Money is a mere means of exchange, in a production for sale,
private, corporate, or state owned, wage slave rationed access, economy. It
will be totally unnecessary in a commonly owned, free access production for use
post capitalist society. The franchise was only won through struggle. but
liberty has not yet been won if we remain in conditions of waged slavery of the
vast majority and privilege for the rest. Capitalism cannot give us freedom to
live as social equals, if ownership of the means of production and distribution
are held by a minority, private, corporate or state ownership. It is the poor
who produce all of the wealth in the first place. The property of the rich is
extracted from the surplus value over and above the rationed subsistence
(wages) paid to the poor in return for their mental and physical capacities
being employed in the creation of this wealth. The workers commodity
(labour-power) doesn't receive the full value as other commodities do. State
ownership is not common ownership. Nationalisation is not common ownership. The
system in the old Soviet Union was state-capitalism. Socialism/communism is truly
a post-capitalist, free access, production for use, common ownership society,
without buying or selling, money, governments 'over' you, banks, insurance or
any of the coercive apparatus of private, corporate or state owned society.
Poverty is relative as well as absolute:
“A house may be large
or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all
social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house,
and it shrinks from a little house to a hut. The little house shows now that
its owner has only very slight or no demand to make; and however high it may
shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighbouring palace grows to an
equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will
feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four
walls…A noticeable increase in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive
capital. The rapid growth of productive capital brings about an equally rapid
growth of wealth, luxury, social wants, social enjoyments. Thus, although the
enjoyments of the workers have risen, the social satisfaction that they give
has fallen in comparison with the increased enjoyments of the capitalist, which
are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the state of development of
society in general. Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure
them, therefore, by society and not by objects which serve for their
satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative
nature…In general, wages are determined not only by the amount of commodities
for which I can exchange them. They embody various relations.” – Marx, Wage Labour and Capital
Where scarcity does not exist, therefore acquisitive
impulses would not be engendered in the same way as in scarcity and rationed
access society such as capitalism. As production would not be turned off and
people made redundant, before human needs can be satisfied, as presently in
capitalism, where production is for sale to satisfy the profits of a few
percentage of the population, an economic parasite capitalist class. Access
would be self-determined. You don't take more air than you need, so why would
you take more food, clothing, shelter, etc than you need? According to the
ideological defenders of capitalism, people are motivated to work only by
monetary compensation or by the threat of starvation. The undeniable fact that
millions of hours of voluntary work are engaged in by people all the time.
People are motivated to do socially useful work by reasons other than money and
so could be relied on to do this too in a socialist society.
The Tories aren't the bad guys. It is capitalism and the Labour Party supports this equally as much and always has done, even to using troops during
strikes. A Labour government like all capitalist governments is rules you. The
banking system doesn't enslave people, but capitalism does, by waged slavery.
Banks are merely a function of a market system of private, corporate and state
ownership of the means of production and distribution, which has production for
profit for the enrichment of a minority capitalist parasitic class, as opposed
to a, post-capitalist, commonly owned, free access system which would have
production for use in the interests of all and have no need of money, banks,
insurance, markets, governments, police, armies navies and war machines. Capitalism
can't be r managed in the interests of the working class, by Left, or Right, or
Centrist, variants of its governments. No government can lift people out of
poverty. Poverty (absolute, actual and relative) is essential to keep workers
desperate for waged slavery.
You just can't have a 'nicer' capitalism. Unemployment is inevitably
associated with of capitalist competition over markets, trade routes and
spheres of interests. You can't have even the 'Right to Work'. There is always,
even in boom times a reserve army of unemployed, to drive down wages. (If
necessary they will inject inflation into the economy). Unemployment is
currently 5.5 percent or 1,860,000 people. If their "equilibrium
rate" of unemployment is 4% rather than 5% this would still mean 1,352,000
"need be unemployed". The government don't want these people to find
jobs as it would strengthen workers' bargaining position over wages, but that
doesn't stop them harassing them with useless and petty form-filling, reporting
to the so-called "job centre" just for the sake of it, calling them
scroungers and now saying they are mentally defective. Government is 'over' you
not 'for' you. Governments do not exist to ensure 'fair do's' but to manage
social expectations with the minimum of dissent, commensurate with the needs of
capitalism in the interests of profit. Worker participation amounts to
self-managing workers self-exploitation for the maximum of profit for the
capitalist class. Exploitation takes place at the point of production. Because
society is structured around the ownership of productive resources by a tiny
minority and the compulsion of the majority to work, in order to live, to
create profit for that minority, society cannot be reformed to abolish
exploitation or the periodic economic crises that result from it. All the power
to hire and fire is held by the employing class. It is past time to abolish the
wages and prices system. Capitalists, regardless if they are home-grown
vultures or overseas vultures, move in and out of countries based on profit
maximisation, not to save or create jobs. The capitalist class don't wake up at
night wondering how they can save or create jobs of people, but how they might
make a profit, by leeching surplus value off their potential workforce.
“Instead of the
conservative motto, ‘A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!’ they ought to
inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages
system!’”- Karl Marx Value, Price and Profit
Society could not function without the social aspect of
sociability despite aggression and competitive behaviour being rewarded. People
are no more naturally violent than naturally cooperative. They have to be
'trained' to kill in war situations.
"What these
studies have taught the military is that in order to get soldiers to shoot to
kill, to actively participate in violence, the soldiers must be sufficiently
desensitized to the act of killing. In other words, they have to learn not to
feel -- and not to feel responsible -- for their actions. They must be taught
to override their own conscience. Yet these studies also demonstrate that even
in the face of immediate danger, in situations of extreme violence, most people
are averse to killing. In other words, as Marshall concludes, "the vast
majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they
could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be 'conscientious
objectors' " Dave Grossman, On
Killing
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists possesses an eloquent
piece on a world without money, a condensed explanation of surplus value and redundancy
in everyday language. In socialism, we won't
be returning to barter. We will be taking over all the array of technological
expertise and information of capitalism, which will enable production of
surpluses and no switching off of capacity until needs are met, as opposed to
artificial (rationed by price) demand as presently. The idea is that free
access will be deliverable with voluntary labour. The interesting thing is how
capitalism can tease us with the potential for its own demise, democracy the
Achilles heel for liberation and recently Paul Mason's book, ‘Postcapitalism: A
Guide to Our Future’ at least shone a focus upon some possibilities. We may
likely die without seeing socialism, but we will be happy that we have been one
of those consistent in keeping the original idea of what socialism is, and is
not, alive. Making socialism is a task the world’s working class have to do for
themselves.
Socialism depends on people recognising our mutual
interdependence. There is, in other words, a sense of moral obligation that
goes with the territory. Socialism will permit a far greater degree of
technological adaptation without the constraints of the profit system.
Intrinsically backbreaking or unpleasant work can be automated. Conversely some
work may be deliberately made more labour intensive and craft based. Even under capitalism today most work is
unpaid or unremunerated - the household economy, the volunteer sector and so
on. So it is not as if this is something we are unaccustomed to. Volunteers
moreover tend to be the most highly motivated as studies have confirmed; they
don't require so called external incentives. We will get rid of an awful lot of
crappy and pointless jobs that serve as a disincentive to work. Since we would
be free to do any job we chose to what this means in effect is that for any
particular job there would be a massive back-up supply of labour to cover it
consisting of most people in society. In capitalism this cannot happen since
labour mobility is severely restricted since if you have a job you cannot just
choose to abandon it for the sake of another more urgent job from the
standpoint of society. With these two core characteristics of a socialist
society - free access to goods and services plus volunteer labour - there can
be no political leverage that anyone or any group could exercise over anyone
else. The material basis of class power would have completely dissolved. What
we would be left with is simply human beings being free to express their
fundamentally social and cooperative nature.
We have a world to win.
