Who needs money?

Whether washed or worthless we will be better off without!

We live in a society where almost everything is bought and sold. That which you need in order to live is a cornmodity; you must buy it from someone who will make a profit out of selling it to you. Our minds are dominated by money. It is our passport to existence. No money, no access to what we need. Too little money, no comfort. Money drives people crazy: contrary to the words of the song, money does not make the world go round - money makes the world go mad.

It turns the white-coated scientist into the unprincipled servant of commerce. It converts the caring doctor into the grasping private practioner. Money makes pathetic liars out of salesmen and robotic paper counters out of bank clerks. Money leads young men to beat up old women. Money is the source of the poor man's scheme to have a fat wallet which ends too often in a cold prison cell. Money is the rich man's god. Children beg for money. Not a day passes when we do not think about it. Have I enouqh money for ... If only this cost less . . . I must now pay my money for ... Bills, tokens, threatening reminders, final demands, security locks, bank queues, exchange rates, newsreaders announcing that the pound has fallen, as if it is the sun which has fallen out of the sky. It is a vast, mentally corrupting, emotionally destructive money madness.

Why Money?

Money is the universally accepted means of exchange. It is a universal equivalent. Instead of me giving you three toasters for your armchair, I pay in an accepted, legal currency. Sounds sensible. Who wants to return to the awkward system of bartering goods? It seems sensible as long as we have a property-based system of society where wealth is owned by some and sold to others.

The two main uses of money by most people are for food and housing. You need money to buy food from the corner store, or, more probably, the supermarket. In effect, you are paying the owners of food production for the right to have access to what they possess. These millionaire food manufacturers did not produce the food. But you must buy if from them so that they may profit. You pay money for housing to the landlord or the building society. They own the land that you live on and they own the means of producing the buildings in which you dwell. Directors of building societies are not to be found on building sites making houses. They are too busy getting drunk in their clubs or playing golf.

Now, imagine that all these things that you need were owned and controlled in common. By everyone. All of us - you included. There is nobody to buy food frorn - it is common property. There are no rents or mortgages to pay because land and buildings belong to us all. There is no need to buy anything from any other person because society has done away with the absurd division between the owning minority (the capitalists) and the non-owning majority (the workers). You would not need money. In a society of commmon ownership money would have no role. It would be like the tramlines in a city which has done away with trams. No longer would money exist.

The money test I

"But we need rnoney - couldn't live without it". That is what most well-conditioned readers will say. In our society people learn to turn money into a fetish. In primitive societies certain objects were invested with magical powers. For example, in Ancient Egypt cats were regarded as sacred animals which had to be treated with great respect or they would turn the world upside-down. Modern people are taught to believe that money contains intrinsic powers. Where would we be without it? Beware of dethroning the money-god. Let us put this to the test.

Take a pile of money. Three fivers and a couple of pound coins. Leave them in a dark room and see what happens. Will they dig coal? Will factories be built or homes furnished? Well. at least they could cook you a good dinner: you can get good food for seventeen quid. Nothing will happen. Humans make money powerful. Left to itself it is just a pile of tokens of no worth. Even the picture of the Queen is ugly.

The money test II

But is money that important to you? Perhaps it is less intrusive in your daily life than has been suggested. Try one more test.

Stop selling yourself for money for three months. That is what you do every time you go out to work in return for a wage or salary. You put yourself on the shelf along with the baked beans and the canned tuna fish and you say 'Buy me!'. The wages system, which turns the vast majority of people into exploited workers, is a process of selling your mental and physical energies in return for some money. For most of us, if we do not sell ourselves we will have little or no access to what we need in order to live. We devote most of our waking lives to trying to obtain money. Our work is devalued by money: if we enjoy working, the pleasure is diminished by the knowledge that we are only really engaging in a sordid transaction - and how many workers hate the miserable work that they are forced to do in order to get money?

Give it a try: stop selling your labour power for money. You will give up on the test long before three months - or three weeks - or even three days. Most wage slaves are too petrified of losing their jobs - their chance to be bought for money - to even contemplate such an exercise. And rightly so, for under the wages system we are lost if we do not seil ourselves for money.

Abolish money

Socialists stand for a world without money. All wealth will be commonly owned, so there will be no body to buy what you need from. The right to live, and to be comfortable and happy, will not depend upon your pocket-book. Freedom will not be costed by accountants who will only give you liberty if you can pay for it.

In a socialist society people will work according to their abilities and take according to their needs. Who will decide what their needs are? Not their bosses or the state or a cunning advertising industry - none of these will exist. People will decide for themselves. Who but humans ourselves are able to decide what we need?

There will be no "socialist market". Contrary to the economic babble of certain "theorists" on the Left, it is quite obvious that the market, which is a mechanism for buying and selling commodities and realising a profit for the sellers, will have absolutely no function in a community where nobody is buying or seiling or making profits. In a society where production is solely for use people will have free and equal access to take what they need from the common store.

Are people capable of living in a society of free access without making a mess of it? Will they take too much? Will they all refuse ever to work? Will they go to sleep for a thousand years and refuse to move a muscle? These are the fears about the nature of human beings that we in this money-mad society are urged to have. Socialists do not share such fears. We know just how co-operative and sharing and intelligent workers are capable of being. After all, we are a party of workers.

Given a society of moneyless, free access men, women and children will co-operate together to make and to take what they commonly need and desire. They will do so democratically. And we could do so tomorrow if the vision of a moneyless society grabs hold of enough imaginations and penetrates the consciousness of enough of those millions of workers who are currently crying out, openly or quietly to themselves, under the strain of the enormous and often unbearable pressures of the money system. Without money, humans will be free to relate in ways which we have forgotten or only half-remember. The banks can close down, the cash machines put in museums and the children who cry because their parents have too little money to pay for them to grow up can stop.

STEVE COLEMAN
(Socialist Standard November 1990)

The Fetishism of Money

The Lancet said the situation in Haiti remained “chaotic, devastating and anything but co-ordinated”. It accused agencies of “jostling for position” and needless competition for funds.

“Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavoury characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts,” The Lancet wrote.

How often do we hear it said, “we do not have the resources” ? What is meant by resources is always money. Reliance on the imagined powers of money runs through every social problem , even disasters such as the Haiti earthquake. The magical powers of money to solve problems dominates the many charities that constantly ask for money. It is not the purpose here to criticise those who want to do something to help others in desperate need. In a way, their willingness to help provides a hope for the future. But the brutal facts have to be faced that the present appeals for money are a pathetic substitute for the availability of real resources and the freedom that communities in socialism would have to immediately use them.

Many are unable to see the availability of real resources because their minds are pre-occupied by the illusion that only money resources count. The fetishism of money has distorted their thinking. They imagine that real resources can only be brought into use by money, whereas the opposite is the truth. Problems are not solved with money resources. They are solved by people using their labour, skills and the necessary materials and there is in fact an abundance of these material resources.The powers of the world community to go to the aid of the victims and survivors of traumatic events such as in Haiti can on be fully released with socialism and the abolition of money.

The Museum Piece

Let's let Mr Money retire from the management of our mode of survival and find shelter in a museum niche to rest beside flint stone hammers, anvils and bronze axes. Visitors might then like to stop a while in front of the niche, ponder over the antique family accommodated therein and discover Mr Money among them; but this time with a difference. For the old, Mr Money might still rouse great reminiscences, but for the young merely an inquisitiveness about an odd article, now stripped of any individuality.

Our kids would surely be much amused to observe the currency note with printing on the paper and ask "What's that, mummy?", "Papa, what is it?" and we "papas" and "mummies" would be prompt enough with our ready knowledge: "That was money."

"Well, what was money?" our kids would wonder.

"Money was what money did."

"What did it do?"

We should then recite what we had to memorise by rote from the lecture-notes of, and texts written by, our revered professors in the lately-dead economics departments of universities—"Money had four functions: exchange, measure, payment, store."

"Exchange? Peculiar." "What did it mean?"

"Buying and selling."

"And, what was it that buying and selling stood for?"

"You see, in actual fact, functions do not define a thing; they only describe its form; but it has also its content which has to be sought in its source. The source of money was exchange-value that expressed value that stood for the social labour necessary to produce something useful. Exchange, or to sell to buy, so to say, was engendered by private property relations. You couldn't sell what wasn't exclusively yours; you couldn't buy what was exclusively yours. Money couldn't be eaten; money couldn't be worn. You couldn't use money to build houses. Money did not lay and hatch eggs, or bear fruits, or produce young. You couldn't sow money and reap a harvest. Nothing useful could be produced merely by laying and sowing money. Money did not even produce money."

"Why was it necessary, then?"

"Because there was a social alienation—an owner/non-owner divide."

"Why was society divided that way?"

"Oh Dear! Why do you need to know all this here and now? It'll take a lot of time to explain the whole lot. Anyway for the time being, try to understand just a difference. Nowadays, as and when we feel hungry, what do we do? We just take what we need from where it is stored; and that's all, simply because we all have free access to them, we all collectively own and control them. But in those days when only a few people privately owned and controlled all means of production and distribution, the vast majority of us had little or nothing to own or control but our ability to work, which we were obliged to sell for a wage or a salary which was always less in terms of value than what we produced, and then we had to spend the money thus received to buy what we ourselves had produced and stocked at the behest of our employers—our food, clothes and all that we needed."

"Really, very interesting! But, what happened when you couldn't find a buyer for your ability to work?"

"Can't you follow? We had to starve. It's as simple as that!"

"Starve? A strange word, but what did it mean?"

"It meant to die of hunger. Understand?"

"Did it? Die of hunger? Even if there were enough stocks to meet everybody's need? And that merely because you didn't possess these coloured pieces of worthless paper to buy the products of your own labour? Horrific! What a shame on you!"

"Indeed! Quite so, the state of affairs was exactly what you've just stated. Yet, my sweet little observers, money wasn't just coloured pieces of worthless paper. In itself it might have been worthless, but it represented a great worth—private property. It was the ultimate form of expression of a relation between people mediated as though it was a relation between things. A relation between active social forces carried through a unique, indirect and roundabout manner working exactly like natural forces, irrespective of people's will, forcibly, coercively, destructively, blindly, behind the backs of the producers themselves. A totally inhuman relation reigning over humanity."

"And, that day, when we were listening to you reading off a passage from your school history book, we heard the author boast, claiming such a society to be civilised, and you said you were required to go on cramming such stuff for your exams. How stupid you were!"

BINAY SARKAR

(Socialist Standard April 1998)

WORKING FOR NOWT

The Socialist call for the “Abolition of the wages system” is usually met with derision. People, we are told, will only expend their physical and mental energies in exchange for a wage or a salary. Voluntary co-operative labour is a pipe-dream.

A few moments reflection will show this money crippled view of human beings to be wrong. We know of very many examples of our fellow human beings doing unpaid work – that is working for no monetary return.

Writing in The Guardian last year Michael White referred to Britain's generally thriving voluntary sector – one in three of us volunteer … and create £27.5bn worth of value to the economy.

In November 2003 the TUC reported that workers in the UK did £23 billion pounds of unpaid overtime. The average amount done each week by the more than 5 million workers performing unpaid overtime was 7 hours 24 minutes, worth £4,500 in extra annual salary. All the figures were taken from official statistics, and exclude employees who do less than one hour of unpaid overtime a week.

Last year the figure had increased to £26.9 billion.

The value of volunteers in UK sport in 1996 was reported to be £1.5 billion by Chris Gratton and Peter Taylor in Economics of Sport and Recreation.

Nor is this simply a strange quirk confined to Britain:

The value of that [unpaid] work ranges from 15 percent of gross domestic product in the case of Japan to 54 percent in Australia.

Marga Bruyn-Hundt in The Economics of Unpaid Work (1996) estimates the monetary value of unpaid labour in Netherlands ranges from six percent to 55 percent of GNP. Unpaid household and voluntary work takes over one and a half times more hours than paid work.

Depending on the method used the value of unpaid labour in Switzerland was at least 127,116 Mill. Fr. in 1997 equal to 34% GDP.

Even using conservative estimates, the magnitude of this [unpaid] labour is staggering. Kathleen Cloud and Nancy Garrett, specialists in global economic development, estimated the value of unpaid labour in 1990 for 132 different countries. They found that unpaid household labour contributed $8 trillion, or just over one-third of the total official GNP for these countries.

Who says that without wages people would not work?

GT

Abolish Money !

From the anti-G-20 demo

An idea that may be catching on .

Imagine that all the things you need are owned and held in common. There is no need to buy food from anyone--it is common property. There are no rent or mortgages to pay because land and buildings belong to all of us. There is no need to buy anything from any other person because society has done away with the absurd division between the owning minority (the capitalists) and the non-owning majority (the workers). As long as money exists , financial and commercial values will prevail , not human values . So, we're talking about a moneyless society in which, instead, people would contribute according to their abilities and take, freely as their right, from the common store what they need to live and enjoy life.

Money is simply a device to separate the workers from what they produce. The workers must aim to abolish it.

See Smash Cash article

The rise and fall of money

Many people mistakenly believe that money has always existed and that it therefore always will.
We explain why money is out of date.

Human beings have lived on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years without using money. When they were hungry, they ate. When they were thirsty, they drank. Whatever was available to anyone was available to everyone.

It wasn't paradise, because food was scarce, and growing communities were eventually forced by this scarcity into a competitive struggle for life.

First came the invention of agriculture, and the consequent need to defend the land, or property, on which crops were grown.

Although this gave communities more stability and growth, agriculture and animal husbandry could not by themselves supply everything which they needed to develop as cultures. For this they needed to associate with other communities and pool their resources. But in the new culture of property there was never again to be such freedom to take whatever was available.

And so began the exchange of products known as trade. And although some quite advanced bronze age societies managed to trade very well by using barter (e.g. the Egyptians), it was a supremely awkward way to conduct transactions. With the advent of the Iron Age, cheap metal was for the first time plentiful, and coinage was slowly introduced to facilitate the trading process.

Civilisation has since grown up on the back of this trade, whose sophistication was made possible by the invention of money. To the modern mind therefore, civilisation relies on money. This is a misunderstanding. In fact, it is only trade which relies on money. Civilisation relies on distribution of material goods certainly, but distribution is not the same thing as trade, just as give is not the same thing as sell. Modern industrial society has given us the means to free ourselves forever from that scarcity which has always dogged our forebears. Money is no longer a necessity or logical feature of society, and only a tiny minority benefit from its presence.

In history, many things become out of date, like the steam engine or quill pens. Money is about to join them.

Money today

Money is indispensable to the capitalist system, but this system is not indispensable to human society. Money as a universal means of exchange represents capital. The possessing of money enables the buyer to acquire goods and services (commodities) and the seller to dispose of goods and services. The key resource that is bought and sold is human labour power—the ability to transform initial wealth (resources, raw material, etc) into more wealth.

We live in a society where almost everything is bought and sold. That which you need to live is a commodity, you must buy it from someone who will make (or at least expect) a profit out of selling to you. It is our passport to existence in capitalism. 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.

The key to the rise of continuation of the capitalist system is the ability of members of the capitalist class (owners of means of wealth production and distribution) to buy the working abilities of members of the working class. They combine that labour with capital resulting in commodities that can be sold for more than it costs in total to produce them.

A high proportion of employment in capitalism consists of handling money in some way. There are hundreds of occupations that would not exist in a society that had no need for money: they range from accountants, bank and insurance staff, salespeople, wages clerks to name only some of the more numerous occupations. Tangible products needed only in a money system include bank notes and coins, account books and invoices, meters, safes and many others.

Capitalism as a market system means that the normal method of getting what you need is to pay for it. The normal way for members of the capitalist class to get money is to invest their capital to produce rent, interest, dividends or profit. The normal way for workers to get money is to sell their labour power for wages, salaries, commission or fees. If they are unable to find employment they depend on state or other handouts. The result is poverty in the midst of potential plenty—actual plenty only for the privileged minority.

Socialism: a moneyless society

Socialism means a world society based on production solely for use, not profit. It will be a classless society, in which everyone will be able to participate democratically in decisions about the use of the world's resources, each producing according to their ability and each taking from the common store according to their needs.

In such a society there can be no money—or, more precisely, no need for money. Money is only needed when people possess, and most do not.

Imagine that all the things you need are owned and held in common. There is no need to buy food from anyone—it is common property. There are no rent or mortgages to pay because land and buildings belong to all of us. There is no need to buy anything from any other person because society has done away with the absurd division between the owning minority (the capitalists) and the non-owning majority (the workers).

In a socialist world monetary calculation won't be necessary. The alternative to monetary calculation based on exchange-value is calculation based on use values. Decisions apart from purely personal ones of preference or interest will be made after weighing the real advantages and disadvantages and real costs of alternatives in particular circumstances.

The ending of the money system will mean at the same time the ending of war, economic crises, unemployment, poverty and persecution—all of which are consequences of that system.

The revolutionary change that is needed is not possible unless a majority of people understand and want it. We do not imagine all humankind's problems can be solved at a stroke.

Reforms of the present system fail because the problems multiply and recur. It will take time to eliminate hunger, malnutrition, disease and ignorance from the world.

But the enormous liberation of mental and physical energies from the shackles of the money system will ensure that real human progress is made.

STAN PARKER