I Am Not A Communist

After explaining why I consider myself a socialist, the obvious follow-up question is:

If you are a socialist, why are you not a communist?

The answer is not moral revulsion, historical tribalism, or a defence of capitalism as it currently exists.

The answer is coordination.

I. The Coordination Problem

Large modern economies are extraordinarily complex systems.

Millions of people produce goods and services through long, distributed supply chains that stretch across continents and time. Production decisions are made long before consumption occurs. Education takes decades before it becomes labour. Infrastructure projects take years before they produce economic returns.

No individual — and no central authority — can directly observe all of the labour contributions required to reproduce such a system.

This creates a coordination problem.

Money and prices are imperfect tools for solving that problem, but they are tools nonetheless. They allow decentralised actors to compare production choices without needing a complete overview of the entire economy.

A system that abolishes money therefore removes one of the few mechanisms available for coordinating complex production.

II. The Information Problem

Advocates of non-monetary economies often imagine that production could be organised through planning alone.

But planning faces a basic informational constraint.

To plan an economy, the planning authority must know:

• how much of each good is needed
• how much labour and material it requires
• how those inputs interact with every other production process

In small communities this is sometimes possible.

In industrial societies with thousands of interconnected production chains, it becomes far harder.

Prices are not perfect reflections of value, but they are signals generated by millions of local decisions. They transmit information about scarcity, demand, and production constraints in ways that no central ledger can easily replicate.

III. The Surplus Problem

Modern economies cannot operate through exact simple reproduction.

They require surplus.

Surplus funds:

• infrastructure
• education
• research and innovation
• buffers against shocks
• the transition between declining and emerging industries

In capitalist economies this surplus is extracted through profit.

That system has obvious problems. It produces inequality, misallocation, and cycles of instability.

But eliminating profit does not eliminate the need for surplus.

It merely changes how surplus is collected and allocated.

IV. The Accumulation Problem

A further difficulty arises once money is removed from the system.

Modern economies do not simply distribute goods. They must also prevent uncontrolled accumulation of resources that would destabilise production and reproduction.

In monetary economies, this is managed imperfectly but visibly through mechanisms such as taxation, interest rates, public spending, and regulation. These tools allow surplus to be extracted and redistributed without requiring direct control over every production decision.

In a non-monetary system this problem becomes harder.

If goods rather than money are the medium of accumulation, then accumulation still occurs — it simply takes a different form. People accumulate influence over resources, access to production, or control over distribution networks.

Without a monetary accounting system, there is no straightforward way to measure or regulate this accumulation.

As a result, the ability to accumulate advantage shifts away from economic coordination and toward political positioning.

Those who are best able to influence planning institutions, distribution committees, or bureaucratic hierarchies gain disproportionate control over surplus allocation.

In effect, accumulation does not disappear.

It becomes political rather than economic.

This risks pushing the economy even further away from the reproduction requirements of the value field. Decisions become shaped less by the material constraints of production and more by institutional power within the planning structure.

In other words, removing money does not eliminate accumulation.

It simply changes the arena in which accumulation occurs.

In the framework developed elsewhere in this project, this risks pushing the economy further away from the reproduction requirements of the value field, while obscuring the signals that normally appear in the price field.

V. The Concentration Problem

If the state becomes the sole organiser of economic production, then the institution responsible for extracting surplus is also responsible for regulating itself.

This creates a concentration of power that is difficult to correct.

One way to think about this is through an analogy.

Making the state responsible for all surplus extraction, allocation, and regulation is a little like making your defence barrister, police officer, prosecution barrister, judge, and jury the same person.

Even if that person is well-intentioned, the structure lacks internal checks.

Systems work best when different institutions place constraints on each other.

VI. This Is Not Small-State Liberalism

Rejecting total economic centralisation does not imply support for laissez-faire capitalism.

Modern economies depend on large-scale infrastructure that markets alone do not reliably provide.

Examples include:

• energy grids
• transportation networks
• financial systems
• healthcare systems
• education systems
• long-term research

These systems shape the conditions under which labour can reproduce itself. They are foundational rather than optional.

For this reason, they often require public institutions capable of coordinating investment across long time horizons.

The state therefore has an essential role in maintaining the conditions under which the economy can function.

But that role is not identical to running every productive activity directly.

VII. The Practical Position

My position is therefore neither classical capitalism nor classical communism.

It is closer to a mixed system where:

• markets coordinate much day-to-day production
• the state maintains and regulates critical infrastructure
• surplus is managed to stabilise reproduction of the economy
• institutions constrain each other rather than concentrating power in a single authority

This position does not promise perfect efficiency or perfect fairness.

But it acknowledges the coordination constraints that complex economies face.

Ignoring those constraints does not produce utopia.

It usually produces collapse.

Conclusion

The goal of socialism, as I understand it, is not to abolish coordination mechanisms simply because they emerged under capitalism.

The goal is to organise economic institutions so that the reproduction of society is stable, fair, and materially grounded.

Money, markets, and decentralised production are not sacred institutions.

But neither are they easily replaceable.

Until an alternative coordination mechanism exists that can operate at the scale of modern economies, abolishing them is less a revolution than a gamble.