ZJW
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The DSA at sixes and sevens:
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/30/socialists-fight-aoc-2028
A correction: what the article calls the ‘The DSA’s Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Caucus’ is actually called the ‘Liberation Caucus’. ‘Marxist-Leninist-Maoist’ is, though, an accurate description.
According to this — see note at bottom about ‘author’ — he’s a mechanical engineer:
https://notesfrombelow.org/article/engineers-and-communist-materialism
Financial Times: ‘Could AI revive the socialist dream?’:
Something else of interest to Americanologists:
Ro Khanna is a left-Democrat congressman, who emphasises that he is a ‘capitalist’, not a ‘socialist’. His program is clearly social-democrat nonetheless.
Ro Khanna’s 14 Point Program:
He clearly intends to contest the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2028.
Robbo203:
Sorry. I was offline for a few days.
Unilateral exposition of texts is a good thing of course — and congratulations on ‘What Comes Next?’ — but what I meant by ‘What’s lacking is a third voice — in-kind-calculationist, critiquing them both’ was actually interceding in that particular debate, yes.
So: for the Smith vs Lueer aspect, just access the latter of the two links I posted (the one I sub-titled ‘HL to TM’, and at the page that opens, at the very bottom, you see ‘Leave a comment’.
And if you have something to say about Meretz … perhaps along the lines of what ALB said? … then you can do that at the bottom of https://keimform.de/2026/the-problem-of-mediation . (That ‘Elvin’ who leaves comments there is of course me.)
Recent vehicular collisions between Tony Smith and Hermann Lueer:
TM to HL:
A reply to Lueer’s second review of A socialism for the twenty-first century
HL to TM
Since it is a dispute between two advocates of different kinds of commensurate units-of-account, neither side’s arguments will resonate with readers of this Forum. That does not mean they are at all boring, as not least to me.
What’s lacking is a third voice — in-kind-calculationist, critiquing them both. In years past Robbo203 would have taken up this task with great relish.
(My apologies to anyone who has fainted at seeing yet again the name ‘Lueer’.)
Five years later, engineer Nick Chavez now continues in ‘The Black Box of Production’:
https://designformanufracture.com/2026/06/26/the-black-box-of-production .
The third to the last paragraph:
‘Workers in the technical professional stratum are therefore less crucial for the initial establishment of communist production than technicians are, but are indispensable for catalyzing communism’s transformational program. The managerial stratum, however, poses a strange tension for the communist movement. It is obvious that managers enjoy significant social privilege due to their role in administering capitalist production, which rarely produces communist sympathies. However, the matter remains that coordinating efforts between different units of production is itself a highly technical domain of expertise. Even if the social basis for capitalist forms of management is dissolved during communist construction, the need for managerial capacities in general will actually grow in communism rather than diminish, albeit in highly transformed ways. Rather than optimizing production for the singular metric of profitability, communist production will be continually optimized for a balance between a large variety of metrics. What these metrics are and what the optimal balance is between them can only be decided through collective deliberation at different scales. Because the relationships between units of production will involve coordination oriented around these socially-deliberated metrics, rather than through a market that mystifies social coordination in the form of money, it will be necessary to make use of the relevant skills for networked and institutional cooperation that are presently concentrated within the managerial stratum. The skills required to translate abstract or ambiguous goals into tangible, actionable directives and to shepherd their execution over short and long time horizons in complex organizations staffed by a diversity of people will be crucial for communist reconfiguration of production.’
Robbo203, re your post at page top:
What is the surprise? MUG’s program is modeled after the CPGB’s. And you’ve read the Weekly Worker for certainly more years than I have, so certainly you know that the CPGB espouses this very same ‘minimum-maximum program’.
In a post above I gave the site http://www.democratic-planning.com .
Here is another:
http://www.indep.network
It says of itself that ‘We reject Command Economies’ and ‘We reject Market Economies’.The site’s name is the International Network for Democratic Economic Planning (INDEP) .
On that site — or rather in a link from it — Stefan Meretz replies to Herman Lueer’s critique of the Sutterlütti & Meretz book that ALB reviewed. The reply:
Stefan Meretz Responds to Herman Lueer’s Critique of Commonism
If you find the beginning boring (but thank God it is nothing like their book), you might skip down to section heading ‘Labor time calculation doesn’t help’.
It would be more useful if they would reply to criticism of this sort (quoting ALB): ‘A more pertinent criticism would be of their opposition to delegate democracy and to any central administrative body even an unarmed one. Their argument against this is tired old anarchist one that ‘power corrupts’ ‘.
But to do that they’d have to be made aware of it.
ALB on May 29:
‘This sounds as if it might be interesting. Hope it’s not going to be about the notorious “labour-time vouchers”. ‘Did it happen? And?
This person liked it.
‘ [16] It is unfortunate that Soren Mau did not follow the implications of his excellent book Mute Compulsion in his speculations of a post-capitalist society (Mau, 2023a) which appears untroubled by questions of commodity relations and the socialisation of the productive forces (Mau, 2023b). Phil A. Neel and Nick Chavez draw this out in their critical response to Mau. Their effort to think through the technical aspects of a socialisation of productive forces under socialist relations comes closest to the spirit of Bettelheim in the current context. Neel and Chavez, (2024).’
(That’s at ‘Charles Bettelheim and the Value-Form: The Problem of the Real Socialisation of the Productive Forces in Socialist Transition’ by Roberto Mozzachiodi at https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/charles-bettelheim-and-the-value-form-the-problem-of-the-real-socialisation-of-the-productive-forces-in-socialist-transition )
“If you were to say why no ‘special importance should be attached to’ this would already serve as a needed, however miniature, critique.”
Actually, on the back of recommendations by you and others, I read this text with a group of people a few months back. I’ll post a few paragraphs of thoughts after the festive season is over.
Ok DJP, not one but two festive seasons have ended since then. What do (did) you have to say about it?
(The question, if now lost to winds of time, it was about this: https://www.endnotes.org.uk/palabre/forest-and-factory )
At the link I gave above — https://www.democratic-planning.com/info/models — if aside from looking at the summary of those few ‘models’ presented, you also then click ‘about us’, you will see a link to a twice-monthly podcast called ‘Future Histories’hosted by Jan Groos.
Some of the interviews are with the authors of such models. I see the names Muldoon, Saros, Mau … (Naturally there are also many guests who will not be attractive.) See https://www.futurehistories-international.com for clickable list of podcasts in English.
Would it not be a good thing to also get the SPGB position onto this program?
I don’t know if this — whose ‘models’ need to be updated — has been noted on this site:
