Notes received from friends
Thank you for your patience in answering the questions. I think our main difference is that in many cases you refer back to the movement and capacity of humans themselves, instead of answering the practical problem.
I agree that a council society can want to organize production based on human needs and not capital profits. My question, however, is not “Can humans make decisions?”; the question is what is the precise mechanism for making and implementing these decisions?
For example, you say that the councils determine how much steel, medicine, or bread to produce. Okay; let’s assume that local councils and factories collect the necessary information. What structure would collect this information on the scale of a country of, say, 80 or 90 million people and turn it into a production plan? If there were a difference between the two councils about the amount of production or consumption, who would make the final decision and by what method?
This question does not mean accepting the market and capitalism. Incidentally, my question is: if we eliminate the market and the price, what alternative mechanism would we create to coordinate millions of economic decisions?
As for the shortage, I don’t think your answer completely solves the problem. I accept that free and informed people can distribute resources fairly; but when resources are truly less than needed, “real need” alone does not determine priority. For example, if we only have 1,000 houses ready for 5,000 families, all of these families have real need. If medicine is only available for 1,000 people but 5,000 people need it, there must be a specific criterion for prioritization. “The council decides” is still not the answer to this question; my next question is, by what criteria and method does the council decide, and what happens if people disagree with the council’s decision?
As for bureaucracy, I think your answer does acknowledge the danger, but the solution is still too general. You say that more and more informed public involvement will prevent bureaucracy. I agree with public participation, but a complex economy is bound to create institutions for coordination, statistics, transportation, energy, production, distribution, and planning. My question is, how do we make sure that these coordinating institutions do not gradually become an independent centre of power? What specific mechanism is there for their removal, oversight, transparency, and limitations? Simply saying that “the people should get involved” is not enough for me.
Regarding foreign trade, your answer incidentally raised a new question for me. You say that domestically, money and the market lose their relevance, but as long as other countries are capitalist, foreign trade continues to be conducted according to the law of value, the world market, and currency.
So, in this case, a society without money and a market at home must have foreign exchange to buy chips, machinery, medicine or raw materials from abroad. How does it obtain foreign exchange? What does it export? What institution decides how much of the domestic production is exported and how much remains for domestic consumption? And who decides on the priority of imports?
I think that here we can no longer say that the issue is “not complicated”. Incidentally, this is one of the points that shows that the transition from a capitalist economy to an economy without money and a market is, at least in the transition period, a very complex economic and political issue.
As for management, I did not say that engineers and technicians should be fired. On the contrary, my question was precisely how, if ownership changes, management and expertise will be organized? You say that specialists will remain, and everyone can learn the specialty they are interested in. This idea is understandable, but the practical question still remains: who is responsible for the specialist decisions? What if an expert disagrees with the majority decision of the council but is technically correct? And how is a decision made if several experts disagree on an issue?
Ultimately, I have no objection to the principle that people should have more control over their own work and lives. My argument is that there is a long way to go from “wanting a free, council-based society” to “managing a complex society without markets, money, and government.”
For this reason, I still think that a significant part of my initial objections has not been answered. Your answer explains more about what this movement wants and what kind of society it believes in; but I want to know exactly how this society is supposed to work and how it will prevent failure, scarcity, concentration of power, and economic collapse.
Explanation and continuation of the answers:
Dear friends!
We also appreciate your generosity, follow-up, spirit full of inquiry and sense of the need to explore ambiguities, we welcome the continuation of the discussions with great enthusiasm, we see this work as an integral part of the ongoing common class struggle. You say:
Our main difference is that in many cases, instead of responding to the practical problem, you refer back to the movement itself and the capacity of humans.
This difference is deeply rooted; you have recognized it correctly. We hope that our use of certain concepts will not be seen as a sign of “stamping” and “stigmatizing.” We strongly dislike this. In our opinion, the method of cognition that you have adopted and insist on continuing is not a method of cognition for changing realities, society, the world, and human life, but rather an interest in interpreting these issues and turning them into a kind of academic preoccupation. This is one of the most obvious, fundamental differences between us. You must be familiar with the “dualism of interpretation and change.” You have focused all your senses, your capacity for curiosity, and your intellectual power on, for example:
“What is the precise mechanism for decision-making and implementation in a council society being built on the ruins of capitalism?”
“What structure transforms the collected information of a society of 80-90 million into a production plan?”
“If there is a dispute between two councils about the amount of production or consumption, who will resolve the dispute and by what method?”
What is surging in these questions is not the roar of the need to change the deadly black objectivity that dominates the lives of billions of people on earth and tens of millions of hungry Iranian workers, without water, electricity, medicine, treatment, education, and the target of American and Israeli bombing and genocide by the ruling capitalist regime, but rather finding answers to satisfy one’s own mind, to satisfy one’s inner needs to dominate the interpretation of the present and future of the world. These two are opposites. The first seeks change, and the second is enamoured with interpretation.
Both the first and the second, each more than the other, strive to know, are fascinated by unlimited access to data and knowledge, but one wants all this to radically change the present existence, the other has a thirst for mastery in interpretation. One struggles to make the right campaign of liberation the order of his life and that of others, the other tries to be knowledgeable about the sea and the ocean, to appear so, to bring the top and bottom of the world under the microscope of his knowledge.
One is deeply materialistic, a proponent of fundamental change, the other is metaphysical, willingly or unwillingly a defender of the status quo, even if his claims of being revolutionary, even his claims of being anti-capitalist, fall on deaf ears. Why is hecompletely metaphysical, academic?
Let us whisper a few words in this regard. The initial text of the book “Socialism, Economics, Politics”, which was mentioned in the previous reply, was prepared in 1990 (36 years ago), at that time there was still no sign of the Internet anywhere in Europe, or at least the author of the text had not even heard of it.
The digital industry was still a newborn compared to today, artificial intelligence was not even famous in technology-crazed academic circles. We remind you of these points because what has happened in the last three decades in the digital and artificial intelligence fields has undoubtedly had a very profound impact on the process of the victorious Soviet movement to establish a society without wage labour, classes, and the state. Despite all this impact, the approach to the abolition of wage labour did not feel the need to rework and complete the topics of the book. Why? Because its starting point in organizing the text was not at all to have a container to describe or explain all the details, planning, architecture, and establishment of socialism without any flaws or impurities.
He saw this as rolling in the abyss of interpretation. What was holding back the cell, the cell of the existence of the activists of this approach, was not the lack of knowledge to build the impregnable palace of socialism, but the way and well for the working class and the labour movement to emerge from the darkness of going astray, enduring failures, exhaustion, and being destroyed under the pressure of poverty, misery, hunger, deprivation, and the blackness born of the capitalist octopus. They wanted to find the right path to change, to know the secrets of the successive failures of decades and centuries, to share them with their comrades, to make the subject of consultation, the agenda of the soviet campaign. They also realized that in the interval between the days of writing that text and the formation and growth of a solid soviet movement against wage labour, achieving victory, and establishing the future society, the greatest technical, scientific, and informational developments would perhaps occur, developments that would have the greatest impact on the process of architecture and the establishment of socialism. What one day is considered a comprehensive plan full of certainty for the construction of socialism and the abolition of wage labour will require thousands of revisions and manipulations a few years later.
The anti-capitalist approach, the abolition of wage labour, did not see the need to rework “socialism, economics, politics” in the wake of the storm of scientific, informational, and digital advances because it did not pursue the understanding of socialism in “seeing realities rationally, considering rationalities real.” It sought the path to a radical change in the dominant objectivity, the liberation of humanity, the liberation of billions of workers who create 1,500 trillion dollars of capital today in the world, deprived of the power of lime, fallen from existence. In the process of preparing that simple initial text, its eyes were dazzled by many facts. That its class, the labour movement, has wandered from one swamp to another throughout the twentieth century, has not pursued its anti-capitalist class struggle in any area, and has become the work of various sections of the bourgeoisie in people’s anti-imperialism, democracy, democratic revolution, changing the governance model of capital, and changing the form of capitalist ownership. Its struggle for improved livelihoods, medicine, treatment, social welfare, human rights, political freedoms, against gender, ethnic, racial apartheid, environmental pollution, hunger, homelessness, poverty, war, Holocaust, genocide, dictatorship, whether peaceful or violent, in both cases, has been a hangover from capital, buried in the twisted order of capitalism.
His view of immediate and future demands, strategy, strategy, solution, organization carried the burden of this great calamity on his vision. Pursuing the mystery of establishing the future society and analysing socialism for the approach to the abolition of wage labour was the right starting point for shedding light on the twists and turns, the ups and downs of the class struggle against wage slavery. We had taken the absolutely right circle. Because analysing socialism told us what the correct class campaign path was, it warned us that we must understand capitalism as deeply as possible, how the movement against the existence and domination of wage labour should be, how the worker, the labour movement, organization, this movement, and other campaign issues should be viewed, each of these in turn sounds the siren in our consciousness that we must bring the past under the whip of a radical anti-capitalist critique. This is something that this approach has done to the best of its ability and must do more.
We emphasized the metaphysical nature of your method of cognition and the basis of your view of society, history, the world, and the struggle, because you are not hitting the main ring of the problem. Why? The answer is up to you, but in our opinion – which of course could be incorrect and unrealistic – perhaps because what the wage slavery system has imposed on the lives of billions of workers around the world, tens of millions of Iranian workers, does not bother you as much as it needs to, does not whip you. You do not look at the breadless table of millions of children in working-class families, you do not feel sorry for the long lines of fathers and mothers without the necessary means to purchase medicine and hospital expenses for cancer patients, ALS patients, and thousands of other diseases, you do not touch the life full of humiliation and humiliation of this cursed mass, the sufferings and heartbreaking pains that, no matter how much they challenge, are inherently and deeply anti-capitalist. Instead, you summarize all the miseries and misery in the religiousness and Islamism of the state, the incompetence of the state officials, the ignorance of the rulers, “rent-seeking”, land grabbing, the existence of the businessmen who are sanctioned, the absence of democracy, the absence of the rule of law, and the like. You also search for the way out in “women, life, freedom”, rebellion, these types of solutions and strategies!!
Beyond these assumptions, you also look at the words of the anti-capitalist movement, and the bottom line of your criticism is that it suffers from shortcomings in laying the foundations for the future society. With your highly active mental faculties and great capacity for analysis, you have suggested that everything can be solved by bringing and taking away governments, changing the pattern of governments, but the reality is the opposite. The very short article “Overthrow is inevitable, but how and with what strategy” criticizes this very perspective, the method of observation, and the way of knowing from the angle of the anti-capitalist campaign. All it insists on is that simply bringing and taking away governments is not a cure for any pain. Not only does the overthrow of capitalism, lacking sufficient anti-capitalism, not solve any of the problems of tens of millions of workers, but all other forms of struggle, from the struggle for livelihood, welfare, water, electricity, health, treatment, education to political freedoms, basic human rights, against environmental pollution, criminal gender apartheid, patriarchy, child labour, hunger, poverty and homelessness, will not get anywhere without the direction, the theme, the clear vision of anti-wage slavery, as they have not gotten anywhere so far. To achieve any success, to realize any decisive and important change, it is necessary to start building an organized anti-capitalist council movement. The approach to abolishing wage labour has analysed and criticized all these areas as much as necessary, and has presented a strategy, a solution, and a roadmap. We have explored socialism, the image of the future building of human life, as the key to awareness of the process of the class struggle, the sure and correct recognition of the path of this struggle. In our opinion, this is not the point of departure, the pain, the inner turmoil, the concerns, the core of your effort. The difference that you mentioned at the beginning of your second note emanates from here, and our suggestion, request, insistence, advice, and enthusiasm is that we should discuss it more and more deeply. Your point of departure, the path you have set out is not the starting point and the right path. It is under the pressure of this very wrongness that questions, concerns, searches, criticisms have no place, relevance, or clear connection to the ongoing class struggle. For example, in conditions where the immediate danger of hunger threatens the lives of millions of workers in a very serious and terrible way, you raise the question: “With whose intervention, by what institution or force, will the differences between the councils be resolved?”!! You are looking for a reference for resolving the differences!! The conscious, organized, soviet, anti-wage slavery movement of tens of millions of people, even after covering long paths of campaign and achieving victory, is not respected and close to you, it needs the presence of a high-ranking institution and you are looking for a reference that will resolve the disputes between the councils!! Don’t be misunderstood, we do not deny the possibility of a dispute between the two council, we do not deny the need for a mechanism to resolve the dispute. The difference between what we are saying and what you are saying is that from now on, at an unknown historical distance, we will not decide in our imaginary world how to resolve the disputes between the councils. We see this as metaphysics and a slip in interpretation, what is entangled in our living and present existence is the formation, structuring, maturity, and presence of the movement for the abolition of wage labour by the working masses. This is the movement that will remove the problems mentioned and will have the ability, sufficiency, and competence to do this.
In your recent letter, you also mentioned the problem of possible shortages and how to resolve them by the councils. In our previous response, we clarified that the world’s current problem is not shortages at all. Regarding housing, we said, by adopting a document from official government institutions and the Minister of Housing of the capitalist Islamic fascist republic, that the number of empty houses living and present in the hell of wage slavery in Iran is far greater than the number of households without housing. Here, with your re-emphasis on this story of shortages, let us present more data and information. According to the report of the relevant institutions of the “United Nations”, capitalism produced more than 2 billion and 445 million tons of steel in the world in 2025, of which about 746 million tons were in excess of the total world consumption needs in all areas. Another report by the same international capital institution states that every year, 17% of all food produced in the world, equivalent to one billion tons of food with a volume of 23 million 40-ton trucks, goes directly to the landfill without any consumption.
In 2023, over 100 billion pieces of clothing were produced, 60 pieces per person on Earth. The rate of clothing production in more advanced industrialized countries was 80 pieces and even in less industrialized countries, 40 pieces per person. These are UN statistics. Apart from these figures, everyone knows that every year a huge volume of refrigerators, freezers, televisions, computers, digital products, all household appliances, due to not being sold, are transported directly from stores to remelting centres, without any prior consumption. Capitalism does these things consciously and with a vigilant mind, awake, and awake, first of all it launches the most famous “auctions”!! and when all sales mechanisms, all ways of converting products into money reach an insurmountable deadlock, it takes other solutions. This is the current state of the capital production cycle in the world, and you are drowning in the seven seas of investigation, research, on the secure, indestructible arrangement of the bricks of the future society, worried about the possibility of deficits, shortages of production!!
You ask:
“How do we ensure that the coordinating bodies of the councils do not become an independent power? What specific mechanism is there for dismissal, oversight, transparency and limiting their power? It is not enough to say that the people should intervene.”
“A council society without money and a market at home that wants to import machinery, medicine, chips, what will it export? How will it earn foreign exchange? How much of the production will be exported? How much will be left for domestic consumption? Who will decide on the priority of imports?
If ownership changes, how will management and expertise be organized? Who is responsible for expert decisions? If an expert disagrees with the majority decision of the council but is technically right, how will the final decision be made if several experts disagree on an issue?
Our sincere, comradely and compassionate request is that you yourself, at your leisure, think for a few minutes, not to find answers to the questions, but rather to pose them. Do you see any glimmer of earthiness, serious thinking, or the urgency of the need to radically change the status quo in the questions? Comradely, we say our answer is no. Do you attribute no value, no objectivity, no place to the millions, billions of workers, their struggles, the council movement that they are supposed to establish, the world of interactions, thoughts, boasting, solutions, abilities, and creativity that are supposed to be fruitful and flourishing in this movement? Your view of these billions, millions are even more contemptuous, more patronizing, more saviours, and more patronizing than that of religious scholars. You think that you have to have the first and last word in establishing the future world yourself, prepare the plans, designs, and actions to lay the last brick of the society beyond capitalism right now without any problems or shortcomings!! And our question to you, my dear and precious ones, is why should these humans, these rebels, these cursed builders of history, their movements and campaigns exist at all?! Why do they have the right to exist? Isn’t it that we, to the hilt, must resolve the beginning and the end of the world right now with our miraculous divine wisdom and knowledge, and make it available to humanity in the form of a plan. So why should these humans think? Why should they have the right to think, devise, and create change? Don’t you think this is falling into the worst kind of metaphysics. We hope that you will not consider saying these words as evidence of our escape from thinking, research, or as a sign of ignoring the importance of knowing, dissecting, and discovering truths. We are also sufficiently fond of all of this. What we are talking about is something else.
Dear friends!
Let us enter into a dialogue with each other as painfully, clearly, amicably, and as comrades as possible. If we speak harshly, rudely, and sullenly, do not take it as a reproach, lack of devotion, advice, or paternalistic thinking. We are a bomb of wounds in a movement. It is difficult not to explode when talking about this movement. Look at all our verbal and written inconveniences from this perspective. We have the utmost respect and dignity for your generation, we think about the role you can play in the human liberation movement, a role that we see a deep gap between playing and your current situation. Let us sit down to a closer, more painful, and more responsible dialogue with each other.
Anti-capitalist workers