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Saturday, January 09, 2016

It’s not a question of waiting, but of making it happen.


Money is a mere means of exchange, in a production for sale, private, corporate, or state owned, wage slave rationed access, economy. It will be totally unnecessary in a commonly owned, free access production for use post capitalist society. The franchise was only won through struggle. but liberty has not yet been won if we remain in conditions of waged slavery of the vast majority and privilege for the rest. Capitalism cannot give us freedom to live as social equals, if ownership of the means of production and distribution are held by a minority, private, corporate or state ownership. It is the poor who produce all of the wealth in the first place. The property of the rich is extracted from the surplus value over and above the rationed subsistence (wages) paid to the poor in return for their mental and physical capacities being employed in the creation of this wealth. The workers commodity (labour-power) doesn't receive the full value as other commodities do. State ownership is not common ownership. Nationalisation is not common ownership. The system in the old Soviet Union was state-capitalism. Socialism/communism is truly a post-capitalist, free access, production for use, common ownership society, without buying or selling, money, governments 'over' you, banks, insurance or any of the coercive apparatus of private, corporate or state owned society.

Poverty is relative as well as absolute:
“A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut. The little house shows now that its owner has only very slight or no demand to make; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls…A noticeable increase in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. The rapid growth of productive capital brings about an equally rapid growth of wealth, luxury, social wants, social enjoyments. Thus, although the enjoyments of the workers have risen, the social satisfaction that they give has fallen in comparison with the increased enjoyments of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the state of development of society in general. Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature…In general, wages are determined not only by the amount of commodities for which I can exchange them. They embody various relations.”Marx, Wage Labour and Capital

Where scarcity does not exist, therefore acquisitive impulses would not be engendered in the same way as in scarcity and rationed access society such as capitalism. As production would not be turned off and people made redundant, before human needs can be satisfied, as presently in capitalism, where production is for sale to satisfy the profits of a few percentage of the population, an economic parasite capitalist class. Access would be self-determined. You don't take more air than you need, so why would you take more food, clothing, shelter, etc than you need? According to the ideological defenders of capitalism, people are motivated to work only by monetary compensation or by the threat of starvation. The undeniable fact that millions of hours of voluntary work are engaged in by people all the time. People are motivated to do socially useful work by reasons other than money and so could be relied on to do this too in a socialist society.

The Tories aren't the bad guys. It is capitalism and the Labour Party supports this equally as much and always has done, even to using troops during strikes. A Labour government like all capitalist governments is rules you. The banking system doesn't enslave people, but capitalism does, by waged slavery. Banks are merely a function of a market system of private, corporate and state ownership of the means of production and distribution, which has production for profit for the enrichment of a minority capitalist parasitic class, as opposed to a, post-capitalist, commonly owned, free access system which would have production for use in the interests of all and have no need of money, banks, insurance, markets, governments, police, armies navies and war machines. Capitalism can't be r managed in the interests of the working class, by Left, or Right, or Centrist, variants of its governments. No government can lift people out of poverty. Poverty (absolute, actual and relative) is essential to keep workers desperate for waged slavery.

You just can't have a 'nicer' capitalism. Unemployment is inevitably associated with of capitalist competition over markets, trade routes and spheres of interests. You can't have even the 'Right to Work'. There is always, even in boom times a reserve army of unemployed, to drive down wages. (If necessary they will inject inflation into the economy). Unemployment is currently 5.5 percent or 1,860,000 people. If their "equilibrium rate" of unemployment is 4% rather than 5% this would still mean 1,352,000 "need be unemployed". The government don't want these people to find jobs as it would strengthen workers' bargaining position over wages, but that doesn't stop them harassing them with useless and petty form-filling, reporting to the so-called "job centre" just for the sake of it, calling them scroungers and now saying they are mentally defective. Government is 'over' you not 'for' you. Governments do not exist to ensure 'fair do's' but to manage social expectations with the minimum of dissent, commensurate with the needs of capitalism in the interests of profit. Worker participation amounts to self-managing workers self-exploitation for the maximum of profit for the capitalist class. Exploitation takes place at the point of production. Because society is structured around the ownership of productive resources by a tiny minority and the compulsion of the majority to work, in order to live, to create profit for that minority, society cannot be reformed to abolish exploitation or the periodic economic crises that result from it. All the power to hire and fire is held by the employing class. It is past time to abolish the wages and prices system. Capitalists, regardless if they are home-grown vultures or overseas vultures, move in and out of countries based on profit maximisation, not to save or create jobs. The capitalist class don't wake up at night wondering how they can save or create jobs of people, but how they might make a profit, by leeching surplus value off their potential workforce.

“Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’”- Karl Marx Value, Price and Profit

Society could not function without the social aspect of sociability despite aggression and competitive behaviour being rewarded. People are no more naturally violent than naturally cooperative. They have to be 'trained' to kill in war situations.
"What these studies have taught the military is that in order to get soldiers to shoot to kill, to actively participate in violence, the soldiers must be sufficiently desensitized to the act of killing. In other words, they have to learn not to feel -- and not to feel responsible -- for their actions. They must be taught to override their own conscience. Yet these studies also demonstrate that even in the face of immediate danger, in situations of extreme violence, most people are averse to killing. In other words, as Marshall concludes, "the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be 'conscientious objectors' "  Dave Grossman, On Killing

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists possesses an eloquent piece on a world without money, a condensed explanation of surplus value and redundancy in everyday language. In socialism, we  won't be returning to barter. We will be taking over all the array of technological expertise and information of capitalism, which will enable production of surpluses and no switching off of capacity until needs are met, as opposed to artificial (rationed by price) demand as presently. The idea is that free access will be deliverable with voluntary labour. The interesting thing is how capitalism can tease us with the potential for its own demise, democracy the Achilles heel for liberation and recently Paul Mason's book, ‘Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future’ at least shone a focus upon some possibilities. We may likely die without seeing socialism, but we will be happy that we have been one of those consistent in keeping the original idea of what socialism is, and is not, alive. Making socialism is a task the world’s working class have to do for themselves.

Socialism depends on people recognising our mutual interdependence. There is, in other words, a sense of moral obligation that goes with the territory. Socialism will permit a far greater degree of technological adaptation without the constraints of the profit system. Intrinsically backbreaking or unpleasant work can be automated. Conversely some work may be deliberately made more labour intensive and craft based.  Even under capitalism today most work is unpaid or unremunerated - the household economy, the volunteer sector and so on. So it is not as if this is something we are unaccustomed to. Volunteers moreover tend to be the most highly motivated as studies have confirmed; they don't require so called external incentives. We will get rid of an awful lot of crappy and pointless jobs that serve as a disincentive to work. Since we would be free to do any job we chose to what this means in effect is that for any particular job there would be a massive back-up supply of labour to cover it consisting of most people in society. In capitalism this cannot happen since labour mobility is severely restricted since if you have a job you cannot just choose to abandon it for the sake of another more urgent job from the standpoint of society. With these two core characteristics of a socialist society - free access to goods and services plus volunteer labour - there can be no political leverage that anyone or any group could exercise over anyone else. The material basis of class power would have completely dissolved. What we would be left with is simply human beings being free to express their fundamentally social and cooperative nature.


We have a world to win.

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