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Forest and Factory: The Science and the Fiction of Communism
How might communism work? How can we approach this question with any rigor? What roles do industrial production, planning, and deliberative decision-making have in communism? In just under 21,000 words Phil Neel and I try to provide an answer to these questions.
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Technical Expertise and Communist Production
On the character of technical expertise developed in “high mix low volume” vs “low mix high volume” manufacturing operations. I chart out what this means for communism as both a political movement and an eventual productive state of affairs.
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Engineering, Commodity Production, and Capitalist Domination (Part 2)
Those of us who have accumulated the technical expertise necessary to enable the endless churning of things from factories have done so as part of a vast machine built on an absurd amount of suffering. This suffering cannot be undone, but can potentially be redeemed if this expertise is leveraged towards building a society where planetary domination by the alien logic…
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Engineering, Commodity Production, and Capitalist Domination (Part 1)
The role of engineers in capitalism is two-fold: our labor simultaneously enables the domination of other laborers through the deployment of technology in service of capital accumulation while also itself being subject to domination by capitalism. A modern anti-capitalist approach to politics must account for the complex role of engineers, as engineers play not only a pivotal role in capitalism, but…
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Dead Labor is the Embryo of Communism
For those of us who want a communist society, a society of rationally planned production with universal human wellbeing as its main priority, we must ask: what makes communism possible? What is the foundation upon which such a society comes into being and perpetuates itself?
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The Present and Future of Engineers
Most engineers are proletarians: we perform labor in exchange for a wage, which we need in order to afford a comfortable life in the global capitalist system. Despite this, the origins of modern engineering lie just as much in Taylorist factory management as in the sweaty wage labor of the factory floor. In the social totality that is capitalism, we are…