With socialism, we shall all satisfy our needs from common storehouses, according to our desires. Everyone will be able to have what he or she desires in food, in clothing and travel. The abundant production now possible, and which invention will constantly facilitate, will remove any need for rationing or limiting of consumption. Every individual will be secure from material want. Material anxiety being removed, and the rat-race for wealth and status eliminated. There will be no class distinctions since these arise from differences in material possessions — all such distinctions will be swept away. There will be neither rich nor poor. Money will no longer exist. There will be no selling, because there will be no buyers, since everyone will be able to obtain everything at will, without payment. The possession of private property, beyond that which is for actual personal use, will disappear. There will be neither masters nor servants, all being in a position of economic equality — no-one will be able to become the employer of another. Theft and all other economic crimes will disappear, with all the coercive law-enforcement institutions for preventing, detecting and punishing them.
As soon as people are working together some sort of organisation of work and of distribution becomes inevitable. Production cannot be carried on without organisation. In each industry, the workers concerned in the work must form and control the organisation, directed by the community an society as a whole. The various industries are interlinked in interest and utility; therefore the industrial organisations must be interlinked. When wages have disappeared, when there exists economic equality, when the position of manager, director, supervisor, etc., brings no material advantage, the danger of oppressive behaviour by the management will be largely nullified and organisers and administrators will be chosen and workers will be free to change him. Co-operation for the common good is necessary. Since co-operative work and mutual reliance on mutual aid render some kind of organisation necessary, the best possible form of organisation must be chosen: the test of its worth is its efficiency and the scope for freedom and initiative it allows to each of its units. Committees and delegates, built up from the base of the workshop and local assemblies, presents the best form of organisation yet evolved; it arises naturally when the workers are thrown upon their own resources in the matter of government. We live always, however, in a state of flux, and there is and happily can be, no permanence about human institutions; there is always the possibility of something higher, as yet undiscovered.
Consider the position in London with capitalism abolished; the tubes and buses, the mainline stations, the docks, the waterworks, the power stations require to be operated. Millions of people are waiting for their food and groceries requirements to be brought to them. If any of these things cease, then people will be deprived of accustomed necessaries. Thus everything has to be reorganised and built upon a new basis; production for use, not for profit, and capitalism is overthrown. Everyone, both as worker and consumer, has new hopes and desires and new claims upon life, for has not the socialist revolution come? Everyone demands more leisure and more relaxed work , improved food, better clothes, more pleasant housing. Everyone is demanding a share in deciding how things shall be done. The only people who could deal with the great new situation would be the people who already do the work and who produce. All inter-connected as they are in this busy hive of activity. Workers and consumers would come together and talk the matter over; appoint one of their number to take stock and to coordinate supply and delivery. All this will be done purely by way of managing affairs so that all may be, as far as possible, satisfied that the needs of all may be explained and understood by those who have to supply them. But there should be no compulsion; some people may say: “What the majority decide is good enough for me.” Others will say: “I like to have a voice in it.” As a rule, when things affecting a group of people who are working together come up for decision everyone of the group will join in and give his or her opinion, and generally the thing will be decided by mutual agreement. Compulsion and coercion are repugnant to the socialist ideal. No-one may make a wage-slave of another; no-one may hoard up goods but the only way to prevent such practices is not by making them punishable; it is by creating a society in which no-one needs to become a wage slave, and no-one cares to privately hoard goods when all that is needed is readily supplied as required from the common storehouse. To recapitulate, workers’ and community councils structured in interlocking levels, will form the administrative machinery for supplying the needs of the people in socialist society.
Socialism necessitates the creation of initiatives which shall animate the entire people. Under capitalism, people are like a flock of sheep shepherded by their owners. With socialism, on the contrary, they will be free co-operators, producing, inventing, studying, not under the compulsion of law, or poverty, or the incentive of individual gain, but from deliberate choice and with an eager zest for achievement. Socialism will provide the material conditions which will make voluntary co-operative labour possible. Only by willing service and intelligent initiative can true socialism develop. The establishment of the socialism entails a complete breach, both in practice and in ideas, with capitalism. There are no half-way compromises.
Abridged and adapted from here
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pankhurst-sylvia/communism-tactics/index.htm
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