Elsewhere I have written on the distinction between low mix high volume manufacturing and high mix low volume manufacturing and how this dichotomy might play into a communist reconfiguration of capitalist industry, but in that essay I did not do much to discuss how this factors into communist society in the long term.
Of course this is basically speculation; social configurations of the future (including and especially productive ones) will necessarily be the result of the immanent unfolding of events that have yet to happen. But we can tease out some ideas that may be useful down the line.
To summarize what I have said before about these two manufacturing paradigms in the context of social upheaval and productive reconfiguration: I suggest that the dynamism of high mix low volume facilities, with their configurability and adaptable workforces, would likely make them crucial to the expansion of a communist territory. The ability to produce a variety of goods on demand to directly meet aggregate social needs is critical. Low mix high volume production lines, with their single-purpose tooling, simply are not suited for the type of variety demanded by turbulent social reconfiguration. I think it is likely most high volume lines would, in the context of a communist revolution, lie mostly dormant or be dismantled and repurposed into more flexible productive arrangements.
But what of after revolution when the dust has settled? After all, does the labor efficiency of high volume manufacturing not create the necessary conditions for communism to be possible at all? There would exist many competing requirements. One such example would be productive self-sufficiency of localities to flexibly respond to local needs vs the leveraging of centralized high-efficiency production to save labor time and satisfy the needs of many localities more efficiently than they could do separately.
It is important to reframe the term “efficiency” here: in the context of capitalist industry efficiency is ultimately a matter of money. An operation is said to be efficient if it brings in more revenue than it costs to operate it. Efficiency in terms of labor time is a logical extension of this reasoning. However if capitalism has been ended and production is done to satisfy needs directly, profit is no longer at play. Labor time efficiency is just one possible form of efficiency, and one done for reasons of human happiness rather than profit. Efficiency in terms of carbon footprint, usage of certain scarce materials, local noise levels, unpleasantness of the labor required, health risk to laborers, impact on ecosystem, and countless other factors can now be rationally considered in aggregate and against each other to decide if a certain process is worth investing human time, energy, and material into. This is largely a political question and I could only hazard random guesses as to how different factors may be balanced.
So with regards to communist production happening between the two poles of decentralized adaptable (localized high mix low volume) and centralized fixed (low mix high volume for a larger geographic area), it is important to understand how this actually manifests for produced goods themselves. Not every productive decision has to be made at a global administrative level. Some decisions, administrative actions, and actual concrete production can all happen at a local level for the sake of expediency and simplicity. For example, if somebody wants a nice wooden rocking chair, is it important for a decision on this to be weighed on by a global administrative organ? Certainly not. Perhaps the city-level administration has a certain amounts of several types of lumber at its disposal based on needs forecasting in the previous cycle. A portion of this is allocated to more essential productive processes, but the other portion is free to be used for less essential processes like rocking chair fabrication on a first come first serve basis. Our chair aficionado, having secured the necessary lumber, could go to a community workshop with the necessary bandsaws, planers, routers, and drill presses and make the chair themselves during the time they are not performing more essential labor (which only takes a small portion of the week). If they do not have the expertise to make the chair themselves, they could place an order with a local group of renowned woodworkers who, during their non-essential-labor time, simply enjoy the art of making bespoke wooden furniture. Given the wait list this will take several weeks. The other option is to request it from another group of woodworkers on the other side of the city whose reputation is slightly lower but as a result can fabricate it very soon, and then send the chair on a truck driven by a person performing the essential labor of transporting non-essential goods (like custom rocking chairs). Either way, our person now has their chair! A local need was thus handled locally to the satisfaction of everybody involved.
But what of the lumber? Was this procured locally by a guild of lumber enthusiasts? Probably not. Perhaps this city is not located near the carefully-managed sustainable lumber-producing forests, and thus must receive an allotment from the closest forest several thousand kilometers away. The felling and processing of those trees into logs into lumber would likely be categorized as essential labor, as it is upstream from a large number of productive processes. Here a higher upfront investment of labor time and materials is allocated to minimize the labor time, energy, and waste necessary to produce the each piece of lumber. Because of the criticality of lumber production, great efforts are made to make it efficient by as many metrics as possible, including maximizing its level of automation. To maximize these efficiencies, only just enough trees are processed to satisfy the lumber requirements forecasted for each administrative locality that is set to receive lumber from this productive unit. Decisions on how to allocate the lumber between different sectors and essentiality classifications can be made more locally. Larger regional administrative bodies need only understand how much lumber is needed for the region on a per-cycle basis.
Perhaps there is a great need for chairs, and the woodworkers are overwhelmed with requests for plain, boring, and more or less interchangeable chairs. Instead an injection molding plant, staffed partially by people performing their weekly essential labor and partially by people enthusiastic about this particular industrial process (some people may do both throughout the week), machines a mold for a generic plastic chair and sets it to use to fabricate 300 of them. The design of the chair was done several years before by a very respected group of engineers and industrial designers and is one of the most popular chair designs on the internet. Enough chair-wanting people agree on this chair to meet the order minimum for fabricating a mold and doing a production run with some allocated thermoplastic of the specific kind needed. A minority of chair-desiring people really did not like this chair, and organized to have different style plastic chair designed. Once enough people agreed they wanted that chair, a mold was fabricated and the chairs molded. From then on, any time somebody wants either style chair from this facility they just put in an order, and once the order minimum is reached and the necessarily plastics are allocated for that cycle the run is performed and the chairs distributed.
But what of more complicated goods containing complicated microelectronics, rare materials, and high tech assembly processes? There are plenty of goods that do not make sense to ever make in small artisanal quantities. The precision and complicated sequence of actions required to manufacture semiconductor devices and integrated circuits, for instance, necessitates specialized machinery that is sophisticated enough to require significant amounts of labor time, expertise, and materials to build, maintain, and use. It is just about as complicated to fabricate 200 of a certain small integrated circuit as it is to fabricate 20,000 of them, the difference is just in the amount of time and materials needed. Otherwise the process is basically the same. The fact that complicated electronic assemblies, such as general use microcontrollers or FPGAs, require material inputs from disparate corners of the globe means it would be inefficient by just about every conceivable metric affecting human wellbeing to fabricate small quantities of them in small shops all over the planet. The production of goods like these would likely be centralized in specialized facilities that serve geographic areas just as broad as where all the material inputs originated from. For many goods this is essentially the whole globe. These specialized facilities may contain a number of low mix high volume production lines that, when grouped together, can benefit from joint economies of scale in terms of labor time and energy usage. Concentration of high tech production in certain localities could pose the threat of strange political power imbalances with respect to areas with little or no high tech production. There might simultaneously be a push by planners and enthusiasts to develop new technological processes that allow for decentralized fabrication of complicated goods using easily reconfigurable machines, such as pico-scale omni-material 3D printers (which currently do not exist). The balance of such imperatives would be deeply political, as would decisions about whether to centralize or decentralize the production of goods that could conceivably be made using either type of production style. Realistically this is many if not most goods.
Significantly more can be said on this topic, enough to fill thousands of pages of speculation. The relationship between group decision making (likely to vary across geographies and cultures), demarcation of labor as essential vs unessential (possibly with gradations), prioritization of certain efficiency parameters (and the resultant production limits for various goods), collective vs individual management of need satisfaction, administration of domestic vs public consumption, and all sorts of other considerations are worthy of detailed thought.
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