Capitalism would seem to be quite exceptional as a social system in unnecessarily burdening us with work that bears little or no relation to meeting human needs (even if such work might be considered necessary from the standpoint of enabling the system to function on its own terms). This is all the more remarkable given the enormously potent technology it has developed to lighten our workload considerably.
The terms and conditions under which we work today, the constant niggling awareness that our livelihood is dependent on our compliance to the arbitrary will of our employers and so forth, corrodes any sense of intrinsic satisfaction we might get from work. Even so, we still need to work despite this — not just for the money but also our own wellbeing notwithstanding the adverse terms and conditions under which we might presently work. Not being able to work at all can make matters even worse for us.
We need ‘work’, but we need also the conditions that will make work more satisfying. Capitalism cannot deliver this because it is not a system oriented to the satisfaction of human needs. It is first and foremost a system based on the blind accumulation of capital out of surplus value. That in itself signifies the alienation of the majority from the productive resources of society that necessarily imposes upon labour the quality of being coerced and unfree and hence undesirable.
The possibility of individuals being able to freely move between jobs according to their own inclinations would help to greatly enrich the entire experience of work as well as help to produce a more rounded person. However, in the capitalist society we live in today we cannot just freely choose to alternate between different kinds of jobs as we might wish. If we do happen to have a job in capitalism we are hemmed in by legal contracts and fixed hours that conspire to bind us to this job and prevent us from adopting a too-flexible or experimental approach to work.
What would the implications be if, in contrast, all work were to become unpaid work – that is, performed on a free and voluntary basis? Obviously, in a capitalist society this is simply not possible. It is incompatible with the existence of capitalism.
If all work were to take the form of free creative voluntary activity then the products of that work – the goods and services we all depend on – would have to be completely free in the sense of being made available without any price tag attached. Money, as a socio-economic phenomenon, would simply cease to exist. After all, if you were not paid to work where would you get the means to buy anything?
So unpaid voluntaristic or self-determined work would imply ‘free access’ to the collective products of such work (and vice versa). Moreover, both of these things imply something else – namely, the common or social ownership of the productive resources of society itself.
This is often misunderstood. Market libertarians in particular, are prone to decry this as a blatant case of ‘theft’. ‘You are going to confiscate my property and make it the property of the community’ they complain. But this is to completely misconstrue what common ownership of society’s productive resources is about.
‘Theft’ simply implies the transfer of ownership of the thing in question from the victim of such a theft to the perpetrator. It thus implies a private property relationship. Common ownership, on the other hand, means transcending the very concept of property itself. You are not losing anything; you are, in a sense, gaining the world instead. But so is everybody else (including also the ex-capitalists). Collectively, you are asserting joint or social ownership over the natural and industrial resources of the planet.
Social ownership of these resources is the completely logical and appropriate response to the plain fact that production today is a completely socialised process. The laptop on which I am typing out this article, is – directly or indirectly – the product of the collective labour of literally millions and millions of workers scattered right across the world.
It is no longer possible for anyone to say of any particular product, ‘I made this, therefore this is mine’. The 18th century philosopher John Locke’s ‘labour theory of property’, on which the market libertarians base their case that common ownership would be theft because the fruits of one’s labour ought to be exclusively appropriated by oneself by natural right, has thus been rendered historically obsolete and completely impracticable. In fact, given that production is now a socialised process, it backfires on them by implying socialised ownership — that what is produced by collective labour should be owned collectively.
Robin Cox
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