At this site I’ve so far mainly written about nuclear energy. Today I will write something about my political side. I’m a communist, so if you’re not interested in this, move along. Still here? Good, let’s continue.

How I got here

I’ve been active on the (far) left since 2003 and developed my politics in several phases, never really satisfied with this or that about marxist politics, despite it clearly, for me, being the most developed line of thought. Over the years I’ve come to terms with many aspects of this struggle. For example, after I realised the trotskyist organisation I was in wasn’t going to be a model for actually building a mass party, I came across the CPGB and after a few years co-founded an ‘orthodox’ marxist organisation aiming for genuine mass party politics, the Communist Platform. Fast forward a decade or so and a purge and split away from the Socialist Party later, and I’m involved in a proto-party of this kind, the Revolutionary Socialist Party, that’s not quite a party yet, but has a program, has some basic organisational functioning, and has hundreds of members and is growing, both in numbers and influence.

I’m not saying I’ve figured out some magic formula, I haven’t. It’s hard work, we make mistakes, we learn often by roundabout ways, but I feel that with the ‘neo-Kautskyite’ mass party model, we have something that has a positive dynamic. That’s one element covered to my satisfaction. Not so much with another: economics.

Back in 2014, when I co-founded said ‘orthodox’ marxist group, we started out reading Capital and taking that study seriously. I’m still happy that I did because it put many pieces into place for me. One thing it however only hints at, at several points in the book (and elsewhere in Marx’ works), is what the communist alternative exactly entails. This remained an open question for me for many years.

Fast forward to 2021, I came across a book called Fundamental Principles of communist production and distribution, a book originally published in 1931 in the Netherlands by council communist Jan Appel and his Group of International Communists. This book is a true gem that for decades wasn’t really read on the far left in the Netherlands, as far as I’m aware anyway. This situation should really be rectified: in my not so humble opinion, it should be considered a standard work of marxism.

What Jan Appel aimed to do in this book is take Marx’s sketches for a communist society and develop it into a framework of how a moneyless economy actually works. It makes a very convincing case doing so. The basic argument is this: not money, but labour time is the basic measure of the economy. This works both for production and for consumption. In daily practice, if you work 40 hours a week, you get 40 hours of social product credited and you can consume the equivalent of those 40 hours.

This has many implications, for which I refer to the book, but the crucial point Jan Appel makes again and again in the book is that you don’t need a state for this economic functioning. This, of course, was a response to the abject failure that was developing in the USSR of the 1930’s: instead of developing a communist society of free producers Marx envisioned, it reinvented a form of class society. Jan Appel calls this ‘state capitalism’: money exists, surplus creation exists, therefore worker exploitation remains, etc.

With his framework Jan Appel aims for an economy in which the state apparatus has no role whatsoever. He starts from Marx's sketches and builds his framework based on this. Worker control and societal ownership of the means of production are the central pillars of his proposal. With his labour time economy, he develops a cybernetic approach where the economy is continually self-correcting and developing.

A convincing idea, but… How to get there? In this, the book fails to convince. All Jan Appel can do is repeat the ideas of a spontaneous revolution where no political force can seize the day and concentrate power into its hands. How this is supposed to work we are left guessing.

A three phase approach going from here to there

This has bothered me ever since I read this book. It comes so annoyingly close to a fully rounded proposal, only to fail at the delivery of it. Let me spell out the central problem we need to solve here: we can realistically rule out an overnight global revolution where workers abolish the money economy. How then do we engage between the (capitalist) money economy and the (communist) labour time economy?

A further problem is that we need to get this right from the get go. As soon as the workers movement, anywhere, seizes political power away from the capitalists, it has to establish a communist economy. Many comrades disagree. Their argument is that for a historical period we have to deal with capitalist society or its remnants. I always found this unconvincing. If the historical experience with the USSR has taught us one thing, it should be this: once established, a new ruling elite will never relinquish power. Therefore, it can no longer be a force for establishing communism, even after some undetermined length of time.

The revolution therefore has to abolish the state, and not establish a new bureaucratic apparatus. How though? It’s important to have these discussions far ahead of any revolution, because once we’re dealing with hungry masses, there’s no time or room to experiment. A sobering thought.

What if we flip this argument and not wait until the revolution, whenever that comes, but build and gain experience with proto-communist economics in the here and now? After all, the whole point of the communist revolution is that it has to be a self-emancipatory act of the working classes. This however just moves the problem forward: how do we deal with the money economy and let labour time economics get some solid footing?

This kept me thinking for a long time… until it just hit me: you can’t translate money directly into labour time and vice versa, instead you need an intermediary. Indeed, this goes back to the argument Marx extensively makes in the first three chapters of Capital: money is merely a universal equivalent between commodities.

So, the point then is that a commodity, any commodity, can act as a ‘translation’ between labour time accounting and money. This is then the ‘interface’ with which we can communicate with the existing capitalist world, while building a communist one.

Realising this, the logic of how to build a communist movement (read: a proto-labour time accounting economy) unfolds itself. I’ve separated this into three phases. There might be more ways to achieve the same goal, and I’m open for this discussion, but this is my modest proposal, using worker cooperatives as a vehicle:

Phase 1

This phase is indistinguishable from regular coops. Say you have a coop that produces furniture. Communicating with the external (capitalist) world means that you have to sell the products for money. Labour time accounting is merely an internal administrative exercise.

Phase 2

At this point we have a movement of coops. Think Mondragon. Between the different coops there is trade based on labour time accounting. Say we have farms, a food factory, a distribution coop and a store: they would communicate internally on the basis of labour time accounting. This has some potential efficiencies as profit would be eliminated between the coops. This could help get a competitive advantage on capitalist firms or gain more resources to extend the network of coops. The workers though would still get money wages, as they need to pay bills with them. Externally the coops would communicate with other companies using money. A cooperative bank would be set up to have this function.

Phase 3

This would be the revolutionary phase. At this point the cooperative movement would own factories, infrastructure, land and housing to some extent. There is however a point when a qualitative shift occurs and the question that needs to be resolved is which system is going to survive: will the old capitalist system remain, or the proto-communist system become universalised? I suppose this point comes more or less when consumers stop using money. If you can ‘pay’ your rent and utilities using labour hours instead of money, things are probably going to get heated.

You could argue that you can divide phase 3 up along political areas. Again, the proletarian world revolution probably won’t happen overnight. So, the ‘higher stage’, if you will, of phase 3 would be dealing with capitalist economies in other parts of the world. I would argue, being from the Netherlands, that we need a European revolution to definitively settle the class war in our favor, that is, to have a system that can grow into the higher stages of communism on its own. Spreading communism to the whole globe might take a while of course, maybe a whole historical epoch.

At no point would we need a state to decommodify the economy. It would grow organically sprouting from worker self-organisation. At first slow, then ever faster, perhaps aided by inevitable capitalist crises and rounds of austerity. Are you closing that hospital? I don’t think so. It’s now a cooperative by the health workers. Party organisation would still be needed, as all of this is rather explicitly a political project in how we want to organise society. In my view, the ‘orthodox’ marxist idea of mass partyism, organising the working class as a class-for-itself, fits hand in glove with this.

That’s it. A perhaps surprisingly simple suggestion in building a communist mass movement, one that starts from the womb of the old society, as Marx would’ve said. Not only can we start right away, setting up worker coops, instead of waiting for the revolution, it’s also an explicitly communist economy we would be building. We would gain experience while building the movement, solving inevitable problems we have along the way. We would build a more elaborate planned and cybernetic alternative economy the bigger this gets, and we would not only build our forces for the revolution, we would actually hold vast economic assets in our class war with the capitalists.

Let’s build a brighter tomorrow today comrades.