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Terring

Citizen of the Cosmos

Brief disclaimer. English is not my native language and I want to improve it, so expect some errors and feel free to correct them.

Now it’s time for my out-of-place filthy propaganda :P

I’ve came to the conclusion that nowadays anything goes when we speak about Communism. Some people believe that Communism is the best idea ever proposed and the only way to lead mankind into a better future (like Star Trek), others believe that’s a great idea in theory but terrible in practice or not practical at all, and others flat out reject it as (at best) just a better version of Capitalism or as (at worst) a terrible vision that can only be compared with Nazism. For those reasons I’m focusing on the positive face of Communism, as a way to make our world a better place to live, and what I want to comment is the concept of the communist society.

Oh, and by the way, Stalinism and Maoism suck and can go fuck themselves with a cactus. Now let’s move on.

A communist society is a society where the means of production are collectively owned with free access, and it’s free from class, money and the state itself. A post-scarcity, money-free society where everybody can have free access to whatever they wish, without the need of jobs and without the fear of unemployment, where everybody can enjoy a high level of live and be free to do what they wish. Sounds awesome, sounds perfect, sounds utopian, but believe it or not… this is plausible! It’s possible to create this kind of society, because for the first time in human history we have the capability, the technology, the resources and the knowledge to build a global society of abundance for everyone, where the need for money and trade is obsoleted, where people are not separated at classes anymore, and nobody tells them what to do and what to think.

This is possible, but there is a little catch. It’s not Communism! “What? But it’s sounds like Communism”. It might sounds like that, but it’s not. Claiming that archiving this kind of society is possible only by Communism, is like claiming that the only way to fly is by flapping your hands like a bird. Of course you can fly. Not by trying to mimic birds, but with an airplane.

In our case, the “airplane” is a vision named The Venus Project, brain child of the American scientist Jacque Fresco. The Venus Project presents a new social and economic model that utilizes science and technology toward social betterment (like Star Trek) and to achieve a sustainable civilization of abundance for all without any exception. The Venus Project suggest the redesign of our culture based on our nowadays abilities and knowledge (kind of what if we could build our civilization from scratch, but nowadays and fully updated this time), and one of its most important key points is the declaration of all natural resources as the common heritage of all people, in a proposed economic system called Resource Based Economy.

In a Resource Based Economy, all goods and services are available to all people without the need for means of exchange such as money, credits, trade, barter or any other means. For this to be achieved, all resources must be declared as the common heritage of all Earth’s inhabitants. Equipped with the latest scientific and technological marvels, such as hydroponics and industrial robots, humankind could reach extremely high productivity levels and create an abundance of resources for everybody, all with the lowest environmental footprint possible. A solarpunk version of Star Trek, if you wish to imagine it. No more poverty and hunger, no more putting people into “rich” and “poor” categories, no more working to death to earn your right to live, no more abusing humans and the environment into a predatory system like capitalism.

“A Resource-Based Economy is in the application of the methods of science with human concern and environmental concern. If we used the scientific method throughout the world, the probability of war drops to zero. The probability of human suffering disappears. Deprivation, poverty, crime – all those things tend to disappear because there’s no basis.”

Jacque Fresco

But wait a minute! Isn’t The Venus Project still Communism, but with more science and a different name? Actually, no. Just because two ideas can share some points doesn’t mean that they’re both the same thing. This would be like claiming that a dog and a table are the same thing just because both of them have four legs. Communism and The Venus Project does share some key points, but they also have plenty of differences. Let’s have a look at them.

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
Dom Helder Camara

It’s true that Karl Marx contributed much to understanding the limitations of free markets, but The Communist Manifesto called for forcible, violent overthrow and revolution by the working class (proletariat), which is something that The Venus Project doesn’t advocate for social changes. In contrast, TVP approaches social change as a process of guided evolution and a problem of engineering to produce a working alternative. Rather than workers revolt, The Venus Project calls for the coordination of interdisciplinary teams to hypothesize and engineer a design solution for a human social system that renders the present one obsolete.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
R. Buckminster Fuller

Unlike past visions for Communism, and especially unlike past attempts of putting it into practice in China and Soviet Union, TVP calls for an experimental analysis of the social system implementation. This is unlike any communist revolution, utopian commune, or coup d’état that has always suffered from the fundamental problem of lacking a methodology for evaluating and improving the system’s function via data-driven decisions. The Venus Project calls for iterative prototyping of cities that we take as the unit of analysis in validating or falsifying hypotheses. The full scale blanket application of social policies to a vast geographic area, be it through revolution or legislation, without a means of evaluating their effectiveness, follows from an approach heavy in politics but lacking in scientific method. After all, all systems must be tweaked in order to fit the societies and contexts in which they are applied.

In other words, Communism is “let’s just make it already” and TVP is “let’s test it before we make it”.

Today, the complexity of our global civilization and the resulting problems cannot be managed by the political organization of a working class. Likewise, the compromises offered by variations of socialism represent patchwork solutions involving the tweaking of gears in an already broken machine that requires an entire replacement. The problems today are technical and require the mobilization of scientists and engineers, to provide technical solutions within a systems approach to manage the Earth’s resources with reference to its carrying capacity. This requires a global survey of resources, personnel, and needs.

Karl Marx diagnosed many of the underlying problems of the free market and predicted the collapse of Capitalism by its own mechanisms (and thanks to COVID-19, climate change and the recent financial crisis of 2008, we might already live at Capitalism’s final days) in his articulation of the “internal contradictions of Capitalism”, and he did envision a world free from oppressive structures. But Marx omitted innumerous logistical problems we would face as a planetary system and the systems approach required to manage the Earth and its resources for all inhabitants, both human and otherwise. This is why we need a strategic management methodology for Earth, which is a Global Resource Based Economy.

As exclaimed in The Communist Manifesto, the “history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. Knowing what we know now (150 years after the publishing of the book), we might rewrite this statement to state the underlying problem, that the history of civilization has been the history of resource mismanagement under conditions of scarcity. All class struggle has been a symptom of this underlying condition and it is this root cause that The Venus Project addresses. Although Karl Marx did envision a vague picture of a communist society wherein money, private property, and social hierarchy was abolished, he couldn’t begin to imagine how to implement that at a technical level.

In contrast to Communism, The Venus Project calls for the total redesign of cities (transportation, distribution, manufacturing, recycling, infrastructure) to produce abundance of goods and services. This is achieved through automation and optimized infrastructural efficiency. All basic social, personal, and ecological needs are accounted and provided for at the outset according to the latest scientific assessment, and managed as a system via cybernetic feedback loops. Humanity’s scientific knowledge and means of production have evolved well beyond what is needed to make this a reality. But it begins with a test and a prototype, not a wish and a revolution.

So in other words, the visions of the communist society are possible but not under the umbrella of Communism, and Marx’s visions can be archived but not as he envisioned them.

But isn’t all of this “utopian”? No, because utopia means perfection and perfection is impossible, although a constant state of improvement is both possible and necessary if we want to avoid any problems made by stagnation. I think the right word is “eutopia”, which means “something better and still possible”. Besides, utopian is not the need of something better, but the believe that you can get different results by doing the same stuff again and again, which is also the definition of insanity.

“Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is? Insanity is doing the exact… same fucking thing… over and over again, expecting… shit to change.”
Vaas Montenegro, Far Cry 3

And what about “human nature”? We’re genetically programmed to be evil and greedy and this is something we can’t change it, right? Wrong. The concept of human nature is more interesting and complex than just using it as a reason to excuse our worst values. We’re not evil and greedy inborn. We become evil and greedy because we live in an environment that perpetuate those terrible behaviors. I’m sure some of you might have notice that many people don’t know what forces are involved in shaping human behavior, so they invent their own concepts and project their own values into human behavior and say “that’s human nature”. Well, if humans are evil, selfies and greedy by nature, how do you explain the numerous acts of kindness and generosity? How do you explain the fact that people, like doctors, help other people because they want to help and not to earn money? And if human nature can’t be changed, why we don’t live in caves anymore? Why we keep evolving, both technological and social? Why we don’t support slavery and racism anymore? Why women can go to universities and vote? Because we change.

Hopefully I did provided some answers and food for thought and discussions without going off topic too much. Before I close, I’d like to recommend you a short video named “A World Worth Imagining; Jacque Fresco - The Man with the Plan” available on Vimeo.com for more information.

My job here is done.
flies away

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