0. Intro. -- Purpose
Supply prioritization in a socialist transitional economy
A determination for supplying actual human need in a socialist transitional economy
by Chris Kaihatsu,
[email protected], 9-08
[importance -- 1st]
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs ranking
(People's most basic needs are attended to first)
[importance -- 2nd]
Needs ranking
(Lower wealth / income takes priority)
[importance -- 3rd]
Quality of goods & services ranking
(Quantity served is preferred over quality of goods / services)
(Quality is difficulty -- survey-derived -- times labor hours)
[importance -- 4th]
Prioritization
(First come, first served)
tinyurl.com/499pd5v
1. Means -- Vanguardism
From all the discussions on vanguardism I've ever been around, including on this thread, it seems that there are really only a handful of issues involved.
My greatest concern is that we don't get *bogged down* by history. While I admire and champion all comrades who are adept at revolutionary historical matters -- certainly moreso than myself -- I've found that I've shied away from a more comprehensive, academic approach simply because the past is *not* directly transferable onto the future. There are many substantial, determining details of the historical situation back in 1917 that are *not* confining us today -- sheer material productive capacity would be one, not to mention communications capability, and so on.
This means that we *can't* look to the Bolshevik Revolution as the definitive, transferable model by which to form all revolutionary plans for the future. Yes, we should all be well aware of its intricacies and outcomes, but no, we should not be *beholden* to its *specific* storyline here in the 21st century.
I'm more than a little surprised that so many are so concerned about a vanguard organization's potential for "hanging onto power" after a revolution is completed. In my conceptualization the vanguard would be all about mobilizing and coordinating the various ongoing realtime aspects of a revolution in progress, most notably mass industrial union strategies and political offensives and defenses relative to the capitalists' forces.
*By definition* a victorious worldwide proletarian revolution would *push past* the *objective need* for this airport-control-tower mechanism of the vanguard, for the basic fact that there would no longer be any class enemy to coordinate *against*. Its entire function would be superseded by the mass revolution's success and transforming of society.
A vanguard is certainly needed *for* a revolution simply because it would be the ultimate centralization of mass political power that the world has ever seen -- far moreso than current bourgeois institutions like the UN Security Council or the United Nations General Assembly or whatever. A vanguard would accurately reflect the minute-by-minute interests of the mass working class, similar to the several Marxist news sites in existence today.
I'd imagine that most of the routine political issues of the day, even going into a revolutionary period, could be handled adeptly by these existing organizations and organs -- however, the tricky part is in carrying out specific, large-scale campaigns that are under time pressure. This is where the world's working class should have the *benefit* of hierarchical organization, just as the capitalists use with their interlocking directorates and CEOs and such.
A vanguard organization would have to, unfortunately, *take over* and *be responsible for* certain crucial, time-sensitive aspects of a united front against the capitalists. Too much lateralism -- which anarchists promote -- is just too slow and redundant in its operation, organizationally, to hope to be effective against the consolidated hierarchies that the capitalists employ.
Just as it's easier to travel in elevators than in cars we should *strive* for a vertical consolidation of militant labor groupings as part of a worldwide proletariat offensive. This tight centrality and focus would enable the vanguard to manuever much more quickly and effectively against the class enemy's mobilizations, no matter where and when they take place, worldwide.
tinyurl.com/ckaihatsu-vanguardism
2. Means -- Global Syndicalist Currency
This is basically advocating a global syndicalist currency that would be worker-controlled, cut across national boundaries, retain full labor value, and provide a broad range of trans-national goods and services through regular distribution channels.
All labor provided towards supplying the currency would necessarily be revolutionary acts, and could take place on a variety of scales, in a mixture of patterns of participation, gradually growing in size as cities once did. Transparency of accounting and operations would provide ongoing credibility, with worker-controlled decision-making -- call it stochastic soviets, if you like...!
It would be far more preferable to build up the strength and reach of a global syndicalist currency, backed by full, unexpropriated labor value, and enjoying the credibility that comes with transparently published accounts. Given these qualities it should be easy to see how this currency {would} be absolutely incompatible, both economically and politically, with any existing, capitalist currencies.
tinyurl.com/49bezkk
3. Ends -- Local commune-type moneyless productive entity
Rotation system of work roles
A universal template for covering all work roles through time, going forward, for a post-capitalism, moneyless, collectivized political economy
by Chris Kaihatsu,
[email protected], 10-10, for 'Allocating jobs' thread at RevLeft.com, tinyurl.com/24tohdc
- Everyone will assist everyone else in the local area with properly fulfilling the duties of any given work role.
- Unit of time per role must remain consistent.
- People in an area of work roles cannot switch their placement in line in the circle.
- Any roles at larger scales are either in addition to local work roles or else are entirely in replacement of smaller-scale work roles.
- New additions to an area of work roles enter the line in the circle at the bottom, beginning their rotation with a half-cycle of less-popular work roles.
- New collectively agreed-upon work roles will be placed in the existing sequence according to their ranking on a scale of 1 to 10, as averaged from the rankings submitted by those in the local area of work roles.
Rotation system of work roles
http://postimage.org/image/1d53k7nd0/
4. Ends -- Flat, all-inclusive mode of participation at all levels without delegated representatives
[In] this day and age of fluid digital-based communications, we may want to dispense with formalized representative personages altogether and just conceptualize a productive entity within a supply chain network as having 'external business' or 'external matters' to include in its regular routine of entity-collective co-administration among its participants.
Given that people make *points* on any of a number of *issues*, which may comprise some larger *topics* -- and these fall into some general *themes*, or *categories* -- wouldn't this very discussion-board format of RevLeft be altogether suitable for a massively parallel (ground-level) political participation among all those concerned, particularly workers, for *all scales* of political implementation -- ?
I think there's conventionally been a kind of lingering anxiety over the political "workload" that would confront any regular person who would work *and* wish to have active, impacting participation in real-world policy, along the lines of the examples you've provided for this thread's discussion.
But I'll note that, for any given concrete issue, not everyone would *necessarily* find the material need to individually weigh in with a distinct proposal of their own -- as I think we've seen here from our own regular participation at RevLeft, it's often the case that a simple press of the 'Thanks' button is all that's needed in many cases where a comrade has *already* put forth the words that we would have said ourselves, thereby relieving us from the task of writing that sentiment ourselves.
Would concrete issues at higher, more-generalized levels be so different, so inaccessible to the regular, affected person on the ground? Wouldn't the information gathered within such an appropriate thread of discussion "clue everyone in" as the overall situation at that level -- say, from the participants of several different countries -- ?
I'll ask if delegated representatives *are* really required anymore when our current political vehicle, the Internet-based discussion board, can facilitate massively participatory, though orderly and topic-specific conversations, across all ranges of geography and scales of populations.
5. Ends -- Centralization
*Centralization* should be favored, for the interests / benefits of organizational cohesion, accountability, and efficiency (non-redundancy, or avoiding waste from duplication of effort).
But centralization does not necessarily mean "centralization from above" or "centralization according to the whims of an elite small group", to address your concerns.
[...]
Rather than seeing politics as *having* to reside in individual -- and possibly careerist -- personages, we should conceptualize a generalized, centralized co-administration as consisting of *policy* that has been developed and supported from below in a bottom-up way.
There *is* centralization, though, in [these] (human-social) examples -- the airport network cross-agrees to a certain shared schedule for all plane flights, the railroad system had to come to an agreement on the gauge of track to use, the telephone cables had to conform to a certain right-of-way access across zoned land, the electricity system has a set policy regarding pricing, and the Internet has come to certain standards on a consistent protocol for packets, and a markup language for the web, among other protocols for other services.
In *political* terms I would say that these are all definitely *centralized* modes of operation, along the lines of a single U.S. dollar currency for the nation of the United States. Like money, the way these systems of standards may be *used* in actual usage is another matter, but that matter is strictly one of *usage*, or consumer-type activity -- meaning non-political with regards to the policy standard.
I'll maintain that the *creation* of a mode of social interchange *is* a political matter, and is one that *always* requires centralization from some sort of process -- hopefully one that is bottom-up, from the self-activity of the working class.
Regarding the top-down and bottom-up stuff, my position -- spelled out within the model at my blog entry -- is that the *general political culture* (of a post-capitalist society) will be able to handle most of the determining, or top-down, part of what should get done. Consider that we'd still be using the net, and would have local, regional, continental, and global media channels of journalism (TV, radio, newspapers, net, whatever) -- so that the politics of the day would be covered by journalists and could reflect back to us what the most prominent discussions happened to be. More-popular initiatives would enjoy widespread grassroots organizing drives, publicity campaigns, celebrity endorsements, debate sessions, news programs, documentaries, etc.
On the flipside -- bottom-up -- liberated laborers, by definition, could pick-and-choose what they would be most interested in using their fully discretionary time for, if anything. In this way the top-down and bottom-up aspects would be dialectical to each other, with an area of complexity in the middle. Not all proposed policy initiatives would enjoy planet-wide support, even if the appropriate liberated labor was available to do it. Or, conversely, some ideas might be wildly popular but would be untenable from the *labor* side of things.
Those plans that were both urgently needed by masses of people -- as for basic human living requirements -- and could be accomplished fairly easily -- providing local farming, building new housing, generating energy for electricity, etc. -- would have no problems finding both popular support *and* the liberated labor that would be sufficient to make it happen.
6. Ends -- Post-commodity surplus
I base my foundational reasoning on the premise that a society / civilization will produce a *surplus*. Given this surplus society then has to have a way of deciding how to dispose of that surplus. It's from this central premise that reasoning can be carried on "outward" from there, exploring further chains of causation that lead "inward" towards the production of that surplus.
[I'm] of the position that a post-capitalist system of abstracted material valuations -- if any -- should *not* represent / be transferable for actual material items. Instead, with all goods and services, assets and resources being *collectivized*, the material domain would be basically freely available, like nature itself, though mediated through a collective-political process.
What's always at issue is human *labor* -- *that's* what I think should be the 'independent variable' to be qualified and quantified as well as possible, to serve as the determining source of all other political and economic activity in a post-capitalist social environment. In my conception (accessible as a model at my blog entry) self-selected actions of freely given liberated labor would entitle the laborer to, in turn, authorize the same from others, going forward, in a like proportionate quantity.
Since all of the material proceeds (goods and services) from such liberated labor effort would already have been pre-planned by the larger collective-political process, the output of all liberated labor would always be *collectivized* and *not* under the control of any individual liberated laborer, or grouping of liberated laborers. Therefore there would be no need for the abstract valuation of material items (goods and services) whatsoever -- only the co-administration of them as collective assets and resources according to their basic physical properties.
tinyurl.com/47a4cde
communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors
This is an 8-1/2" x 40" wide table that describes a communist-type political / economic model using three rows and six descriptive columns. The three rows are surplus-value-to-overhead, no surplus, and surplus-value-to-pleasure. The six columns are ownership / control, associated material values, determination of material values, material function, infrastructure / overhead, and propagation.
http://postimage.org/image/35sw8csv8/
Ownership / control
communist administration -- All assets and resources will be collectivized as communist property in common -- their use must be determined through a regular political process of prioritized demands from a locality or larger population -- any unused assets or resources may be used by individuals in a personal capacity only
labor [supply] -- Only active workers may control communist property -- no private accumulations are allowed and any proceeds from work that cannot be used or consumed by persons themselves will revert to collectivized communist property
consumption [demand] -- Individuals may possess and consume as much material as they want, with the proviso that the material is being actively used in a personal capacity only -- after a certain period of disuse all personal possessions not in active use will revert to collectivized communist property
Associated material values
communist administration -- Assets and resources have no quantifiable value -- are considered as attachments to the production process
labor [supply] -- Labor supply is selected and paid for with existing (or debt-based) labor credits
consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily
Determination of material values
communist administration -- Assets and resources may be created and sourced from projects and production runs
labor [supply] -- Labor credits are paid per hour of work at a multiplier rate based on difficulty or hazard -- multipliers are survey-derived
consumption [demand] -- Basic human needs will be assigned a higher political priority by individuals and will emerge as mass demands at the cumulative scale -- desires will benefit from political organizing efforts and coordination
Material function
communist administration -- Assets and resources are collectively administered by a locality, or over numerous localities by combined consent [supply]
labor [supply] -- Work positions are created according to requirements of production runs and projects, by mass political prioritization
consumption [demand] -- All economic needs and desires are formally recorded as pre-planned consumer orders and are politically prioritized [demand]
Infrastructure / overhead
communist administration -- Distinct from the general political culture each project or production run will include a provision for an associated administrative component as an integral part of its total policy package -- a selected policy's proponents will be politically responsible for overseeing its implementation according to the policy's provisions
labor [supply] -- All workers will be entirely liberated from all coercion and threats related to basic human living needs, regardless of work status -- any labor roles will be entirely self-selected and open to collective labor organizing efforts on the basis of accumulated labor credits
consumption [demand] -- A regular, routine system of mass individual political demand pooling -- as with spreadsheet templates and email -- must be in continuous operation so as to aggregate cumulative demands into the political process
Propagation
communist administration -- A political culture, including channels of journalism, history, and academia, will generally track all known assets and resources -- unmaintained assets and resources may fall into disuse or be reclaimed by individuals for personal use only
labor [supply] -- Workers with past accumulated labor credits are the funders of new work positions and incoming laborers -- labor credits are handed over at the completion of work hours -- underfunded projects and production runs are debt-based and will be noted as such against the issuing locality
consumption [demand] -- Individuals may create templates of political priority lists for the sake of convenience, modifiable at any time until the date of activation -- regular, repeating orders can be submitted into an automated workflow for no interruption of service or orders
A further explanation and sample scenario can be found here:
'A world without money'
tinyurl.com/ylm3gev
'Hours as a measure of labor’
tinyurl.com/yh3jr9x
7. Ends -- Post-commodity distribution
To extend this meandering direction of thought, I've always pictured the *logistics* -- beyond the information flow, which could be thought of as ubiquitous -- of a collectivized cooperative economy to be akin to several concurrent expanding ripples in a pond. The ripples represent "pulses" of productive output from each locus out into the larger society. The edges of two expanding ripples touching could be thought of as points of *transfer* from one productive center to another -- linkages in a supply chain. (Since all production would be pre-planned there would not have to be any significant waste, pictured as parts of the ripple's perimeter that radiated out to infinity.)
Realistically the pond might be better thought of as having the viscosity of *broth*, meaning that "waves" of supplies are physically / materially limited in their geographical radii of outreach, due to logistical *costs* (of transportation, etc.). In practice perhaps this highly stochastic web of logistical interconnections might simply use a communications overlay that mirrors their radii of *physical* outreach -- limited-range wi-fi "clouds" that extend out to communicate current inventories and capacities with their productive-capacity neighbors, and no further.
[10] Supply prioritization in a socialist transitional economy
http://postimage.org/image/1bxymkrno/
[7] Syndicalism-Socialism-Communism Transition Diagram
http://postimage.org/image/1bufa71ms/
Centralization-Abstraction Diagram of Political Forms
http://postimage.org/image/35ru6ztic/
Rotation system of work roles
http://postimage.org/image/1d53k7nd0/
communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors
http://postimage.org/image/35sw8csv8/