A-Infos (en) Germany, Trier, Die Plattform: Lecture - A Good Life After Capitalism - Report (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Dear friends and comrades, ---- last Thursday, December 11, 2025, we 
revived a format from a few years ago and, in a lecture, explored 
various ideas and concepts of a post-capitalist economy. ---- Of course, 
we are aware that an economic system for a future world is not something 
we can simply plan on the drawing board and then implement. However, we 
also believe that, as the social left, we have not been able to offer 
any tangible alternatives that people can imagine for many years. This 
is also why we often fail to convince people that capitalism and its 
distortions are not a law of nature and can be overcome. We need more 
concrete ideas and proposals with which we can engage in dialogue.

And these concrete ideas do exist. Even in recent years and decades, 
intelligent people have been giving thought to the crucial question of 
how we can manage the economy differently, how we can do better. But 
these proposals rarely make it beyond academic discourse. Our event on 
Thursday was a tentative step towards engaging in dialogue locally with 
people who view the situation from a similar perspective to ours. 
Together, we want to work on expanding this exchange and contributing to 
a society that finally starts discussing ways out of crisis and 
exploitation.

Below you'll find very brief, outlined descriptions of the ideas we 
discussed (which, of course, can't even begin to do justice to their 
complexity). If you'd like to discuss them further, get in touch, 
preferably via Instagram.

We thank everyone who attended for a successful evening and a great 
exchange, even if things were a bit subdued after the presentation. For 
future events, we'll likely try to present the topics in several sessions.

With that in mind, we continue to explore the possibilities. - The Trier 
Platform

Working Time Socialism

This concept is a further development of the classic state-socialist 
approaches of the 20th century and therefore doesn't truly correspond to 
our vision of a liberated society from the outset. However, that wasn't 
our aim, and this proposal also offers interesting ideas arising from 
the misery of capitalist modernity, even if they perhaps don't go far 
enough.

Based on Marx's labor theory of value, this approach proposes paying 
working people with some form of "labor time loans." We shouldn't think 
of these as money, because they would only be usable once, 
non-transferable, and would expire after a certain period. The value of 
all goods is measured in the labor time necessary for their production, 
so if I work ten hours, I can buy goods whose production requires ten 
hours of labor. This sounds simple, but becomes incredibly complex in 
intricate production chains. Because it's not just about the labor time 
involved in producing a specific commodity, but also the labor invested 
in the machinery used to produce it, in the raw materials and 
intermediate products, in the necessary knowledge, and so on. Such a 
concept was unthinkable in the past, but if we assume that we, as a 
(global) society, are now able to perform these incredibly complex 
calculations using information technology, it suddenly becomes tangible.

There would still be a state through which society is organized, but the 
diversification of sectors would prevent the emergence of a class of 
bureaucrats, as in all real-socialist states. This state would have to 
pay for social security, infrastructure, the means of production, and 
the like through a general tax, but beyond that, there would be no 
surplus value to be siphoned off. The distribution of the produced goods 
would be conceivable through a socialist consumer goods market. 
Furthermore, incentive systems would have to be created, because even if 
these ideas sound better than our current situation, wage labor would 
still exist. And where there is wage labor, there is also class 
conflict, even if it exists within the people themselves.

Parecon
The name Parecon stands for Participatory Economics and refers to a 
concept that has been discussed within the radical left for several 
years. Parecon aims to build society and the economy based on four 
fundamental values: self-governance, solidarity, diversity, and 
fairness, and proposes five institutions to organize it accordingly. The 
economy and society would be fundamentally self-governed, and every 
person would participate equally in decisions that affect them. This 
works through workers' and consumers' councils, in which all production 
and distribution are planned and carried out. Parecon also considers the 
abolition of wage labor impossible and instead proposes introducing fair 
compensation based on effort and sacrifice. Those who perform unpopular 
jobs would receive more. Here, too, "money" does not exist as a 
universal medium of exchange that can be concentrated indefinitely, but 
would be non-transferable and only obtainable through work. Everything 
else-the means of production, the infrastructure, and so on-would belong 
to everyone as a community of productive resources. The formation of a 
class of coordinators that ultimately develops into a new elite is to be 
prevented through balanced task bundles. This means that as many people 
as possible are empowered to take on as many diverse tasks as possible, 
such as assembly line work and planning. The fifth institution is 
participatory economic planning, which means that all councils exchange 
information about their capacities and needs and negotiate these based 
on what is possible. Reconciliation committees would mediate between the 
councils, make proposals, and assist with coordination, especially when 
there are conflicting ideas. For example, annual plans would be drawn up 
outlining what should be produced, invested in, and consumed. Thus, 
there would no longer be a distribution of goods through a market, which 
always involves the pursuit of self-interest.

Commonism
We recently discussed the approach of commonism. The portmanteau word is 
clearly composed of communism and commons, which in English-speaking 
countries is a rather broad term for any kind of traditional common 
ownership. In commonist thought, however, the term is defined more 
narrowly. It describes any form of resource-be it knowledge, technology, 
raw materials, land, machinery, and much more-that becomes a common good 
through the process of commoning and is used by a group of people on 
behalf of everyone. However, they do not own it. No one owns anything, 
and so goods are not exchanged but rather shared. The communities of use 
are again called commons. The radical aspect of this idea is the 
abolition not only of private ownership of the means of production and 
the market as a distribution instrument, but also of wage labor. All 
participation is voluntary. The fact that people still undertake 
necessary tasks is to be organized through the fundamental human need 
for the productive provision of their own existence. This eliminates 
alienation from labor. Since goods no longer have a price in any "unit 
of account" (such as money), exchange value and thus the dual nature of 
the commodity form also disappear. They are produced and distributed 
solely for their use value. The vision of such a society would 
inevitably depend on a high degree of information technology. As an 
illustrative example, we can consider the Fediverse. All transpersonal 
communication (through a person's personal acquaintances), whether 
between households, production facilities, or functional councils, takes 
place via "protocols" in which common agreements (such as consensus on 
shared practices, delivery deadlines, and much more) are enshrined, and 
through which federations of arbitrarily complex nature can be formed. 
These protocols presuppose radical information transparency and can be 
dissolved at any time. This creates an unavoidable incentive for 
cooperation; by taking advantage of others, I can no longer achieve my 
own goals. My advantage, my advancement, becomes an inextricable part of 
everyone's advancement.

https://trier.dieplattform.org/2025/12/18/vortrag-gutes-leben-nach-dem-kapitalismus-bericht/
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