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, not just because of their scale but because of the way production is distributed across time and space. Millions of people contribute to the production of goods and services through supply chains that stretch across continents, while decisions about production are often made long before consumption occurs. Education takes decades before it becomes labour, and infrastructure projects require years of investment before they generate any return.

In such a system, no individual—and no central authority—can directly observe or track all of the labour contributions required to reproduce the economy. The knowledge required to coordinate production is dispersed across countless actors, each of whom only sees a small part of the overall process.

This creates a coordination problem, because aligning production with future demand requires information that is inherently distributed and incomplete. No single point in the system has access to the full picture.

Money and prices, while imperfect, function as mechanisms for managing this constraint. They condense information about scarcity, demand, and production cost into signals that allow decentralised actors to compare choices and adjust behaviour without needing a complete overview of the system. In effect, they allow coordination to emerge from local decisions rather than requiring it to be imposed from above.

A system that abolishes money therefore removes one of the few mechanisms capable of coordinating production at this level of complexity. The question is not whether money is flawed—it is whether anything else can perform the same coordinating function at scale.

II. The Information Problem

Advocates of non-monetary economies often assume that planning can replace markets as the primary mechanism of coordination. However, this assumption runs into a fundamental informational constraint.

To plan an economy, a central authority must know not only how much of each good is needed, but also how much labour and material is required to produce it, how those inputs interact with other production processes, and how changes in one part of the system affect the rest. This is not a static problem; it changes continuously as conditions shift.

In small communities, where production is relatively simple and locally visible, this kind of coordination is sometimes feasible. But in industrial economies with thousands of interdependent production chains, the informational burden becomes far greater. The relevant knowledge is not only vast in scale but also constantly changing and context-specific.

Prices do not solve this problem perfectly, but they provide a mechanism for transmitting fragments of this distributed information. Each transaction reflects local conditions—availability of resources, demand for goods, production constraints—and these local signals aggregate into a system-wide pattern that actors can respond to without fully understanding it.

Planning systems, by contrast, require that this information be gathered, processed, and acted upon centrally. The difficulty is not simply computational; it is structural. Much of the information required for coordination only exists in local, tacit, or rapidly changing forms that are difficult to centralise in a usable way.

III. The Surplus Problem

Modern economies cannot operate through exact reproduction alone, because reproduction is not a static process. Societies must expand, adapt, and respond to shocks, which means they require surplus rather than mere equilibrium.

Surplus plays multiple roles. It funds infrastructure, education, research, and innovation; it provides buffers against economic disruption; and it allows resources to be reallocated as industries decline and new ones emerge. Without surplus, an economy lacks the capacity to adjust to changing conditions.

In capitalist systems, surplus is extracted through profit. This process is far from ideal. It generates inequality, encourages misallocation, and contributes to cycles of instability. However, removing profit does not remove the need for surplus itself. It only changes how surplus is generated, measured, and distributed.

Any viable economic system must therefore solve not only the problem of production, but also the problem of how surplus is created and allocated over time.

IV. The Accumulation Problem

Once money is removed from the system, a further difficulty emerges. Economies do not simply need to generate surplus; they must also prevent the uncontrolled accumulation of resources that can destabilise production and reproduction.

In monetary systems, accumulation is visible and, to some extent, measurable. Tools such as taxation, interest rates, public spending, and regulation provide mechanisms—however imperfect—for managing how surplus is concentrated and redistributed.

In a non-monetary system, these mechanisms become less clear. If goods rather than money function as the medium of accumulation, accumulation does not disappear. Instead, it takes on different forms, such as control over access to resources, influence over production decisions, or authority within distribution networks.

Without a common accounting framework, it becomes harder to measure how much is being accumulated and by whom. As a result, accumulation tends to shift away from economic processes, where it is at least partially visible, and toward political processes, where it is mediated through institutional influence.

Those who can shape planning decisions, control distribution mechanisms, or influence bureaucratic structures gain disproportionate power over how surplus is allocated. Accumulation, in this sense, does not vanish; it becomes embedded in the structure of governance itself.

This shift creates a further problem. When accumulation becomes political rather than economic, decisions are less constrained by the material requirements of production and more by the internal dynamics of institutions. The economy risks drifting away from the reproduction requirements of the value field while losing the signals that would normally indicate that misalignment.

Removing money, therefore, does not eliminate accumulation. It changes where accumulation occurs and how it is exercised.

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 concentrates multiple forms of authority within a single structure, making it difficult to correct errors or constrain misuse of power.

The issue is not simply one of intent. Even a well-intentioned institution faces structural limitations if it lacks external checks. Systems tend to function more effectively when different institutions impose constraints on one another, creating feedback mechanisms that limit overreach.

This can be illustrated through analogy. Making the state responsible for all aspects of economic coordination is similar to assigning the roles of defence barrister, police officer, prosecution barrister, judge, and jury to the same individual. Even if that individual acts in good faith, the absence of institutional separation removes the conditions under which accountability normally operates.

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 systems that markets alone do not reliably produce or maintain.

Infrastructure such as energy grids, transportation networks, financial systems, healthcare systems, education systems, and long-term research institutions forms the material base on which economic activity depends. These systems shape the conditions under which labour can reproduce itself and are therefore foundational to any functioning economy.

Because they operate over long time horizons and require coordinated investment, they often depend on public institutions capable of planning and sustaining them. The state, in this sense, plays an essential role in maintaining the structural conditions necessary for economic reproduction.

However, this does not imply that all productive activity must be directly managed by the state. The problem is not the presence of markets as such, but the absence of mechanisms capable of coordinating complex systems at scale.

VII. The Practical Position

My position is therefore neither classical capitalism nor classical communism. It is better understood as an attempt to balance coordination mechanisms under real constraints.

In practice, this means allowing markets to coordinate much of day-to-day production, while the state maintains and regulates critical infrastructure and intervenes where necessary to stabilise the reproduction of the economy. It also requires that institutions be structured in such a way that they constrain one another, rather than concentrating authority in a single centre.

This position does not promise perfect efficiency or perfect fairness. It does, however, take seriously the coordination constraints that complex economies face. Ignoring those constraints does not produce a more just system; it produces a system that is less capable of sustaining itself.

Conclusion

The goal of socialism, as I understand it, is not to abolish coordination mechanisms simply because they emerged under capitalism. It is to organise economic institutions in a way that allows society to reproduce itself in a stable, fair, and materially grounded manner.

Money, markets, and decentralised production are not beyond critique, but neither are they easily replaced. They perform functions that any alternative system would also need to perform.

Until a mechanism exists that can coordinate production at the scale and complexity of modern economies, abolishing them is less a revolution than a gamble.