We have to be asking what exactly is going on with value in this model.
My first critique jumps on the following.
1. If this supposed state is based on planning, distribution, infrastructure then how does it differs from the production collective? When you are planning work on projects your firm is the one engaged in it's own developed work practices of how to do the work. There are planners etc. involved but close work needs to happen between specialists/team leaders to execute a plan (this is more specific to scalable industries like construction, healthcare etc.), why incorporate these people into a body that isn't already a part of the aggregate of producers? Economic Planning and distribution is a multi-disciplinary field that spreads accross all industries, these people are intellectual workers. It would unnecessarily elevates state workers into a body that has it's own interests.
This essentially forms a specialist class for the next mode of production, an educated technocratic layer of planners who aren't responsible to production as a producer. They are responsible to their own internal structure to deliver plans on time, this not only makes them antagonistic to workers, but implies a competitive structure within this state body to find new modes of scientific management over labour, which they receive as a slave class who must achieve a work. Moreover, what are the rights of this state body?
It may be a strata of people receiving workmen's wages as per the manifesto, but the body has some sort of special authority to receive a project and all of the value cost that will require it's enactment and to require of the production collective to deliver it. This is organised labour, sure, but it doesn't really deviate from the corporate contracting model except for the fact that it's not trying to deliver surplus value to an owning class. It still however falls into the problems of productivism, the economic race to the bottom in this case, is based on labour discipline. We can expect from this shoddy work, extended work days, increased labour intensity to deliver to the prestige of the members of this special body above production.
but this is already excluded by the fact that the production commune makes all the decisions regarding how production happens, this contradiction only results in either the planners or the workers having the say in how work is done. It invents class struggle again.
To mediate this struggle a judicial force needs to be invented to do so and now you have a third social body, is this to be part of the state or is judicial power exercisable by the production commune? is legal apparatus outside both bodies? A dictatorship of the proletariat would assume the production commune, but then it begs again the question, why the state structure in this model? It's interests are against the worker if it's existence is based upon the existence of the state. It's expenses are decided by law, let's say, then if it has the power to legislate, it's a battle royale between the state or the commune to empower or pay off representatives promising to legislate in it's favour and we've invented winchester democracy again and put it in the hands of a centralised courthouse of the worker's republic.
Moreover If they aren't arbiters of permissions for specialised activity like driving, I assume that if it is at a class of vehicle that is generally for economic distribution or requires specialised training that it will be handled by the production commune? This would require industry collaboration on different vehicle classes and at this point the production commune is already taking over the tasks of the state. If someone fails or is unable and decides to drive a vehicle they can't handle, how are they authorised/disauthorised for that activity? It would be a permit/qualification, unless there is something else?
If this state structure isn't planning the distribution of value for reproductive and non-productive social activity via taxation then what are they doing? what is their basis for existence then to be an unnecessary admiralty over the army of labour? If there is no military, police, parties, (real) planning or taxes then it's not a state and there is no reason to treat it as outside the sphere of production.
What you're describing as a state essentially functions like a centralised supercomputer that issues plan and commands. To have a mobile, molecular, on-site and integrated collection of intellectual workers who are part of production and are able to live within the commune is much more preferable.
The main political problem here is that it's somewhere in the highest stage of state-capitalism/lowest stage of lower communism but has all the social calling cards of a communist society. It is after the destruction of the state and before it at the same time.
Pic for attention. Also because society.
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