Why Money?
Money is the universally accepted means of exchange. It is a
universal equivalent. Instead of me giving you three toasters for your
armchair, I pay in an accepted, legal currency. Sounds sensible. Who wants to
return to the awkward system of bartering goods? It seems sensible as long as
we have a property-based system of society where wealth is owned by some and
sold to others.
The two main uses of money by most people are for food and
housing. You need money to buy food from the corner store, or, more probably,
the supermarket. In effect, you are paying the owners of food production for
the right to have access to what they possess. These millionaire food
manufacturers did not produce the food. But you must buy if from them so that
they may profit. You pay money for housing to the landlord or the building
society. They own the land that you live on and they own the means of producing
the buildings in which you dwell. Directors of building societies are not to be
found on building sites making houses. They are too busy getting drunk in their
clubs or playing golf.
Now, imagine that all these things that you need were owned
and controlled in common. By everyone. All of us—you included. There is nobody
to buy food from—it is common property. There are no rents or mortgages to pay
because land and buildings belong to us all. There is no need to buy anything
from any other person because society has done away with the absurd division
between the owning minority (the capitalists) and the non-owning majority (the
workers). You would not need money. In a society of common ownership money
would have no role. It would be like the tramlines in a city which has done
away with trams. No longer would money exist.
The money test I
"But we need money—couldn't live without it". That
is what most well-conditioned readers will say. In our society people learn to
turn money into a fetish. In primitive societies certain objects were invested
with magical powers. For example, in Ancient Egypt cats were regarded as sacred
animals which had to be treated with great respect or they would turn the world
upside-down. Modern people are taught to believe that money contains intrinsic
powers. Where would we be without it? Beware of dethroning the money-god. Let
us put this to the test.
Take a pile of money. Three fivers and a couple of pound
coins. Leave them in a dark room and see what happens. Will they dig coal? Will
factories be built or homes furnished? Well. at least they could cook you a
good dinner: you can get good food for seventeen quid. Nothing will happen.
Humans make money powerful. Left to itself it is just a pile of tokens of no
worth. Even the picture of the Queen is ugly.
The money test II
But is money that important to you? Perhaps it is less
intrusive in your daily life than has been suggested. Try one more test.
Stop selling yourself for money for three months. That is
what you do every time you go out to work in return for a wage or salary. You
put yourself on the shelf along with the baked beans and the canned tuna fish
and you say 'Buy me!'. The wages system, which turns the vast majority of
people into exploited workers, is a process of selling your mental and physical
energies in return for some money. For most of us, if we do not sell ourselves
we will have little or no access to what we need in order to live. We devote
most of our waking lives to trying to obtain money. Our work is devalued by
money: if we enjoy working, the pleasure is diminished by the knowledge that we
are only really engaging in a sordid transaction—and how many workers hate the
miserable work that they are forced to do in order to get money?
Give it a try: stop selling your labour power for money. You
will give up on the test long before three months—or three weeks—or even three
days. Most wage slaves are too petrified of losing their jobs—their chance to
be bought for money—to even contemplate such an exercise. And rightly so, for
under the wages system we are lost if we do not sell ourselves for money.
Abolish money
Socialists stand for a world without money. All wealth will
be commonly owned, so there will be no body to buy what you need from. The
right to live, and to be comfortable and happy, will not depend upon your
pocket-book. Freedom will not be costed by accountants who will only give you
liberty if you can pay for it.
In a socialist society people will work according to their
abilities and take according to their needs. Who will decide what their needs
are? Not their bosses or the state or a cunning advertising industry—none of
these will exist. People will decide for themselves. Who but humans ourselves
are able to decide what we need?
There will be no "socialist market". Contrary to
the economic babble of certain "theorists" on the Left, it is quite
obvious that the market, which is a mechanism for buying and selling
commodities and realising a profit for the sellers, will have absolutely no
function in a community where nobody is buying or seiling or making profits. In
a society where production is solely for use people will have free and equal
access to take what they need from the common store.
Are people capable of living in a society of free access
without making a mess of it? Will they take too much? Will they all refuse ever
to work? Will they go to sleep for a thousand years and refuse to move a
muscle? These are the fears about the nature of human beings that we in this
money-mad society are urged to have. Socialists do not share such fears. We
know just how co-operative and sharing and intelligent workers are capable of
being. After all, we are a party of workers.
Given a society of moneyless, free access men, women and
children will co-operate together to make and to take what they commonly need
and desire. They will do so democratically. And we could do so tomorrow if the
vision of a moneyless society grabs hold of enough imaginations and penetrates
the consciousness of enough of those millions of workers who are currently
crying out, openly or quietly to themselves, under the strain of the enormous
and often unbearable pressures of the money system. Without money, humans will
be free to relate in ways which we have forgotten or only half-remember. The
banks can close down, the cash machines put in museums and the children who cry
because their parents have too little money to pay for them to grow up can
stop.
Steve Coleman
From the November
1990 issue of the Socialist Standard
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