Moneyless (2017)

Book Review from the January 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Into The Open Economy'. By Colin R. Turner. (Applied Image. 80 pages)

In 2011 Colin Turner put a short video Free World Charter on the internet making the case for a moneyless world of free access and making the same point  (but not in the language) that we do: that, while the world is capable of providing enough to feed everyone and allow them a decent life, most people’s access to what they need is rationed by the amount of money they earn from working for a wage or salary. The video didn’t suggest doing anything other than signing an online charter to show you supported the idea of ‘a world without money’.

By comparison, this short book is a disappointment. Turner’s approach is to show that what he calls an ‘open economy’ is possible by pointing to the many examples today where people cooperate to do things without money and where they are motivated to act by other aims than the pursuit of money. This is true of course but Turner goes further and argues that the way to an eventually money-free society is through encouraging and extending these examples.

This is to underestimate what is involved in ‘abolishing money’. Money is a feature of a society where goods and services are produced to be bought and sold because they are privately owned. Capitalism is the highest form of such a society, one where the means of production are monopolised by a few who own and control them via companies or the state and who pay people to operate them with a view to making a profit.

To get to a society where people can have free access to what they need instead of having to pay for it, capitalist ownership of the means of production has to be ended and control over their use transferred to the community as a whole,. Dispossessing the privileged owning class requires political action on the part of the excluded majority. But not the kind of political action within the system that Turner rightly criticises in the section headed ‘The Limitations of Governance’:

‘Being itself part of the economy, the government is limited by what it can do … Government – and its individual members – are all very much subject to the economy, and therefore have only very limited control over it … State spending and interest rates do not control the economy – they are merely reactions to it. When the economy is good, the government spends, when the economy is bad, the government cuts back. Instead of shaping the economy, all the government is really doing is 'housekeeping' the best it can with the fruits of the wider economy on its doorstep.’

But this is not a case for throwing the baby out with the bathwater and rejecting political action altogether in favour of the small-scale local activities Turner mentions (growing your own food, tool libraries, car-pooling, using open source software, building your own home, etc). It’s a case for rejecting reformist political action within the system in favour of political action aimed exclusively at revolutionising the basis of society from minority class ownership to democratic common ownership (thereby making money redundant).

Adam Buick