Why we Struggle

RAISE THE RED BANNER OF SOCIALISM

Austerity has been criticised as an irrational policy, which further exacerbates the economic crisis by creating falling effective demand. However, this criticisms scarcely explains why such a policy persists, despite its ‘failure’. In reality, economic crises express themselves above all in a reduction of profitability of the capitalist class. Austerity constitutes a strategy for raising capital’s profit rate.

Austerity constitutes a strategy of reducing business costs. Austerity reduces the price of labour, increases profit per labour-unit cost and thus boosts the profit rate. It is complemented by institutional changes that, on the one hand, enhance capital mobility and competition and, on the other, strengthen the power of managers in the enterprise and share and bondholders in society. As regards fiscal consolidation, austerity gives priority to budget cuts over public revenue, reducing taxes on capital and high incomes, and downsizing the welfare state. However, what is cost for the capitalist class is the living standard of the working majority of society. This applies also to the welfare state, whose services can be perceived as a form of ‘social wage’. It is clear, therefore, that austerity is primarily a class policy. It constantly promotes the interests of capital against those of the workers, pensioners, unemployed and economically vulnerable groups. In the long run, it aims at creating a model of labour with fewer rights and less social protection, with low and flexible wages and the absence of any substantial bargaining power for wage earners.

Recession puts pressure on every capitalist to reduce all forms of costs, to more intensively follow the path of ‘absolute surplus-value’, i.e. to try to consolidate profit margins through wage cuts, intensification of the labour process, infringement of labour regulations and workers’ rights, massive redundancies, etc. From the perspective of big capital’s interests, recession gives thus birth to a ‘process of creative destruction’. There is a redistribution of income and power to the benefit of capital, and concentration of wealth in fewer hands as small and medium enterprises, especially in retail trade, are being ‘cleared up’ by big enterprises and shopping malls.

This strategy has its own rationality It perceives the crisis as an opportunity for a shift in the correlations of forces to the benefit of the capitalist power, subjecting societies to the conditions of the unfettered functioning of financial markets, attempting to place all consequences of the systemic capitalist crisis on the shoulders of the working people. This is the reason why, in a situation of such an intensification of social antagonisms like today, a government that wants to side with labour and the social majority cannot even imagine to succumb to pressures to continue implementing austerity policies.

The financial sphere is not simply the reign of speculation, it is not a casino, it is much more an overseeing mechanism. In his analysis in Volume 3 of Capital, Karl Marx illustrates that social capital is being occupied by two ‘subjects’: a money capitalist and a functioning capitalist. In the course of a lending process, the money capitalist becomes the recipient and proprietor of a security, that is to say a written promise of payment from the functioning capitalist, the manager. In Marx’s own words: “In the production process, the functioning capitalist represents capital against the wage-labourers as the property of others, and the money capitalist participates in the exploitation of labour as represented by the functioning capitalist.” Secondary contradictions between the managers and the big financial investors certainly do exist, but they are minor in comparison to the capital-labour class contradiction.

Every enterprise is Janus-faced, comprising on the one hand the production apparatus per se and, on the other, its financial existence, its shares and bonds, which are being traded on the global financial markets. The production of surplus value constitutes a battlefield situation where resistance is being encountered, meaning that the final outcome can never be taken for granted. Techniques of risk management, organized within the very mode of functioning of the ‘deregulated’ money market, are a critical point in the management of resistance from labour, and thus for promoting and stabilizing austerity. Financial markets generate a structure for overseeing the effectiveness of individual capitals, that is to say a type of supervision of capital movement. The demand for high financial value puts pressure on individual capitals (enterprises) for more intensive and more effective exploitation of labour, for greater profitability. This pressure is transmitted through a variety of different channels.

When a big company is dependent on financial markets for its funding, every suspicion of inadequate valorization increases the cost of funding, reduces the capability that funding will be available and depresses share and bond prices. Confronted with such a climate, the forces of labour within the politicized environment of the enterprise face the dilemma of deciding whether to accept the employers’ unfavourable terms, implying loss of their own bargaining position, or face the possibility to lose their job: accept the “laws of capital” or live with insecurity and unemployment. This pressure affects the whole organization of the production process. It therefore presupposes not only increasing “despotism” of managers over workers but also flexibility in the labour market and high unemployment. Hence, “market discipline” must be conceived as synonymous with “capital discipline.”

The working majority in practically every capitalist country will always be opposed to shrinking wages and precarious employment, to degeneration and cut-back of public services, raising the cost of education and healthcare, weakening of democratic institutions, strengthening of repression. They will always conceive the ‘crisis of labour’ (i.e. unemployment, precarious and underpaid work etc.) as a social illness that should be tackled by itself, not as a side effect of the recovery of profits. The continuation of austerity is therefore a matter of the social relation of forces. As Karl Marx commented on the limits of the working-day: “The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible … On the other hand… the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights force decides.”

Under capitalism, the economic power of society is only used to produce goods which can be sold at a profit; if this cannot be done then nothing will be produced. The owners of the means of production would rather allow their businesses to sit idle than to produce at a loss, even if the things that could be produced are desperately needed. The capitalist economy is governed by profit not need, and for this reason is highly inefficient in terms of meetings society’s needs, despite what all the apologists of capitalism claim. We are frequently told that capitalism is the most efficient of all economic systems – yet if this were the case, why would factories and offices lie idle and empty, despite being able to produce an abundance of goods and services that society needs? If profit were removed from the equation there would be no barrier to using all the means of production at our disposal to their fullest extent.

For many, it is clear what we are fighting against but it can be harder to picture exactly what we are fighting for. Socialists are not crystal-ball gazers. We cannot predict the future with absolute certainty and so we cannot say exactly what socialism will look like. Society is not shaped by the speculation of past generations, but by the decisions and actions of the present. Nonetheless it is still possible to make some deductions about what socialism will look like by applying a materialist analysis to the development of history and society. In other words, we can make hypotheses about the future, based on the evidence from the present and the past. This is not a precise science that can predict exactly when a revolution will break out or the specific form that it will take but by looking at capitalist society we can see potentially what a socialist society will look like. This idea of an economy that isn’t run for profit gives us the first glimpse of what socialism will look like. Socialism means the end of a society in which human beings are oppressed and exploited by other human beings. It means an end to private property and an end to profit and the anarchy of the market. A socialist society would be able to plan in the interests of the needs of the many, instead of the profits of a few. This is the foundation of a society of abundance, in which all the forces of economic production are rationally and democratically planned in the interests of the majority. Instead of alienating us from our work, socialism will gives us a real stake in the economy and in society, by giving us collective ownership over it. The work itself will therefore have a more direct purpose and be clearly for our own benefit and the benefit of others around us, instead of paying dividends for far away investors.

For people to be able to genuinely participate in the democratic running of society they must have the time to do so. Under capitalism, the length of the working week and the pressure of day-to-day life mean that the vast majority are completely divorced from political activity. For someone working long hours or two jobs, the last thing they are capable of or willing to do with their evenings and weekends is attend meetings on proposed. In a socialist society, where the efficiency of technology and automation has greatly reduced the hours of the working day, people will finally have the free time necessary to participate fully in how society is run. By placing the economy under genuine democratic control of the working class, people will also have the motivation to participate thanks to the knowledge that their thoughts and actions can make a tangible difference. At the heart of socialist democracy, therefore, is the ability for society to actually be able to implement the decisions it makes.

 Socialism does not mean an immediate end to all of the world’s problems and the creation of a paradise in which everyone lives happily ever after. It does promise a system where humans can stop destroying themselves and their planet, and instead begin to take conscious control of their own lives. From a capitalist’s point of view, destroying the planet is an acceptable price to pay for higher profits, not least because it is the world’s poorest people who will be the ones who bear the brunt of extreme climate change. When it comes to climate change socialism is the only thing that can save us from destroying the planet by reducing emissions to mitigate climate change which would contribute to solving the most serious problem facing all life on earth today. The technology already exists to harness the energy from wind, waves and sun, which could be used to power the entire planet. This is not done because it would be an unprofitable exercise for those capitalists who have built and invested in enormous fossil fuel companies. Capitalism is incapable of planning for the future, interested as it is only in short term gain.

The poor health of the poor

The gap between rich and poor is leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths in Scotland, health experts say. NHS Health Scotland examined 30 years of health trends and found large differences in preventable causes of death across social groups. It revealed that there was little difference in death rates from non-preventable diseases such as brain and ovarian cancer, but large differences in more preventable causes like alcohol-related deaths and heart disease. The common factor suggested for the persistence of health inequalities was social inequalities.

Dr Gerry McCartney, head of the public health observatory at NHS Health Scotland, said: "Health inequalities represent thousands of unnecessary and unjust deaths per year across almost all social groups in Scotland.”

Director of Public Health Science Andrew Fraser said these patterns of death were not inevitable. "The answers lie in tackling the causes of inequalities, and not just the recognised causes of disease. Patterns of death that are evident in this report are the end-points of circumstances that span Scottish life rather than focus on a particular disease group. Prevention is achievable, and inequalities are not inevitable."

Sadly, Socialist Courier would not agree that inequalities are not inevitable. Capitalism creates such inequality and until capitalism disappears, disparities in health will persist. Nor are we alone in our pessimism. Inequality Briefing – a collective project supported by a range of organisations and individuals, on their website states: "Inequality has been growing for the last 30 years. The gap between rich and poor is the widest since the second world war... If current trends continue, we will have reached Victorian levels of inequality in 20 years." It continues: "Inequality has an impact on all aspects of life in Britain today. It means that some families are going hungry, children are left behind. Health and life expectancy of the poor are lower than that of the rich. Social mobility is at its lowest point in a generation and those born into poverty are likely to stay there."

The Economics of Insanity

Capitalism is not an efficient way of supplying crucial human needs. Just by virtue of being human, are entitled to certain basic conditions of freedom and dignity which have to be respected by others. That’s something the Socialist Party hopes everyone can accept. Yet, we live today in a capitalist world, and capitalism has completely transformed the meaning of political rights and their relation to economic and social rights. Capitalism has created a separate economic sphere with its own rules and its own forms of power; and political rights have been emptied of economic and social content. The system has produced a whole new set of social problems which belong specifically to capitalism.  

Under the capitalist system basic goods and services are produced for and obtained from the market. But above all, it’s a system in which the main economic actors, workers and employers, are dependent on the market. Market dependence is the essence of the system. This unique way of organising material life has had a relatively short history. Other societies have had markets, but only in capitalism is dependence on the market the fundamental condition of life. This means that a wide range of human activity is subject to the market and determined by its requirements in a way that was never true before. In capitalism, the workers who supply our goods and services are market-dependent because they live by selling their labour-power for a wage. In other words, labour-power has become a commodity. Capitalists depend on the market to purchase labour power and capital goods, and to sell what the workers produce.

Workers are paid for their work. That seems just the opposite of peasants exploited by landlords, peasants who pay some kind of rent to the landlords. But do workers in capitalism really get paid for all the work that they do? What are they actually paid for? They’re paid for their labour power for a certain period of time, not for what they actually produce during that time. Whatever the workers produce belongs to the capitalist, and the capitalist appropriates the difference between what the workers are paid and what their products or services will fetch on the market. So capitalists appropriate the surpluses produced by workers in the form of profit, just as landlords appropriate surpluses from peasants in the form of rent. Karl Marx called this, exploitation. Capitalism, however, means a very specific way of extracting surpluses from workers — it’s not done by means of direct coercive force but through the market.

The fact that capitalists can make profit only if they succeed in selling their goods and services on the market, and selling them for more than the costs of producing them, means that making profit is uncertain.

Capitalists have to compete with other capitalists in the same market. Competition is, in fact, the driving force of capitalism — even if capitalists often do their best to avoid it, by means, for example, of monopolies. But the social conditions that, in any given market, determine success in price competition is beyond the control of individual capitalists.

Since their profits depend on a favourable cost/price ratio, the obvious strategy for capitalists is to cut their own costs. This means above all constant pressure to cut the costs of labour. This requires constant pressure on wages, which workers constantly have to resist. It also requires constant improvements in labour productivity. That means finding the organisational and technical means of extracting as much surplus as possible from workers within a fixed period of time, at the lowest possible cost.

To keep this process going requires regular investment, the reinvestment of surpluses. Investment requires constant capital accumulation. So there’s a constant need to maximise profit. The point is that this requirement is imposed on capitalists, regardless of their own personal needs and wants. Even the most modest and socially responsible capitalist is subject to these pressures and is forced to accumulate by maximising profit, just to stay in business.

We can talk as much as we like about corporate social responsibility. But capitalism itself puts severe limits on that. The need to adopt maximising strategies is a basic feature of the system and not just a function of irresponsibility or greed — although it’s certainly true that a system based on market principles will inevitably place a premium on wealth and encourage a culture of greed.

The need constantly to improve the productivity of labour generates constant improvements in technology and what’s conventionally called economic growth. But the same market pressures that make it so dynamic also have contradictory effects. Capitalism is prone to constant fluctuations and business cycles producing continual periodic crises.

Capitalism may be efficient in producing capital, and it’s certainly true that capitalism has generated great material and technological progress. But there’s a huge disparity between the productive capacities created by capitalism and what it actually delivers.

Production is determined not by what’s needed but by what makes the most profit. Everyone, for instance, needs decent housing, but good and affordable housing for everyone isn’t profitable for private capital. There may be a huge demand for such housing, but it’s not what the economists call “effective demand,” the kind of demand with real money behind it. If capital is invested in housing, it’s most likely to be high-cost homes for people with money. That’s the whole point of capitalism.

Where production is skewed to the maximisation of profit, a society can have massive productive capacities. It can have enough to feed, clothe, and house its whole population to a very high standard. But it can still have massive poverty, homelessness, and inadequate health care. You only have to look at the United States, where there are some of the highest rates of poverty in the developed world and where tens of millions have no access to affordable health care. What possible excuse can there be for that in a society with such enormous wealth and productive capacities?

Capitalism is inefficient in another sense too. With its emphasis on profit maximisation and capital accumulation, it’s necessarily a wasteful and destructive system of production. It consumes vast amounts of resources; and it acts on the short-term requirements of profit rather than the long-term needs of a sustainable environment. All aspects of life that become market commodities are outside the reach of democratic accountability. They answer not to the will of the people but to the demands of the market and profit.

Capitalism is unique, because unlike any other system before it, the capitalist doesn’t need direct coercive force to get access to the worker’s labour.

Workers aren’t legally dependent on capitalists. They’re not slaves or serfs. They’re not in conditions of debt bondage or peonage. They’re obliged to work for capital not because they’re compelled by the capitalist’s superior force, but because they need to sell their labour power for a wage just to get access to the means of subsistence. This means that economic and political power have been separated in a wholly new way.

It doesn’t mean that the capitalist market can exist without support from the state. If anything, capitalism needs intervention by the state in some ways more than any other system, just to maintain social order and the conditions of accumulation. But the economic power of capital is separate from political power in two senses: the capitalist’s power over workers doesn’t depend on privileged access to political or legal rights, and possession of political and legal rights by workers doesn’t free them from economic exploitation.

The second major point is that the capitalist system is driven by certain inescapable imperatives, certain compulsions, the economic imperatives of competition, profit-maximisation, constant accumulation and the endless need to improve labour productivity. These really are imperatives. They’re not just choices made by greedy capitalists. They’re conditions of survival for capital. When we talk about the capitalist market, we’re talking about compulsions, necessities, not simply opportunities and freedom. And much of human life is driven by these imperatives. They drive not just production and the allocation of labour and resources but many aspects of life outside the workplace, even down to the most basic organisation of time.

There’s no such thing as a capitalism governed by popular power, no capitalism in which the will of the people takes precedence over the imperatives of profit and accumulation, no capitalism in which the requirements of profit maximisation doesn’t dictate the most basic conditions of life. The essential condition for the very existence of capitalism is that the most basic conditions of life have been commodified, turned into commodities subject to the dictates of profit and the “law”’ of the market. Every human practice that’s commodified is outside the reach of democratic accountability.

Capitalism has certainly marginalised and impoverished many people, and it continues to reproduce poverty even in developed economies. But there’s no doubt that it has tremendously improved material conditions in general and raised the standard of living for vast numbers of people throughout the world. The point, though, is that it has also produced distinctive problems of a kind that never existed before, even in more prosperous economies. The basic point is that market dependence in capitalism means that people have lost non-market access to the means of production and the means of subsistence.

When people are in direct possession of land, for instance, and when that possession doesn’t depend on success in the market, there isn’t what I’m calling market dependence or market imperatives. What we see in the history of capitalist development is the loss of that kind of possession. We see either complete dispossession for the majority, or the imposition of conditions that make possession dependent on success in the market, which for many people ultimately leads to dispossession.

We also see the destruction of communal networks — village communities, and so on — which traditionally gave people some kind of support in times of need. In the earliest days of capitalism, in England for instance, this meant among other things the loss of customary rights to the use of common land, in the famous process of enclosure. It also meant a change in communal values and changes in the way the law was applied. It meant new legal definitions of property in which any traditional commitment to a basic right of subsistence was replaced by the imperatives of profit. As capitalism developed into its industrial form, there were also measures, like changes in the system of relief for the poor, designed to uproot people from their local communities, to increase the mobility of labour. It means the privatisation of just about everything. It means what some people have called a whole new process of enclosure. It can mean outright dispossession of small landholders, or it can mean the imposition of economic policies that force producers to abandon strategies of self-sufficiency in favour of export-oriented strategies, the production of single cash crops, and so on. It also means, as it did in the early days of capitalism, the break up of various social networks which people have relied on for support.

The basic principle of the capitalist system is the isolation of individuals and their naked exposure to market imperatives. It means eliminating everything that stands between people and dependence on the market, everything that makes them autonomous from the market. And when social life is driven by market imperatives, it’s also subject to the cycles and crises of the market. For example, dispossessed workers, who depend on selling their labour-power for a wage, have nothing to fall back on when the market doesn’t need them. It’s not hard to see how this has created new social problems.

Social services and welfare safety-nets are vulnerable and precarious not just because of changing political fashions but for a more fundamental reason, and that’s because it’s in constant tension with the imperatives of capitalism. It’s the imperatives of capitalism that make these rights necessary, and it’s capitalist imperatives that constantly threaten them. How do we challenge those imperatives? It’s hard to see how we’ll ever overcome them completely without moving beyond capitalism and the commodification of labour-power.

What do we mean by socialism

Marx and Engels, used the terms socialism and communism to mean the same thing - a moneyless, wageless, stateless society - as did numerous others, including the early Social Democrats. People have seem to have fogetten about this in their ill-informed attempt to dismiss free access communism. They have failed to see just how much their own perspective is imprisoned within narrrow horizon of bourgeois rights and bourgeois behaviour patterns It is perhaps difficult now to appreciate but, in the late 19th century/early 20th century, when people talked about a socialist society they meant basically a communist society. In fact, earlier on, when Marx and Engels drew up their "Communist Manifesto", they explained why, at the time, they did not call it the Socialist Manifesto - because of the association of the term socialism with certain political currents they did not favour - but increasingly over time they shifted over to using the term socialism rather than communism - particularly Engels. Large numbers of writers in the late 19th century-early 20th adopted this practice. One thinks of people like William Morris, Hyndman, Kropotkin, Kautsky and many others. Even the Russian Social Democrats before they split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks used the term "socialism" in this way and Stalin wrote a pamphlet in 1906 in which he defined socialism as a moneyless wageless society. In fact, this is how these terms were generally understood up until the early 20th century - as synonym. The distinction between socialism and communism primarily emerged with Lenin - it was never found in Marx identifying the former with what we would call "state capitalism" but even Lenin was not consistent in this and in an interview with Arthur Ransome in 1922 reverted to the old usage.

In the Critique of the Gotha Programme it is clear that Marx was equating the higher stage of communism with free access communism (No, we do not forget that the Critique of the Gotha programme is a primary source of theoretical support for the advocates of labour vouchers). In the Critique he talks of the right of producers being proportional to the labor they supply; and how these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

That last phrase did indeed originate with Louis Blanc but as a revision of Saint Simon's argument that individuals should be rewarded according to their labour input. In other words it specifically repudiates the notion of payment for work - whether in cash or labour vouchers or whatever

People who argue against the "Impossibilist" perspective on the grounds that we cannot really know what a socialist society will be like until we live in it are taking up a rather absurd and extreme position which incidentally traps them in Catch 22 situation - how are we ever going to get to live in a socialist society if we dont know what it is in advance of creating it? Indeed, how would we even know that what we created was socialism at all! Socialism is obviously impossible without workers having some idea of what socialism is beforehand but all that is needed is a basic idea, a rudimentary mental model of a classless wageless stateless society. It does not require a theoretical grasp of the organic composition of capital or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Lenin talking quite explicitly of a communist society without labour vouchers:

"Communist labour in the narrower and stricter sense of the term is labour performed gratis for the benefit of society, labour performed not as a definite duty, not for the purpose of obtaining a right to certain products, not according to previously established and legally fixed quotas, but voluntary labour, irrespective of quotas; it is labour performed without expectation of reward, without reward as a condition, labour performed because it has become a habit to work for the common good, and because of a conscious realisation (that has become a habit) of the necessity of working for the common good—labour as the requirement of a healthy organism.

It must be clear to everybody that we, i.e., our society, our social system, are still a very long way from the application of this form of labour on a broad, really mass scale.

But the very fact that this question has been raised, and raised both by the whole of the advanced proletariat (the Communist Party and the trade unions) and by the state authorities, is a step in this direction." From the Destruction of the Old Social System, To the Creation of the New

We have the evidence of ABC of Communism by the Bolshevik Bukharin that he was not alone.

"Distribution in the communist system:

The communist method of production presupposes in addition that production is not for the market, but for use. Under communism, it is no longer the individual manufacturer or the individual peasant who produces; the work of production is effected by the gigantic cooperative as a whole. In consequence of this change, we no longer have commodities, but only products. These products are not exchanged one for another; they are neither bought nor sold. They are simply stored in the communal warehouses, and are subsequently delivered to those who need them. In such conditions, money will no longer be required. 'How can that be?' some of you will ask. 'In that case one person will get too much and another too little. What sense is there in such a method of distribution?' The answer is as follows. At first, doubtless, and perhaps for twenty or thirty years, it will be necessary to have various regulations. Maybe certain products will only be supplied to those persons who have a special entry in their work-book or on their work-card. Subsequently, when communist society has been consolidated and fully developed, no such regulations will be needed. There will be an ample quantity of all products, our present wounds will long since have been healed, and everyone will be able to get just as much as he needs. 'But will not people find it to their interest to take more than they need?' Certainly not. Today, for example, no one thinks it worth while when he wants one seat in a tram, to take three tickets and keep two places empty. It will be just the same in the case of all products. A person will take from the communal storehouse precisely as much as he needs, no more. No one will have any interest in taking more than he wants in order to sell the surplus to others, since all these others can satisfy their needs whenever they please. Money will then have no value. Our meaning is that at the outset, in the first days of communist society, products will probably be distributed in accordance with the amount of work done by the applicant; at a later stage, however, they will simply be supplied according to the needs of the comrades. It has often been contended that in the future society everyone will have the right to the full product of his labour. 'What you have made by your labour, that you will receive.' This is false. It would never be possible to realize it fully. Why not? For this reason, that if everyone were to receive the full product of his labour, there would never be any possibility of developing, expanding, and improving production. Part of the work done must always be devoted to the development and improvement of production.

If we had to consume and to use up everything we have produced, then we could never produce machines, for these cannot be eaten or worn. But it is obvious that the bettering of life will go hand in hand with the extension and improvement of machinery. It is plain that more and more machines must continually be produced. Now this implies that part of the labour which has been incorporated in the machines will not be returned to the person who has done the work. It implies that no one can ever receive the full product of his labour.But nothing of the kind is necessary. With the aid of good machinery, production will be so arranged that all needs will be satisfied.

To sum up, at the outset products will be distributed in proportion to the work done (which does not mean that the worker will receive 'the full product of his labour'); subsequently, products will be distributed according to need, for there will be an abundance of everything. In a communist society there will be no classes. But if there will be no classes, this implies that in communist society there will likewise be no State. We have previously seen that the State is a class organization of the rulers. The State is always directed by one class against the other. A bourgeois State is directed against the proletariat, whereas a proletarian State is directed against the bourgeoisie. In the communist social order there are neither landlords, nor capitalists, nor wage workers; there are simply people - comrades. If there are no classes, then there is no class war, and there are no class organizations. Consequently the State has ceased to exist. Since there is no class war, the State has become superfluous. There is no one to be held in restraint, and there is no one to impose restraint.

But how, they will ask us, can this vast organization be set in motion without any administration? Who is going to work out the plans for social production? Who will distribute labour power? Who is going to keep account of social income and expenditure? In a word, who is going to supervise the whole affair? It is not difficult to answer these questions. The main direction will be entrusted to various kinds of book-keeping offices or statistical bureaux. There, from day to day, account will be kept of production and all its needs; there also it will be decided whither workers must be sent, whence they must be taken, and how much work there is to be done. And inasmuch as, from childhood onwards, all will have been accustomed to social labour, and since all will understand that this work is necessary and that life goes easier when everything is done according to a prearranged plan and when the social order is like a well-oiled machine, all will work in accordance with the indications of these statistical bureaux. There will be no need for special ministers of State, for police and prisons, for laws and decrees - nothing of the sort. Just as in an orchestra all the performers watch the conductor's baton and act accordingly, so here all will consult the statistical reports and will direct their work accordingly. The State, therefore, has ceased to exist. There are no groups and there is no class standing above all other classes. Moreover, in these statistical bureaux one person will work today, another tomorrow. The bureaucracy, the permanent officialdom, will disappear. The State will die out. Manifestly this will only happen in the fully developed and strongly established communist system, after the complete and definitive victory of the proletariat; nor will it follow immediately upon that victory. For a long time yet, the working class will have to fight against, all its enemies, and in especial against the relics of the past, such as sloth, slackness, criminality, pride. All these will have to be stamped out. Two or three generations of persons will have to grow up under the new conditions before the need will pass for laws and punishments and for the use of repressive measures by the workers' State. Not until then will all the vestiges of the capitalist past disappear.

Though in the intervening period the existence of the workers' State is indispensable, subsequently, in the fully developed communist system, when the vestiges of capitalism are extinct, the proletarian State authority will also pass away. The proletariat itself will become mingled with all the other strata of the population, for everyone will by degrees come to participate in the common labour. Within a few decades there will be quite a new world, with new people and new customs."

Then there was Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed, Chapter 3, Socialism and the State that says it all:

“The material premise of communism should be so high a development of the economic powers of man that productive labor, having ceased to be a burden, will not require any goad, and the distribution of life’s goods, existing in continual abundance, will not demand – as it does not now in any well-off family or "decent" boarding-house – any control except that of education, habit and social opinion. Speaking frankly, I think it would be pretty dull-witted to consider such a really modest perspective "utopian."

What Trotsky is advocating here is the abandonment of the idea of material rewards or remuneration as a so-called incentive to produce. And if that is not enough we also have Trotsky saying:

"True, Abramovich demonstrated to us most learnedly that under Socialism there will be no compulsion, that the principle of compulsion contradicts Socialism, that

under Socialism we shall be moved by the feeling of duty, the habit of working, the attractiveness of labor, etc., etc. This is unquestionable.

Only this unquestionable truth must be a little extended. In point of fact, under Socialism there will not exist the apparatus of compulsion itself, namely, the State: for it will have melted away entirely into a producing and consuming commune. None the less, the road to Socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the State. And you and I are just passing through that period. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction. Now just that insignificant little fact – that historical step of the State dictatorship – Abramovich, and in his person the whole of Menshevism, did not notice; and consequently, he has fallen over it."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/ch08.htm

And Kautsky, too:

"Besides this rigid allocation of an equal measure of the necessaries and enjoyments of life to each individual, another form of Socialism without money is conceivable, the Leninite interpretation of what Marx described as the second phase of communism: each to produce of his own accord as much as he can, the productivity of labour being so high and the quantity and variety of products so immense that everyone may be trusted to take what he needs. For this purpose money would not be needed.

We have not yet progressed so far as this. At present we are unable to divine whether we shall ever reach this state. But that Socialism with which we are alone concerned to-day, whose features we can discern with some precision from the indications that already exist, will unfortunately not have this enviable freedom and abundance at its disposal, and will therefore not be able to do without money."

The Labour Revolution III. The Economic Revolution X. MONEY

Finally, the Anglo-Marxist, founder of the Social Democratic Federation, HM Hyndman

"A much more serious objection to Kropotkin and other Anarchists is their wholly unscrupulous habit of reiterating statements that have been repeatedly proved to be incorrect, and even outrageous, by the men and women to whom they are attributed. Time after time I have told Kropotkin, time after time has he read it in print, that Social-Democrats work for the complete overthrow of the wages system. He has admitted this to be so. But a month or so afterwards the same old oft-refuted misrepresentation appears in the same old authoritative fashion, as if no refutation of the calumny, that we wish to maintain wage-slavery, had ever been made."

The Left Apologists

So perverse are the arguments presented by critics of free access communism that they uncritically project into communism the same kind of atomistic self- interested outlook that prevails in capitalism forgetting that we are talking about quite a different kind of society altogther. In fact, free access communism is the most complete example of what is called a “gift economy" in anthropological terms. It is based on the principle of “generalised reciprocity” and the clear recognition of our mutual inter-dependence. It is not economic restrictions in the form of some kind of rationing that we should be focussing on but, rather a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between the individual and society and the realisation of human beings as truly social individuals ( a social individualn is an individual who realises his or her needs are part of a collective process of development and stimulation and thus has no need to hoard, monopolise, accumulate objects, articles for purposes other than that of use.). Critics of free access communism need now to fundamentally question and reassess the assumptions upon which they base their criticisms. The time is long overdue to restore and reassert the vision of higher communism as the explicit goal of revolutionaries everywhere. Anything short of that has either failed dismally or been found wanting. Revolutionaries today, 150 years after Marx, should NOT be advocating questionable stop-gap measures that have long been rendered obsolete by technological development. We should be hell-bent on getting the real thing - a society based on the principle "from each according to ability to each according to need"!

Of course, we cannot have socialism right now because the conscious majoritarian support for such a system simply does not yet exist. You can't have socialism without a large majority wanting and understanding it. The ends and the means have to be in harmony. There is absolutely no way you can force communism on a reluctant population that doesnt want or understand it. They are required to understand what it entails. They will realise very well that with a system of voluntary labour we will each depend upon one another for a communist society to function properly. The point is that in communism, unlike in capitalism, we shall have a genuine vested interest in promoting the well-being of others - if for no other than reason than that our own welfare is bound up with theirs. Socialist writer Keith Graham has written:

"...the very nature of the future society is such that it must be sustained by people clearly aware of what they are doing, actively and voluntarily cooperating in social production. It is literally unthinkable that a population should organise its affairs according to such principles without being aware that this is what they are doing. People can be coerced or duped into doing what what they themselves do not comprehend or desire but they cannot be coerced or duped into doing what they voluntarily choose to do"

When we meet these preconditions then people will fully appreciate, their mutual interdependence and the need to pull together for the common good.

You cannot just simply project into a communist society the same kind of behavioural assumptions that underlie this dog-eat-dog capitalist society. Human behaviour and human thinking is at least in part a product of the kind of society we live in. Critics illegitimately project into communism, the behaviour patterns and modes of thinking that pertain to capitalism - including, its atomised individualistic way of looking at things. Capitalist competition fosters egoism. This is why narrow economically-focussed criticisms of a communist society fail miserably every time because they take no account of the fundamentally different sociological framework within which a communist society will operate. Free-access communism eliminates the need for greed and removes the rationale for acquiring status through the accumulation of material wealth. The only way in which one can acquire status and the respect of one's fellows - a hugely powerful motivator in any society - would be through one's contribution to society, not what one takes out of it. Critics of free access or higher communism have fallen into the same erroneous way of looking at the matter as the bourgeois economists with their taken-for-granted assumptions about human nature being inherently lazy or greedy. Remember the myth about The Commons? How The Commons were destroyed by the ignorance, the democracy of the commoners, ruining the land through over-grazing; without taking proper steps to conserve fertility; through, according to our mythologists, that combination of greed, stupidity, and laziness that the bourgeoisie project unto everybody else when in fact it describes them to a T? But it was a myth. The Commons were not destroyed by either ignorance, abuse, or laziness of the commoners-- they were managed quite well, and democratically by the commoners, who willingly worked out the terms of shared use, and proper conservation. The argument that says "Oh, if human beings can just have free access to things, they'll act like locusts" has at its base, a version of that same myth

Socialism

The goal of social ownership and democratic control of production and distribution has to be articulated directly. To seek political improvements to the capitalist system is a distraction from what needs to be done. When we insist that the working class has to be educated before it can make progress, some people on the left who have good intentions say that they "don't want to wait that long." But this isn't an option. A "revolution" carried out by people who are angry at the injustices of the old social system, but unclear about what to replace it with, or not sufficiently dedicated to the democratic structure of the new system, is the road to a new dictatorship. The working class who will create a socialist society must also know how to operate it. They need to understand what the basic rules of the game are, so to speak. There needs to be a widespread consensus about what to expect of people if a socialist society is to properly function. "Anti-capitalism" in itself can never succeed in overthrowing capitalism. To bring capitalism to an an end we need to have a viable alternative to put in its place. And this is an alternative that we need to be conscious and desirous of before it can ever be put in place. A class imbued with socialist consciousness will be far more militant and empowered than any amount of mere "anti-capitalism". Socialist consciousness is class consciousness in its most developed sense. The idea that such an alternative could somehow materialise out of thin air without a majority of workers actually wanting it or knowing about it is simply not realistic. Such an alternative can function if people know what it entails. In itself, engaging a workplace struggles within capitalism - important though this is - doesnt take us much forward since capitalism can only ever be run in the interest of capital. The capitalist system isn't a failure due to bad leaders or bad policies, but because of the kind of system that it is.

Socialism in other words meant a moneyless, wageless, stateless commonwealth. This was the general understanding of what socialism meant. Marx didn't talk about a "transitional society". He talked about the lower phase of communism. It was still communism...that is, a classless society. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”

Who decides what your ability or need is? It would take some sort of position of power to determine who is in need and who has ability. Power naturally corrupts and tends to find ways to increase and consolidate power. After time, you are left with those who have consolidated power to abuse, and those who don't. Therefore who decides? The answer, you do! This is the whole point of the communist slogan "from each according to ability to each according to need". The autonomy of the individual is maximised and as a result, we all benefit. As the Communist Manifesto put it:

"In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all"

Specifically a communist (aka socialist) society - or at least what Marx called the "higher stage" of communism - exhibits two key features:

1) Free access to goods and services - no buying and selling. No barter. You simply go to the distribution point and take what you require according to your self determined needs. This depends on there being a relatively advanced technological infrastructure to produce enough to satisfy our basic needs. Such a possibility already exists. Capitalism, however, increasingly thwarts this potential. In fact, most of the work we do today in the formal sector will be completely unnecessary in a communist society - it serves only to prop up capitalism. What possible use would there be for a banking system under communism, for example? We could effectively more than double the quantities of resources and human labour power available for socially useful production by scrapping capitalism. Communism will destroy the need for greed and conspicuous consumption

2) Volunteer labour. Your contribution to society is completely voluntary. There is no wage labour or other forms of co-erced labour. You can do as little or as much work as you choose. And you can do as many different kinds of jobs as you want, too. The presumption is that people would freely choose to work under communism for all sorts of reasons:

- the conditions under which we work will be radically different, without an employing class dictating terms work will become fulfilling and pleasant

- we need to work, to express ourselves creatively

- with free access to goods, conspicuous consumption will be rendered meaningless as a way of gaining respect and social esteem. Which leaves only what we give to society as a way of gaining the respect of our peers. This should not be underestimated; it is one of the most important motivational drives in human beings as numerous studies in industrial psychology have confimed

- Communism depends on people recognising our mutual interdependence. There is, in other words, a sense of moral obligation that goes with the territory

- Communism will permit a far greater degree of technological adaptation without the constraints of the profit system. Intrinsically backbreaking or unpleasannt 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 dont 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 communist 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 coooperative nature

Free access communism is not going to be brought to the point of collapse by the fact that we cannot all have a Porshe or Ferrari parked outside our front door. Imagine what it could be like without a boss class on our backs? Imagine what our workplaces could become without the cost cutting constraints of capitalism and having the freedom to decide on these matters ourselves. Imagine not being tied tdown to one single kind of job all the time but being given the opportunity to experiment with different jobs, to travel abroad to work in new places, to taste new experiences. Imagine a moneyeless, wageless communist world in which most of the occupations that we do today - from bankers to pay departments to arms producers to sales-people - will simply disappear at a stroke releasing vast amounts of resources and, yes, human labour power as well for socially useful production. Kropotkin was quite right. We dont need the whiplash of the wages system to compel us to work. The mere fact that we recognise our mutual interdependence in a society in which we will fully realise our social nature will suffice to impose upon us a sense of moral obligation to contribute to the common good of our own free will. Indeed we already, to some extent, do this today even under capitalism, given that fully half of all the work that we do today is completely unremunerated. How much more conducive will a communist moral economy be to the performance of unremunerated work is not hard to see.

It’s not a question of waiting, but of making it happen.

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.