A Vision of a Socialist Economy

 Unfortunately, socialism has now become a dirty word. In the sense it is used by the Socialist Party, it does not mean a one-party police state or state capitalism. It means a free and voluntary association. Socialism is a world without classes, without nations, and without money”. While this definition is very basic (even negative, since it defines socialism as being “without”), it nonetheless contains the fundamental characteristics of socialist society:

− It will be without classes, because working people cannot free themselves by becoming a new exploiting class: the reappearance of an exploiting class after the revolution would in reality mean the defeat of the revolution and the survival of exploitation. The disappearance of classes flows naturally from the interest of a victorious working class in its own emancipation. One of the class’ first objectives will be to reduce the working day by integrating into the productive process the unemployed and the masses without work in the Third World, but also the petty bourgeoisie, the peasants, and even the members of the overthrown bourgeoisie.

− It will be without nations, because the productive process has already gone well beyond the framework of the nation, and in doing so has rendered the nation obsolete as an organisational framework for human society. By creating the first planetary human society, capitalism has already gone beyond the national framework within which it was itself born. Just as the bourgeois revolution destroyed all the old feudal particularities and frontiers (taxes on the movement of goods within national frontiers, laws, or weights and measures, specific to this or that town or region), so the world socialist revolution will put an end to the last division of humanity into nations. The state is there to serve the interests of the capitalist class, to give to the capitalists as much as they can without risking social unrest and to take from the workers as much as they will allow. Only when workers realise they have no country to owe allegiance to, and that the reliance on leaders leads them nowhere but down a blind ally, will we start to make progress.

− It will be without money, because the notion of exchange will no longer have any meaning in socialism, whose abundance will allow the satisfaction of the needs of every member of society. Capitalism has created the first society where commodity exchange has been extended to the whole of production (contrary to previous societies, where commodity exchange was limited essentially to luxury goods, or certain articles which could not be produced locally such as salt). Today, capitalism is being strangled by its inability to sell on the market everything that it is capable of producing. The very fact of buying and selling has become a barrier to production. Exchange will therefore disappear. With it will disappear the very idea of the commodity, including the first commodity of all: wage labour.

The WORLD SOCIALIST MOVEMENT understands that only through mutual solidarity among the working class can we realise our common goals. We hope to achieve a global network of individuals and groups united by our opposition to capitalism and the State. We hold the following ideas:

Opposition to all forms of capitalism (past, present, local, global, state or ‘free market’)

Its replacement by a class-free, money-free world community without borders or states

Common ownership and direct democratic control of the means of production.

A free access ‘use’ economy with production geared towards the satisfaction of human needs;

Voluntary association, cooperation and the maximisation of human creativity, dignity and freedom.

A recognition that such an alternative society can only be established democratically from the ‘bottom up’ by the vast majority of people, without the intervention of leaders, politicians or ‘vanguards.’