Dear Tom,

I’ve returned frequently to your talk “Unifying Marxism & Cybernetics,”^[1] which you presented earlier this year at the Complex Anarchism Symposium in Brussels.

The talk is a critique of the Anarchist’s absolute principle against hierarchy from a cybernetic perspective. You further critique, or rather investigate and demonstrate, the mutual relationship between cybernetic organization and Marx’s “Photographic Negative” of social relations in communal production. (Sidenote: Hilarious how you critique the symposium’s own pamphlet!) While you each arrive from different traditions, there may be a convergence here between your thought and that of Zoe Baker in their recent talk “What is Communism?”^[2] Baker highlights the anarchic quality of the society of “free and equal producers,” while you point to the necessities of viable organizational structure and principles of political economy for communal society.

In previous presentations and discussions, you rely on the Group of International Communists (GIC) and Marx’s writings to articulate the functioning of a communal system of reproduction, but here you elaborate on their arguments and consider how existing capitalist businesses are introducing elements of communal production. As you note, however, these attempts will be nothing more than “pseudo-Communist” unless social relations change. Here you emphasize how the necessary condition for the transformation of private ownership of capital to communal ownership of capital lies with the social relations of production. This could conversely be put as the transition from a system of production dominated by capital towards production managed by society, i.e., the producers themselves.

Perhaps you rely too heavily on biological metaphors when discussing the necessity of hierarchy, but you express a difficult distinction when you interrogate the voluntary character of acts. Whether an individual act is voluntary or forced is an arbitrary and isolated concern. Rather when discussing society, we must be concerned with whether an act or relation is one of domination or exploitation. Anarchist traditions stress how the state and its legal apparatuses cannot be relied on to enforce free social relations, because the state is itself a structure of domination that mediates exploitation. And yet neither does the governing structure of any given society determine its social relations of production.

So, what social relations can give rise to communal society? I want to rest on your point that the matter of equal compensation is not merely a moral proposition, but a necessity of both political economy and cybernetic structure. To put it as directly as you do, producers not only should be but must be equally compensated for their working time. Why? As you illustrate, communal relations cannot be achieved without the establishment of a direct relationship between work and product. Since this cannot be done without calculating the social average of production, anything other than equal compensation would immediately be evident to any producer, but, most importantly, uneven compensation would break the equivalence between work and product. As such, compensation based on the social average of production in terms of working time would necessarily be an egalitarian form of compensation—though one can easily imagine many over-and-underhanded attempts by owners, state officials, union leadership, and even senior members to fragment the social value of working time among producers, such as those with varying levels of experience or skill.

However, these attempts will fall flat over time to the transparency of their greed, but more forcefully to the necessity of equal compensation for the implementation of working-time accounting. How could one measure the social value of a product if some of its producers were taking 1 ½ hours for every hour of production, while others were taking merely ½ an hour? This cannot be accounted for. While this tiered approach to compensation in working time may seem viable from the side of production, the product could not be valued according to an average production time because there is no equivalent unit of account: the hour of working time. Would some products be valued at a higher social average than others if they were produced by more experienced or skilled workers? Would products produced by less experienced or skilled workers be valued lower? In fact, the inverse would be more likely to be the case in terms of production time, but this discrepancy would disrupt the functioning of a communal system of production and distribution.

Attempts to “fuck with” working time accounting are fruitless, however, because the basis of equal compensation is not in the equality of labor, but rather in the equality of labor power and, more specifically, the standardization of social production through technology. As such, labor power becomes increasingly equivalent through the operation and maintenance of machinery. If new machinery is introduced, producers will arrive at new standards of social production. Finally, the dead labor of past generations will provide the basis of living labor’s equality and freedom. Our labor can only be as free to the degree that we free all the labor of past generations. After all, they deserve to rest just as much as we do.

Still, communal society must not only go beyond wage labor, but also beyond the so-called bourgeois demand of compensation based on time—need itself should be our social standard. But without any form of measurement, producers could not plan or control any aspects of their work. More critically, working-time compensation and consumption measurements would not be a further fetishizing of labor power because it is based on the social average of production time, not the individual producer's ability to work. With working-time accounting, our work would, then, not be treated as a commodity because our time and abilities would not be bought. Not from the wage fund, not from our owners, and certainly not from taxes. Our “wages” would cease to be paid to us after the fact of our work. Instead, our compensation would be guaranteed and come to us directly from the work itself. How this surplus is directed will be the realm of communal politics.

Although the focus of “Unifying Marxism & Cybernetics” is a critique of the centrality of organization in Anarchist thought—or rather its apparent lack—there is danger of falling into a similar trap with cybernetics. Cybernetics may be a much-needed response to the failure of central planning across Marxist traditions or, in this case, the avowed negation of all hierarchy, but, as it stands, you argue that organizational structure results from social relations. With its introduction into individual businesses or across industries, we can perhaps rest assured that working-time accounting can be the underlying principle of not only viable organizations within capitalist markets, but also organizations that may outcompete private businesses.

Only… this leaves the question of realization. The GIC leaves us with the same question. I think it is time that we attempt to answer.

Who could do so? Where will this take place? Although the calculation may entail the collaboration of union membership with civil servants, union leadership, and perhaps some owners, the measurement and realization of working-time accounting can only be accomplished by workers themselves. The implementation of equal compensation for productive work cannot be a matter of state policy or judicial victory, because we are concerned with the transformation of social relations, not the enforcement of existing social relations. While wage labor is enforced by state policy and regulated by legal codes, communal relations could not be introduced through such means. Working-time accounting could only be implemented at the sites of productive labor.

The realization of communal society must take place in civil society. In another instance of serendipitous convergence, Chris Cutrone, in his recent article “Socialist Unity!” reviving the Campaign for a Socialist Party, emphasizes this necessary character of socialist activity.^[3] Here, the term “Party” is used in its nearly forgotten sense of civil organization or social action, perhaps the most significant being labor organizations.

Often I hear echoed how unions are weaker than ever before. Ah, the despair! But wouldn’t this be easily explained by the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, which is to say the ever-increasing role of machinery in production and the decreasing role of workers? Precisely so, and, yet, so entwined in capitalist state politics, how could union bureaucracies today be the site of transformation from private to communal production? Simply because they are the site where producers can implement measures for equal compensation—where producers can introduce the form of compensation which will extinguish their exploitation and prevent the private accumulation of their labor into capital.

Unions, of course, are not the place where class consciousness is necessarily formed, but rather where the aims of a classless society can be achieved. The strength of labor organizations or any civil groups relies on the ability of their principles to bring about communal society, where the basis of our freedom is not exploiting or being exploited by one another.

This is where unions must accomplish their final act, the act they have been avoiding for perhaps over a century since the settlement of the second industrial revolution. Their final act because it leads necessarily to their dissolution as mediators between workers and business owners. The spheres of private and public life would appear to merge. Not all at once, certainly not all at once, but, as Slavoj Žižek infamously wrote, we need to cut the balls.^[4] The final act of unions and the final death throes of state officials trying to govern our lives, but perhaps also both the first and final act of the working class. Here, then, are the beginnings of communal human society, that is, complex communal society. The threat of returning to the barbarity of capitalist production, alienated society, will be the history of an inconceivable delusion, though nonetheless one that informed and preceded our free society. How many more confrontations will remain, but, at least, we will be confronting ourselves and not the objects that dominate us.

Still, in their confusion, the owners of capital and state officials will exhaust every method to overcome their impotence. Will there be a return to the bloody labor conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth century or will the exchanges remain bloodless and over paper, despite the ongoing slow violence of hunger and dispossession? Let us do all that we can to keep the inevitable conflict bloodless while remaining firm in our principles and commitment.

As you argue, Tom, a system of communal production operating with the working-time measure is more efficient than that of privately owned businesses. Private businesses could not establish themselves within networks of communal production because they would only be able to compensate producers with less than the social average. Undoubtedly, we will be coerced by capitalists and officials with an innumerable array of punishments, and perhaps incentives, to remain within wage labor, but this reaction will succumb to the higher efficiency of communal production and higher compensation, not to mention control over working conditions and working time. A breaking point will be reached, and this could be accomplished by the communal withholding of essential materials or services from private businesses—materials and services such as steel, agricultural lands, logistics, and city maintenance, notably waste work. Any conflict over a component of production affecting all industries would bring capital and communal production to a breaking point.

There is a preoccupation with either production or distribution alone, either the fair reforms of production or the philanthropic reforms of distribution. Yet, a communal society is predicated on the unity of production and distribution. In fact, there is no true distribution in a capitalist system because distribution, and more broadly logistics, is only another site of the production of surplus value. Every domain of our lives continues to be carved into and carved out for profit. If we do not overcome exploitation our lives will continue to be dominated by private profit. Perhaps we do not yet live in human society, but only in the silent company of commodities, and we remain commodities to one another. If the public and private spheres of life are not breached, we will remain alienated not only from ourselves but also alienated from all past and future generations.

There are many depths to be explored. Now, I suppose I arrive at my questions:

• How do you think working-time accounting could be realized? What would perhaps be the equivalent of primary accumulation for the implementation of communal production?
• As articulated by Andrew Kliman, what role could the M.E.L.T. (Monetary Equivalent of Labor Time) play in introducing working-time accounting?
• What sites are amenable for the introduction of working time? Are any labor organizations working on the measurement of social averages of production or does this measurement already exist “ready-made” in capitalist accounting?
• What do you make of the Cutrone’s Campaign for a Socialist Party and call for Socialist Unity?

This last question I will approach myself:

This letter and these questions are decidedly not addressed to any “socialist intelligentsia,” but neither are they addressed only to workers. I speak for myself and towards a still-gestating class. Consciously addressing that socialist intelligentsia, Chris Cutrone writes: “We must create the bare rudiments of a socialist movement of the working class.” My brothers and sisters, did you hear that? How adorable! We will be created.

Regardless, socialism will not be achieved by argument, but its principles must be articulated and made actionable. This is also no earnest plea, because our aims are neither demands we ask of businesses nor proposals we make to governments. The only demands we can make are of ourselves and each other. Yes, we can “work out in practice” the meaning of socialism and capitalism, but the meaning of either has little relevance to the principles that can overcome the private accumulation of capital. This is the only disagreement we cannot set aside for “Socialist Unity!” or the unity of a developing working class. This is the strength of Cutrone’s appeal, but also its weakness. His address betrays not only his position, but also his ignorance of the real movement already occurring in capitalist firms. Today may not be the “time” for socialism in the U.S. or elsewhere, but we must take back our time and, beginning with today, make our own time.^[5]

-Alexander Benedict

Let them be hunted soundly. At this hour
Lies at my mercy all mine enemies.

— Prospero, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Act IV

1. Tom O'Brien, “Unifying Marxism & Cybernetics,” paper presentation, Complex Anarchism Symposium, May 2025, [Rerecorded for From Alpha to Omega, July 2025], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doFptvKcIss.

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2. Zoe Baker, “What is Communism?,” Libcom, July 30, 2025 https://libcom.org/article/what-communism-zoe-baker.

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3. Chris Cutrone, "Socialist Unity!” Sublation, July 29, 2025, https://www.sublationmag.com/post/socialist-unity.

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4. The Perverted Dance (Klemen Slakonja), “Cut the Balls,” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=80X0pbCV_t4&t=46s.

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5. See The Classless Society in Motion to support Tom O-Brien’s book project and interviews as well as reading groups on From Alpha to Omega: https://theclasslesssocietyinmotion.com/

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