Money Must Go

We live in a society where almost everything is bought and sold. That which you need in order to live is a commodity; you must buy it from someone who will make a profit out of selling it to you. Our minds are dominated by money. No money,  No honey. It is hard to envisage the world without money. It requires a considerable jump of the political imagination to think of life without banknotes, coins, or cash-cards. From cradle to coffin, lives are conditioned by money. Without it we starve; because of it, we are poor; if we steal it we get locked up.

Money is indispensable to the capitalist system, but capitalism is not indispensable to human society. “We need money—we can't live without it" is a well-conditioned criticism of any proposal to end the money-system. As proponents of a money-free society, many objections are put to the Socialist Party about this idea. What happens if we all want a yacht or Maserati or private jet, they ask emulating present-day billionaires?

There are two responses. The first is that the objector assumes that people would have transformed capitalism into a socialist society without changing their ideas or attitudes. They still dream of living like the rich. But socialism is not going to be something introduced for people, delivered to them by an enlightened elite, but something that they themselves are going to have to establish in full awareness of what they are doing and why. Would people who establish socialism going to want to ape the rich? And, understand that, in a society where goods and services will be freely and permanently available in relative abundance, greedily and selfishly grabbing and hoarding will be a foolish and pointless thing to do

The second response is that in socialist society everybody will have a Rolls-Royce! Not literally, of course, but in the sense that whatever is produced in socialism will be of the best quality, though, once again, without any of the prestige that attaches to the best things today just because they are out of reach of the vast majority and only available to the rich. The yacht and the jet can be time-shared with others. The fact is that, while it is true that resources are limited in an absolute sense, it is not true that human wants are limitless. It is technically possible today to produce enough of what humans, as rational beings, are likely to reasonably want in a rationally-organised free and equal society.

Are our fellow-workers capable of living in a society of free access? Will they take too much? Will they all refuse to work? 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 worries. 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 money-free society, men and women will co-operate together to make it run as efficiently as possible and will take what they require 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 fellow-workers who are currently crying out, openly or quietly to themselves, under the stresses and strains of the unbearable pressures of the money system. Without money, humans will be free to relate to one another in ways which we have forgotten or only half-remember. Banks can be turned into community centres and ATMs can be melted down for scrap-metal. 

The Socialist Party stands for a world without money. All wealth will be commonly owned so there will be nobody to buy what you need from. The right to live, and to be comfortable and happy, will not depend upon your wallet or bank-balance. The value and quality of of life will not be costed by accountants and actuaries. In socialism, people will work according to their abilities and take according to their needs. Who will decide what their needs are? Not the advertising industry. 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 Left intellectuals. 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 selling 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 distribution centres.

The Socialist Party stands for a society in which all factories, farms, offices, docks, mines, the entire means of producing and distributing wealth will be owned by the entire world community. The resources of the earth will belong to everyone. No laws will exist to preserve the right of one section of society to use things and another section to be denied the use of them. World socialism will be based on free access for all people to all the goods of the earth. In such a society money would be an out-dated relic. Nobody will buy anything or sell anything or pay for anything. Those who still cannot imagine such an arrangement should remember that people in pre-capitalist societies would have found our present social order equally difficult to comprehend.

Would people be happy if we didn't use money? Today most people work at boring monotonous jobs in offices and factories not because they like the work but because they need money. The abolition of money would liberate them all from wage-slavery. It is not money as such which can satisfy needs. In Robert Tressell's novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Owen, explained to his workmates "money itself is not wealth: it’s of no use whatever....Money is the cause of poverty because it is the device by which those who are too lazy to work are enabled to rob the workers of the fruits of their labour”

 Those who have made the mental leap from the prison of the money system to the freedom of world socialism are urged to join us now in our struggle to create the society of tomorrow. The objective is urgent. We have waited for too long.