuality, despite the fact that it developed in class society, but on a new basis. It will no longer be "the development of the small minority at the expense of the exploited and oppressed great majority", as Engels shows that class society is. This time, thanks to the possibilities opened up by large-scale production run by society as a whole, it will the entire population that develops. But a classless society can no longer by run according to the naive and apparently natural methods of the old preclass society. Before we lament this, let us recall that not only war, but the solidification of any division of labor into hereditary functions, was common to this old society. The new forms of communist society will be built on conscious organization. The cooperation needed for this society can never again by achieved on the naive and "natural" base of the old preclass societies; guarantees of rights, for example, may have made no sense at all in terms of the old tribal society, but they will be indispensable in any complex, future classless society. The relationship between the interests of the whole and individual rights can never be handled on the old basis; no matter how highly conscious people are, the old, sacred umbilical cord between individual and individual and between individuals and society is broken, the old spontaneous unanimity is broken, and they have to be replaced by organization, by a more thought-out relation between people.

I agree, except that part on the "guarantee of rights" which we have already discussed. Of course, my conception of "organization" and a "more thought-out relation between people" in communism doesn't include a central directing apparatus.

Ken:
The old preclass societies could not deal with increasing populations (beyond a certain point), nor the forces unleashed by technical advance (beyond a certain point). It was not the state that destroyed them. It was their inability to deal with the advance of the economic forces that helped develop the state. And it is only on the economic basis of a new form of cooperation that the state itself will fall. This new basis will not be autonomous enterprises, which in my opinion is an idealization of what already exists in present-day society. The social planning of production as a whole, which is only possible on the basis of large-scale production and the initiative of the entire workforce (population), has to be this basis.
You think that this means I am pessimistic about "human nature". I don't quite understand this point. You say I am pessimistic apparently because I observe the increasing complexity of human society, the end of the umbilical cord between individual and society, and the dialectical relation of human disagreements with human advances. But on the other hand, you claim that organization, any organization, must always mean oppression and a state. On what basis? Human nature? Then why call me the pessimist? I think we can dispense with the talk of human nature, and we should instead deal with what changes in human society are being prepared for by large-scale production, and what form of human organization will correspond to an economic base of large-scale production run by a populous society as a whole. I believe that the evolution of present-day organization already shows indications of what future organization, when freed from class division, could be.

I have no such claim that organization "must always mean oppression and the state". In fact my argument is quite the opposite. I say we can have an organized communist society based on the autonomous decisions of socially conscious workers and workers' collectives. You, on the contrary, believe that the "increasing complexity of human society" calls for ever growing central regulation, administration and government (this looks more like a weberian argument, rather than a marxist one). But you will decree that, since social classes will have been abolished, this is not a state anymore.
The problem with your view of organization is that it seems stuck in the old II International economic evolutionism. Lenin also believed that the giant corporate monopolism of his time was the threshold of socialism. They were fruits ripe for expropriation and to be put under the control of the workers' state. In terms of organizational structures, there was a direct link between monopoly capitalism and socialism. This vision proved in practice to be flawed and Lenin lived to see the russian bureaucratic nightmare revive under the thin veil of the dictatorship of the proletariat (or of its vanguard anyway). Stalinism was to be built on this.
The french communist party in the 70's (the years of the common program with Mitterrand) added a new brick to this construction with its theory of monopoly state capitalism. The growing intervention of the capitalist state in the economy (keynesianism, nationalizations, planning, economic policy, etc.) was itself a new step in the direction of socialism. Now you didn't even needed to take state power away from the hands of the bourgeoisie. You only needed to slowly infiltrate yourself on the capitalist state as it is and follow the path of growing state intervention. This was called advanced democracy, on the way to socialism. Of course, this is too disgusting revisionist talk even to be mentioned here. Anyway, this strategy is now bankrupted because, beginning in the early 80's, capitalism developed a frenzy of deregulation, privatization, downsizing, etc. Monopoly state capitalism is now in tatters. Even the laws of the concentration and centralization of capital cannot be considered a one way road anymore. We certainly have constant formation of monopolies, but we also have monopolies being dismembered and competition arising anew (take IBM and the computer industry). You have concentration and centralization of capital on the one hand, but you also have a constant mushrooming of new poles of competition on the other hand. On the whole, we cannot say that we are nearer to the formation of a single, worldwide, behemothian and bureaucratic industrial trust than we were 80 years ago in Lenin's time.
The thing is, I don't believe capitalism is going to bequeath us the organizational forms we are going to use for building communism, much less in communism itself. The whole thrust of historical materialism is exactly the opposite. It states that the development of the forces of production will run counter the existing relations of production (and this includes not merely the appropriation of the means of production but the very arch typical organizational structures into which that appropriation expresses itself). When this contradiction reaches a explosive point, an epoch of social revolution will unfold. This is, no doubt, what is going to happen in the next century. I hope we will both be here to see it.

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NOTE:

(1) See Tom Thomas, 'Crise technique et temps de travail' (ed. of the author, 1988); Tom Thomas, 'Partager le travail, c'est changer le travail' (Albatroz, 1994).
This comrade lives in eremite type seclusion at his home and is building a great theoretical work, at a pace of a book a year more or less. His works can't be found on libraries or bookstores though. If you write to him presenting yourself as a communist militant interested in his work, he'll probably send you any books you request. He lives at: 83, rue de Tolbiac, 75013 Paris, France.

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