Our socialist case, which no one else is putting, is that in a world of plenty there is poverty, that a society which puts ironmongery into space cannot house people decently, that workers are debased and degraded in useless toil, that our species is threatened with extermination because of capitalist economic conflict — and that all this is absolutely unnecessary for a single day longer.
A world social democracy without frontiers, in which work will be voluntary and enjoyable, in which every member of our society will have equal access to all goods and services, in which poverty and war will not exist — this free society is technically feasible now and can be established as soon as the majority of people understand and desire it.
The history of the last hundred years has proved time and time again: reformist programmes do not lead the working class to socialism. They obscure the issue. What is needed is a clear-cut case, uncluttered and uncompromised, for the abolition of wages. The Socialist Party declares that the workers have it in their power to build a society wherein the wealth produced shall be freely available to everyone without the need to buy, sell or exchange everything that is required.
So under the present system money is used to buy and sell commodities. All wealth has a price once it has become a commodity, and people cannot live without wealth. Our access to wealth is determined by our access to money. There are three was of obtaining money under capitalism:
1. Criminal Theft. This embraces illegal acts like robbing banks, mugging, begging on the streets and defrauding the benefits system. The risk involved is that the state is there to ensure that property is defended against suckers like working class criminals and those who defy the defence of capitalist social relations can be locked up, beaten or killed.
2. Legalised Theft. You will run into no trouble with the state here. The theft that is essential to the continuation of capitalism is exploitation (paying the worker less than the value of what he produces) which in polite circles is known as “running a business profitably”. Large fortunes can be made in this way, but before the reader becomes too attracted to this option it should be pointed out that entry to the class of legalised robbers is only available to a small minority of the earth’s inhabitants, usually by inheritance.
3. But if prisons or profits are not for you, there is a third way of getting money. All you have to do is to sell yourself to a capitalist in return for just enough money to keep you coming back the following week in need of more money. This is wage slavery and it is the position of the vast majority of men and women today.
The money we get in return for producing ail of the wealth in society is enough to buy cheap and shoddy goods. Meanwhile, those who own and control the means of producing and distributing wealth —the ones we are producing surplus value to provide for—are able to live in comfort, security and privilege.
Imagine a money-free society where all goods are available according to individuals’ self-determined needs. Will people take more than they need when they know that wealth will be there for the taking whenever they want it? It would be foolish for someone in a society of free access to take twenty loaves of bread when they need only one the others will soon be stale. Who will want to eat all twenty loaves simply because they are free? When did you last see a person filling their lungs with excess air or his mouth with more water than they could drink because these things are free? And if you did encounter such a person, would you resent the greed or laugh at the stupidity? The wretched theologians and psychologists, their minds contaminated by the conditioned behaviour of property society, ignorantly conclude that always men must act as anti-socially as we are forced to now. It is not “human nature” that stands in the way of a money-free society, but human consent to the continuation of private property.
When the majority class of wage slaves get rid of the institution of property, money will have no more use than tram lines in a tramless city or gas lamps in an age of electricity. Exchange will have no meaning when there are no property rights to pass from one person to another. Just as you cannot sell your coat to yourself, so, when the community commonly owns and democratically controls the means of producing and distributing wealth, there will be no non-owners to buy things from or sell things to, to steal from or to give to. Wages will be replaced by co-operative labour; classes will be replaced by social equality; money will be replaced by free access to all wealth. The richness and beauty of the world is there for the taking; are you ready to claim it?
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