The allegedly realistic designs of a “first phase” of socialism hinge upon contradictory assumptions: on the one hand, it presupposes people who are partial to free association, but on the other hand, these same people would still be animated by the good old shopkeeper’s spirit, wanting to take advantage of everyone else. A social revolution would once again risk missing out on creating a free society if it did not from the get-go act according to its new principles: making all work voluntary and transforming it—as much as possible—into travail attractif, free access to all goods, and the re-absorption of state power by society. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

if one does not think of revolution as being a complete miracle, as something that proletarians will achieve in the heat of the moment, almost accidentally, spontaneously, and without any goal set in advance, and if one does not delegate the project of human emancipation to the machines, then it would appear reasonable to try and reach some sort of understanding concerning the basic features of a classless society. Several objections to this have been raised: it’s premature (“the struggles aren’t quite there yet, the time isn’t ripe”), unnecessary (“people will take care of it eventually”), pretentious (“you can’t just predetermine it”), or simply impossible (“you can’t anticipate that”). But there’s never been a continuous movement defying the existing order without an idea, however vague, of what could take its place. A purely negative critique of the status quo, which some radical leftists invoke, is ultimately impossible. For example, aiming for “a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common” (Capital) follows necessarily from the critique of private property. But because this leaves a lot of room for imagination — including scenarios that have little to do with freedom and happiness — revolutionaries should state clearly what they want. Not in order to peddle recipes for redemption, but as a contribution to the necessary discussion on how to leave the old world behind. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

Traditionally, communist critique of existing social relations would begin from the premise that the technical productive forces developed by capitalism, reified into machinery, simply need to be freed from the fetters of private property by overthrowing the relations of production, so that the productive forces can then enter into the service of a self-conscious humanity. Yet as early as the 1840s, Marx and Engels had noticed that capital-driven development would eventually reach a stage “when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being which under the existing relations only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces.” (German Ideology) Just as Herbert Marcuse noted that certain “purposes and interests of domination are not foisted on technology ‘subsequently’ and from the outside,” but that they “enter the very construction of the technical apparatus,” the Operaist Raniero Panzieri, with reference to Marx, criticized existing technology as a means of subjecting living labour to the commands of capital. The purpose of generating surplus value is not external to machinery, but constitutes and shapes every fibre of it just as it shapes the totality of the labour process. This idea must be further developed. On the one hand, the “automatic factory potentially establishes the domination of the associated producers over the labour process” (Panzieri) and is therefore a precondition for a free society without scarcity. On the other hand, machinery in the modern factory system appears as “the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs, co-ordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central moving force”. The capitalist use of machinery […] determines the development of technical progress itself. […] Under existing conditions, digital technology and analogue machinery both serve as a means in the class struggle from above: their purpose is not to improve living conditions, but to effect the most efficient exploitation of human labour. Specifically, they determine the rhythm of work and the organization of production, ensure the conformity of employees, and finally serve to destroy all interpersonal contact. By enforcing the Taylorist program of an extremely fragmented work flow in all areas of production, they contribute significantly to the devaluation of the commodity labour-power and consequently to the weakening of workers’ bargaining power. In addition to this weakening, it also subjects those dependent on wages to the “despotism of the factory,” as Marx described it. Workers are even more demoted to being mere appendages of the—now “intelligent” and networked—machinery. Driven by process-optimizing software, they primarily experience emptiness, stress, overwork, they are robbed of even the smallest amount of freedom and sometimes of any knowledge of the production process at all. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

Undoubtedly, the wealth of contemporary society includes many things for which a liberated society would no longer have any use. Certain forms of work organization, energy and food production would have to be abolished alongside technologies invented solely for the supervision, control and regulation of human labour and the freedom of movement. However, a distinction should be made between the technical elements of contemporary machinery by themselves, and the arrangements they assume for the purpose of producing surplus value. Machinery as it exists today is more than the sum of its parts. Gears, rollers and belts, as such, do not make an assembly line. Although modern scientific progress and technical inventions have been subordinated to the imperatives of profit maximization, liberation will have no other forms of knowledge, technology, and machinery (or at least not in sufficient quantities) to start from. The notion that the machinery and science left behind by capitalism would be of absolutely no use after the revolution then seems ideological. […] Just as the wheel and belt don’t naturally form an industrial production line, the circuit integrated microchip doesn’t necessarily serve to surveil the wage-dependent. A headset, a camera and Java code, as individual technical components, are not surveillance systems for logistics, and it is not for nothing that socialist hopes have been linked to the emerging digitization. […] Certain goods (operating systems, software, music, texts and so on) can be digitally duplicated without much effort and loss, and as a result they do not fit easily into the commodity form. This has made it possible to conceive of new, non-proprietary forms of distribution and collaboration. Even the Internet, despite its military origins, nourished early ideas of cybersocialism, where people’s needs would be evaluated on a global scale in real-time, and production would be adjusted accordingly. Under the label “the internet of things”, which means nothing more than the fact that different devices (things) are connected to the Internet and can respond according to predetermined criteria, this potential for satisfying needs in real-time has expanded to the sphere of tangible products. This does not just refer to “smart” refrigerators or to cybernetic housing units, that is to say, the often overemphasized consumer side of things, but to the changes brought about in production, maintenance and transport by networked machines. Here, automatically monitored and demand-oriented maintenance cycles unleash a great potential for savings. The principle of just-in-time production can be implemented much more efficiently than the warehouse worker could, simply because the warehouses can communicate directly with the suppliers, bypassing human intervention. Storage robots receive, sort and register the orders directly. Once put into operation, such fully automatic feedback loops replace a considerable number of workers, since the only human intervention they require is to be serviced from time to time. Under currently existing conditions, where potential free time and leisure manifest themselves as unemployment, this is indeed a technological attack on worker’s power, but it also points to the possibility of a world that makes physical labour superfluous on an unprecedented scale. For these reasons, the digitalization of labour and distribution processes should be welcomed as steps towards a well-functioning planned economy and the actual abolition of toil. Even if it only serves to exploit human labour power more intensively, it would be a fetishization of technology to blame technological progress as such for the misery of the current situation: though ascribed to technology, the forces at work are in fact social in origin. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

Like every new productive force, the “digital revolution” can at times point beyond what currently exists and come into conflict with the given relations of production and ownership. Capital has responded with “innovations” that curtail the potential of ever-increasing computing power. In the software industry, a large portion of the research has gone into enforcing the commodity form in the digital sphere for many years. Furthermore, personal computers are no longer “universal machines”: their possibilities are limited by their assigned interfaces and programs so that they function only as the terminus of digital capitalism. This is justified as “user-friendliness”: anyone who uses a computer for reasons outside of research, development and production today is no longer supposed to understand what is going on in the device, and is instead made dependent on digital services. As with most productive forces within capitalism, the development of the computer is characterized by the fact that in dealing with them, the user does not learn any of the skills proper to the productive force. On the contrary, we find ourselves in a situation in which the widespread usability of computers is paired with an extensive digital illiteracy. Technological progress has become a source of social regression; the culturally pessimistic suspicion that smarter phones require ever dumber people is not that far-fetched. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

A revolutionary movement must advocate neither for the socialist mass-production of computers and smart objects as they are today, nor for a blind destruction of technologies. Instead, it would have to work towards the development of these technologies’ potentials. On the one hand, this means spreading the knowledge necessary to use these technologies and on the other hand, identifying those elements of the machinery whose sole purpose is to serve the mandates of surplus-value production and rendering them harmless. The point is not just to abolish titles of ownership, but to reclaim social control over technology, which would also mean profoundly transforming the existing machinery to meet people’s needs. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

[…] Despite the immense scale of productive forces that the commune will acquire, it is certainly possible that bottlenecks will still occur. However, these will not be eliminated by adopting timesheets. A control system of that sort would actually unnecessarily tie up energies and hinder the transformation of consciousness necessary for the creation of an “association of free individuals” and “social individuals.” The success of the communist revolution may ultimately depend on this change of consciousness. People themselves must be added to the list of productive forces whose potential can only fully develop in a free society. Here, it is apt to recall thinkers from Fourier to Marcuse, who theorized a liberated society in which ‘passion’ would become productive without coercion. According to various sociological studies, the top priority of employees in technologically and economically developed regions of the world is that their work be interesting, meaningful, and that it carry responsibility. As David Graeber shows by pointing to bullshit jobs, jobs so stupid that their completion would fill any half-sane person with shame rather than with pride or satisfaction, capitalism is unable to satisfy these needs. In the commune, these jobs will be eliminated. Others will be automated. What remains will be transformed as much as possible into travail attractif; work that is done in free cooperation with others instead of under the command of a boss, work that helps develop the workers’ “senses, capabilities, and faculties of reflection” (Meinhard Creydt) rather than just aiming at maximum output. And finally, even boring jobs could become bearable if they are rotated and thereby only performed for short periods of time. Of course, steel production cannot simply be turned into play. […] ‘passion’ will become productive not so much when it comes to monitoring mostly automated processes, but in solving tricky problems. Rather than establishing a control regime that prevents people from shirking their work duties, the communards ought to dedicate themselves to organizing and imparting practical and theoretical knowledge, education, and skills in all sectors of society in an egalitarian manner. Even today, skilled workers are more productive than the unskilled, and communism can be less than ever a communism of factory workers. Instead, everyone’s capabilities would be developed so that fields like mechanical engineering, medicine, transportation services or computer science would be available to them. Overcoming the division between manual and intellectual labour as quickly as possible would have to be a guiding principle for the revolutionary movement from the start: the noticeably high amount of manual labour performed as a hobby — the arts and crafts boom, urban gardening, model making, fixing up old cars, etc. — indicates a ‘productive’ passion to do something with one’s hands. The goal should not be the most fair distribution of work and free time, but rather the humane abolition of this very separation along with the greatest possible automation of production. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The wealth of the commune will hardly be the same as the wealth we know, only produced under different relations. Nor is the point to give metropolitan residents more of what they already have: more flights, cars, cell-phones, and ugly, cheap t-shirts. And not because those needs could be denounced as “artificial” and juxtaposed with so-called natural ones. As the late Marxists from Frankfurt demonstrated, distinguishing between artificial and natural needs tends to be arbitrary in an authoritarian sense, because nature, as manifested in individuals’ drives, and society are inextricably intertwined in every need. As products of the existing class society, however, needs are not innocent nor should they always be projected into a classless society. Adorno answered this dilemma on the one hand with the dialectical core of his argument: reorganizing production towards the satisfaction of “even and especially those [needs] produced by capitalism—then the needs themselves would be decisively transformed”. It would “quickly emerge” that the masses don’t need the “trash” forced upon them today. On the other hand, he answered with ideas of equality and solidarity: “The question of the immediate satisfaction of need is not to be posed in terms of social and natural, primary and secondary, correct and false; rather, it coincides with the question of the suffering of the vast majority of all humans on earth. If we produced that which all humans now most urgently need, then we would be relieved of inflated social-psychological concerns about the legitimacy of their needs.” […] Without posing the question of ‘true’ and ‘false’ needs and far from any austere anti-hedonism in a green guise, a social revolutionary movement would aim at a different kind of wealth in the capitalist centres. While wealth today presents itself as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’, being not so much social, but a mere sum total of private, unequally distributed possessions, the commune would have to aim not only for maximal socialization in the sphere of production, but also in the spheres of use and consumption. Contrary to any cult of community, the “right to solitude” (Marcuse) and the retreat into private life would be inviolable. However, unlike in the profit economy, built on bulk sales and planned obsolescence, the private sphere in the commune would no longer be primarily the space in which a steadily increasing flow of accumulated commodities must be devoured in order to keep the machine running. If canteens and laundromats became spaces of encounter beyond their bare functionality, it would no longer be necessary to have a dishwasher and washing machine in every apartment. With a few immediate measures, the commune would be capable of solving problems in a flash that technocrats endlessly grind their teeth on. Rather than continuing with the unmitigated disaster that is “e-mobility”—electric cars consume the same amount of labour, resources, streets and space in cities as cars that run on gas, and instead of exhaust gas pollution there is the highly toxic production of batteries — the commune could simply build a few tramways (with cars gone, there is no need to expend huge amounts of effort to dig tunnels into the earth). With no harried tourists and managers, air traffic could be reduced drastically in order to let the planet breathe a little. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

If a council, however, is simply understood as everyone who lives or works in a certain place discussing matters of common interest, putting the results of those discussions into practice, and consulting with other councils by means of delegates recallable at any time, then this form would likely be the backbone of a new commune. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The basis on which councils, grassroots assemblies — or whatever one may want to call them — organize and how they interface with one another would differ from place to place in accordance with local conditions and would certainly change frequently. According to Horkheimer, “the instability of the constitution would be a characteristic trait of a classless society: the forms of free association do not condense into a system.” Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

Decentralization, as envisaged in the 1871 program of the communards and still desirable to this day, has its limits. For example, it does not make any sense and it is not even possible in some cases to produce everything locally. A global commune, or one encompassing only large regions for a time, would face questions concerning the use of limited resources that can only be answered centrally. Such a commune, based on non-authoritarian structures whose central organs merely follow directives “from below”, could be easily overwhelmed by its tasks. For everyone to be involved in every decision may be utopian in the negative sense of the word. Such limits would have to be dealt with in some fashion to prevent the emergence of a political sphere populated by specialists. Hence, the disappearance of the state would not yield an amorphous condition, but rather require a highly developed form of social self-organization. The “re-absorption of state power by society” would demand an entirely new way of dealing with problems for which the law, criminal justice and prisons are responsible today. Much, even most, of what is now crime, like property crimes, is the product of material necessity and would automatically disappear with said want, but some problems would remain. We must build on the critique of the Soviet legal scholar Evgeny Pashukanis who deemed “criminal law, like law in general” to be “a form of the relationships between egoistic and isolated subjects” and rooted in the bourgeois principle of equivalence. Retribution must be replaced by a practice of betterment and rehabilitation which will “render the court case and court verdict totally superfluous”. Instead of building prisons — “a social crime and failure”, according to Emma Goldman — and wasting time with a legal system, which today is growing out of control, the communards of the future would have to work towards a new method of resolving conflicts which helps “ameliorate” violent individuals. This may even involve some coercive measures. Fundamentally, the challenge is to make sure that the dissolution of legal relations does not amount to a regression to a condition worse than the status quo, in which at least the very abstractness of the law ideally protects the individual from state despotism. The “re-absorption of state power by society” cannot mean that the individual is entirely at the mercy of the caprices of their neighbours or that a bourgeois society governed by abstractions is replaced by the immediacy of small communities. For this, there is no guarantee. It is one of the many great but not unsolvable challenges that humankind would face. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

the married couple and family would disappear, if not as a way of life, then as an economic unit, since there would be no private wealth, no bank accounts, no real estate, no inheritance. The unholy fusion of material interests and intimate human relationships would be eliminated. This would almost certainly be beneficial to the relationships between parents and children and between genders. No woman would be forced to suppress her wish for a divorce for fear of sliding into poverty because she no longer has access to her husband’s income or a roof over her head. Moreover, the private and the social would take on an entirely new character through changing their relationship. The hope for happiness placed in the family today, often only to be greatly disappointed, is mostly a reaction to inhuman conditions; the homey existence in the small family collective is the polar opposite of a society in which no one can feel at home. If people still want to live in nuclear families after the revolution, certainly no one would be inclined to forbid this, but the desire to live this way would diminish. And if it does not disappear entirely, it would still yield less tragic results than today, as individuals would have a completely different place within society, and the economic function of the family would be gone. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

To the extent that today’s gender relations are enmeshed with a certain opposition between wage labour and housework, including child rearing, a social revolution would fundamentally facilitate the emancipation from those relations. There is, however, no guarantee of any progress whatsoever. Even if child rearing is organized rationally and socially, it could still be left to women; thus, all those facets of gender relations outside of a certain division of labour would be even less likely to disappear by themselves. The historical link between classical gender stereotypes — which continue to exist, though they are in flux in late capitalist, liberal countries — and the partition of the social process into a market economy and private reproduction is quite obvious. Nevertheless, they have thrust deep roots even in the most hidden corners of people’s inner lives and continue to be a source of identity. If only because these gender roles are developed and lived subconsciously, their complete elimination will take time: “Whereas particularly the destruction of state power can be thought of as a concentrated ‘overthrow’, the necessary transformation and self-transformation of (one’s own) gender subjectivity can hardly be thought of as anything but a lengthy, culturally revolutionary process, that can become eruptive from time to time but will generally only take place little by little in everyday interpersonal relationships and new cultural production”. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The transition to the commune can neither be thought of as the conquest of state power nor as the result of a gradual expansion of an allegedly already burgeoning new logic of production, and not even as a combination of both, that is, as a joint venture of a left government and alternative practices from below. Not much needs to be said about the Marxist-Leninist understanding of revolution: conquest of state power, nationalization of the economy followed by a patient waiting game as the state “withers away”. In rejecting this view, however, the necessity of a rupture has given way to an alternative gradualism under titles like Commons or Wertkritik, an allegedly ground-breaking renewal of Marxist thinking that, after its farewell to the working class, moved increasingly closer to the green, alternative ideology of the 1970s. Embellished as a decoupling from the “commodity-money system”, islands with a different way of living and producing are to be established in order to undermine that system step by step. To the extent that it is possible to create a livelihood outside of the market, there is certainly no reason not to do it. Not much can be done, however, without putting an end to property, understood not just as the expropriation of those who currently control the means of production (the first decisive confrontation), but also ending the separation between enterprises, which would be abolished as such and replaced by mere nodes in the flow of social production. Without a revolutionary mass movement, it is not possible to attain sufficient resources for a different kind of life and, if they were available, they could hardly maintain their independence from market relations in the long term. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The transition to the commune is only conceivable as an unstoppable movement of occupations, appropriating whatever is of use for it — housing, public buildings, factories, farmland, means of transportation — while blocking or sabotaging anything that must be shut down. The key is to use anything that is captured to keep expanding the movement, otherwise the whole thing would collapse. Goods must simply be distributed, services like medical care or transport provided for free; money would not be “abolished” by decree as in Soviet war communism, but would become superfluous, likely having already been devalued by the deep social crisis. Such a practice has appeared in all the great uprisings as the common goal makes petty questions of ownership irrelevant; in May 68, farmers brought the fruits of their fields to the occupations in Paris; in many of the square occupations of recent years food was given out freely, the injured were treated, tasks that needed to be done were shared voluntarily. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The challenge, however, which can hardly be overstated, is to go beyond the looting and distribution of goods and to start producing in a new way. How a factory works is best known to those who work in it; nothing happens without their cooperation, even in the age of high-tech; supported by anyone who is interested in this endeavour, they could begin immediately to adapt work processes to their needs, and, if necessary, to convert production in accordance with the requirements of the movement and give their products to the embryonic commune. Even the social revolution in Spain in 1936/1937 faced the problem of being economically dependent on regions that were not in upheaval. More so today, the global division of labour would quickly doom any purely local attempt at revolution. This does not mean that the revolution would have to break out on the same day everywhere in the whole world, but rather that everything would be lost if it does not quickly spread to large areas which, at the very least, are able to furnish it with the bare necessities. A deep crisis spreading to a number of countries could turn out to be the catalyst for such an expansion. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The crux of the matter is that, in its present state, the production apparatus that today spans the entire globe is a terrible starting point for an upheaval, no matter its potentials. There is a deep chasm between the present state and the possible commune, and the leap over that chasm suggested here may appear in some respects quixotic. Politically, this is reflected in the aforementioned turn to the localized Commons and to a kind of neo-anarchism that sees “infrastructure” as the enemy and which aimlessly destroys railway tracks. But it is also there in the postulate of the indispensability of the state: the world has become so complex, it is claimed, that the transition to a postcapitalist society cannot do without the leadership of the great helmsman. That both extreme positions are wrong can be shown quite easily. The first surrenders without hesitation before the enormous challenge of re-appropriation, while the second overestimates the controllability of the capitalist economy. Drafting any kind of counterproposal is all the more daunting. Precisely because the commune is not predetermined by the objective course of history, an outline of what it might look like should be discussed today. The more that the working class discusses it across the globe today and the more clearly a completely different world can be visualized, the more likely it is that another revolutionary movement could arise after all. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society