Abolition of Money!

Many of our fellow-workers cannot conceive of a world without money and prices, but those of us in the Socialist Party of Great Britain can. We envision a largely self-regulating system of stock control in which calculations on what is produced and where and when are made in kind rather than in terms of a common unit like money. A self-monitoring and self-adjusting system of stock control will permit the producers themselves in their worker councils, neighbourhood assemblies, industrial unions or whatever to ascertain more or less immediately the availability of goods of any particular item throughout the system; the communications technology to enable this to happen is already in place, a benefit of global capitalism and its extensive supply-chains. Socialism comes from capitalism which has already created a large, organised, highly trained working class which carries out by itself all essential productive, administrative and educative activity throughout the world and which is inexorably driven because of its subordinate social position and its conditions of work, to challenge the status quo. Capitalism has also produced and carries on producing, the material conditions necessary for the establishment and the practical organisation of a united world-wide society rapid world-wide communications and a potential abundance of goods and services. Furthermore, many of the problems of modern capitalism (pollution, the threat of nuclear war, terrorism) are world problems which can only be approached on a world scale and which therefore spread among workers a consciousness of the need for global solutions.

Achieving 'abundance' can be understood as the maintenance of an adequate buffer of stock in the light of extrapolated trends in demand. The relative abundance or scarcity of a good would be indicated by how easy or difficult it was to maintain such an adequate buffer stock in the face of a demand trend (upward, static, downward). It will thus be possible to choose how to combine different factors for production, and whether to use one rather than another, on the basis of their relative abundance/scarcity. By following the rule of using the minimum necessary amounts of the least abundant factors it will be possible to ensure their efficient allocation. Money and prices would not come into it. Socialism is a system of society which makes commodity-production and money outdated precisely because it is a society based on the common ownership and popular control of the means of production"; in other words, a society where what is produced is shared collectively by the community. Consumer goods produced under such circumstances cannot be sold to the members of the community which already owns them; all that can happen to them is that they can be allocated, divided, handed out or made available to the members of the community in accordance with a democratic decision. The essence of socialist distribution is free access according to self-defined requirements as judged by the individual members of socialist society, in other words, that consumer goods and services should be freely available for people to take and use as and when they needed them, or as Marx said, “from each according to ability, to each according to need”.  Marx mentioned labour-time vouchers as one possible way of distributing consumer goods in the early days of socialist society — but Marx was clear that such vouchers would not be money, could not be money n fact, since money implied commodity-production which socialism precisely abolishes in favour of production directly and solely for use. Today there is no longer any need to think in terms of vouchers as a means of distributing goods in socialist society. This is why we emphasise free access to consumer goods and services according to individual needs as the socialist mode of distribution and as something that could be implemented very rapidly once capitalism has been abolished.

In socialism there will be an abundance of everything for people will be able to make use of the fantastic capacity of technology. We will not have to restrain the use of something like cybernetics and automation, for fear of causing unemployment. On the contrary, it will mean, rather, the redundancy of drudgery and sweated toil in socialism as more efficient production and more time for leisure is introduced and,it will not, as now, be the cause for misery.  To quote Oscar Wilde, as so many do, in his essay on The Soul of Man Under Socialism, said “In socialism, all unintellectual labour, all monotonous dull labour, all labour that deals with unpleasant things and involves dreadful conditions will be done by machinery, and just as trees grow while the countryman is asleep, so while humanity is enjoying itself in cultivated leisure, machinery will be doing the necessary and unpleasant work.” Socialist society will be void of instability and insecurity. 

Apart from the unshackled use of industrial technology on the earth’s resources, people in socialism will also be able to benefit from the work of millions of men and women who had previously been employed in socially useless work under capitalism. The multitudes for instance, who were being trained by their governments in the savagery of war, or who were building death-machines, or bank employees—the list is extensive. We obviously cannot provide a blueprint as the precise details of socialism will be decided by the majority who in the future will establish that society and live in it. But we can make certain general statements about its nature.

We can say that it will mean the end of buying and selling, the end of money and the wages system. We can say that, with the disappearance of such factors as cost and competition, it will mean people planning production democratically according to their wants and taking what they need to consume from the abundance of resources made available by modern technology. We can say that it will mean voluntary cooperation, work as a pleasure, not toil, and all men and women as social equals. We can say that it will mean complete democracy in all departments of life with freedom to choose one’s activities and occupations without being pushed around by decisions from above or by any kind of arbitrary authority. We can say that socialism will be world-wide—it cannot be anything else; ‘British Socialism’ is a contradiction in terms and anyway the world is now so closely united in terms of communications, fashions and the rapid flow of ideas that if people in one place were ready for socialism the rest of the world could not be far behind.