Fundamentals of an Economy in a Classless Society
Discussion
The Classless Society In Motion:
"In 1930 the Group of International Communists laid out their vision for a self-directed society of free and equal producers, echoing and elaborating upon the scattered writings of Marx and Engels on the topic.
Building on the GIC’s outstanding and long overlooked work – ‘The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution’ – we further develop their core ideas, introducing a number of new and related principles. With these, we show how a society of free and equal producers is a concrete possibility. What has long been dismissed as an impossible dream, we reveal to be both simple and elegant.
Using the lens of Marx’s value theory, we analyse and critique the most prominent existing attempts at describing a socialist economy. It will be shown how a lack of understanding of Marx’s analysis of the value form, coupled with a flawed idea of the nature of socialism/communism, fundamentally undermines these projects.
The material basis of the egalitarian society we describe, emerges organically from and in opposition to the existing capitalist relations of production, abolishing private property, classes, money, markets, exploitation, and the value-form in its wake. Established within an open and transparent general system of accounting, it has no need for a caste of bureaucratic planners or a party dictatorship.
Planning is a continuous and distributed process. Socialist theory must come to terms with this reality. Planning is not reducible to arbitrary time epochs, decided by administrative convenience. It must be a living, organic, democratic and continuous process, answering only to its own internal rhythms and the rational control of its participants.
We offer a return to a vision of a society based upon the abolition of wage labour, a position fundamental to the Marxists and Anarchists of the First International."