Dónal Ó Coisdealbha has published an article entitled Modern Industry and Prospects for Socialism in Cosmonaut about how the social production relation work in capitalism today and how they could evolve to a democratically planned organisation of work. Ó Coisdealbha is well placed to produce such an article since he is the director of process control, smart and digital development at a factory owned by a multinational electrical equipment manufacturer while at the same time he co-writes a book on labour time planning.
Here is the introduction of the text:
This piece is a discussion of the social relations of modern industrial production and what it means for socialism. I believe this is important because the literature around socialist economics and planning tend to focus on abstract models of how production might work, without much emphasis on how it currently works and why. My conclusions may be surprising to the reader, although, in light of the information I’ll present, I think they should be regarded as common sense. For instance, I will explain that what socialists would immediately recognize as cooperative relations of production are already understood to be highly desirable by today’s industrial planners, although, of course, they do not express it in those terms. An appreciation of this and related facts allow us to refocus away from abstractions such as ‘planning’ and ‘competition,’ and instead to think about the changing nature of the content of those terms.
In this piece I will explain why necessary technical changes in planning tend to be complemented and optimized by changing the social relations of labor within the enterprise, and how capitalists have reacted to this reality by both experimenting with cooperative working conditions while also trying to find ways to avoid them. I will discuss the conclusions which can be drawn from these emergent features of the production system–namely that capitalist imperatives act as a fetter on the further development of industry. Using the lens of how existing industry works, it is possible to see how an economic system composed of generalized cooperative relations of production would have huge inherent superiorities over an economy based on private production processes.
To read more: https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/08/modern-industry-and-prospects-for-socialism/