Here, we will present an initial, very general outline of derivative quantum field communism, drawing particularly from texts by Stefan Heidenreich on non-monetary economics, Robert Meister on the question of justice as an option, and Danah Zohar on quantum management.
Without addressing the issue of distribution and production of goods and information of all kinds among numerous actors in moneyless networks, it is impossible to outline a communist “economy,” which, in turn, is to be understood as a specific non-economy. In this non-economy, there are numerous connections, relations, and transactions across various scales of organizational forms (particularly in public domains), all of which possess a social core that manifests itself in gifts, friendships, and innovations in a non-monetary economy. It is assumed that private production will continue to some extent.
In the economic networks of capital, clusters or hubs form at various scales, closely correlated areas connected through market-mediated monetary circulation processes and acts of information, whether they be companies, cities, or states. Capital as a whole, setting a priori rules, can only be thought of virtually; it cannot be approximately represented in any information structure, no matter how complex. If attempts were made to manage the world economy through central planning entities, it would fail hopelessly due to the informational complexity of network structures.
Therefore, in any future non-economy, we must start with local commons, clusters, or hubs that connect their transactions and relations through assignments and allocations (matching) across different scales to address local or even global economic problems. The size of commons will vary and depends on social, economic, geographical, cultural, and historical contexts. A hub or common would then be a form of self-organization to meet the needs of human and non-human actors, whether it be free public products, water, energy, technologies, health, research, and education. All commons should be part of a “healthy” biosphere, which may only be guaranteed through some form of global regulation of the use of natural resources. Commons should regularly shape their needs, necessities, productions, and information in self-processes to be discussed and present plans, which in turn must be coordinated with other commons and overarching political meta-commons for specific periods.
Profit-oriented companies would disappear as an organizational form in a moneyless economy. Local, as well as non-localized networks with flexible internal and external structures, connections, and allocations, would replace location-bound production facilities with regulated workflows and strict task assignments. Open commons operating within networks are complex adaptive systems that constantly reposition themselves through co-creative dialogues among individual internal areas and with the external environment. Any imposition of external or “top-down” control reduces individual parts and destroys the system’s creativity. In any future interconnected non-economy, where zero-distance quantum development between commons will have become a reality, close cooperative and non-hierarchical relationships are necessary, both internally and externally. In the context of quantum management, commons should free themselves from boundaries (silo-like departments and functions) and hierarchies and bureaucracies. Nevertheless, each common has the right (up to a certain extent, as coordination with other commons and meta-commons remains necessary) to determine its own strategy, set its own priorities, decide how to achieve its goals, and enter into partnerships. Commons residents invent procedures that facilitate tasks and positions and decide through cooperative relationships. Like quantum wave functions, common areas are overlapping possibilities, each with the potential for a rich new reality. And these new realities emerge when commons establish new relationships internally and externally. Through the use of ecosystem alliances, there is a rich potential to branch out by transforming possibilities into new combined realities in every direction. Opportunities for various ecosystem alliances and thus new possibilities are created with each new relationship. However, reliance should not be placed solely on collective relationships, as this would lead to a reduction and perhaps even the elimination of individual freedoms.
Roland Barthes speaks of the fantasy of a life, a regime, indeed a lifestyle that is neither reclusive nor communal: a solitude with regular interruptions. Barthes suggests naming this form of coexistence “idiorhythmia,” derived from the Greek “idios” (one’s own) and “rhythmos” (rhythm). In idiorhythmic communities, each subject lives according to their own rhythm yet remains within a certain type of structure, in contact with others. Nancy has brought forth the formula: Singularly common.
While Fourier designed a plan for an organized, closed community, Barthes was less concerned with sketching a model and more focused on defining a zone between two extreme forms of life: an excessively negative form, solitude, and an excessively assimilative form, the convent or monastery. He speaks of a utopia of socialism at a distance. In the search for a balance between cooperation and autonomy, Barthes’ idea needs to be related to the zero-distance quantum concept.
The relationship between assignment, task, and production in a hub or common also affects the question of ownership. The cooperative form no longer relates to ownership but to shared political constitution. A hub or major infrastructure need not belong to anyone, but it must function to some extent, meaning it must fulfill the tasks assigned to it from within and without to provide the public with services such as transportation, information, education, health, and more. In an economy without money, monopolistic platforms as private companies lose their meaning and are expropriated.
In a moneyless economy, new forms of community arise. To use commons for the production and distribution of common goods and information, monopolies must disappear or be operated collectively. They cannot simply be nationalized but should be transformed into meta-commons that utilize the information structures of monopolies, remove them from ownership, and reshape them into meta-cooperatives. Meta-commons would then replace the state as a specific form of community. The goods and information mediated through data commons are not only those of major infrastructures like transportation, energy, or information and tasks that have traditionally been the responsibility of the state, such as education and health, but they also lead to the construction of new non-monetary political commons. They take over public areas from territorially closed nation-states and develop new ones, both locally and internationally. In place of territorial state units, semi-automated matching institutions could emerge, grouping around individual commons and meta-commons. The matching process connects actors with high network reach, but interactions between commons on different levels and scales would need to be negotiated through political processes.
Without money, the mechanisms of distribution also change. Taxes or fees are impossible; hence, community budgets as we know them today cannot exist. Instead, a common itself becomes an economic and political actor. Once a collective decision is made to assume a function and mediate it, non-monetary negotiations must determine values. These values initially apply to a specific group of people and relate to a particular situation or place. Beyond this value range, a meta-meta-commons could be constructed to encompass all externalities and future consequences, possibly even the entire globe.
Coordination among commons must go beyond horizontal networking of commons; it requires an additional coordinative level, namely, meta-commons to coordinate commons and their productions. There is a risk of block formation and new compositions, potentially leading to the emergence of something akin to a central coordination commons at the top. Considering the challenges posed by global climate change, some form of international authority cannot be entirely ruled out. Commons and meta-commons, for the most part, constitute the public sector, distributing certain products, housing, healthcare, education, care, and public transport freely and universally. This involves the distribution of labor, products, and information necessary for collective reproductions, initially allocated among commons while taking into account individual abilities and inclinations.
In contemporary capitalism, there is a close correlation between data, information, and prices. Production and distribution continue to be represented by prices, which function as information signals in markets and are settled in money, with money closely tied to data streams. Goods and services, as well as information and events, are increasingly mediated through algorithmic processes. Today, data on consumer behavior, motivations, and preferences are collected and traded in real-time. In the context of algorithms, speed and information advantage are crucial for decision-making that leads to profit realization. Prices and goods circulate in network environments and are part of computer simulations. Aggregate approaches to dynamic-stochastic equilibrium are increasingly replaced by agent-based simulations and behavioral models.
Desires, competencies, and motivations circulate in networks as they form connections. These networks involve transactions that play a significant role in a non-monetary economy. Money-mediated commodity exchange and non-monetary gifting are two important opposite forms of transactions. In monetary buying and selling, two transactions are linked: (Purchase): (A, B, x), (B, A, y) with the value function fw(x)=fw(y) (Heidenreich).
In non-monetary gifting, one actor (A) gives something (x) to another actor (B). As Heidenreich correctly formulates, actors can be humans, as well as machines, programs, and machines. Gifts encompass products, information, events, access, actions, etc. Here, actor A can receive an x from actor B, which need not necessarily be a product but could also be a position in a network. The network properties of these products or positions involve a series of vectors that function as linked pointers. A bundle of vectors reflects the origin of the product and its source products and contains vectors indicating comparable transactions. The notation for a transaction would be: A received x from B, where x had previously passed through the hands of C, D… and comparable x were passed on by E, F… (A, B, (C, D, (E, F, …))). (Heidenreich)
The question of evaluating products and information is inherently political in a moneyless economy, whereas today, evaluations are constructed through complex capitalization processes. These forms of evaluation must consider that things which prompt a transaction differ from other things. A second aspect concerns assessing how things change over time, allowing for short-term versus long-term considerations. These differences can be highlighted by representing them through a limited number of characteristics, possibly using digital data to create a codification. Alternatively, they can be enhanced by connecting a story to the object, forming the basis for the transaction.
To mediate the countless transactions, a procedure is necessary. Heidenreich suggests matching as a vital processor and transformer in a moneyless economy. As Heidenreich observes, it cannot be solely described as assigning, allocating, or linking. The matching process serves to connect and mediate all participants and their desires, needs, abilities, and products in a transaction, to intervene in decisions, to accompany negotiations, and to fix results. Theories in the context of algorithms and networks refer to matching as any allocation of elements from two different sets. These elements can be things or people, events or moments, places or objects of all kinds.
Matching conveys priceless gifts in network-shaped environments. The respective result shows the difference between the before and after states, with each matched transaction having effects beyond the immediate participants. The environment encompasses productions, transactions, and information that enter into matching, are processed in processing, and are ultimately fixed. It is necessary to include the desires, needs, and capacities of the participants, the actions of the supply faction and the demand faction, as well as those of the product and other affected actors. Comparable transactions must also be taken into account. Matching processes these parameters to propose solutions. It does not act as an auctioneer, as it does in a market economy, but as a mediator (Heidenreich). The scaling of matching depends on needs and requirements. Mediation and coordination should occur not through quantitative prices, but through qualitative information, although quantitative aspects must also be considered. A cement-commons must not only communicate the type of cement needed to the construction-commons but also the quantity required. However, it is not solely about decentralized natural planning because a flexible coordination is inconceivable without an information level that goes far beyond a possible evaluation of products in labor hours. There could be two-year plans in the public sector, listing everything that should be produced in the public sector, but which can hardly be converted into a specific number of labor hours.
In a non-monetary economy, the matching algorithm does not act as an auctioneer determining the ideal price but rather as a mediator mediating between the participants and their actions in a network. The matching process in the area of essential goods must involve political components. Moreover, the processes of matching require rules to be negotiated in specific scenarios. The matching algorithms do not dictate decisions but merely propose a solution in non-hierarchical processes along with all participants. We are dealing with heterogeneous processes, recursions, and multiplications in which results are achieved in the course of interactions between all participants. During processing, matching makes suggestions, situational possibilities, and accompanies the decision-making process. Ultimately, establishing the rules by which matching should take place touches on political and social questions concerning the mediation of individual inclinations and lifestyles and collective necessities of justice and equality.
One could think of these processes as connections of energy quanta that are entangled with each other. Identifiable entities must be thought of in relation to the entire system of relationships with which they are intertwined. This is because the “parts” of quanta receive many of their properties through these relationships. And they have the potential to assume other properties when they are in other relationships. Each quantum part has the potential for further properties when it is in a relationship with other parts. Even the combination of parts in a relationship system gives this combination more or different characteristics or properties than the parts originally possessed. A quantum whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.
Matching will encrypt the data of all participants, allowing them to view information and negotiate transactions without third parties reading along. Matching processes often begin with a request from producers, machines, or algorithms but can also indicate a simple necessity, upon which the algorithm proposes various solutions. The impulse for matching can come from producers, other involved individuals, the product, or even the algorithm itself. In this context, a matching procedure processes bundles of functions and quantum transformations of a transaction, with distribution occurring not through money but through direct coordination. However, this does not mean that calculations are carried out without numbers in a data-based algorithmic economy.
Matching is not only about products or information but also about scenarios that can consist of a patchwork of information and products. Today, this is comparable to buying a designer jacket, a shirt, a tie, and shoes. If the outfit doesn’t match, one will not be successful. Assembling clothing for a look that suits the wearer’s character is an analogy to the statement that “products are replaced by scenarios.” However, in a moneyless economy, this is not to be dimensioned in categories such as success or efficiency, but rather the chaos of the scenario refers to the phenomenon that a small change in a dynamic system can lead to a chain reaction in the entire system. The chaos system starts with a small change and undergoes a massive change. In this process, boundaries fall not only between individual functions in the hub but also between the hub and other hubs.
Functions and quantum transformations become more important than the typology of products and data. Processes replace entities, although objects or things are naturally not completely dispensed with. Heidenreich speaks of things or objects in the sense of object-oriented programming languages—material things, but also events, living beings, interfaces, protocols, and connections. Things act as actors and participate in the economy. Thinking things in AI can already act autonomously in part. With the autonomy of thinking things, the aspect of function becomes more important than that of mere objects. For example, as a thinking thing, a car is capable of seeking the next ride opportunity in coordination with other cars. The car can belong to itself as an independent economic unit.
In planned economies or cybernetic systems such as the Cybersyn experiment in Chile, a simulation was conducted using an algorithm based on specific input values, feedback loops, and predefined variables. The quantum-theoretically grounded matching will need to be more flexible and precise simultaneously to process the quantity of available data. Complex network problems are increasingly being addressed with the help of artificial intelligence, where processes are no longer programmed but trained towards desired results. AI operates through specific routines, processors, and input weighting to produce outputs or results that are no longer strictly predefined. The parameters that come into play and the processes occurring within the black box remain partially unknown. Rules now focus less on variables and program routines and instead orient themselves towards outputs in the context of interactions among actors.
However, there are problematic aspects in the current narrative about the singularity of artificial intelligence: firstly, the expectation of anthropomorphic behavior from machine intelligence; secondly, the image of uniform exponential growth in the cognitive abilities of machines; thirdly, the idea of moral uniformity in machine intelligence. The best way to overcome these issues is to consider AI not as a single object (machine learning, deep learning, singularity, etc.) but as a hyperobject. Already, AI is a global network running on every device (from televisions to smartphones, from tablets to the new console generations, etc.), a worldwide membrane standing between the technological and organic worlds. Understanding the shift from an individual system to a non-monetary hypersystem requires abandoning the anthropocentric perspective and viewing humans as part of a network composed of organic and non-organic elements. AI is not about replicating human cognition but about codifying and automating social practices, information, and work relationships. To make AI revolutionary in a political sense, it must be embedded in cooperative or collective relationships. Hyperinterfaces are the membrane that activates circular mechanisms from nature to the digital realm and back, from the organic to the inorganic, from plants, humans, minerals, digital media, and back.
Hyperinterfaces are essential because they prompt us to reconsider the media and media ecology beyond new media, to reshape the world differently and create a circular relationship. Data is a phantasmatic description of bodies, objects, and events: they contain gaps that leave room for interpretations. This is precisely what we demand from AI: the ability to interpret data. It’s a peculiar situation because we also want AI’s interpretation to be reliable and predictable. However, interpretation is synonymous with expression and creativity. When the next technological stage arrives – perhaps in the form of a quantum computer – this scenario will intensify: terms like fuzziness, uncertainty, and incompleteness will become part of the game. They will be the driving forces behind the enormous computing power at our disposal. Paradigms will once again shift: data processing will place even more emphasis on interpretation, creativity, and capacity. The quantum commons model envisions every minuscule common entity in a co-creative relationship with other commons, with its customers/users, and with meta-commons in the global ecosystem.
Radical contingency is a fundamental characteristic of our world (and not just a result of limited knowledge). Within the categories and values of the exhausted Newtonian paradigm, quantum indeterminacy appears as a threat or negation of everything that science has offered us so far. Precisely because the outcome of quantum events is uncertain, its uncertainty highlights the potentiality of an evolving commons or situation. It provides the opportunity for unlimited creativity and innovation.
A universe in which nothing new or surprising ever happens is replaced by a self-organizing universe where something new is constantly being invented. The quantum scientist knows that this fact or aspect cannot be isolated from its environment or context. Holism replaces reductionism, and the whole is famously more than the sum of its parts. Organized simplicity gives way to self-organized complexity. The quantum world is also made up of relationships, and everything and everyone is interconnected with everything and everyone else, entangled with everything and everyone. This is “quantum holism.” The quantum world is uncertain, and therefore unpredictable; it “feels” its way into the future through creative self-organization. One of the many revolutionary discoveries of quantum physics is that there is no such thing as certainty. When an electron in an atomic system makes a quantum leap from one energy level to another, it is impossible to predict when this leap will occur or how large it will be. And when the core of a radioactive atom emits a particle, it is impossible to say when this decay will occur. There appear to be no laws governing events in the radically contingent quantum universe. Quantum events are probabilistic. Some are more likely than others. With a sufficiently large number of events, we can predict certain patterns of results.
One can best envision the surface of moneyless quantum games as a quantum distribution of games and apps, complex visual interfaces for interacting with characters and mobile interfaces. For individual users, the games serve the function of commenting on actions in the world by considering desires, making offers, conveying decisions, and displaying one’s own status.
An important question in a communist non-economy is that of justice. Usually, the question of justice is treated as the problem of finding a balance between greater equality and greater freedom, both seen as separate social goods potentially in conflict, as greater inequality can result from greater freedom. The solution, of course, is that greater equality can coexist with greater freedom. This issue can also be found in Marx, who on one hand states that the freedom of the individual is the precondition for the freedom of all, but also recognizes that freedom must be related to an intrasubjective recognition of the freedom of others, and equality is implied therein.
Justice theories like those of Rawls or Nozick contain conceptions of freedom as meaningful choice, which, as Robert Meister points out, is not the same as pursuing the financial concept of freedom in the light of a tradable option. Rawls restricts freedom to the choice of what can actually be exercised without incorporating further contingencies that may arise with an option or possibility. Since the possibility is never considered that options can be evaluated even without the presence of only achievable possibilities, Rawls cannot conceive that an assessable option could bring about a revolutionary redistribution of wealth. It is necessary to highlight the value of unrealized and unrealizable options, an idea that Meister finds in the theorist Derek Parfit, at least in principle. Life is presented here as a platform on which alternative future scenarios are evaluated, a portfolio of options that can be both closed and open. In this context, the perspective of equality as a driver for greater justice can be weakened. For Parfit, justice as a value is quite compatible with a theory of evaluation, the evaluation of alternative and possible lives that we might live. This implies the evaluation of meaning, which means.
A similar position can also be found in Karl-Heinz Brodbeck, who points out that economic models always have a normative basis, which is often concealed, and alternative practices not only have to expose these foundations but also propose alternative options in which ethics becomes transparent. Selection is always a matter of evaluation. And without the element of uncertainty and potential variation, there is no transmission of information, so even the act of choice generates information that is not the product of already stored information. In option theory, the unpredictability of choice brings forth new information, which, in turn, allows for choices that can be ranked in terms of priority, so the gaps between the positions can be measured, and their changes assessed. Capital markets are in this sense a medium of communicating contingency, which, as Elie Ayache says, creates order from randomness, allowing value to be stored. Here, a distinction should be made between uncertainty and calculable risk; the former can never be caught up with in the future because the future, as Laruelle says, remains closed.
Contrary to all liberal and previous Marxist traditions, Robert Meister does not want to frame the question of justice as the tension between equality and freedom but to answer it in terms of options that can increase their value through political and social struggles, which, in turn, go beyond practice, offering people more realistic choices based on the low value they represent today. If options can be directly evaluated, then there is no longer a need to speak of a conflict between equality (spreads) and freedom (choice), but as with derivatives, speak of a choice that is not currently possible but has a time value that increases the more time remains and the higher the volatility of the struggles and, therefore, the justice expected during that time. This is what we call derivative communism.
The derivative element of uncertainty or the unthinkable can be related to quantum emergence, which makes the constant creation of something new a feature of the quantum world. The both-and nature of quantum reality also extends to positions in space and time. While both Aristotelian and Newtonian logics insist that a particle is either here or there, that it has either now or in the past interacted with another particle, experiments in the quantum laboratory have shown that particles and their interactions are distributed over space and time. Particles can be both here and there; interactive events can occur both now and then. And the same quantum logic also applies to statements, decisions, and desires.
Today, quantum physical systems are increasingly being treated primarily as carriers of information. Quantum physics is gradually transforming into quantum information theory. The physical properties of carriers of quantum information are often ignored. The focus is primarily on the properties of information processing. In particular, physical spacetime has disappeared from quantum (information) theory. The most fundamental tool is the quantum probability formalism, the calculus of complex probability amplitudes, equipped with Born’s rule, which couples complex amplitudes with probabilities. Another powerful mathematical tool is the use of tensor products to model the (informational) behavior of composite systems – a group of transformers that interact with information fields. Such aspects are likely to be included in moneyless matching procedures. All of this needs further investigation.
[1] For “eco-modernists” like Matthew Huber, a massive effort of public investment and planning is required to eco-modernize post-capitalist systems, with a need to accelerate technological progress. Solving climate change requires a massive development of productive forces, as well as socialist planning.
Japanese philosopher Kōhei Saitō, on the other hand, sees the eco-socialist potential of technological progress less optimistically. The technological form of productive forces is inseparably linked to capitalist production relations. Saitō concludes that the productive forces of capital cannot be transferred to post-capitalism because they are created to subjugate and control workers.
While the first position involves an act of faith in the wisdom of future socialist leadership in dealing with the technological legacy of capitalism, the second overlooks the fact that the task of the productive forces of capital and the downsizing of production could lead to a de-specialization of productive activity, resulting in a dramatic decline in labor productivity and ultimately a collapse of living standards.