We're closer to apocalyptic disasters than ever before. It
is no secret that our planet is in deep trouble and that capitalism is to
blame. Every problem we face as human beings is either caused by the normal operation of our
money-and-profit system (i.e. "capitalism"), or exacerbated by it. In
fact: it is the natural, normal operation of our private property system that
causes, or worsens, each and every social problem we face. Thus, if we really want
to eradicate these problems, we must begin to work towards organising our
society in a manner that reflects the reality of who and what we are: brothers
and sisters in the one human family. Just
knowing this won’t get us very far. Words are cheap. We have to transform this
knowledge into action to change the system.
Imagine ALL humans living in peace and in accordance to
Nature. Technology, energy and world resources can sustain our world
populations: rid the world of hunger, drastically lessen disease and provide for
all its inhabitants. Imagine for a moment a society without money. Imagine a
world without the pressure of bills or the stress of budgeting and all that
goes with our present system. It all sounds impossible to achieve but a possible
world of peace and prosperity is worth thinking about. It would be a
dramatically new and different society, offering a way of life we can only
dream of under our present system.
The moment we realise that a society based on money and
profit, has become counterproductive we have made a break-through. The moment
we realise that the apex of our development as a species is far higher than that
which presently characterises us, we have already made an advance. When we ask why
our global society, and its economy, is controlled by just a small group,
(whether that elite is the tiny corporate ruling class of capitalists, or
totalitarian bureaucrats of "The Party") and not by everyone,
together, engaging in cooperatively in economic activity as one human family to
satisfy human need and want, we have raised our consciousness.
Calling for the abolition of money as such, i.e. while leaving
everything else unchanged and even the isolated slogan "abolition of
money" could misleadingly suggest this would lead to chaos. To be clear we
should say that what we want is to see set up a system for producing and
distributing wealth which doesn't require money. Which would be one based on
the means of life being owned in common, social ownership – communism/socialism
in its proper sense. If the means for producing what we need are owned in
common so would be the product and the "problem" would then be not to
sell it but how to share it ought: giving and taking would replace buying and
selling and so money would simply become redundant and disappear.
A society based on exchange is one in which relations
between individuals are indirect. Exchange and money go hand-in-hand because
you need a medium that represents the abstract form of the worth of those
goods, which can persist between exchanges between private producers, is
universally recognized as nothing other than the bearer of value. Exchange is
nothing if not the ability of A to sell to F to get money to then buy something
from B, who sold something to E to get something from D, who bought something
from F and sold something to A, etc. Exchange is the negation of A having to
have what B wants in order to trade one use-value for another. Where this
process becomes the dominant social form, where labour and the means of production
themselves take the form of commodities, i.e. items produced to be exchanged,
money must also be omnipresent and developed to its final form, as universal
medium, as pure representation of value. Only at this point do we see the
development of the highest form of value: capital.
To abolish capital is to abolish exchange and money because
it is to abolish the ability to buy and sell human labour, the product of human
labour, and to abolish human labour as private labour, asserting directly and
consciously social labour as the new form of labour, hence freely associated
producers. Exactly the "automatic" nature of money indicates its
dominance over us, the dominance of a thing, a social product of human
activity, over human beings.
The word "exchange" implies that one thing is
given in return for something else. This can only happen when the two things
are separately owned. In other words, where there's some form of private
property. Money implies exchange and exchange implies the sectional or private
ownership (if I exchange my apple for your orange we are really exchanging
property title to these things). Therefore money is incompatible with common
ownership and hence socialism. So, exchange is essentially an exchange of
ownership titles. With communism (in its proper sense of the common ownership
by all of the means of production and their products) this doesn't arise. So,
abolishing exchange does not mean that everyone has to consume only what they
produce (an impossibility anyway since all production demands a degree, often a
high degree, of cooperation and so is a collective effort). What it means is
that the means of production and the products are there to be used and taken.
That's why there will be no need for money in communism. It is possible to say
that the only exchange that would take place in communism/socialism would be to
take "according to needs" in exchange for giving "according to
ability".
Socialists don't agree that you can't abolish exchange, or,
rather, that exchange is an eternal feature of human existence (as taught in
economics textbooks). Exchange is not the simple use of some product that you
didn't produce yourself. Nobody produces anything themself or ever has -
production has always been cooperative and a collective effort; it's only
ownership that's been individual. As the word itself implies exchange is the
handing over of something in return for something else. Which implies that the
things being exchanged are owned by those exchanging them. In other words, that
private property exists. So, exchange is the exchange of property titles and a
feature only of societies based on private property. In a communist society (in
the proper sense of the word as one where the means of production and the
products are the common property of all) what is produced is commonly owned and
there won't be - can't be - any exchange. Once things have been produced they
don't have to be exchanged for something else. Some way does have to be found
of sharing them out or of giving people access to them, but that's distribution
not exchange.
Although he dropped some of the more flowery philosophical
language, Karl Marx never abandoned his view that money should be abolished
through the establishment of a society based on common ownership and production
directly for human need. Workers, black, white, male, female, heterosexual, homosexual,
employed, unemployed; the normal operation of the economic system of capitalism
is the cause of almost every problem you've got. Under capitalism, literally
everything is for sale including human beings. Those members of the ruling
class who are even less scrupulous than the rest of this class see no moral
difficulty in holding people in slavery, if profit can be made through such an
endeavor. In a system that glorifies, and indeed requires, profitmaking, it is
little surprise that many persons take this ethic fully and pathologically to
heart and act accordingly.
One of the key
problems with the profit system, is that it is based on competition. Because it
is based on competition, companies must keep costs low, so competitors do not
undersell them. What do you think the largest cost of doing business is? That's
right - labour. In other words, our wages, what our employers pay us. So each
and every employer - including yours - has an irresistible compulsion to keep
wages as low as possible. Moreover, capitalism encourages corporations and
business owners to try and earn as much profit as possible, no matter what. The
less the corporation pays you, the more profit it earns for itself. These are
the two principal reasons your wages are low. As you know, politicians go
around in endless circles discussing this problem, when its cause is extremely
straightforward--the normal, natural, and routine operation of capitalism.
Fortunately, the solution to this pernicious problem is equally
straightforward—the abolition of wage slavery. With socialism there are no
wages and instead free access to goods and services based on need! We, the
people, are not stupid. Under capitalism we have only partial democracy: we have political democracy, in that we vote
for our political representatives but we do NOT have economic democracy. Which
means that we have no control whatsoever over issues of jobs, working
conditions such as hours, intensity of work, frequency of work and similar
issues. We have few rights, and we do what the "boss" orders us to,
or we lose our job, which means we lose our income. Which means we lose our
ability to survive as human beings. All of which means that we are, effectively,
slaves.
It has long known that this planet already produces enough
food to feed everyone on it. Hungry or otherwise ill-fed persons do not receive
the food they need primarily because even food is seen as, and reduced to, a
"commodity" under capitalism, and like every other such commodity, is
grown, created, manufactured, processed, distributed, and sold not to feed
people, but to produce profit for the tiny group of people who own food-related
corporations and other businesses, from the largest agribusiness concern to the
smallest corner-shop. In other words, under capitalism the food industry is an
industry like any other. It operates by the same rules, and for the same
reasons. Understand this reality, and you understand exactly why hungry people go
hungry in a world of obvious abundance, in Africa, Asia, the United States, and
elsewhere. Access to food is the first order of the day for any decent and
moral society. Indeed, the entire capitalist system works just like this; its
very operation is predicated upon the routine practice of denying people what
they need, unless profit can be made. This is the case, whether the needed
resource is food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, transportation, education,
entertainment, or anything else. The fact that the emperor has no clothes,
meaning the fact that this is a blatantly immoral, socially and economically
illogical way to treat our brothers and sisters in the human family, goes
unnoticed or unreported. Whatever one says about it, it is certainly not a method
of social interaction that is rooted in real community. As Erich Fromm has
pointed out, under modern capitalism the values and behaviours of the
marketplace become and are the de facto values and behaviors of the larger
society. Without question, capitalism brings with it and engenders across and
throughout society its own severe set of social values, and corresponding
social environment. As you might guess, this social environment is not one of
cooperation and mutual aid, but of compulsive and institutionalized greed,
corruption, and impersonality, as well as pathological individualism on one
side of the coin, and on the other, superfluous poverty, misery, and
desperation, manifold addictions, and artificial scarcity and want. All which
is underscored and in good measure fueled by the grinding necessity for
economic survival by any means necessary. Given these realities, wouldn't it be
foolish and naive of us not to expect the full range of human aberration,
certainly including all manner of criminal and anti-social activity? Thus,
actions such as robbery and even murder, moral transgressions as well as legal
infractions are and will remain an over-arching fact of life in capitalist
society.
The disgusting and unforgiveable reality is that untold
numbers of people around the globe, have no health care. The single reason is
simply that it can't afford it. And remember, under capitalism, if you cannot
afford a product or service, you simply won't get it--no matter what it is, how
badly you need it, or how immoral it would be to deny it to you. Food,
clothing, shelter, health care, transportation, anything and everything; if a
corporate owner or other businessperson can't make a profit on your need, they
will not fill that need. Sorry, buddy; tough luck. “Can’t Pay – Can’t Have.” This
is the iron law of capitalism. In contrast, socialism would distribute goods
and services based on need, as capitalism most decidedly does not do. Thus,
every person would receive free access to health care, as they would receive
free access to everything else. Walk into the clinic, get your health care. No
payment of a fee, no stress of receiving a medical bill or losing insurance
cover. Furthermore, we would actually require less health treatment, since the
elimination of capitalism would eliminate so many of our present physical and
psychological maladies that are caused by capitalism in the first place. Under
a system like capitalism, that is so viciously and ruthlessly opposed to fully,
properly, and consistently meeting human need, and that presents such a wide
and obvious disparity between its character and method of operation, and the
genuine physical, psychological, and emotional requirements of the human
species, why would we expect that individuals would not lapse into this or that
mental or psychological abnormality? Would not develop this or that mental
illness behavior? The reality is that human beings require a social and
economic support system, and capitalism simply does not provide it, save in
perhaps a fashion that is unpredictable, unreliable, piecemeal, and wholly
dependent on rickety impersonal mechanisms. Compare the behaviour of people and
its effect on others, of our modern-day society, with that in society where
individuals would be inculcated from birth with the principle of solidarity and
sharing and which would act with sensitivity toward their fellow human beings
at all times. It doesn't take much how radically it would differ from modern
capitalist society.
Because capitalism is an economic system that operates in a
fast, aggressive, and predatory manner, to accumulate as much profit as
possible with little thought given to much of anything else, whether the health
of the environment, worker or consumer safety, or anything else. In contrast,
development, industrial production, and economic activity generally in a cooperative
social system would never have permitted such an assault on our environment.
Unlike capitalism, the initial development of our many processes of production inside
socialism would have included environmental impact as a core consideration.
Under capitalism, by contrast, such concerns are of secondary or even tertiary
importance, relegated in consideration or perhaps to be worried about or worked
out "later"--taking a clear backseat to profit maximisation. We're
not asserting that the corporate ruling class pays no attention at all to
concerns such as the environment. In the modern age they have finally come to
pay some attention. But it is simple economic reality that the reason they do so
is because they are continually forced by the government, and by fear of
litigation by consumer or environmental groups, or the government, itself;
moreover, corporations generally do the minimum necessary to satisfy government
regulation or avoid litigation. One of the reasons they take this approach is
that addressing environmental concerns represents significant cost, and one of
the fundamental rules of success under capitalism is to keep costs down, indeed
to cut them to the bone, whether those be the costs of paying workers, or the
cost of maintaining the natural environment. Thus, as with every other problem
we're suffering today, we need look no further for the root cause of our
environmental degradation, generally, or global warming, specifically, than the
normal operation of capitalism. In socialism there would be no money or profit
to worry about, and the only factors to be "maximized" would be those
such as safety, the well-being of the environment, and the health and
self-actualization of people.
Politicians are only able to tinker around the edges of the
economy; they cannot effect any sort of dramatic and permanent change. We all
know this. Clearly, in the modern age the important questions--the ones that
affect our lives most profoundly--are the economic questions, not the political
ones. Yet, our power as citizens is still based on the long-outdated notion of
political power and control, NOT economic power and control! This must be
changed, to bring our power as citizens in line with the present-day character,
nature, and reality of the modern, global economy. In fact, the extension of
power and control from the political to the economic is exactly what we will
have in a socialist society! It is part of the very definition of this
radically new, powerful, and liberating kind of system!
Establish a society that is informed by cooperation,
brotherhood, and love, and a consequent sensitive regard of all toward all,
underscored by a decent and generous sharing of resources. Such a society is
called a Cooperative Society. The only solution which is permanent,
comprehensive, and realistic is the replacement of capitalism with a classless,
moneyless, cooperative commonwealth. Establish a society that is informed by
cooperation and a consequent sensitive regard respect of all toward all,
underscored by a decent and generous sharing of resources. Such a society is
socialism.
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