We were delighted to be invited to Bremen to speak about the basic principles of communist production and distribution. The lecture was recorded and can be watched here: Link to YouTube.

In 1930, when the repressive and exploitative tendencies in the Soviet Union were becoming increasingly apparent, the workers’ movement had split into two major hostile camps, and fascist movements across Europe were gaining more and more support, a small group of dissident communists from Germany and the Netherlands wrote the pamphlet Basic Principles of Communist Production and Distribution. It was motivated by a relentless critique of the Leninist model of party- and state-socialism as well as its more moderate social-democratic variant, which had been the subject of the so-called “socialization debate” of the 1920s. Their critique, however, was shaped by the idea of workers’ self-management and by the experience of the council experiment during the revolutionary waves at the end of the First World War. But how can a socialist planned economy be organized without centralized state control and without money? This was the question the Group of International Communists (Holland) sought to address, and their answer was a decentralized planned economy based on labor-time accounting. The lecture aims to introduce the historical context of that debate as well as the almost forgotten core idea of council communism.

Sebastian Jordan and André Kistner are members of the association Initiative for Democratic Labor-Time Accounting, founded in 2021. Their goal is to contribute to deeper reflection on the economy of a new society in order to help the social left out of its defensive position. They see great potential in a decentralized planned economy based on labor-time accounting.

An event organized by GfkB Bremen/Oldenburg in cooperation with the AStA Oldenburg.
June 28, 2023 at 7:00 pm,
Kukoon – Kulturkombinat Offene Neustadt, Geschwornenweg, Buntentor, Neustadt, Bremen-South, Bremen, 28201, Germany