Letter: Money & Survival (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

In addition to pointing out some of its deficiencies, for which I am grateful, the criticism of my book Money & Survival in the Socialist Standard, June 1992, was valuable in highlighting for me those differences in approach which prevent my joining the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

It is true that I did not deal with issues such as the historical development of capitalism, class structure or the ownership of the means of production. but this is because they would have no significance in a moneyless society. In pointing out that financial systems inhibit scientific, social and economic progress, that they must be less, perhaps much less, than 50 percent efficient. I am attempting to show the enormous potential that would lie before a world that could free itself of such inhibitions.

The future can only be built upon experience of the past but social circumstances are always changing and our perspectives must change with them. I have no doubt that many of the criticisms of society and capitalism remain as valid today as they had done in the days of Karl Marx but both have changed. In the eighteenth century there were no transnational companies dominating the world, nor production workers with middle class values, nor was there a United Nations drawing the peoples of the world together.

Confrontation, whether in party politics or class wars, invites hostility, holds up the advancement of human society and is self-defeating. The eighteenth century concept that the poor can only be assisted by depriving the rich is derived from illusions of scarcity and exchange value, both of which, as I explained in my talk to my friends in your Bristol branch, are money-oriented concepts that have only had validity in narrow local contexts and are totally irrelevant today.

Confrontation begets confrontation and because the rich live in constant fear of losing their wealth, their power and their privileges, they are only too willing to believe that eventually, however far into the future that might be. those benefits will trickle down to the poor, and that that justifies them in fighting anything or anybody that threatens to take those advantages away. They have the power and resources and even in the unlikely event that they were defeated, another group would arise to grab the spoils.

To assume that once socialism is achieved the money system would wither away is to fail to appreciate the financial and psychological power of the money system. The reverse is true. Only when money has been eliminated can we hope to build a just and forward-looking social system.

There is no short-term solution. The dissemination of such ideas is bound to be a slow process and may never materialise before the human race destroys itself, but that is no reason why we would stop thinking and trying.

Melvin Chapman,

Bath

Reply:

We still can't see how money could be eliminated before socialism is established; nor how socialism could be established without a political confrontation with the privileged class who currently own and control the means of production—Editors.