Our planet is changing itself to cope with global warming in
ways that will make our environments hostile to our continued existence as a
species. Capitalism distorts the values, relationships and structures that
ideally exist between people and between people and nature. At the heart of the
capitalist system is the practice and concept of money. Capital is money that begets more money. Money
and markets represent capitalist power. You cannot have capital without money.
You cannot have wage-labour without money. People who have no money understand
that money is not a neutral tool, it’s a form of control. Capitalists are
defined by money, their power is monetary power, their logic is a market-based
logic. If our strategies for confronting, undermining and overwhelming capital
are based in these simple facts, it is not hard to challenge the system.
Marx often ridiculed those who seemed to think that they
could simply redefine money, issue it on different terms, regulate it in new ways,
or give goods and services ‘prices’ at a distribution centre or before they
reached the market. Marx opposed those who only saw money as a neutral tool or
ineffectual form rather than appreciate that money is at the basis of practices
that developed and maintain class and private property. Marx main points were
to do with breaking with money per se, rather than thinking that all you had to
do was to ‘tinker’ with it and achieve large-scale change, let alone
revolution. Marx’s analysed experiments, such as workers’ cooperatives and
labour money and wrote of their incapacity to fulfil the principles of
decision-making being transparent and just, and production efficiently and
effectively satisfying social needs. Today, socialists make the same points about
the plethora of half-baked schemes — fair trade, carbon trading, community
currencies and so on, using nebulous terms such as ‘social capital’ or ‘natural
capital’ — that cannot lead to socialism unless they go hand-in-hand with
political movements to erode capitalism, private property, and create a global
commons focusing on production for everyone’s basic needs.
Many environmental and social activist campaigners appeal to
a 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 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. If the ecologists continue to consciously
and conscientiously argue and propose options that are based on a logic of use
values we can 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 values — ‘You can make
more money this way’; ‘Why not trade in environmental values?’ — we are lost. Capitalists
cannot in practice appreciate environmental and social values. The system they
employ reduces everything to a market assessment, a monetary value, a price. 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’. He
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. The political conclusion is:
“The religious
reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical
relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally
present themselves to him in a transparent and natural form.” (Marx,1867)
To institute socialism we only need to understand the
potential, limitations and needs of a natural and built world held in commons
along with the basic needs of humans — and share decision-making based on a
discourse of use values and distinct measures appropriate to differing use
values. There is no need for a universal unit of account or means of exchange. Acknowledging
money as a tool of power points to revolutionary strategies which undermine
capitalism non-violently and involve instituting direct democracy in the
process. Money is not a ‘mere tool’ at all, but rather omnipotent. So powerful and
pervasive a force, in fact, that even some of the most committed and passionate
socialists can complain that they cannot envisage a socialist future without
some kind of monetary framework or role for money and markets. What a
dictatorship of the imagination money and its market has wrought, that even its
most ardent detractors cannot think outside their prison walls.
We are already in a process of species suicide or we are in
a process of renewal of what it is to be human. We cannot afford to think in
terms of a long-term plan or reformism, if only because of the haste with which
we must move. It is fitting that we take the most accurate route. There will be
a revolution or, literally, nothing left of our species. Revolution means
workers’ gaining control of the means of production and making work meaningful
through self-organised cooperation and collective self-realisation.
Post-capitalism means increasing our free time to enable a growth of
individuality and humanity replacing labour as the source of value in society.
Socialism is a market-free, money-free, class-free and state-free society, as
well as want-free, sustainable and just.
The Socialist Party does not lay down a hard and fast plan
for a socialist future but tries to stimulate people’s imaginations and counter
those who regard it as impossible. We need to have a clear idea of where we are
going and how our different activities might ultimately constitute a socialist
future. We want as many people as possible elaborating ideas of a
post-capitalist future so we can argue, experiment and establish this society.
We can express it in various terms. A local–global compact society. The noun
‘compact’ refers to a social agreement and, used as an adjective, ‘compact’ is
associated with efficiency and economy, referring to a condensed, small and
efficient use of space. The concept of a compact world is one of multiple horizontal
cells, which aim for relative collective sufficiency within neighbourhoods and
bioregions, connected by networks of various sizes appropriate to their
functions, with voluntarily created and agreed to compacts structuring the
production and flow of goods and services. ‘Collective sufficiency’ is a term
to refer to material, basic-needs sufficiency evolving on the basis of a
commons and people working together to ensure their communal sufficiency (in
contrast to individuals or singular households developing ‘self-sufficiency’).
‘Permaculture’ stands for permanent and sustainable culture, integrating human
practices with natural processes to yield security in food and other basic
needs. Diversity and resilience are both enhanced by relatively autonomous
collectively sufficient neighbourhoods and bioregions.
Marx’s clear analysis, based as it was on use values offers a
clear way forward. People seeing our basic human needs and the needs of the
environment in direct, scientific and practical forms and then advancing to
discussing options for just and sustainable futures in terms of such use values
would be a real advance. Socialist politics must be embedded in people’s direct
and immediate control of the means of production and distribution.
Adapted and abridgedfrom an interview of Anitra Nelson
1 comment:
The interview was interesting also.
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