This proposal is not fully communist in the way Marx imagined. It does not abolish all market exchange. It does not assume perfect social harmony. What it offers is a framework in which the productive capacity of society is directed by the people who depend on it, backed by empirical science.
The disagreements with Marx that motivate this proposal are technical, not fundamental. The criticism of capitalism and imperialism stands. A thorough overhaul of society is necessary, but the state retains uses even after revolution. A non-state society likely cannot prevent armed groups from installing themselves as a ruling class. At the same time, the Leninist vanguard has no mechanism remain accountable to the masses.
Skepticism toward both institutional vacuum and Leninism’s institutional monopoly is what drives the design described here: a divided state, powerful enough to enforce the will of the people, too divided within itself to conspire against them.
The capitalist class structure should be abolished. (Part 1, “The Class Structure as Statistical Regularity,” showed that this structure, an exponential distribution of wage income and a Pareto power-law tail of capital income, is a statistical regularity arising from the conservation laws governing exchange and accumulation.) There would still be differentiation in the general sense that different people will gravitate toward different professions, but not the specific structure in which one class owns the means of production and another class must sell its labor to survive. That structure is what this proposal dismantles by providing an alternative that renders it powerless.
This proposal does not promise utopia. It offers an institutional structure designed to prevent the specific failures (concentration of economic power, concentration of political power, production for profit rather than for use) that make the present arrangement intolerable. The only plausible way forward is a mass movement with a concrete proposal whose effects are close enough to what has been described here.
The economy should be planned. It should not be planned by a party bureau or left to the anarchy of the market. It should be planned in a manner accountable to the people who live and work within it.
Snapshots of the Labyrinth 