Money must go

Money: the curse of our lives. Waste your week working for it. Rush round the shops looking to spend it then waiting aiting for the bills to arrive through the letterbox—now you have less of it. Dreaming of winning the lottery. Dreading debt and the knock on the door from the bailiff to tell you the consequences of not paying it. On the streets the homeless beg for it. Women sell their bodies for it; so do rent-boys. Families break up over it. Criminals smash and grab it. Bitter strikes to get bosses to pay out a few more pounds of it.

Money stunts our lives until we are hardly living at all but on the treadmills of money payments. Money afflicts the many and makes affluent the few.
The parasitic rich live in expense-account luxury, thinking little of a few hundred pounds for a business lunch. Mothers anguish over how to buy shoes for three pairs of children's feet. It is a sick set-up.

The one workable alternative, the sane way forward which the Socialist Party will not be silent about. We must abolish the need for money. Money is only needed when some possess and most do not. Most must buy from some. Workers who produce must buy the necessities of life from the capitalist few who possess the world's wealth. The right of the minority to own and control must be ended. Class division must be ended. Buying and selling must cease. Money will then be done away with. We will produce for use. The ingenuity of administering money madness can be devoted to the infinitely saner and worthier cause of organising world production to satisfy human needs.

In a money-free world, there will be an end to the hardships which are faced by millions today as if they were a natural plague. No more starvation or homelessness or debt or repossession or cheap and shoddy bargain lifestyles. But we do not romanticise “the good old horny-handed worker”. We members of the working class also are conditioned to know ourselves only through a slave consciousness which fights against trust and collectivity. The young are turning against the old and white against black and men against women and fit against disabled—and all of these the other way round as well. The struggle to survive makes petty-minded money-grabbers out of the best of us and drives us as workers to adopt the meanness of spirit and factional hatreds of our oppressors.

Freedom from money will mean freedom of access to all that we need. But it will mean much more. It will mean the freedom to be freely human; to explore our natures and to nurture our behaviour. We shall be free to work not for money, but because we are social beings who express ourselves best through the expenditure of useful energy. We will be free to be more than just postmen or just mothers or just doctors or just painters: we will be free to be all of those things. The alienating division of labour will come to an end. It is humanity which will look after humanity, not a class whose function is to service higher (i.e. richer) forms of humanity. The struggle for a new system of society—for social revolution and nothing less—is more than a struggle for workers to "get more" out of society. A revolution carried out to let the homeless have shelter and the starving eat and the families on benefits to enjoy more. But we in the Socialist Party do not advocate and struggle for a few more “things"—or even a lot more. 

We do not seek a new world system which is just like capitalism only with more of everything for everyone. We seek—we demand—the freedom of all humans to have full control over society, for only then will we have full control over our humanity. We do not want more money, we want no money. We are not demanding welfare for the poor, but an end to the condition of buying and selling which necessitates poverty. We seek not a better-off working class but an end to the working class. We are workers who want to be humans, victims of wage slavery who will be satisfied with nothing less than an end to all slavery in all of its forms. Only then will we be free to live as true social animals: co-operatively, consciously, happily, in dignity.

 To become human we must abolish money: nothing less, no compromises.