We want to abolish wage labour, but what do we propose to replace it with? The abolition of wage labour can only be conceived as a process of emancipation that will affect every aspect of our lives. It means a total transformation of social relations. The Socialist Party conceives of a society that abolishes exploitation and we expose those proponents of various “socialisms” which is merely the replacement of private property by state property while preserving the foundations of capitalism: wage labour and the commodity. Nothing will belong to anybody anymore. Socialism as we understand it, is above all a human community where there is no property, no State that oppresses, no classes that separates and which confers distinction. Socialism is not a platform of reforms must be led to victory by the number of votes or by violence. The Socialist Party does not aspire to conquer State power and replace the unjust and perverse power of the ruling class with its own power. Our electoral policy is not about raising up some individuals to be ministers or peoples commissars, but of rendering such functions useless.
The socialist revolution can only be, from its very first steps, the founding act of the democratic and common ownership of the means of production, a community in which no one is excluded and where buying and selling —even money—will be unknown. The principle of sharing will replace the principle of exchange without taking the form of a State — the rule of some over others. With the abolition of the State, money and the commodity, people will exercise conscious control over their own activity by way of the relations and interactions that they establish among themselves and between them and the rest of nature.
Socialism will be a society where the most precious gift will reside in human relations; where all human beings will have the chance to enjoy what they do, and possess the time and the space in which to do it and for which they are themselves will responsible for. Socialism presupposes the free association of men, women, and children, beyond the roles of dependency and reciprocal submission. Likewise, socialism entails the realisation that scarcity or poverty is not the result of a shortage of means, of things or of objects, but that it derives from a social organisation based on the monopoly of a few at the expense of the rest.
In a capitalist society, all goods are produced for sale, for making a profit. Within socialism, the producers will not exchange their products: nor will the human activity incorporated in these products appear any longer as their value, as if this were a real quantity that they possessed. These goods will no longer be characterised by having a value; they have no price and cannot be exchanged (in accordance with that value, regardless of the standard by which it is measured), nor, for that same reason, can they be sold. They will have no other purpose than the satisfaction of human desires and needs such as they are expressed at any particular moment.
With the elimination of commodity production, the domination of the product over the producer will also disappear. Mankind will rediscover the connection with what we make. With the disappearance of money, goods will be freely available at no charge. One will not have to have a certain amount of money in order to have the right to obtain anything whatsoever. A socialist society will therefore not be a mere extension of our “consumer”. society. It will not be an immense supermarket where passive beings only have to help themselves. There will be no devastation of resources without worrying about the future nor will there be a pursuit of a constant stream of useless throwaway junk. The fact that a product has been made by one person or another will not entail the persistence of the principle of property, even of a “ cooperative and decentralised” variety. Productive activity will no longer be bound to the notion of ownership, but to that of individual and collective creativity, to the awareness of satisfying human needs for both individuals and for the community as a whole. With the replacement of exchange by common ownership, goods will no longer have an economic value and will become mere physical objects which human beings can use to satisfy any needs they may have. Production will not obviate the necessity of undertaking an estimation of the needs and possibilities of the community at any given moment, but they will not be reduced to a common denominator measured according to a universal standard. They will be assessed as physical quantities and only in this respect will measurement have any meaning for human beings. In the past, some socialists (including Marx himself) expounded the idea that the distribution of products could be regulated by the circulation of labour-time vouchers that would correspond to a social average labour time calculated after taking account of deductions devoted to social funds. In fact, the existence of a common standard that measures product and labour is incompatible with the real abolition of wage labour, exchange or value. Furthermore, such a system would require the consideration of certain arbitrary variables in accordance with the difficulty of the job, of its inherent interest thus it would, therefore, relapse into an “economic calculation” that would require a “unit of value” whether expressed in the form of money or, directly, in that of labor time. Socialism, as a society without money, will not, however, need any universal unit of measurement; all calculations will proceed in accordance with the nature of the thing calculated. The appeal of an object will, therefore, be derived from the object itself and not from any value that is more or less arbitrarily assigned to it. Its production, like its use, will be determined in accordance with its meaning for men and nature.
Socialism means the end of the separations that compartmentalise our lives. There will be no antagonism between looking out for oneself and looking out for others. People will associate with each other, brought together by their shared tastes and affinities. This by no means implies that all conflicts will be abolished, but that the irreconcilable opposition between human groups and interests will come to an end. This does not mean that life on earth will be a “paradise”, but that the relations between people will no longer be relations between individuals who are indifferent with regard to each other. Socialism will rehabilitate what is human. In socialism, the elderly will not be warehoused in nursing homes that are merely the last stop before the cemetery. Nor will education be compulsory as a preparation for wage labour and separated from the rest of social life. Socialism will introduce an unprecedented freedom: the freedom to travel over the whole surface of the planet without having to answer to anybody or show any documentation, the freedom to go wherever you want whenever you want and to stay there as long as you want.
The socialist revolution is not a clash between two armies, one of which follows the orders of the privileged and the exploiters while the other serves the working class. It cannot be reduced to a war for the seizure of power and the control over territory. We would play the enemy’s game if we reduce our revolution to a confrontation of force and to safeguard “conquests” construct another state structure. The revolution would then degenerate into a civil war, fatally falling victim to the mere repetition of the mistakes of the past. The confrontation between two armies, the red and the white, will not be the socialist revolution but the transformation of the workers into the army of another vanguard.
The revolution will, in fact, be a social revolution that will completely transform all other relations and that will make men and women the subjects of their own history. It will destroy the State and politics and it is by abolishing commodity relations that it will destroy capitalism. Socialists do not seek to be nourished by the taste for capitalist blood in a spirit of vengeance. The aim of the Socialist Party is to eliminate the material and mental structures of oppression rather than to destroy individuals. Our goal is the emergence of a reconciled community. There exists the possibility (remote as it seems) that our class enemies could undergo a change where they will come to understand the benefits in the realisation of the community without masters or slaves. If a truly human society is to be created where we can relate to each other as members of a real community instead of as isolated individuals, then the commodity-form must disappear completely. The death of the commodity will be the beginning of a truly human society existing in harmony with the rest of nature.
Adapted and abridged from here
https://libcom.org/library/communism-points-consideration-linsecurite-sociale
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