Post-capitalist free-access socialist society

Universal Benefit Income is not something the Socialist Party can agree with as we challenge the whole concept of a monetary income, i.e. with people having to buy what they need. We favour a post-capitalist society of common ownership and democratic control, where people wouldn't have "incomes" but have free access to what they needed. There are also some reformists who argue that even under capitalism it is better to let people have some things free (e.g. health care, transport, phone calls) rather than give them money to buy these services. But a post-capitalist free access socialist society in effect means effectively that we will all own and control the means of production and distribution and can abolish wages and prices into the museums of antiquity.

Many proponents assume that if the government gives everybody, working or not, a regular income this is going to have no effect on wage levels? They seem to be assuming that this would be in addition to income from work whereas what is likely to happen is that it would exert a huge downward pressure on wages and that over time real wages would on average fall by the amount of the "basic" income. In other words, that it would be essentially a subsidy to employers. It would be "basic" in the sense of being a minimum income that employers would top up to the level people needed to be able to reproduce and maintain their particular working skill. Don't they understand how their much-vaunted law of supply and demand works? Reformists do come up with some crackpot ideas. Capitalism cannot be reformed to eliminate poverty, either absolute or relative. The poor are an essential component of capitalism and must be kept in relative or absolute poverty to compel them into waged slavery in order to produce wealth for the capitalist owners of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth. Why subsidise employers in their rationed exploitation of wage slaves when we could abolish wages and prices altogether and the real wealth creators and producers (all of us) own the world in common?

The Labour Party has never been a socialist party. The new society has to be made by ourselves and we can dissolve all governments 'over' us and elect ourselves to run a commonly owned world:

"The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois.” (1879 Marx and Engels).

There is no country can exist independently of the rest of the world. If you wish sustainability, we have to proceed from production for sale in an intensely profit oriented, competitive ,wasteful , minority-owned coercive waged slavery, war machined system, into a free access production for use, commonly owned one. A democratic world economy where we all own and share resources, based on the tenet of, "from each according to their ability to each according to their needs." Once we have a common ownership, production for use, money-free, post-capitalist free-access society and have abolished the wages and prices rationing system, we can all volunteer our contributions to the social pot.

The problem is actual and relative poverty are essential components of capitalism in order to keep the majority wage-slaving away in a production for sale economy for the profit of a minority social class. Capitalism has to be replaced by a production for use society which is owned by all and has free access to the wealth produced in conditions of real social equality.

A post-capitalist society will dissolve the governments 'over' us and elect the people, with delegated responsibility where necessary, over resources. Abolish wages and prices systems and end poverty at a stroke.  It is the poor who create wealth and not the other way around.

It is a naive belief that capitalism could be reformed in a way in which poverty could be eliminated. Poverty, absolute and relative are essential conditions of capitalism. It requires a working class which is relatively poorer than the owning class to induce it into waged slavery in order to create all of the world’s wealth for the owning parasite capitalist class. Poverty and war are essential concomitants of capitalism and will remain so, until it is replaced by a post-capitalist, production for use, moneyless, free access society, run by us all in conditions of real social and economic equality.

The market does not satisfy human needs. The market is not the answer. There is only one way to escape for workers from the detrimental effects of capitalism and that is for the economy to be run by the immediate producers themselves. Once in control of the process of production they would have no interest in wasting effort on producing goods that no one wants, on turning out goods of low quality, or resisting innovations that would make their work easier. The price mechanism does not let firms know what to produce in advance any more than the free associated producers are able to foresee all needs and all links in the production process. But they would be quite capable of working out what their main needs are likely to be, if only because they can calculate what is needed in the same way that capitalism does – by seeing what was needed in the past – and then adjust it according to their own democratically expressed preference. Supply can be made to correspond to demand.

Socialism is a system of planning and management in which the workers allocate resources and democratically determine priorities themselves. Such a system demands that the people themselves articulate their needs as producers, consumers and citizens, in other words, that they become the masters of their conditions of work and life, that they progressively liberate themselves from despotism and diktat of the market and its tyranny of the wallet.

Socialism will be a delegatory democracy of various diverse workers and community councils. The rule of bureaucracy or technocracy is irreconcilable with the conscious control and direction, through planned democratic association of self-managing producers. All wealth comes from the application of labour to raw materials. It was all still produced by the workers. Regardless of how production proceeds, by hand or brain, or in modernised facilities.

The question is that of ownership and control of wealth production, effectively at present it is for the enrichment of the minority owners of production and distribution mechanisms, as production is for sale to that end. With common ownership and production for use, then all wealth is available and production can be ratcheted up efficiently to satisfy human needs rather than choked off to satisfy market demand.

The capitalist class have been superfluous to the productive process since the start of the last century as educated workers generally run capitalism from top to bottom. They (the parasite class) are an unnecessary burden upon the productive process. The satisfaction of the capitalist need for profit ensures that they are engaged in competition with each other (even to the extent of war over raw materials etc.) and production is switched on and off, to satisfy profit requirements, rather than cooperatively engaged upon to satisfy human needs.

"The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor" Voltaire

Wee Matt