Movement of the Day: the new cybernetic left

This movement, at present mostly intellectual, is mentioned by Nick Dyer-Whiteford in his essay, Red Plenty Platforms:

“Despite the fall of actually-existing socialism, the idea of computerized economic planning continued to be developed by small groups of theorists, who have advanced its conceptual scope further than anything attempted by Soviet cyberneticians. Two schools have been of particular importance: the ‘New Socialism’ of Scottish computer scientists Paul Cockshott and Alan Cottrell (1993); and the German ‘Bremen School’, which includes Peter Arno (2002) and Heinz Dieterich (2006), the latter an advocate of Venezuelan-style ‘Twenty First Century Socialism’. These tendencies have recently converged (Cockshott, Cottrell & Dieterich, 2010). However, because little of the Bremen group’s work is translated, the focus here will be on the New Socialism of Cockshott and Cottrell.

The distinguishing mark of the New Socialist project is its classic Marxist rigor. Accordingly, its twenty-first century super-computer planning follows to the letter the logic of the late nineteenth century Critique of the Gotha Program (Marx, 1970), which famously suggests that at the first, ‘lower’ stage to communism, before conditions of abundance allow ‘to each according to his needs’, remuneration will be determined by the hours of socially necessary labour required to produce goods and services. In the capitalist workplace, workers are paid for the reproduction of the capacity to labour, rather than for the labour actually extracted from them; it is this that enables the capitalist to secure surplus value.

The elimination of this state of affairs, Cockshott and Cottrell contend, requires nothing less than the abolition of money—that is, the elimination of the fungible general medium of exchange that, through a series of metamorphoses of money in and out of the commodity form, creates the self-expanding value that is capital. In their new Socialism, work would be remunerated in labour certificates; an hour’s work could be exchanged for goods taking, on a socially average basis, an equivalent time to produce. The certificates would be extinguished in this exchange; they would not circulate, and could not be used for speculation. Because workers would be paid the full social value of their labour, there would be no owner profits, and no capitalists to direct resource allocation. Workers would, however, be taxed to establish a pool of labour-time resources available for social investments made by planning boards whose mandate would be set by democratic decisions on overall social goals.

Labour time thus provides the ‘objective unit of value’ for the New Socialism (Cockshott & Cottrell 2003: 3). It is at this point that its proponents invoke the capacities of information technology.”

2.

“However, to speak of planning in such panoptic contexts is to inevitably invoke fears of omniscient state control. The New Socialists come from a vanguard Marxist-Leninist lineage, with a self-avowed ‘Jacobin’ centralist perspective (Cockshott, Cottrell, & Dieterich, 2011). To consider how cybernetic planning might be developed in more transparent and participatory modes, we need to look to different communist traditions.”

4 Comments Movement of the Day: the new cybernetic left

  1. AvatarJim Fearnley

    But it appears that, although they cannot be accumulated into an asset-like surplus, labour certificates do not challenge the basic premise of the capitalist exchange economy, namely, that labour value is defined as a universal measure, and its representation [in this case, certificates rather than money] can be used to exchange for commodities ‘containing’ a commensurate value. This seems far from the unimpeachable first principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”, which acknowledges the differential between the abilities of different individuals and the possible ‘shortfall’ between their capabilities and needs, and also the individual nature of any given individual’s ‘constellation’ of needs as expressed by the use values necessary to them to participate fully in the social collective.

  2. AvatarBob Haugen

    1. What Jim Fearnley said.

    2. But in either vision (the New Socialist or the utopian communist), the operative question is how to get from here to there? And of course along the way, “there” will change.

    We need both strategy and tactics for a feasible transformation.

    Search also for the “adjacent possible”.

    And also for Enrique Dussell, who does not offer an actual solution but some pregnant ideas.

    And then maybe Michel will arrive at an answer in Ecuador?

  3. AvatarApostolis xekoukoulotakis

    There is no such thing as an objective unit of value.
    One hour of teaching is not the same as one hour of planting.
    It is the forces of the market that give the ratio between the 2 hours of work,
    and thus introduce an abstract labor unit of time.

  4. AvatarBob Haugen

    After reading and thinking about the essay, I think Nick Dyer-Whiteford and most of the people he quotes are missing something important.

    He is correct that the computing capabilities of (for example) Google and the logistical practices of (for example) Walmart are sufficient to the task of planning huge economies.

    But huge plans, however constructed, become inaccurate after maybe the second real event, and then get more inaccurate all the time.

    Plans are “push” systems.

    In the 1990’s, the Toyota Production System (mentioned previously in the P2P Foundation blog) developed “pull” systems, that worked off P2P signals that could be morphed into stigmergy if you cross your eyes a bit.

    And most commercial supply chains now try to work off point of consumption events.

    So you could imagine pull signals from points of need from the commons, traveling through value networks.

    And then you also need feedback and feed forward mechanisms.

    So, while I do not believe that the world will be transformed by better software, it would be possible to do a lot better than either the Red Plenty systems or the current corporate systems.

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