Recently, we published a longer article on “Syndicalism and Labour-Time Accounting.” It was sharply criticized by Aníbal, a council communist writer. According to him, our approach is reformist: “In short, what IDA advocates stands in opposition to communism and particularly to two of its finest expressions: the KAPD and the GIC, council communists.” This criticism from Aníbal is not new. He has criticized us in similar terms on several previous occasions. Fortunately, another voice has now entered the discussion. Rafael Verta, a writer and activist from Brazil, took the initiative to contribute to the debate and enrich it with additional arguments. He defends our position that it is worthwhile to begin gaining practical experience with labour-time accounting here and now. We reproduce his contribution below.
A direct reply to Aníbal’s criticism of IDA’s Workers Control App and similar projects.
by Rafael Vertamatti
1. On communist embryos in a capitalist system.
The author affirms that a world revolution and the destruction of the capitalist system are necessary conditions for the beginning of any transitional process towards communism and argues against initiatives of communist embryos inserted in capitalism.
There are two statements there. The first is a strategic position, which considers it ineffective to direct efforts towards non-priority initiatives (first we should take over the state, then we organize the productive and economic transition). The second is a moral judgment, a critique beyond the strategic conviction about the supposed ineffectiveness of proto-communist productive and economic organizations: more than ineffective, it is “utopian” and spread “illusions”.
He goes on further and says that “IDA advocates stands in opposition to communism and particularly to two of its finest expressions: the KAPD and the GIC, council communists.”
First, it would be necessary to demonstrate that economic organization initiatives that propose to apply communist principles, even while we are inserted in capitalism, are impossible in a rational, causal and deterministic way – an impossible task, since we have no way of predicting the entire chain of reactions from a contemporary historical phenomenon.
But let’s take that assumption: the success of any organization that sets out to change the mode of production depends conditionally on an international revolution, on the seizure of the state by the working class. Without revolution, such initiatives are doomed to failure. From this reading, it seems very reasonable to me to consider that these initiatives would accelerate the transition process after the revolution, since there would already be some accumulation, experience and familiarity of workers with post-market concepts, such as the uselessness and parasitism of private ownership of means of production, the possibility of an economy that is not based on money or monetary exchanges, the advantages of centralizing productive data and access to rationalize the economy, etc. The existence of cooperatives and practical models of non-monetary distribution that survive the revolutionary process can precisely serve as a starting point and be then generalized by a proletarian state, instead of having to start everything from scratch.
How the existence of such chains of production (controlled by workers, without private property, no monetary exchange, no capital accumulation, managed through democratic popular assemblies and popular power) would be an obstacle to the revolutionary process completely escapes me, and even if not effective by themselves, should be viewed as something positive – to say the least.
If my criticism here is coherent, what would then be a good reason to attack such initiatives as “illusions” and “utopias”? What makes these initiatives antagonistic at all? After all, if the political organizations that you defend aim to inaugurate a new mode of production and promote new productive and economic institutions, why would such projects not be valuable? Well, from the author’s own words it’s clear the root of his antagonism is moral, for it is in “opposition to the finest expressions of communism: KAPD and GIC, the council communists.”
What qualifies anything as “finest expression”? Furthermore, could a project that is not a good “expression of communism” still be useful in the process of overcoming capitalism? And what should be a good “expression” of a mode of production that doesn’t yet exist? In what sense are groups that attempt to test models and pilot projects counterproductive to the author’s revolutionary goals? What is the issue? Could it be that they compete for adherents among the communist niche? Is it a rational critique or tribal identitarianism? Even if these initiatives fail at some point, just as Cybersyn or the USSR failed, they all produce valuable data and lessons for future experiences. At least, they can provide some material basis to guide the challenges of reorganizing production and distribution in a post-capitalist society. This seems indisputable to me. To reproach such initiatives for not following “the correct reading of the Bible” or “the finest expression” of Marx’s Capital, runs the grave risk of being a form of idealism. A mental model of communism with no intrinsic value. Without human curiosity, creativity and courage to try something different with a scientific stance (as opposed to a dogmatic one), nothing good has ever come to fruition. It is only by testing and verifying that we learn and advance.
But I have to be honest. I think the author’s premise here is simply false. Burgos emerged and merchants exchanged goods while within a feudal society. It was precisely the friction between these historical movements that culminated in the bourgeois revolution and gave rise to a new mode of production, capitalism. Contradiction drives reality forward – actual, material contradictions. The organization of a vanguard party, popular action in trade unions, rural guerrillas, urban settlements, production cooperatives, cybernetic economic rationalization, these are all social manifestations of the fundamental contradiction between classes. The assertion that the germs of a new mode of production cannot exist within the present mode of production is demonstrably false, if not just absurd. Whether or not they are utopian and illusory is history in the writting, but it is enough to observe the fact that, in the last revolution that really brought about a global shift in the mode of production (and which was one of the main historical references for Marx), the change succeeded precisely from contradictions between burghs and fiefdoms, merchants and monarchs. It was not ‘capitalist revolutionaries’ trying to overthrow kingdoms and only then organising trade. It was precisely the commercial practice, the germ of capitalism in the midst of feudalism, and friction over the collection of taxes, that caused the conflicts that eventually gave birth to a new mode of production.
2. On planning and other illusions
The author states:
“If they act and organize themselves independently, there can be no collective social planning; it is impossible. Such planning implies that the grassroots units are integrated into an organic framework of interconnections in which they cannot be independent, just as the centralizing bodies cannot be independent either.”
It scares me a little, how this line of reasoning is constructed. It sounds extremely conservative to me. There seems to be a misunderstanding about integrated systems and the functioning of complex ecosystems. The Viable System Model (which was the basis of cybersyn and is still used to this day at coops such as Mondragon) is one of several practical examples that make the statement simply incorrect. Each productive center acts and organizes itself independently in the practical sense, the workers decide what to produce, how to produce, how much to produce, they decide in assemblies according to their own interests, needs and material conditions. However, to be independent is not to be isolated. The system collects and provides data for decision-making, informs about demands, logistics, productivity, inventories, calculates and processes data in real time, metricizing the entire production chain. Instead of producing as much as possible and compete with other nodes of production on market sales, each production center has enough data to know precisely how much of what needs to be produced, what the concrete social demands are.
At Mondragon, this type of system even allows workers to realocate between cooperatives, moving from low demand coops to others that attend higher demands. The indicator of this data is produced by the system (cybernetics), the decision is collective (assemblies) and independent (does not require approval from other coops). That’s integration, it’s that simple. Planning is rationalized because the data and calculations inform the productive centers and are updated with each decision, each input. There is no monetary incentive, the only way to access goods and services is to produce something that meets some social demand, because it is the actual production that translates into credits. Planning does not need to be done by an individual who leads the chain or operates the system. Every human need is converted into data and that is the incentive for production. Nothing prevents a researcher, economist or data specialist from making proposals that guide the chain in one direction or another, if that is agreed and approved in an assembly. So reality refutes the assertion that independent action and organization, integrated via the system, imply the impossibility of collective social planning – just the opposite. I recommend that you get to know these cybernetic systems a little better, such as Stafford Beer’s VSM, or Steve Cottrell’s, Paul Cockshot’s and Ian Wright’s simulators, or Peter Joseph’s Integral.org.
3. On the nature of the proposal
The author closes by criticizing such initiatives for not being truly “communist” and identifies the permanence of the division of labor:
“in reality there are two types of work certificates: those intended for private consumption, which are issued to workers, students, retirees, or people unable to work…”.
Not in communism are there no longer people who work and people who study; this is the division of labor, and specifically the capitalist one. Study and productive activity are linked, not separated; the GIC points this out unequivocally… but IDA must not be reminded of this… ahem. The reason? IDA’s idea is that of petty-bourgeois leftism… a conception that is reinforced when they state:”A programmer and a cleaning worker receive the same number of work certificates for the same amount of time worked, regardless of their occupation, gender, or origin.” In communist society there are no cleaning workers and programmers; that is the capitalist division of labor. If such a difference exists—that categorization of professions into such a division—it simply means that capitalism exists.”
The description of the tool’s proposal, of how it works, does not describe a “communist” society. As Marx himself concludes in the Critique of the Gotha Program, the transition to a new mode of production is bound to begin with legacies of the capitalist system. These legacies must become obsolete with the development of productive and social relations. No one on the face of the earth has ever proposed that it is enough to use an app to transform capitalism into communism. Such projects propose to be an immediate functional embryo, which already eliminates fundamental structures of the capitalist system such as monetary exchanges, capital accumulation, extraction of surplus value, market irrationality and private ownership of the means of production. It’s a beginning, not an end. The criticism “this is not communism” is descriptive and does not justify antagonism.
I believe that we must promote and encourage the widest possible variety of pilot projects and creative initiatives that contradict the logic of the market and capital. Aníbal’s article seems to contain a hint of virtue signaling, as if only the best expressions of communism (according to some subjective criterion) were valid and other initiatives were heresies, subversions of dogma and without any validity, because the truth has already been revealed – but only for the chosen ones. We should encourage people who have their hearts in the right place to try to realize what they believe in far more than promoting a cult following.
Respectfully, Rafael Vertamatti.