Demonetize it!

»Zeitgeist« and Commons

[Es gibt auch eine deutschsprachige Version des Artikels]

Some weeks ago the movie »Zeitgeist Moving Forward« was released (online/torrent and offline), and I have seen the film only now. Whow, this is a loaded movie! In a radical and compelling way it tells the end of the fetish »market economy«. I did not expect that. The following trailer hardly facilitates the right impression:

So, what is the film about and what has this to do with commons?

The movie is full of informations. One has to concentrate enormously to follow all facts and statements (especially for non-english watchers reading the subtitles is hard). The movie has four chapters: »Human Nature«, »Social Pathology«, »Project Earth«, »Rise«. In all parts the film is made very US centered. I want to focus on certain chosen aspects. I recommend reviews of Franz Nahrada, Andreas Exner und Tomasz Konicz (sorry: all in german), which point to important critical points in a striking way, but also name the positve aspects. Critique of science and technical fetishism, patriarchal view (pay attention to clichéd background images of »family« etc.), shortened notion of money (money=debt) etc.; praise for questioning the system and radically breaking with exchange, money, market, state and politics. The movie easily and clearly distance from the »management left«, which is biased in the swamp of the old, although they basically strive for the same.

In chapter »Human Nature« a lot of time is used to argue against genetic determinism, against »being inhered« of nearly everything: crime, alcoholism, laziness, overweight, poverty etc. Regarding this question the stupidity seems to be boundless in the USA. This does not mean, that such debates do not occur in Europe, but they are not so primitive and need more effort to justify a genetic determinsm. The movie brilliantly decodes the economic interests behind such arguments: prison as profit system which »lives« from jailing more and more people; health care as system which only profits from steadily suffering and sick people, a system with no interest in real »healing« etc.

However, it is shortsighted to change genetic determinism with a kind of an environmental determinism: It ought to be the environment which makes all that which is imputed to the genes. Allegedly the sciences have recognized this clearly, but due to ideological reasons it is not conceded. However, also the environmental determinism is an ideology, is a reduction, and blinds out, that humans are producing the conditions themselves under which they live and suffer. Simply to walk on the »other side« of the dualistic determinist view disimproves the situation.

Indeed, it is the socio-economic system which has to be changed (where humans in a new »environment« should change in a better direction, that’s the hope). However: Who should do this if all are »victims of the culture«? There is an unlogical answer: the scientists. Why should they be excluded from the environmental determination? What enables them to gain insights which are denied for others? The background of this position (which is heavily critized in the above mentioned articles) is the idea of a »neutrality of sciences« and a notion of »the scientific method«, which is dead dangerous. If someone owns »the method« then s/he — completely unscientific — takes off from others, justifies a higher status, legitimates authority and, finally, elitism. Actually, this has not be necessary, but in the movie it is and therefore has to be criticized (surely in more detail than I do here).

On the other hand, the alternative to determinism can not be scientific relativism, where in some way all are right and not right at the same time — depending on what one wants to see as »science«. But this too would only be a dualistic repulsion, which is right in criticizing »the scientific method«, but can not serve as an own fundament of relativism. Dogmatism and relativism are only two sides of the same coin, of the same reduction. Contrary to this, the notion of truth has to be defended which, however, requires for each scientific object an own adequate approach. Method and object are not separated from each other as »scientific methodists« claim, and the method is not »subjectively relative« as »postmodern relativists« assert, but the method depends on its object, is related to this object and is only valid in respect to this object.

Chapter »Social Pathology« shows the intellectual roots of modern market paradigm with John Locke and Adam Smith. In detail this is interesting (i.e. regarding Locke, that private property should leave »enough for all«). However, the history of capitalist market economy is not only a history of ideas, but a real history of the qualitative transition of an agrarian-mechanical to an industrial way of production — which is not addressed in the film. Then at some point big industry and monetary system »are there«, and then systematically produced imbalances, waste of resources und inefficiencies are criticized.

The way of unmasking capitalism aa an inefficient system of production of vital goods is excellent, although the systems ideological self-attribution always claims the contrary. The monetary system is described as systematically producing over-indebtedness and inflation inevitably heading for a collaps, because the state cannot create money from nothing to compensate exponential growing debts. The backlink to real economy as well as money being value and (fictious) capital is, however, too narrowly considered. Overall, notion and concept of »economy« are maintained, but the »scarcity-based market economy« is criticized as »anti-economic«. »Scarcity« is debunked as social form of commodity production, which has nothing (or only a little) to do with the »nature« of limited goods. »Scarcity« is made, it is not »there«.

In Chapter »Project Earth« the Zeitgeist alternative of a Resource-Based Economy (RBE) as a »true economy« is presented. The starting point is as simple as true: Humans need things for their living which they produce by using resources. The consumption of resources when producing goods has to be adjusted to the regeneration ability and limited availability of resources to allow for a good living for all humans on earth — today and for future generations. In order to achieve that, the resource stock of whole earth has to be mapped in order to be able to make scientifically reasonable — and not politically driven — decisions about the structure of production. It is annoying that exactly at this point the german subtitles falsely speak about »commodities« (instead of goods), but this does not touch english listeners.

As an example a city of the Venus Project is presented, which has been designed following engineer-optimized concepts. Well, I don’t want to live in such a city. At this point the alleged »neutrality of sciences« break through, which find itself decoupled from humans needs although the film continiously emphasizes that all is about satisfying human needs. Do we see here creeping in the domination of the experts view over the people? This would be a dystopian vision, which the Zeitgeist project does not require at all. But actually these circular optimized Venus cities are not at issue, because a societal change towards a RBE would be a gigantic transformation project of existing grown structures into reasonable resource-saving new structures, which start from the needs of the people. The valid idea that infrastructures have to be most effective as possible (therefore the circular form of Venus cities) applied to existing real cities would result in enormous savings without bringing them into such a circular form. From the recources viewpoint a complete rebuilding of everything would be stupid.

Human needs as the driver of a societal transformation are clearly underestimated. Here, we don’t see much trust in the people, which isn’t surprizing if one sees them simply as »victims of culture«. The insight, that separated satisfaction of needs through »consumption« leads to highly contradictory and self-damaging behavior, is partly realized but not used here. If we think reversely by having a societal form allowing for integration of diverse human needs in a process of communicative mediation previous to production, then balanced and substainable inclusion of all needs would be possible. Once the people have a real bearing on their conditions, they will use them. In fact, a »buying decision« is not influence, instead real influence has to bear on production. Basically this is possible in a RBE, because most separating elements are abandoned: money, market, state, politics, domination.

Finally, the last chapter »Rise« is about a possible replacement of current »socio-economic system« (it is rarely spoken about capitalism). Here, »Moving Forward« toils as all others do who want a need-oriented society. This can not be any different. Again, we drastically understand as much the global system called »market economy« has failed: endless resource exploitation, deforestation, hunger (ebery day 18000 children starve), people displacement, climate catastrophe — nothing we not already know in some way. But who can stand this every day without suppressing it or pushing the »guilt« to the victims?

Also this is nothing, which not other active people would bewail, but Zeitgeist draws the only valid and logical consequence: If the socio-economic system did produce all that, then a solution can never be found inside this system. It is not enough to elongate or adjust some levers. Instead, a new way to produce the livelihood has to be brought into the world. This new way of production cannot base on the mechanisms of the old — money, market, state, commodities, exchange. Probably there is some more, including the Zeitgeist-own religious faith in the sciences. However, central points which normally are avoided by »left« approaches are on the table.

The final image of the movie where the ruling class drop their power and the ruled people drop their money is not more than this: an image using the medium of a film. It is art, because other then artistically one can not show this scenario of an end of a society. Every more concrete imagination would be unbelievable. We will see, whether Zeitgeist kann become a global movement. It is not really clear why they rarely exist in Germany. Maybe, because the illusionists who believe, that immanent reforms can save anything are dominant. Despite using unfit means they, however, express the same wish which Zeitgeist represents: May the society become human.

What does this has to do with commons?

The simple answer is: Commons are a RBE on a small scale. Simply said, as RBE looks »from above« the commons look »from below«. The RBE is weak answering the question of how people will create truly reasonable and human circumstances — the commons show this in numerous examples on the small or medium scale. The commons are weak answering the question of how the commons principles can be extended on the societal level — RBE is presenting an approach for whole society.

However, and I am quite sure about that, it would come to a serious »clash of cultures«, when anti-monetarist and technique-believing Zeitgeist people bump on monetary ignorant and technically sceptical commoners — very roughly said. This sometimes happens yet within the commons, .i.e. if »digital« meet »natural« commoners.

But why shouldn’t this become exciting provided that one is willing to learn from each other?

The Alternative to Capitalism

Adam Buick

If state capitalism is not socialism, what is ? In other words, if state ownership and management of production does not amount to the abolition of capitalism but only to a change in the institutional framework within which it operates, what would be the essential features of a society in which capitalism had been abolished?

Although it is possible to imagine that capitalism could be replaced by some new form of class society in which some other method of exploitation would replace the wages system, we shall concern ourselves here only with the replacement of capitalism by a society from which, to remain deliberately vague for the moment, exploitation and privilege would be absent.

Since capitalism isa worldwide class society and exchange economy, it is clear that the exploitation-less alternative to capitalism would have to be a classless world society without exchange.

No classes, no State, no frontiers

The basis of any society is the way its members are organised for the production of wealth. Where a section of society controls the use of the means of production, we can speak of a class society. Control of the means of production by a class implies the exclusion of the rest of society from such control, an exclusion which ultimately depends on the threatened or actual use of physical force. An institutionalised organ of coercion, or state, is thus a feature of all class societies and historically first made its appearance with the division of society into classes.

In all class societies, one section of the population controls the use of the means of production. Another way of putting this is that the members of this section or class “own” the means of production, since to be in a position to control the use of something is to own it, whether or not this is accompanied by some legal title deed.

It follows that a classless society is one in which the use of the means of production is controlled by all members of society on an equal basis, and not just by a section of them to the exclusion of the rest. As James Burnham put it:

“For a society to be ‘classless’ would mean that within society there would be no group (with the exception, perhaps, of temporary delegate bodies, freely elected by the community and subject always to recall) which would exercise, as a group, any special control over access to the instruments of production; and no group receiving, as a group, preferential treatment in distribution”. (Burnham, 1945, p. 55)

In a classless society every member is in a position to take part, on equal terms with every other member, in deciding how the means of production should be used. Every member of society is socially equal, standing in exactly the same relationship to the means of production as every other member. Similarly, every member of society has access to the fruits of production on an equal basis.

Once the use of the means of production is under the democratic control of all members of society, class ownership has been abolished. The means of production can still be said to belong to those who control and benefit from their use, in this case to the whole population organised on a democratic basis, and so to be “commonly owned” by them. Common ownership can be defined as:

“A state of affairs in which no person is excluded from the possibility of controlling, using and managing the means of production, distribution and consumption. Each member of society can acquire the capacity, that is to say, has the opportunity to realise a variety of goals, for example, to consume what they want, to use means of production for the purposes of socially necessary or unnecessary work, to administer production and distribution, to plan to allocate resources, and to make decisions about short term and long term collective goals. Common ownership, then, refers to every individual’s potential ability to benefit from the wealth of society and to participate in its running”. (Bragard, 1981, p. 255 – emphasis in the original)

Even so, to use the word “ownership” can be misleading in that this does not fully bring out the fact that the transfer to all members of society of the power to control the production of wealth makes the very concept of property redundant. With common ownership no one is excluded from the possibility of controlling or benefiting from the use of the means of production, so that the concept of property in the sense of exclusive possession is meaningless: no one is excluded, there are no non-owners.

We could invent some new term such as no-ownership and talk about the classless alternative society to capitalism being a “no-ownership” society, but the same idea can be expressed without neologism if common ownership is understood as being a social relationship and not a form of property ownership. This social relationship—equality between human beings with regard to the control of the use of the means of production—can equally accurately be described by the terms “classless society” and “democratic control” as by “common ownership” since these three terms are only different ways of describing it from different angles. The use of the term “common ownership” to refer to the basic social relationship of the alternative society to capitalism is not to be taken to imply therefore that common ownership of the means of production could exist without democratic control. Common ownership means democratic control means a classless society.

When we refer to the society based on common ownership, generally we shall use the term “socialism”, though we have no objection to others using the term “communism” since for us these terms mean exactly the same and are interchangeable. If we have opted for the term “socialism” this is as a means of showing that we decisively reject the Leninist insertion of some sort of “transitional society”, wrongly called “socialism”, between capitalism and its classless alternative, generally called “communism”. For us socialism is communism, since both terms describe the society which immediately follows the abolition of capitalism.

Common ownership is not to be confused with state ownership, since an organ of coercion, or state, has no place in socialism. A class society is a society with a state because sectional control over the means of production and the exclusion of the rest of the population cannot be asserted without coercion, and hence without a special organ to exercise this coercion. On the other hand, a classless society is a stateless society because such an organ of coercion becomes unnecessary as soon as all members of society stand in the same relationship with regard to the control of the use of the means of production. The existence of a state as an instrument of class political control and coercion is quite incompatible with the existence of the social relationship of common ownership. State ownership is a form of exclusive property ownership which implies a social relationship which is totally different from socialism.

As we saw, common ownership is a social relationship of equality and democracy which makes the concept of property redundant because there are no longer any excluded non-owners. State ownership, on the other hand, presupposes the existence of a government machine, a legal system, armed forces and the other features of an institutionalised organ of coercion. State-owned means of production belong to an institution which confronts the members of society, coerces them and dominates them, both as individuals and as a collectivity. Under state ownership the answer to the question “who owns the means of production?” is not “everybody” or “nobody” as with common ownership; it is “the state”. In other words, when a state owns the means of production, the members of society remain non-owners, excluded from control. Both legally and socially, the means of production belong not to them, but to the state, which stands as an independent power between them and the means of production.

The state, however, is not an abstraction floating above society and its members; it is a social institution, and, as such, a group of human beings, a section of society, organised in a particular way. This is why, strictly speaking, we should have written above that the state confronts most members of society and excludes most of them from control of the means of production. For wherever there is a state, there is always a group of human beings who stand in a different relationship to it from most members of society: not as the dominated, nor as the excluded, but as the dominators and the excluders. Under state ownership, this group controls the use of the means of production to the exclusion of the other members of society. In this sense, it owns the means of production, whether or not this is formally and legally recognised.

Another reason why state ownership and socialism are incompatible is that the state is a national institution which exercises political control over a limited geographical area. Since capitalism is a world system, the complete state ownership of the means of production within a given political area cannot represent the abolition of capitalism, even within that area. What it does mean, and this has been one of the major themes of this book, is the establishment of some form of state capitalism whose internal mode of operation is conditioned by the fact that it has to compete in a world market context against other capitals.

Since today capitalism is worldwide, the society which replaces capitalism can only be worldwide. The only socialism possible today is world socialism. No more than capitalism can socialism exist in one country. So the common ownership of socialism is the common ownership of the world, of its natural and industrial resources, by the whole of humanity. Socialism can only be a universal society in which all that is in and on the earth has become the common heritage of all humankind, and in which the division of the world into states has given way to a world without frontiers but with a democratic world administration.

No exchange, no economy

Socialism, being based on the common ownership of the means of production by all members of society, is not an exchange economy. Production would no longer be carried on for sale with a view to profit as under capitalism. In fact, production would not be carried on for sale at all. Production for sale would be a nonsense since common ownership of the means of production means that what is produced is commonly owned by society as soon as it is produced. The question of selling just cannot arise because, as an act of exchange, this could only take place between separate owners. Yet separate owners of parts of the social product are precisely what would not, and could not exist in a society where the means of production were owned in common.

However, socialism is more than just not an exchange economy; it is not an “economy” at all, not even a “planned economy”. Economics, or political economy as it was originally called, grew up as the study of the forces which came into operation when capitalism, as a system of generalised commodity production, began to become the predominant mode of producing and distributing wealth. The production of wealth under capitalism, instead of being a direct interaction between human beings and nature, in which humans change nature to provide themselves with the useful things they need to live, becomes a process of production of wealth in the form of exchange value. Under this system, production is governed by forces which operate independently of human will and which impose themselves as external, coercive laws when men and women make decisions about the production and distribution of wealth. In other words, the social process of the production and the distribution of wealth becomes under capitalism an economy governed by economic laws and studied by a special discipline, economics.

Socialism is not an economy, because, in reestablishing conscious human control over production, it would restore to the social process of wealth production its original character of simply being a direct interaction between human beings and nature. Wealth in socialism would be produced directly as such, i. e. as useful articles needed for human survival and enjoyment; resources and labour would be allocated for this purpose by conscious decisions, not through the operation of economic laws acting with the same coercive force as laws of nature. Although their effect is similar, the economic laws which come into operation in an exchange economy such as capitalism are not natural laws, since they arise out of a specific set of social relationships existing between human beings. By changing these social relationships through bringing production under conscious human control, socialism would abolish these laws and so also “the economy” as the field of human activity governed by their operation. Hence socialism would make economics redundant.

What we are saying, in effect, is that the term “exchange economy” is a tautology in that an economy only comes into existence when wealth is produced for exchange. It is now clear why the term planned economy is unacceptable as a definition of socialism. Socialism is not the planned production of wealth as exchange value, nor the planned production of commodities, nor the planned accumulation of capital. That is what state capitalism aims to be. Planning is indeed central to the idea of socialism, but socialism is the planned (consciously coordinated) production of useful things to satisfy human needs precisely instead of the production, planned or otherwise, of wealth as exchange value, commodities and capital. In socialism wealth would have simply a specific use value (which would be different under different conditions and for different individuals and groups of individuals) but it would not have any exchange, or economic, value.

Conventional academic economics in the West rejects the definition of economics as the study of the forces which comes into operation when wealth is produced to be exchanged. But even on the alternative definition it offers—that economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources to meet some human needs (1)—socialism would not be an economy. For socialism presupposes that productive resources (materials, instruments of production, sources of energy) and technological knowledge are sufficient to allow the population of the world to produce enough food, clothing, shelter and other useful things, to satisfy all their material needs.

Conventional economics, while denying that the potential for such a state of abundance exists, nevertheless admits that if it did this would mean the end, not only of “the economy” as a system of allocating scarce resources but also of goods having an economic value and price; goods would simply become useful things produced for human beings to take and use, while economics as the study of the most rational way to employ scarce resources would give way to the study of how best to use abundant resources to produce “free goods” in the amounts required to satisfy human needs (2). Significantly, the ideologists of state capitalism take up a basically similar position: if abundance existed, value, prices, money, markets and wages could be abolished but, since abundance does not yet exist and could not be brought into existence for some considerable time, all these categories of capitalism must continue (3).

As far as academic economics in the West is concerned, this question is not really one of fact but of definition. Scarcity is built into to its theoretical system in that it regards a “factor of production” as being scarce so long as it is not available in unlimited supply. Thus for it “abundance” can only be a theoretical limiting case—a situation where land, capital and labour were all available, quite literally, for the taking—which could never exist in practice, so that by definition scarcity would always exist. But this is a quite unreasonable definition both of scarcity and of abundance. Abundance is not a situation where “an infinite amount of every good could be produced” (Samuelson, 1980, p. 17). Similarly, scarcity is not the situation which exists in the absence of this impossible “total” or “sheer” abundance. Abundance is a situation where productive resources are sufficient to produce enough wealth to satisfy human needs, while scarcity is a situation where productive resources are insufficient for this purpose.

In any event, value and its categories do not arise from scarcity as a supposed natural condition; they arise, as we saw, from the social fact that goods are produced as commodities. Similarly, socialism is not a mere “state of abundance”; it is a social rather than a physical or technical condition. It is the set of social relationships corresponding to a classless society, i. e. to a society in which every member stands in the same position with regard to controlling and benefiting from the use of the means of wealth production. The establishment of a classless society means an end to the wage labour/capital relationship which is the basic social relationship of capitalist society. The wage (or employment) relationship expresses the fact that control over the use of the means of production is exercised by a section only of society. It is a relationship between two social classes, presupposing a division of society into those who control access to the means of production and those who are excluded from such control and are obliged to live by selling their ability to work. Since the very existence of wage labour (employment) implies a class of owners and a class of non-owners of the means of production, no society in which the predominant form of productive activity continues to be wage labour can be regarded as being socialist.

In socialist society productive activity would take the form of freely chosen activity undertaken by human beings with a view to producing the things they needed to live and enjoy life. The necessary productive work of society would not be done by a class of hired wage workers but by all members of society, each according to their particular skills and abilities, cooperating to produce the things required to satisfy their needs both as individuals and as communities. Work in socialist society could only be voluntary since there would be no group or organ in a position to force people to work against their will.

Socialist production would be production solely for use. The products would be freely available to people, who would take them and use them to satisfy their needs. In socialism people would obtain the food, clothes and other articles they needed for their personal consumption by going into a distribution centre and taking what they needed without having to hand over either money or consumption vouchers. Houses and flats would be rent-free, with heating, lighting and water supplied free of charge. Transport, communications, health care, education, restaurants and laundries would be organised as free public services. There would be no admission charge to theatres, cinemas, museums, parks, libraries and other places of entertainment and recreation. The best term to describe this key social relationship of socialist society is free access, as it emphasises the fact that in socialism it would be the individual who would decide what his or her individual needs were. As to collective needs (schools, hospitals, theatres, libraries and the like), these could be decided by the groups of individuals concerned, using the various democratic representative bodies which they would create at different levels in socialist society. Thus production in socialism would be the production of free goods to meet self-defined needs, both individual and collective.

Calculation in kind

Under capitalism wealth is produced for sale, so that particular items of wealth (goods produced by human labour, useful things) become commodities which have an exchange value. Indeed, it is only as exchange value that wealth has significance for the operation of capitalism; all the millions of different kinds of useful things produced by human labour are reduced to a common denominator—their economic value—based ultimately on the average working time needed to produce them from start to finish, of which money is the measure. This enables them to be compared and exchanged with reference to a common objective standard and also allows the calculations necessary to an exchange economy to be made in a common unit.

With the replacement of exchange by common ownership what basically would happen is that wealth would cease to take the form of exchange value, so that all the expressions of this social relationship peculiar to an exchange economy, such as money and prices, would automatically disappear. In other words, goods would cease to have an economic value and would become simply physical objects which human beings could use to satisfy some want or other. This does not mean that goods would come to have no value in any sense; on the contrary, they would continue to have the physical capacity to satisfy human wants. The so-called economic value which goods acquire in an exchange economy has nothing to do with their real use value as a means of satisfying wants, since the value of a good to human beings, i. e. its capacity to satisfy some want, has never borne any relation to the time taken to produce it. In socialism goods would cease to be commodities but they would remain use values; indeed, with the shedding of their useless economic value their importance as use values would be enhanced, as this would be the sole reason why they were produced.

The disappearance of economic value would mean the end of “economic calculation” in the sense of calculation in units of “value” whether measured by money or directly in some unit of labour-time. It would mean that there was no longer any common unit of calculation for making decisions regarding the production of goods. This has often been regarded as a powerful argument against socialism as a moneyless society, so powerful in fact that when it was first expressed in a systematic way by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 (Hayek et al., 1935, pp. 87-130) it led many self-proclaimed Marxists, including Karl Kautsky, to abandon finally the definition of socialism as a value-less society (and thus, in effect, to recognise that they had always stood for state capitalism rather than socialism)(4) and others to elaborate complicated schemes for using labour-time as a common unit of account in socialism (GIC, 1930; Pannekoek, 1970, pp.23-9). Only one participant in the discussion, Otto Neurath, an academic on the margin of the German Social Democratic movement, pointed out that socialism, as a moneyless society in which use values would be produced from other use values, would need no universal unit of account but could calculate exclusively in kind(5).

Calculation in kind is an essential aspect of the production of goods in any society, including capitalism. A commodity is, as we saw, a good which by virtue of being produced for sale has acquired in addition to its physical use value a socially-determined exchange value. Correspondingly, the process of production under capitalism is both a process of production of exchange values and a process of production of use values, involving two different kinds of calculation. For the former, the unit of calculation is money, but for the latter there is no single unit but a whole series of different units for measuring the quantity and quality of specific goods used in the process of producing other specific goods (tonnes of steel, kilowatt-hours of electricity, person-hours of work and so on). The disappearance of economic or value calculation in socialism would by no means involve the disappearance of all rational calculation, since the calculations in kind connected with producing specific quantities of goods as physical use values would continue.

What it would involve would be the end of the subordination of the choice of which use values to produce and which technical methods to employ to exchange value considerations. In particular, the aim of production would cease to be to maximise the difference between the exchange value of the goods used up in the process of production and the exchange value of the final product.

One critic of socialism as a moneyless society, the Dutch academic and former minister, N. G. Pierson, writing in 1902 in reply to Kautsky’s talk “On the Day After the Social Revolution” (Kautsky, 1902), argued that, without the common unit of account represented by value as measured by money, socialist society would be unable to calculate its “net income”:

“We will now discuss the division of income and we will assume that this is effected according to the most advanced method, that of communism. We at once discover a value problem in the strict sense of the word. What is to be regarded as income, and what therefore comes into the question when considering the division? Naturally only net income; but the income of the socialist State will also be gross income. Raw materials will be required for the goods which it manufacturers, and in the course of manufacture fuel and other things will be consumed and machines and tools will be wholly or partly worn out. The live stock which has been reared will have consumed fodder. In order to calculate its net income the communist society would therefore have to subtract all this from the gross product. But we cannot subtract cotton, coal and the depreciation of machines from yarns and textiles, we cannot subtract fodder from beasts. We can only subtract the value of one from the value of the other. Thus without evaluation or estimation the communist State is unable to decide what net income is available for division”. (Hayek et al, 1935, p. 70)

Pierson was right: without economic value and money it would be impossible to calculate “net income” but this—as the difference between the amount of exchange value in existence at the end as compared with at the beginning of a year—is a calculation that would be quite unnecessary, indeed perfectly meaningless, in socialism. The aim of production in socialism being to produce concrete use values to satisfy human needs, all that could interest socialist society at the end of a year would be whether specific quantities of specific goods had been produced over that period. To check this there would be no need to reduce (to continue with Pierson’s examples) cotton, coal, machines, yarns, textiles, fodder and beasts, to some common unit; on the contrary, it is precisely in their concrete physical forms of cotton, coal and so on that socialist society would be interested in these goods and would want to count them.

Socialist society has no need for value computations such as net income, national income, gross national product and other such abstractions obtained by ignoring the concrete use values of the specific goods produced during a given period. Indeed, socialism involves precisely the freeing of production from its subordination to these exchange value considerations. The aim of production in socialism is not to maximise “national income” or GNP or “growth” (of exchange values), which are meaningless concepts for it, but to produce the specific amounts and kinds of use values which people had indicated they wanted to satisfy their needs. The calculations involved in organising and checking this would be calculations in kind and would not require any universal unit of measurement.

Similarly, at the level of the individual productive unit or industry, the only calculations that would be necessary in socialism would be calculations in kind. On the one side would be recorded the resources (materials, energy, equipment, labour) used up in production and on the other side the amount of the good produced, together with any by-products. This, of course, is done under capitalism but it is doubled by an exchange value calculation: the exchange value of the resources used up is recorded as the “cost of production” while the exchange value of the output (after it has been realised on the market) is recorded as “sales receipts”. If the latter is greater than the former, then a “profit” has been made; if it is less, then a “loss” is recorded. Such profit-and-loss accounting has no place in socialism and would, once again, be quite meaningless. Socialist production is simply the production of use values from use values, and nothing more.

Even though the existence of socialism presupposes conditions of abundance (i. e. where resources exceed needs) socialist society still has to be concerned with using resources efficiently and rationally, but the criteria of “efficiency” and “rationality” are not the same as they are under capitalism.

Under capitalism there is, in the end, only one criterion: monetary cost, which, as a measure of economic value, is ultimately a reflection of the average time taken to produce a good from start to finish. The managers of capitalist enterprises are obliged by the working of the market to choose the technical methods of production which are the cheapest, i. e. which minimise production time and therefore monetary cost. All other considerations are subordinate, in particular the health and welfare of the producers and the effects on the natural environment. Many commentators have long pointed out the harmful effects which production methods geared to minimising production time have on the producers (speed-up, pain, stress, accidents, boredom, overwork, long hours, shiftwork, nightwork, etc., all of which harm their health and reduce their welfare), while more recently scientists have documented the damage such production methods cause to nature (pollution, destruction of the environment and wildlife, exhaustion of non-renewable resources).

Socialism, as a society geared to producing only uses values and not exchange value, would take these other considerations into account and subordinate the choice of production methods to the welfare of human beings and the protection of their natural environment. No doubt this would lead in many cases to the adoption of production methods which, by capitalist standards, would be “inefficient” and “irrational” in the sense that were they to be adopted under capitalism they would “cost” more and so be “unprofitable”. This is why such methods are not adopted under capitalism, where it is exchange value and not use value that counts, and why capitalism would have to be replaced by socialism if the original aim of production as a means to serve and enhance human welfare were to be restored.

In socialism, men and women in the various industries and individual productive units would have the responsibility for producing given amounts of a particular good to a particular standard, would seek to minimise (ideally eliminate) the harm done to the health and welfare of human beings and to the environment. As there would thus be a clear object and clearly defined constraints, industries and productive units could use mathematical aids to decision-making such as operational research and linear programming to find the most appropriate technical method of production to employ. As neutral techniques these can still be used where the object is something other than profit maximisation or the minimisation of monetary costs.

As to decisions involving choices of a general nature, such as what forms of energy to use, which of two or more materials to employ to produce a particular good, whether and where to build a new factory, there is another technique already in use under capitalism that could be adapted for use in socialism: so-called “cost-benefit analysis” and its variants. Naturally, under capitalism the balance sheet of the relevant benefits and costs—advantages and disadvantages—of a particular scheme or rival schemes is drawn up in money terms, but in socialism a points system for attributing relative importance to the various relevant considerations could be used instead. The points attributed to these considerations would be subjective, in the sense that this would depend on a deliberate social decision rather than on some objective standard, but this is the case even under capitalism when a monetary value has to be attributed to some such “cost” or “benefit” as noise or accidents. Furthermore, in so far as money is an objective measure, what it measures is production time to the exclusion of all other factors. In the sense that one of the aims of socialism is precisely to rescue humankind from the capitalist fixation with production time/money, cost-benefit type analyses, as a means of taking into account other factors, could therefore be said to be more appropriate for use in socialism than under capitalism. Using points systems to attribute relative importance in this way would not be to recreate some universal unit of evaluation and calculation, but simply to employ a technique to facilitate decision-making in particular concrete cases. The advantages/disadvantages and even the points attributed to them can, and normally would, differ from case to case. So what we are talking about is not a new abstract universal unit of measurement to replace money and economic value but one technique—among others—for reaching rational decisions in a society where the criterion of rationality is human welfare.

Planning and industrial organisation

Socialism would inherit from capitalism the existing material basis: a complex worldwide productive network linking all the millions of individual productive units in the world (farms, mines, factories, railways, ships, etc) into a single system. The links we are talking about are physical in the sense that one unit is linked to another either as the physical user of the other’s product or as the physical supplier of its materials, energy or equipment. Under capitalism such links are established in two ways: organisationally (as between different productive units forming part of the same private or state enterprise) and, above all, commercially (as when one enterprise contracts to buy something from, or to sell something to, another enterprise). In socialism the links would be exclusively organisational.

Planning in socialism is essentially a question of industrial organisation, of organising productive units into a productive system functioning smoothly to supply the useful things which people had indicated they needed, both for their individual and for their collective consumption. What socialism would establish would be a rationalised network of planned links between users and suppliers; between final users and their immediate suppliers, between these latter and their suppliers, and so on down the line to those who extract the raw materials from nature.

By industrial organisation we mean the structure for organising the actual production and distribution of wealth. Some activities, such as intercontinental transport and communications, the extraction of oil and of certain other key raw materials, developing the resources of the oceans, and space research, are clearly best treated at world level, and we can imagine them being organised by a World Transport Organisation, a World Raw Materials Board, a World Oceanic Regime and so on. To begin with, and assuming (as seems likely) that socialism would inherit a problem of world hunger from capitalism, the production of certain key foodstuffs and animal feedstuffs might also need to be organised on a world level; there already exists in the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) a world body that could easily be adapted for this purpose.

There would be a need for an administrative and decision-making centre at world level, democratically controlled by delegates from the various regions of the socialist world (we say nothing of the size and limits of these regions since such details must be left to the members of socialist society to settle), whose basic task would be to coordinate relations between the world industrial organisations, between these and the world-regions, and between the various world-regions. This centre would not be a “world government” since, as we have already explained, there would be no state and no government, not even at world level, in socialism. It would be an administrative and coordinating body and would not be equipped with means of coercion.

Other industries, and in particular manufacturing and processing, could be organised at world-regional level. There is no point in drawing up in advance the sort of detailed blueprint of industrial organisation that the old IWW and the Syndicalists used to (despite the promising name of “Industrial Workers of the World”, these were in fact blueprints for industrial organisations within a national framework), but it is still reasonable to assume that productive activity would be divided into branches and that production in these branches would be organised by a delegate body. The responsibility of these industries would be to ensure the supply of a particular kind of product either, in the case of consumer goods, to distribution centres or, in the case of goods used to produce other goods, to productive units or other industries.

Since the needs of consumers are always needs for a specific product at a specific time in a specific locality, we will assume that socialist society would leave the initial assessment of likely needs to a delegate body under the control of the local community (although, once again, other arrangements are possible if that were what the members of socialist society wanted). In a stable society such as socialism, needs would change relatively slowly. Hence it is reasonable to surmise that an efficient system of stock control, recording what individuals actually chose to take under conditions of free access from local distribution centres over a given period, would enable the local distribution committee (for want of a name) to estimate what the need for food, drink, clothes and household goods would be over a similar future period. Some needs would be able to be met locally: local transport, restaurants, builders, repairs and some food are examples as well as services such as street-lighting, libraries and refuse collection. The local distribution committee would then communicate needs that could not be met locally to the body (or bodies) charged with coordinating supplies to local communities.

Once such an integrated structure of circuits of production and distribution had been established at local, regional and world levels, the flow of wealth to the final consumer could take place on the basis of each unit in the structure having free access to what is needed to fulfil its role. The individual would have free access to the goods on the shelves of the local distribution centres; the local distribution centres free access to the goods they required to be always adequately stocked with what people needed; their suppliers free access to the goods they required from the factories which supplied them; industries and factories free access to the materials, equipment and energy they needed to produce their products; and so on.

Production and distribution in socialism would thus be a question of organising a coordinated and more or less self-regulating system of linkages between users and suppliers, enabling resources and materials to flow smoothly from one productive unit to another, and ultimately to the final user, in response to information flowing in the opposite direction originating from final users. The productive system would thus be set in motion from the consumer end, as individuals and communities took steps to satisfy their self-defined needs. Socialist production is self-regulating production for use.

To ensure the smooth functioning of the system, a central statistical office would be needed to provide estimates of what would have to be produced to meet people’s likely individual and collective needs. These could be calculated in the light of consumer wants as indicated by returns from local distribution committees and of technical data (productive capacity, production methods, productivity, etc) incorporated in input-output tables. For, at any given level of technology (reflected in the input-output tables), a given mix of final goods (consumer wants) requires for its production a given mix of intermediate goods and raw materials; it is this latter mix that the central statistical office would be calculating in broad terms. Such calculations would also indicate whether or not productive capacity would need to be expanded and in what branches. The centre (or rather centres for each world-region) would thus be essentially an information clearing house, processing information communicated to it about production and distribution and passing on the results to industries for them to draw up their production plans so as to be in a position to meet the requests for their products coming from other industries and from local communities.

Impossibility of gradualism

The governments of some of the state capitalist countries, in particular those which had Leninism as their official ideology, used to proclaim as their long-term gaol the establishment of a society which they call “communism” and which at first sight bears a resemblance to the society we have outlined as the alternative to capitalism. For instance, at its 22^nd Congress in 1961, the “Communist” Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) adopted a programme “for the construction of communism”. One of the many books and pamphlets produced to popularise this programme tells us:

“Communist distribution is a system of supplying members of society with all they need free of charge. In this society money will be superfluous.

Under communism, consumer goods—to say nothing of capital goods—cease to be commodities. Trade and money will outlive themselves. Flats, cultural, communication and transport facilities, meals, laundries, clothes, etc., will all be free. Stores and shops will be turned into public warehouses where members of communist society will be supplied with commodities for personal use. The need for wages and other forms of remuneration will disappear.” (Man’s Dreams, 1966, pp. 172 and 224)

The society here described as “communism” is thus to be a moneyless society, but there is an implication that there might still be a body separate from the members of society which would be handing out goods to them at its initiative. In other words, it is implied that the means of production might still be controlled by a minority group which would distribute products free to the excluded, non-controlling majority. That this is to be the case is confirmed by other passages in which we are told that “communism” can be established in one country or group of countries and that the party will continue to exist for a long time even after the establishment of “communism” on a world scale (6). Above all, there is the incongruity that this system of “free distribution” is seen as gradually evolving from the present state capitalist system in Russia. What is envisaged is a gradual evolution, under the direction of the party, from a form of state capitalism in which workers are paid money wages with which they buy the things they need to a form of state capitalism in which they would be supplied free of charge with the necessities of life, i. e. would in effect be paid entirely in kind.

This perspective of a gradual “withering away” of commodity production and the money economy was not held by the CPSU alone but is the general Leninist view of how the so-called “transition from socialism to communism” will take place. Mandel, for instance, has gone into great detail to show how “decommoditization” would be economically possible as a series of administrative measures introduced on the basis of state ownership, in response to increases in productivity and inelasticities of market demand (Mandel, 1968, pp. 654-86). Such a gradual transition to full payment in kind is perhaps theoretically conceivable (although in our view highly unlikely), but in any event the end result would not be socialism, since socialism is not payment in kind on the basis of state ownership; nor could socialism be introduced administratively by a state capitalist government.

The definition of “communism” as state ownership plus payment in kind is shared by nearly all those who have participated in academic debates on so-called “pure communism” and its feasibility (Wiles, 1962; Sherman, 1970). As a result, most of the discussion which has ensued is irrelevant to socialism/communism considered as a social relationship in which all members of society stand in an equal position with regard to the control of the use of the means of wealth production. We have already seen that a system in which the means of production are owned by a state is not a classless society where all members stand in the same relationship to the means of production, but a class society in which those who control the state stand in a privileged position with regard to the means of production, since they control their use to the exclusion of the rest of society. This is the case even if, as in Leninist theory, this controlling group is to be a vanguard party conceived as being dedicated to serving the interests of the excluded majority. As long as a section of society is excluded from controlling the means of production, a class society exists, no matter how generous or well-meaning the ruling class is considered as being. This is one reason why a gradual evolution from state ownership (state capitalism) to common ownership (socialism) is impossible. Such a gradual evolution from a class society to a classless society is impossible because at some stage there would have to be a rupture which would deprive the state capitalist ruling class—be they well-meaning or, more likely, otherwise—of their exclusive control over the means of production. There would have to be, in other words, a political and social revolution in which the power to control the use of  the means of production would be consciously transferred by the excluded majority from the minority state capitalist class to all members of society.

An equally fundamental reason why a gradual evolution from state capitalism to socialism is impossible is the difference in the form which wealth takes in the two societies. In socialism wealth appears simply in its natural form (as various use values capable of satisfying human wants), while under state capitalism wealth takes the form of value (goods having acquired an exchange value in addition to their natural use value).

As the totality of wealth produced today is a single product produced by the whole workforce acting as a “collective labourer” (Marx, 1919 (vol. I) pp. 383-4), some goods cannot be produced in the one form and some in the other. The social product that is wealth today can only be produced either wholly as value or wholly as simple use value. Certainly some goods can be directly distributed in kind while others remain obtainable only against payment in money, but this is not the same thing. In this case the goods produced for distribution in kind would still be “value” in that their production costs, i. e. the exchange value used up in producing them, would have to be paid for out of the surplus value realised in the priced goods sector. Profit-and-loss accounting in units of value would still be necessary. This is why all schemes such as Mandel’s for a gradual withering away of commodity production insist on the need to retain some universal unit of account (whether this be monetary units as in the various schemes for “shadow prices” or units of labour-time as an attempt to measure economic value directly) in both the price and the “free goods” sector.

The changeover from commodity production to production solely for use can only take place as a rupture, not as a gradual transition. Since “classless society” and “common ownership” are synonyms, and since commodity production is a nonsense on the basis of common ownership, this rupture (revolution) is in fact the same as the one needed to move from class society to classless society. Neither classes nor the state nor commodity production nor money can gradually wither away. It is no more reasonable to assume that state capitalism could change by degrees into socialism than was the assumption of the classical reformists that private capitalism could be so transformed.

Conclusion

The alternative to capitalism as a society already existing on a world scale is, to define it somewhat negatively, a frontierless, classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless world. Or, more positively:

“The new system must be world-wide. It must be a world commonwealth. The world must be regarded as one country and humanity as one people.

All the people will co-operate to produce and distribute all the goods and services which are needed by mankind, each person, willingly and freely, taking part in the way he feels he can do best.

All goods and services will be produced for use only, and having been produced, will be distributed, free, directly to the people so that each person’s needs are fully satisfied.

The land, factories, machines, mines, roads, railways, ships, and all those things which mankind needs to carry on producing the means of life, will belong to the whole of the people”. (Philoren, 1943—emphases in original)

Opinions may legitimately differ as to whether or not such a society is feasible. That is a separate question. However, in the interests of clarity, we suggest that those who pose as critics of capitalism, but who consider that the society outlined above is not feasible in the immediate future, should refrain from using the term “socialism” to refer to any society in which money, wages and the state exist. There already exists a perfectly adequate term to refer to such a society—capitalism or, as the case may be, state capitalism. It merely confuses the issue to talk of socialism being anything other than a moneyless, wageless, stateless world commonwealth.

Notes

(1) “This leads to the basic assumption which economic analysis makes about the physical world. It is assumed that the fundamental feature of the economic world, the feature which gives rise to economic problems at all, is that goods are scarce. Very few things in the world, with the exception of air, water and (in some countries) sunshine, are available in unlimited amounts. It is because of scarcity that goods have to be shared out among individuals. If scarcity did not exist, then there would be no economic system and no economics” (Stonier and Hague, 1980, p. 3—emphasis in original).

(2) “Abundance removes conflict over resource allocation since by definition there is enough for everyone, and so there are no mutually exclusive choices, no opportunity is forgone and there is no opportunity-cost. The golden age, a communist steady-state equilibrium, will have been reached. Gradual change, growth, will be simple and painless. The task of planning becomes one of simple routine; the role of economics is virtually eliminated. There is then no reason for various individuals and groups to compete, to take possession for their own use of what is freely available to all” (Nove, 1983, p. 15). “There would then be no economic goods, i. e., no goods that are relatively scarce; and there would hardly be any need for a study of economics or ‘economizing’. All goods would be free goods, like pure air used to be” (Samuelson, 1980, p. 17—emphases in original).

(3) “Present productive forces are quite inadequate to provide the whole of mankind with up-to-date comfort” (Mandel, 1968, p. 610). “The necessity of a transition period follows precisely from the fact that on the morrow of the abolition of capitalism, society is still living in a situation of relative shortage of consumer goods. The allocation of consumer goods during the epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism must therefore be effected essentially through exchange, that is, through buying and selling. Consumer goods continue to be commodities. Leaving aside the social wage, the labour force is essentially paid in money. A huge monetary sector therefore continues to exist in the economy” (ibid., p. 632—emphasis in original).

(4) “In the same way, even if people were to limit themselves strictly to the exchange of natural produce, the existence of money would continue to be indispensable in a socialist society as a measure of value for accounting purposes and for calculating exchange ratios” (Kautsky, 1922, p. 318).

(5) “ . . . the economic analysis, which starts off with quantities, which are measured differently, and which ends up with quantities, which are measured differently, can never be reduced to a single common denominator, especially not to the common denominator ‘labour’” (Neurath, 1925, p. 74).

(6) “It is not impossible that communism will have been established in the socialist countries before the capitalist countries take the socialist path” (Man’s Dreams, 1966, p. 227). “The Party will hold the leading position in communist society for a long time, although its working methods and forms and its structure will naturally alter substantially. The Party, the very embodiment of all that is progressive and organised, will still exist even in the first stages of communism, after its victory on a world scale. It will take communist society many years and even decades before the new mechanisms are fully developed and become maximally effective, before conditions are created for the withering away of the Party. This will be a long and gradual process” (ibid., p. 233).

Bibliography

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Burnham, James, The Managerial Revolution (London: Penguin, 1945).

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Verteilung und Produktion (Berlin: AAUD, 1930).

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Possibilities of Socialism (London: Routledge, 1935).

Kautsky, K., The Social Revolution (Chicago: Kerr, 1902).

Mandel, Ernest, Marxist Economic Theory (London: Merlin, 1968).

Man’s Dreams, Man’s Dreams Are Coming True (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966).

Marx, Karl, Capital, 3 vols (Chicago: Kerr, 1919).

Mises, Ludwig von, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” in

Hayek, F. A. et al (1935).

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Pannekoek, Anton, Workers’ Councils (Detroit: Root and Branch, 1970).

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Solidarität wär´ eine prima Alternative. Oder: Brot, Schoki und Freiheit für alle

von Friederike Habermann

Beitrag aus den papers der Rosa Luxemburg-Stiftung read more…

Vom Ende des Geldes

[There is also an english version of this article]

Franz Hörmann, Professor an der Wirtschaftsuni Wien, hat mit seinen Thesen vom Zusammenbruch des Währungssystems schon einigen Staub aufgewirbelt. Dieses Jahr soll’s passieren. Und dann? WienTV hat ein Interview mit Hörmann gemacht (im Anschluss an eine Veranstaltung zum Zeitgeist-Film Moving Forward):

Was ist davon zu halten?

Mal abgesehen von der konkretistischen Datierung des Crashs (da haben sich schon andere Kollaps-Theoretiker getäuscht), sehe ich eine Reihe von problematischen Punkten in Hörmanns Thesen — hier mal nur die, die mir spontan anhand des Interviews aufgefallen sind (Disclaimer: ich habe Hörmanns Buch nicht gelesen).

1. Hörmann behandelt Geld so, als ob es tatsächlich nichts mehr mit realer Wirtschaft zu tun habe. Geldschöpfung sei ein Willkürakt privater Banken. Die Probleme entstünden dann deswegen, weil Geld als Substanz angesehen (ein Topf voller Goldstücke) und mit Zinsen belegt werde. Eigentlich sei Geld jedoch eine reine Zähleinheit, bloß Information, es bilde keine Substanz ab, sondern nur Verhältnisse.

Es ist richtig, dass Geld nur Verhältnisse abbildet, aber diese Verhältisse sind Tauschverhältnisse von Waren, hinter den ihr Herstellaufwand steht. Dafür gibt es in der traditionellen politischen Ökonomie auch einen Begriff: Wert. Während der Preis nur eine Zahl sein mag, ist der Wert Ausdruck eines Verhältnisses. Um dies zu verdeutlichen nannte Marx das durch den Wert ausgedrückte gesellschaftliche Verhältnis im Anschluss an die dialektische Philosophie Hegels »Wertsubstanz«. Versteht man Substanz hier umgangssprachlich als »Stoff« und nicht als »Verhältnis«, dann liegt man falsch.

Realgeschichtlich war es tatsächlich eine spezielle Ware, die zur Geldware wurde. Daher liegt es nahe, die Geldware immer als »Sache« zu denken. Tatsächlich drückte auch die historische Geldware nur Verhältnisse zwischen Tauschenden aus. In der Folge wurde dann auch die Stofflichkeit des Geldes aufgegeben, schließlich sogar die stoffliche Deckung mittels Gold im Banksafe, so dass Geld heute nur als »Nummer« erscheint und nichts mehr mit den realen Tauschverhältnissen zu tun hat. Das ist jedoch nicht so. Zwar hat sich die Finanzsphäre relativ von der Realwirtschaft entkoppelt und generiert immer wieder neue »Finanzprodukte aus dem Nichts«, doch bleiben diese stets — wenn auch räumlich und zeitlich vermittelt — auf die Realwirtschaft bezogen. Das partielle wieder-in-Deckung-bringen von Finanzsphäre und Realsphäre ist dann eine Krise. Diese wird mit Notwendigkeit produziert, und mit Notwendigkeit auf immer höherem Niveau.

Der eingebaute Aufschaukeleffekt (aus Geld muss stets mehr Geld werden) hat tatsächlich Total-Crash-Potenzial — da gehe ich mit Hörmann wieder mit. Das liegt aber nicht an den Zinsen, sondern umgekehrt sind Zinsen nur Ausdruck des eingebauten Wachstumszwangs kapitalistischer Logik. Zinsen sind sozusagen die Scheibe, die sich die Finanzsphäre vom Realwachstum abschneiden will — und weil die Realwirtschaft nicht schnell genug »liefern« kann, simuliert sie das schon mal vorab in der relativ entkoppelten Finanzsphäre selbst. Relativ, denn irgendwann kommt der Zwangsabgleich, und dann brechen die Kartenhäuser und Pyramidensysteme zusammen.

2. Hörmann will das, was er meint, dass ohnehin der Fall sei — Geld nur als Zähleinheit — nach einem Crash als neues Geld wieder einführen (durch das Sozialministerium), diesmal mit Grundeinkommen für alle. Dann werde Kooperation statt Konkurrenz und Gerechtigkeit statt Ungerechtigkeit herrschen.

Warum sollte sich dieses »neue« Geld anders »verhalten« als das alte? Alle Verhältnisse, in denen das Geld seine Rolle spielt, sind noch die alten: getrennte Privatproduktion, Tausch, Markt, also Wertverhältnisse. Damit gibt es weiter Konkurrenz und Profitmaximierung. Und natürlich auch weiterhin Kooperation, denn kooperiert wird auch jetzt schon. Auch jetzt schon werden Autos in Legobauweise hergestellt (war ein Beispiel von Hörmann). Gerechtigkeit verstanden als gerechten Tausch (=Äquivalententausch) gibt es ebenfalls schon. Einzig das Grundeinkommen wäre neu, es würde tatsächlich vielen Menschen Erleichterung verschaffen.

3. Bezahlt würden nicht mehr »tote Gegenstände«, sondern nur noch menschliche Leistungen und Fähigkeiten. Für Rohstoffe gäbe es eine eigene Zirkulation. Unbeliebte Tätigkeiten würden mit extra Prämien belohnt, während beliebte Tätigkeiten nicht so viel einbrächten. Da Geld nur eine Zahl wäre, könnte man auf diese Weise menschliches Verhalten steuern.

Sollen »tote Gegenstände« per Gesetz als »wertlos« erklärt werden? Hier zeigt sich wieder der Irrtum, dass Geld eine quasi funktionslose, willkürliche Angelegenheit sei, die beliebig umdefiniert werden könne. Dem ist nicht so. Existieren die basalen Prozesse der Warenproduktion- und distribution weiter, so wird das Geld darin auch weiter seine Funktion erfüllen. Die »Werthaltigkeit« von Produkten ist nicht etwas, das per Verabredung eingerichtet wurde und entsprechend wieder abzuschaffen wäre, sondern mit der Notwendigkeit zum Tausch (solange privat produziert wird, besteht sie) gibt es mit Notwendigkeit Geld, das den Tausch vermittelt. Das ist keine Verabredung, sondern setzt sich hinter unserem Rücken durch. Das wusste schon Adam Smith.

Lustigerweise erinnert mich die Willkürbewertung (Unbeliebtes hoch, Beliebtes niedrig) an Christian Siefkes’ altes (inzwischen verworfenes) Versteigerungsmodell der Peer-Ökonomie. Aber das nur am Rande, sonst haben die Überlegungen nicht viel mit einander zu tun.

So. Es gäbe es noch mehr, das lasse ich jetzt (Stichwort: Bankmitarbeiter als psychologische Coaches — welche Horrorvorstellung!).

Warum müssen diejenigen, die Geld im Prinzip als Fetisch erkannt haben — und das schaffen ja wrklich nicht viele –, dann letzten Ende doch am Geld festhalten? Es scheint ein zu großer Gedankensprung zu sein, sich Verhältnisse vorstellen, in denen wir nicht durch eine sachliche Macht — den Zwang »Geld zu machen« — getriezt werden, sondern unser Leben tatsächlich in die eigenen Hände nehmen.

Ils ont raison (7)

Supprimons la monnaie !

Mais l’effet le plus remarquable du progrès technique, c’est de faire sortir du cercle du commerce et des échanges un grand nombre des biens qu’il contenait originairement parce qu’ils étaient rares et qui tendent à s’en évader à mesure qu’ils abondent. Comme ce changement date d’hier, nous nous en rendons difficilement compte. Mais de jour en jour il s’impose davantage à notre réflexion. Et c’est lui qui nous apporte la seule solution rationnelle du problème.

Qu’on nous permette une anticipation qui, à notre sens, ne devance que de fort peu les réalisations futures. Imaginons que brusquement l’homme cesse de produire en vue de profit et qu’il se propose uniquement la satisfaction des besoins. Du coup les perspectives économiques sont changées. Il ne s’agit plus d’accaparer la production pour le compte de quelques-uns, ce qui conduit à la raréfier, mais de la distribuer aussi largement que possible à tous, ce qui amène à l’intensifier. L’abondance cesse d’être une catastrophe pour devenir un bienfait. Il n’y aura plus d’autre limite à la production que l’assouvissement complet de tous les désirs de tous, ce qui pratiquement entraîne un formidable développement du machinisme, une hausse immédiate du niveau de la vie générale.

Ce jour-là pourrait et devrait être proche, disons plus, si l’humanité était compréhensive elle devrait déjà l’avoir atteint. Les technocrates américains prétendent qu’on pourrait dès maintenant faire de chaque Américain moyen—et quel est l’Américain qui n’appartiendrait pas à la moyenne?—si les machines des Etats-Unis donnaient le plein de leur production, un individu disposant de 20.000 dollars par an (le dollar étant compté à vingt-cinq francs), soit 500.000 francs de notre monnaie. Mais ce n’est là à notre sens qu’une façon de s’exprimer, car le jour où il en serait ainsi il ne serait plus question de monnaie.

Devant cette profusion des produits qui comblent tous les besoins et tous les désirs humains, il ne s’agit plus ni d’acheter ni de vendre, mais de prendre. Comment parler encore d’échange là où pratiquement tout se trouve à la disposition de tous? L’échange ne se conçoit qu’entre gens dont l’un désire ce qu’il n’a pas et qu’un autre possède, celui-ci désirant, directement ou indirectement, ce que le premier détient et que lui-même n’a pas. C’est dire que tout échange et donc toute tractation en argent suppose un manque, une privation, en un mot une pauvreté. Là où il existe un trop-plein, il n’y a plus à qu’à distribuer.

Et à distribuer gratuitement. Voilà le grand mot lâché. De prime abord, il surprend et même il indigne. Comment? Vous allez me délivrer pour rien ce que je désire? Mais parfaitement, du moins dans la mesure où la chose est possible. Vous le recevrez pour rien dès l’instant qu’il y aura de quoi satisfaire également pour rien à des désirs analogues exprimés pour tous les autres. La limitation et le rationnement ne subsisteront que dans les domaines de la production où il ne sera pas encore possible d’avoir autant qu’il faut et plus qu’il ne faut pour tous.

Il importe de nous familiariser au plus vite avec ces idées neuves qui bouleversent de fond en comble nos anciennes manières de voir. Le passage du rare à l’abondant entraîne logiquement celui du payant au gratuit. Une politique de la hausse des prix, telle que la préconise et la pratique Roosevelt, est proprement insensée et contraire à ce qu’il y a par ailleurs de neuf et de hardi dans ses conceptions. Le vrai, c’est qu’on doit finalement aboutir à la suppression des prix.

Ils ont raison (7)

Supprimons la monnaie !

Mais l’effet le plus remarquable du progrès technique, c’est de faire sortir du cercle du commerce et des échanges un grand nombre des biens qu’il contenait originairement parce qu’ils étaient rares et qui tendent à s’en évader à mesure qu’ils abondent. Comme ce changement date d’hier, nous nous en rendons difficilement compte. Mais de jour en jour il s’impose davantage à notre réflexion. Et c’est lui qui nous apporte la seule solution rationnelle du problème.

Qu’on nous permette une anticipation qui, à notre sens, ne devance que de fort peu les réalisations futures. Imaginons que brusquement l’homme cesse de produire en vue de profit et qu’il se propose uniquement la satisfaction des besoins. Du coup les perspectives économiques sont changées. Il ne s’agit plus d’accaparer la production pour le compte de quelques-uns, ce qui conduit à la raréfier, mais de la distribuer aussi largement que possible à tous, ce qui amène à l’intensifier. L’abondance cesse d’être une catastrophe pour devenir un bienfait. Il n’y aura plus d’autre limite à la production que l’assouvissement complet de tous les désirs de tous, ce qui pratiquement entraîne un formidable développement du machinisme, une hausse immédiate du niveau de la vie générale.

Ce jour-là pourrait et devrait être proche, disons plus, si l’humanité était compréhensive elle devrait déjà l’avoir atteint. Les technocrates américains prétendent qu’on pourrait dès maintenant faire de chaque Américain moyen—et quel est l’Américain qui n’appartiendrait pas à la moyenne?—si les machines des Etats-Unis donnaient le plein de leur production, un individu disposant de 20.000 dollars par an (le dollar étant compté à vingt-cinq francs), soit 500.000 francs de notre monnaie. Mais ce n’est là à notre sens qu’une façon de s’exprimer, car le jour où il en serait ainsi il ne serait plus question de monnaie.

Devant cette profusion des produits qui comblent tous les besoins et tous les désirs humains, il ne s’agit plus ni d’acheter ni de vendre, mais de prendre. Comment parler encore d’échange là où pratiquement tout se trouve à la disposition de tous? L’échange ne se conçoit qu’entre gens dont l’un désire ce qu’il n’a pas et qu’un autre possède, celui-ci désirant, directement ou indirectement, ce que le premier détient et que lui-même n’a pas. C’est dire que tout échange et donc toute tractation en argent suppose un manque, une privation, en un mot une pauvreté. Là où il existe un trop-plein, il n’y a plus à qu’à distribuer.

Et à distribuer gratuitement. Voilà le grand mot lâché. De prime abord, il surprend et même il indigne. Comment? Vous allez me délivrer pour rien ce que je désire? Mais parfaitement, du moins dans la mesure où la chose est possible. Vous le recevrez pour rien dès l’instant qu’il y aura de quoi satisfaire également pour rien à des désirs analogues exprimés pour tous les autres. La limitation et le rationnement ne subsisteront que dans les domaines de la production où il ne sera pas encore possible d’avoir autant qu’il faut et plus qu’il ne faut pour tous.

Il importe de nous familiariser au plus vite avec ces idées neuves qui bouleversent de fond en comble nos anciennes manières de voir. Le passage du rare à l’abondant entraîne logiquement celui du payant au gratuit. Une politique de la hausse des prix, telle que la préconise et la pratique Roosevelt, est proprement insensée et contraire à ce qu’il y a par ailleurs de neuf et de hardi dans ses conceptions. Le vrai, c’est qu’on doit finalement aboutir à la suppression des prix.

Pourquoi le socialisme n’a pas besoin d’argent (ni de bons de travail)

Adam Buick

Le socialisme abolit l’argent. Il ne s’agit pas là d’une simple opinion ni d’une suggestion concernant ce qui devrait se produire dans la société future, mais de quelque chose qui découle logiquement de la nature et du socialisme en tant que société sans propriété et de l’argent en tant que rapport social dans une société de propriété.

L’argent naît de l’échange, mais l’échange ne se fait que là où les biens concernés ont des propriétaires différents. L’échange représente en effet un transfert mutuel de titres de propriété aussi bien qu’un échange physique des biens. Il est donc absurde de parler de l’existence de l’argent dans la société socialiste ; autant parler d’un cercle carré. Le socialisme implique une société sans argent puisqu’il implique une société sans propriété. Ce point a été bien compris par des écrivains communistes tels que Thomas More, Gerrard Winstantley (porte-parole des « diggers », groupe communiste de la période de la révolution anglaise. Voir Christopher Hill Le monde à l’inverse, Payot), Morelly, Babeuf, Buonarotti et Cabet, tout comme il l’a été par Marx et Engels qui, en se joignant à ce courant dès les années 1840, acceptaient comme allant de soi que le socialisme serait une société amonétaire. Quant à Marx, c’est même son dégoût profond pour l’effet de l’argent sur les rapports humains qui l’a fait devenir socialiste.

La première réaction de la plupart des gens à l’idée d’une société sans argent est de demander « voulez voulez donc revenir au troc ? » Cette réaction passe cependant complètement à côté de la planche. Le socialisme entraîne la fin non seulement de l’argent, mais également de l’échange dont le troc n’est qu’une forme primitive. En fait, c’est l’abolition de l’échange par le socialisme qui entraînera la disparition de l’argent.

Dans une société socialiste, l’activité productive prend la forme d’une activité librement choisie enterprise par les êtres humains en vue de produire les choses dont ils ont besoin pour vivre et apprécier la vie. Le travail productif nécessaire de la société n’est pas effectué par une classe de salariés employés mais par tous les membres, chacun coopérant selon ses capacités pour produire les choses nécessaires à la satisfaction des besoins à la fois des individus et de la communauté. Le travail ne peut qu’être volontaire car il n’y aura pas de groupe ou organe social capable de forcer les gens au travail contre leur volonté.

Dans une société socialiste, les biens sont distribués gratuitement dans des centres de distribution d’où on les retire sans donner d’argent ni de bon. Les maisons et appartements sont gratuits ainsi que le chauffage, l’électricité et l’eau, comme le transport, les soins, l’éducation, les restaurants, les blanchisseries, organisés en services publics gratuits. Il n’y a pas d’entrée payante au théâtres, cinémas, musées, parcs, bibliothèques. Le terme le plus adéquat pour décrire cette situation : libre accès car il renvoie au fait que c’est l’individu qui décide quels sont ses besoins. En ce sens, la production dans le socialisme est orientée pour pourvoir aux besoins des individus tels qu’ils sont définis par ceux-ci.

La fin de l’économie

Le socialisme n’est pas une économie car, en rétablissant le contrôle humain conscient sur la production, il restaure au procès social de production son caractère originel : une interaction/échange direct entre les êtres humains et la nature. La richesse au sein du socialisme est produite directement, en tant que telle, c’est-à-dire des articles utiles nécessaires à la survie et au plaisir de l’homme. Les resources et le travail sont utilisés dans ce but par des décisions conscientes et non à travers l’opération des lois économiques agissant avec la même force coercitive que les lois de la nature. Bien que la conséquence soit identique, les lois économiques qui entrent en jeu dans une économie marchande telle que le capitalisme ne sont pas des lois naturelles puisqu’elles sont issues d’un ensemble spécifique de rapports sociaux entre les êtres humains. En changeant ces rapports sociaux en ramenant la production sous le contrôle conscient humain, le socialisme abolit ces lois et donc aussi « l’économie », rendant la science économique et toutes ses catégories (argent, achat et vente, prix, valeur, etc) caduques.

L’abondance est une situation où les ressources productives sont suffisantes pour produire assez de richesse pour satisfaire les besoins humains, alors que la rareté est une situation où les ressources productives sont insuffisantes pour réaliser ce but.

Les idéologues du capitalisme considèrent que si l’abondance existait, la valeur, les prix et l’argent pourraient être abolis, mais que puisque l’abondance n’existe pas encore et ne peut apparaître que dans un temps bien lointain, ces catégories doivent toujours exister. En ce cas il ne s’agit plus de définitions, il y a des faits : est-ce que les ressources productives existantes (matières premières, instruments de production, sources d’énergie) et le savoir technologique qui permet de s’en servir sont suffisants pour permettre à la population mondi ale de produire assez de nourriture, de vêtements, de logements et autres choses utiles pour satisfaire ses besoins ? Je pense que, de toute évidence, la réponse à cette question est « oui ».

Le socialisme cependant n’est pas un « simple état d’abondance ». C’est une condition sociale plutôt que physique ou technique. C’est un ensemble de rapports sociaux correspondant à une société sans classes, c’est-à-dire où tous les membres sont dans une position identique face au contrôle de l’utilisation des moyens de production de la richesse.

La richesse dans le capitalisme étant produite en vue de la vente, les biens particulier qui la constituent deviennent des marchandises ayant une valeur d’échange. En fait, c’est seulement en tant que valeur d’échange que la richesse a une signification pour le fonctionnement du capitalisme ; les millions de différentes sortes de choses utiles produites par le travail human sont évaluées selon un dénominateur commun—leur valeur « économique »—basé sur le temps de travail moyen nécessaire à leur production, et dont la mesure est l’argent. Les calculs nécessaires à une économie marchande—calculs des valeurs d’échange et des rapports d’échange—se font donc en référence à cet « équivalent général » et ce sont ces calculs qu’on appelle « le calcul économique ».

Avec le remplacement de l’échange par le socialisme, la richesse cesse de prendre la forme de valeur et, par conséquent, toutes les expressions de ce rapport social particulier à une économie marchande, telles que l’argent et les prix, disparaissent. En d’autres termes, les biens cessent d’avoir une valeur économique et deviennent de simples objets physiques que les êtres humains peuvent utiliser pour satisfaire un besoin ou un autre. Cela ne veut par dire que les biens n’auront plus aucune « valeur » au sens large du terme ; au contraire, ils continuent à posséder la capacité de satisfaire des besoins humains. La soi-disant « valeur économique » que les biens acquièrent dans une société marchande n’a strictement rien à voir avec leur véritable valeur comme moyen de satisfaire des besoins, puisque l’utilité d’un bien pour l’homme n’a jamais été fonction du temps de travail dépensé pour le produire. Dans le socialisme, les biens cessent donc d’être des marchandises, mais ils restent des valeurs d’usage; en fait, cette valeur d’usage y présente plus d’importance puisqu’elle deviendra la seule raison pour laquelle les biens seront produits.

Le calcul en nature

La disparition de la valeur économique signifie la fin du « calcul économique » en tant que calcul en termes d’unités de « valeur » mesurée soit par l’argent, soit directement en fonction du temps de travail. Elle signifie qu’il n’y aura plus d’unité de calcul universelle à appliquer quand il s’agit de prendre des décisions concernant la production. Le socialisme en tant que société sans argent dans laquelle des valeurs d’usage sont produites à partir d’autres valeurs d’usage ne requiert aucune unité de calcul universelle. Les calculs qui y seront nécessaires se feront exclusivement en nature.

Le calcul en nature est un aspect essentiel de la production des biens dans toute société, y compris le capitalisme. Une marchandise est un bien qui, en vertu d’avoir été produit pour la vente, a acquis une valeur d’échange, économique, en addition de sa valeur d’usage. De même, le processus de production dans le capitalisme est à la fois un processus de production de valeurs d’échange et un processus de production de valeurs d’usage, comportant deux types de calcul différents. Pour le premier processus, l’unité de calcul, c’est l’argent, mais pour l’autre il n’y a pas une seule unité de calcul, mais toute une gamme d’unités différentes pour mesurer les quantités et les genres des biens spécifiques utilisés dans la production des biens spécifiques (tonnes d’acier, kilowatt-heures d’électricité, heures de main d’oeuvre, etc). C’est pourquoi la disparition du calcul économique (c’est-à-dire du calcul en valeur, en temps de travail) dans le socialisme ne signifie nullement la disparition de tout calcul rationnel, car les calculs en nature associés à la production des biens spécifiques en tant que valeurs d’usage continueront.

Le but de la production dans le socialisme étant de produire des valeurs d’usage concrètes pour satisfaire les besoins humains, tout ce qui peut intéresser la société socialiste à la fin d’une période donnée, c’est de savoir combien de quantités de biens spécifiques ont été produites sur la période. Pour vérifier ceci, il n’est pas nécessaire de réduire le coton, le charbon, les machines, les textiles, la nourriture, etc, etc à un dénominateur commun mesuré selon une unité universelle ; au contraire, c’est précisément dans leurs formes concrètes de coton, de charbon, etc que la société socialiste s’intéressera à eux et voudra les compter.

La société socialiste n’aura aucun besoin de calculs en valeur tels « revenu national », PNB et d’autres chiffres obtenus en faisant abstraction des valeurs d’usage concrètes des biens spécifiques. En fait, le socialisme signifie précisément la libération de la production de sa subordination aux considérations d’ordre économique, c’est-à-dire d’ordre échangiste ou marchand. Le but de la production dans le socialisme ne sera donc pas de maximiser le « revenu national », ni le PNB ni la « croissance » (de valeurs d’échange)—ce seront des concepts sans aucune signification pour le socialisme—mais de produire les quantités et les types de valeurs d’usage dont les gens indiquent qu’ils auront besoin. Les calculs qu’il faudra faire pour organiser et pour vérifier ceci seront des calculs directement et exclusivement en nature ne nécessitant pas d’unité de calcul universelle, un « équivalent général », ni l’argent, ni le temps de travail abstrait.

De même, au niveau de l’unité de production, les seuls calculs qui seront nécessaires sont des calculs en nature. D’un côté on enregistre les ressources (matériaux, énergie, machines, travail) consommées dans le processus de production et, de l’autre côté le montant du bien produit ainsi que celui des éventuels sous-produits. Ceci se fait bien sûr également dans le capitalisme, mais y est doublé d’un calcul de valeur : la valeur d’échange des ressources consommées est enregistrée comme « coût de production » tandis que la valeur d’échange du produit (après qu’elle a été réalisée sur le marché) est enregistrée comme « recettes de vente ». Si celle-ci est plus grande que celle-là, on a fait un profit ; dans le cas inverse, c’est une perte qu’il faut constater.

Une telle comptabilité des profits et des pertes n’a aucune place—n’a aucun sens même—dans le socialisme. La production socialiste, c’est simplement la production de valeurs d’usage à partir d’autres valeurs d’usage, voilà tout.

Complementary Currencies Flop

… says Matthew Slater, evangelist of complementary currencies, but still sticking to old illusions:

It is frustrating for me, seeing clearly how almost all the world’s problems boil down to the design and the pervasiveness money, and seeing this point so often missed and overlooked by economists politicians and commentators, none of whom are offering solutions. The problem of money is still not being communicated. Despite proven successes, complementary currencies have a patchy history, and governments regard them with suspicion everywhere except South America. Through Community Forge I’m able to reach and help some of the grass roots organisations that do understand, but it seems so little when whole countries are sinking underwater. Many organisations are coming to us for help, but few people are coming to offer help. And when they do, we don’t even have time to manage them. The movement is growing, but not as fast as the economy is diving, and not as fast, I fear, as the money addicts are finding new ways to part us from it.

Nope, alternative money will not help us, when hard money crashes. Not missing pervasiveness of money is the problem, but pervasive money — at least in our thinking — ruling our activities. Demonetize it!

Solidarity economy and demonetization

Marx’s Critique of Money

Adam Buick

In the section of the Communist Manifesto devoted to “German or ‘True’ Socialism” Marx and Engels said of “German philosophers, would-be philosophers and beaux esprits” influenced by socialist ideas that “beneath the French criticism of the economic function of money, they wrote Alienation of Humanity’, and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois State they wrote ‘Dethronement of the Category of the General’, and so forth”.¹

What Marx forgot to add was that it was precisely in these sorts of terms that he had expressed himself in the first article he wrote after becoming a socialist in 1843. This article, a criticism of a book on the Jewish Question was published in the Deutsch-Franzosiche Jahrbucher in Paris in 1844. It is important because it showed a clear understanding that the establishment of socialism involves the disappearance of both the state and money, a view Marx held on to for the rest of his life but which has been largely ignored by the great majority of those who call themselves Marxists (but who in fact stand for a state capitalism in which money would continue to exist).

The first part of Marx’s On the Jewish Question while supporting the granting of full political rights to religious Jews (as non-Christians) within existing society, argues that political democracy is not enough as it does not amount to “human emancipation”, which can only be achieved “when man has recognised and organised his ‘forces propres‘ (own powers) as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power”²

The second, shorter part applies the same sort of reasoning to money: “emancipation from . . . money”, writes Marx, “would be the self-emancipation of our time” (p.170). Unfortunately for modern socialists, his attack on money took the form of a criticism of the “actual worldly Jew, the everyday Jew” as portrayed in the still widespread but inaccurate popular image of Jews as sharp traders and “men of money”. Thus, after writing that “money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews”, Marx gives as an example the situation in America as described by Thomas Hamilton in Men and Manners in North America:

“The devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of Laocoon who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents which are crushing him. Mammon is his idol which he adores not only with his lips but with the whole force of his body and mind. In his view the world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is convinced that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbour. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other recreation than to exchange objects. When he travels he carries, so to speak, his goods and his counter on his back and talks only of interest and profit. If he loses sight of his own business for an instant it is only in order to pry into the business of his competitors.”³

So Marx’s argument was not directed against the Jews as people (from one point of view it can be seen as a contribution to the debate then going on among Jews and ex-Jews – like himself – as to their future) but rather against the sort of society described by Hamilton which now exists, to a greater or lesser extent, in all countries. The argument that the solution to the Jewish Question lay, not in the Jews disappearing by becoming atheists or Christians as others had suggested, but in the establishment of a moneyless society in which ‘Jewish . . . (money-making) behaviour’ would be impossible, was bound to be regarded as anti-Semitic by religious Jews and Jewish nationalists in the quite different political and historical context of the 20th century. This charge is nonsense; otherwise it would have to be pinned on all advocates of Jewish assimilation and on all critics of the Jewish religion (and as an atheist Marx was naturally a critic of Judaism, with its ridiculous rituals and rules governing all aspects of everyday behaviour, as of all other religions).

This no doubt explains why the second part of On the Jewish Question – which is basically an attack on money and a call for the establishment of a moneyless society as the way to achieve “human emancipation” – has not been given the same circulation as some of Marx’s other writings of the same period, for example The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In a sense this is a pity since in it are to be found some of Marx’s strongest denunciations of money and its effects on relations between people:

“Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and as such appears in a pure form as soon as civil society has fully given birth to the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.”⁴

“Selling is the practical aspect of alienation. Just as man, as long as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something alien, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity – money – on them.”⁵

Of course this criticism is still rather philosophical – capitalism (a term which Marx doesn’t even use) is identified with individualism, “a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another.”⁶ Marx argues that in such a world it is money that emerges as the god to which everything else is subordinated and which completely dominates people’s lives.

Very soon however, Marx (who, it must be remembered, was still working his way towards a full understanding of capitalism and socialism) identified “private property” rather than “egoistic need” as the root cause of people’s domination by money, in the sense that it was private property society that led to human beings being obliged to pursue their self-interest as the means to survive. In some unpublished notes he made in 1844 after reading James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy (which marked the beginning of what was to become a life-long study, and critique, of political economy) Marx argued that in private property society people produce with a view to exchanging their products for money, so that what they produce becomes a matter of indifference to them as long as they can sell it, and that it is this that leads to money dominating their lives:

“Within the presupposition of division of labour, the product, the material of private property, acquires for the individual more and more the significance of an equivalent, and as he no longer exchanges only his surplus, and the object of his production can be simply a matter of indifference to him, so too he no longer exchanges his product for something directly needed by him. The equivalent comes into existence as an equivalent in money, which is now the immediate result of labour to gain a living and the medium of exchange.”⁷

“The complete domination of the estranged thing over man has become evident in money, which is completely indifferent both to the nature of the material, i.e., to the specific nature of the private property, and to the personality of the property owner. What was the domination of person over person is now the general domination of the thing over the person, of the product over the producer. Just as the concept of the equivalent, the value, already implied the alienation of private property, so money is the sensuous, even objective existence of this alienation.”⁸

Earlier in these same notes on Mill Marx had explained in more detail how human beings came to be dominated by the products of their own labour, while at the same time giving us a glimpse of how things would be different in a moneyless society:

“The essence of money is not, in the first place, that property is alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. Objects separated from this mediator have lost their value. Hence the objects only have value insofar as they represent the mediator, whereas originally it seemed that the mediator had value only insofar as it represented them. This reversal of the original relationship is inevitable.”⁹

This is still fairly philosophical but the meaning is clear enough: in a “truly human” society (to speak like Marx at this time) human beings would produce products to satisfy their needs, and their products would “mutually complement one another”; this movement of products from the producer to those who needed them would not take place via money but would be directly organised under conscious human control; in addition, the value of a product would be the value humans put on it in terms of usefulness or capacity to give pleasure. With private property and production for money, on the other hand, this cannot happen: not only does the movement of products from producer to consumer come to be “mediated” by money, but the value of a product comes to be judged not in human terms but in terms of a sum of money; finally, the whole process of the production and distribution of wealth escapes from human control and is dominated by an alien force, money.

In his well-known Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (which were also never published in his life-time) Marx, in what could be regarded as a prophetic vision of the sort of commercial, advertisers’ world we have to suffer today, expanded on the point about the pursuit of money becoming the main aim of life in private property society:

“The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces. The quantity of money becomes to an ever greater degree its sole effective quality. Just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to quantitative being. Excess and intemperance come to be its true norm.

Subjectively, this appears partly in the fact that the extension of products and needs becomes a contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites. Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and whim; and no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch – the producer – in order to sneak for himself a few pieces of silver, in order to charm the golden birds out of the pockets of his dearly beloved neighbours in Christ. He puts himself at the service of the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses – all so that he can then demand cash for this service of love. Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other’s very being, his money: every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the gluepot.”¹⁰

In an earlier passage Marx had once again contrasted this with the situation that would obtain in socialism, where the object of production would be to satisfy real human needs, above all the need for human relations with other human beings. This – a society in which people would relate to people, not as “atomistic individuals”, but as a “true human community” – was Marx’s somewhat philosophical definition of socialism at this time.

Nobody reading these passionate denunciations of money can be left with any doubt that Marx stood for a moneyless society. Although he abandoned some of the more flowery philosophical language in his later published works such as A Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Capital (1867), he 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. Indeed, his later analysis of the process of capitalist production was still based on his early view that in capitalist society the producers (the working class) were dominated by the product of their own labour which had escaped from their control and confronted them as an alien, exploiting force (capital). But, then, the distinction between an “early”, philosophical and a “later”, scientific Marx has never been all that convincing, since not only are the views of the so-called early Marx to be found in his later writings, but also his early writings are not just philosophising as to the true nature of humanity, as the following passage from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 shows:

“An enforced increase of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that such an increase, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity. Indeed, even the equality of wages, as demanded by Proudhon, only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour into the relationship of all men to labour. Society is then conceived as an abstract capitalist.

Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other. From the relationship of estranged labour to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this, because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation.”¹¹

Notes:

1 Marx/Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Progress Publishers, Moscow1977, pp. 64-65; Also at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm

2 Marx/Engels. Collected Works, Volume 3, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1975, p.168; Also at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/index.htm

3 ibid., pp. 170-71

4 ibid., p.172

5 ibid., p.174

6 ibid., p.173

7 Marx, Comments on James Mill, Élémens d’économie politique, Marx/Engels. Collected Works, Volume 3, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1975, p. 221; Also at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/

8 op. cit.

9 ibid., p.212

10 ibid., p.307; Also at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm

11 ibid., p.280