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“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is often treated as Marx’s definition of “real communism.” But what if Marx’s point was precisely the opposite: that communism cannot be reduced to a formula of distribution? Hermann Lueer argues in his article that the common fixation on “fair distribution” and “free…

In an article for the Financial Times, FT’s European economics commentator Martin Sandbu argues that recent developments in artificial intelligence overturn the assumptions of the socialist calculation debate and make a socialist economy possible in the 21st century. An extract from the article can be found below In all the speculation about what future artificial…

This paper by Gabriel Kahan was recently published in the academic journal Competition & Change. It examines how the state tries to influence private capital’s decarbonisation through green investment subsidies. To explore this, the paper examines two green subsidies in France, both aimed at decarbonising some of the country’s highest-emitting industrial sites.By attaching conditions to…

In the website for Jacobin Magazine, Jonas Elvander of the Swedish magazine Flamman has interviewed Aaron Benanav of Cornell University about Benanav’s proposal for a multi-criterial socialism. A summary of the article can be found below: Karl Marx’s anti-utopian line is often used to avoid discussion about what socialism would be like. But engaging in…

In an article for the Participatory Economy Project website, Antti Jauhiainen critically evaluates the merits and issues with local currencies and argues that a participatory economy is an alternative way to transform the economy. A summary of the article can be found below: Why Alternatives Matter The culture of capitalism runs deep in 21st century…

In an article in the journal New Political Economy, Christoph Sorg of Humboldt University Berlin and Irina Herb of Friedrich Schiller University Jena argue that there is a lack of theorising alternatives to capitalist forms of social reproduction and explores how social reproduction could be organised through democratic economic planning. A summary of the article…

The debate on Commonism and labour-time calculation continues with the publication of IDA’s (Initiative Demokratische Arbeitszeitrechnung/Initiative for Democratic Labour-Time Accounting) latest contribution, “The Absence of Mediation as Mediation?”, alongside Hermann Lueer’s critique, “Needs Without Measure? On Meretz’s Concept of Social Mediation.” Both texts respond to Stefan Meretz’s recent article, “The Problem of mediation”. IDA’s article…

In an article for Geese Magazine, Nabi Eullmann critiques how science is organized under capitalism and envisions how it could be organized under communism through an critical exploration of the Group of International Communists’ (GIK) book Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution. A summary of the article can be found below: The desolate landscape…