Learning from the past

The non-market socialist position needs to be promoted urgently because humans have laid the basis for our extinction using capitalist practices and thinking. The intensity, frequency and scope of natural disasters is linked substantially to climate change. The Socialist Party see non-market socialism as the only way to address the combined crises we face, which are results of a capitalist system based in production for profit, relying on exchange rather than use. This system contorts and confuses the values, relationships and structures that ideally exist between people and between people and nature. Capital is money that begets more money. The modern state is the handmaiden to capital. Today, non-market socialists make the same points about the plethora of half-baked schemes — fair trade, carbon trading, community currencies and so on — that cannot lead to socialism. Money and markets represent capitalist power. Capitalists are defined by money, their power is monetary power, their logic is a market-based logic. Socialism must mean sharing power, the power to decide what is produced, how it is produced and for whom. Socialism must be state-free and class-free because states and classes represent exclusive power and needs to be want-free, sustainable and just as well. The motto “from each according to ability, to each according to need” envisions not some abstract, total equality, but rather a sensible, humane distribution of responsibilities

Many environmental campaigners appeal to the logic of use values rather than exchange values to advocate their position. For instance, they will argue that an old-growth forest has more use values and reproductive and sustainable potential to the communities that rely on it for all their basic needs, such as food, potable water, shelter, clothing and medicines, than its use for making profits for a multinational conglomerate that plans to clear-fell the trees, sell them for timber, let or help the remaining forest ecosystem die, and replace it all with a tree farm. Similarly, anti-nuclear campaigners will argue that the industry is unnecessary to fulfil people’s basic needs and a risk to their wellbeing and livelihoods, while the nuclear industry will argue that it will create ‘clean’ energy to sustain growth, jobs and profits. These examples contrast arguments based in use values and those based on exchange values. Those options that are based on the  logic of use values offer a clear and unequivocal alternative to capitalism. Once we start to try to convince capitalists and the state to be more environmentally and socially sound using arguments based on economic exchange values such as ‘You can make more money this  or  ‘Why not trade in environmental values?’ — we are lost. Marx’s analysis shows the absurdity and risks of efforts to try to set prices, which today focuses on making prices reflect environmental values, as in carbon and water-trading schemes or pricing forests and other environmental ‘assets’. Similarly, it is pointless to calculate and try to institute wages for housework. Marx reveals the absurdity of market values, alludes to the workings of the market as absolutely distinct from meeting basic human needs and the needs of ecological systems. A non-market socialist position distances itself from any intense or central emphasis on worker cooperatives and schemes that compromise with the market or mimic capitalism. Our message is quite simple: no money, no exchange, no capital, no state by abolishing the absurd and deadly system of markets and nations. Money appears as what it is: not the culprit of the misery of our times, but simply an extension of the absurdity that consists in exchange economy.

The vision of  the Socialist Party is very similar to that of anarchists: a stateless society in which central government had "withered away," local, ground-up control of all affairs by strictly democratic processes based at the place of work, abolition of the market system (no money, no buying and selling) and its replacement by a system according to which people would voluntarily work for the common good to the extent they were able under the understanding that they could receive whatever they needed for free ("from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"). National boundaries and governments having been eliminated, war would cease. The most common objection is that this goal impossible because "you can't change human nature." Socialists have shown that not only had "human nature" changed many times in the past: there is no such thing as a static human nature. We are products of our environment, particularly of the economic system in which we live. People living under feudalism are motivated by feudal motives and think them natural and fixed, just as people living under capitalism are motivated by capitalist motives and think those natural and fixed. Occasionally in history people undergo what is now called a "paradigm shift" in values, based on an economic transformation. If people's values have changed radically in the past they are certain to change again radically in the future. Engels spent a good deal of energy studying so-called "primitive communist" societies to show that sharing could be as natural and widespread an attitude toward wealth as acquisition.

When everything is held in common, there can't be monetary system. There is nothing to exchange with nobody. Money is meant to facilitate the exchange of goods so no money would exist. There will be full and universal free access. Is it really as utopian and unachievable as some allege? Then these critics should explain how a vast continent wide society (albeit still class ridden) could exist without money or trade. In The Incas: New Perspectives, Gordon Francis McEwan writes:

“With only a few exceptions found in coastal polities incorporated into the empire, there was no trading class in Inca society, and the development of individual wealth acquired through commerce was not possible . . . A few products deemed essential by the Incas could not be produced locally and had to be imported. In these cases several strategies were employed, such as establishing colonies in specific production zones for particular commodities and permitting long-distance trade. The production, distribution, and use of commodities were centrally controlled by the Inca government. Each citizen of the empire was issued the necessities of life out of the state storehouses, including food, tools, raw materials, and clothing, and needed to purchase nothing. With no shops or markets, there was no need for a standard currency or money, and there was nowhere to spend money or purchase or trade for necessities.”

The Inca Empire was optimized to prevent starvation rather than to foster trade. A group of archeologists took core samples in Cuzco valley in Peru, and found evidence for thousands of years of agriculture in the area, including animal husbandry, most likely of llamas. In a paper summarizing their findings, archaeologist A.J. Chepstow-Lusty and his team suggested that the Incas focused their technological and cultural institutions around food production and land management, rather than market economies.