The Venus Project - is it communist?

"Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain" Frederick Engels, Principles of Communism, Section 18

The Venus Project makes a big deal how it is an economic system that's unprecedented in the history of the world, and how it is totally not communist because Communism has "money, banks, armies, police, prisons, charismatic personalities, social stratification, and is managed by appointed leaders.¹ Also, "communism has no blueprint or methodology to carry out their ideals"². and "most importantly, Communism did not eliminate SCARCITY nor did they have a blueprint or the methods for the production of abundance." ³
Well, that relies on the assumption, shared by certain people on the economic left and far-right, that communism is just a massive, oppressive welfare state, where politicians are in charge of factories, or whatever.

That is extremely false.

While this is by no means a marxist apologetic piece, telling you how "Real Communism™

has never been tried", it serves as a means to showcase the similarities to the stages of the communist transition in marxist thought, from an oppressive capitalist prison where the common man is getting screwed hard by the system, and it just gets worse from then on, to a classless(hmm), stateless(hey), moneyless(this sounds familiar), fully automatized(heard this somewhere) society where "the means of productions are held in common".

The term "means of production" might be a bit opaque, but it basically means:
-natural resources and/or raw materials;
-factories;

Which, if one does some equivalency, makes the phrase "all resources declared as the common heritage of all Earth’s inhabitants"⁴, functionally identical, but fancier.

Furthermore, the site claims the communists didn't have any plans for plenty, which is insane.
The 5-year plans were the definition of planned production according to blueprints.

Projected production for the first 5-year plan, 1928

Excerpts from the Romanian Communist Newspaper "Scanteia":
"At Moreni many abandoned wells have returned to production"
"At Tintea a new probe went into production"
"Well 357 from Sovrompetrol-Tintea increased its output 10-fold"

Ultimately, the entire claim that the Venus Project is interested in just abolishing money in itself, is false and misleading.

Money are just tokens propped up by trust and the underlying economy backing it⁵, though subject to various overvaluations, undervaluations, and speculations.

If i tried to pay for my meal with piles of Confederate bills or Monopoly money, the waiter would likely punch me in the face for making fun of him.

The only worth those have is for collectors, history aficionados or paper mills.

The crucial step behind Fresco's idea of "all goods and services are available to all people without the need for means of exchange such as money, credits, barter or any other means" ⁶ doesn't involve the lack of money, as much as the abolition of the division of labour(there is no more private shoemaker and his shop, but a public shoe factory) and the abolishment of private property.

How communism "should" work, explained by communists

So, why doesn't TVP sound like standard communist propaganda, then?

Well, because Fresco went straight from the cold, crushing contradictory near-future capitalist system that Marx wrote against, straight to Marx-Engel's pure communism, where the "state has withered away", everything is done by machines, and we have educated New Men frolicking around.
No more socialists outcompeting everyone, no more class-consciousness endowed workers organizing and being uber-productive, no more great proletarian revolution, no more collectivisation of industry, vanguard parties and all that jazz.⁷

The supercomputer becomes the proletariat and it's democracy, and the circular cities, the marxist democratic communes where production will be planned and the Earth's resources sliced and diced.

The transition becomes superfluous, despite it being the stage where it all plans like these go to hell usually, and on closer inspection, being the part we should be the most scared about, since it involves literally giving all the world's resources to an omniscient council of system engineers that will divide them to the starving masses on a messed up planet how they see fit⁸(what could go wrong?), while the supercomputer gets built, coded and installed.

But in the meantime, just sight tight, buy our stuff, wait for our great automatized city to be done, and most importantly, don't forget to "raise awareness".

Not exactly doing a good job with that, either

Conclusion:
Is the Venus Project Communist?
On a cursory look, yeah. It has the same end-game, principles, and way of getting there.

On a closer inspection, it's 100% communist, and in certain areas, like personal belongings, even more communist than actual communism(mainstream marxists allow personal belongings, while the Venus Project FAQ considers them a mental issue⁸).

To say it is not communist, when the end-game is functionally identical, and even actual marxists say without reservation that it is, just with a bit more spotlight on environmentalism and automation⁹, makes it a red herring.

A more in-depth historical analysis, and historical origins,(don't worry, i'll do a historical analysis, and precedents for cybernetic automation, too) available on Neill's blog:
http://neiltokar.blogspot.com/2011/02/blog-9-global-communist-ideology-of.html

Also, for details on the five year plan goals, see:

http://the-salute.blogspot.com/2009/12/five-year-plans.html

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1 https://www.thevenusproject.com/faq/how-does-the-venus-project-compare-with-communism/^↩
2 idem^↩
3 https://www.thevenusproject.com/faq/is-this-what-karl-marx-advocated/^↩
4 https://www.thevenusproject.com/resource-based-economy/^↩
5 https://aeon.co/essays/the-financial-world-and-the-magical-elixir-of-confidence^↩
6 https://www.thevenusproject.com/resource-based-economy/^↩
7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_history^↩
8 https://www.thevenusproject.com/faq/will-there-be-a-government/^↩
9 https://www.thevenusproject.com/faq/what-is-tvps-stance-on-personal-possessions/^↩
10 https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/162284-Difference-between-Communism-and-The-Venus-Project^↩