Thoughts on the Associated Mode of Electricity Production
June 18, 2022 — Bradley Venner
Motivation
It’s been quite a while since I made a notebook entry, and in this time I’ve been reading a fair amount about Marx’ ideas on the associated mode of production. I found these authors was through the quasi-random Google search for “Marx accounting” and “associated mode or production.” The first Google search returned Robert Bryer (third result in Google), who wrote the books Accounting for Value and Accounting for History. I obtained both of these books through LibGen. Accounting for Value makes the case that accounting was a central concern of Marx and that the labor theory of value can be understood as the underlying cause of a number of accounting conventions. Bryer makes common cause with Andrew Kliman’s temporal single system and to a certain extent with Raya Dunayevskaya.
The focus on accounting reminded me of my earlier explorations on accounting theory, which focused on the Peer to Peer Foundation and Bob Haugen. Haugen’s work and related work on Value Flows was very compelling to me. In particular, the REA system seemed to have a natural correspondance with semiotics and also a generalization to categorical databases. My early correspondence with Haugen at the start of Baez’s Seven Sketches class made this claim. I followed up with Haugen around the potential applications of Value Flows to electrical systems, but my reaction to a work crisis ended this potential collaboration.
The general idea, that contemporary work on decentralized economic systems could have a close relationship to Marx’s economic analysis, needs a great deal of elaboration. But I do wonder if it’s time to complete the cycle and return to electrical systems as one of humanities most pressing problems.
Decarbonization of the electrical system is expected to be necessary to decarbonize many other sectors of the economy, most notably transportation and buildings. A large portion of the decarbonized system is expected to consist of variable renewable sources complemented by “firm dispatchable” resources. The exact mix of these resource types is still uncertain and will vary by geographic location.