A future without money

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