Overheard in the lobby off a welfare hotel . . .
Nick L: I say with a well-organized team and enough support from the general public at the right time, we can do it: we can take over the state and reorganize it from top to bottom.
Karl M: But wouldn’t that make you just another management team?
Nick L: No, no, no! Of course the team’s head would be in the right place. Once we took over, we’d make sure things moved in the right direction. OK, we’d have to plan on a complete renovation of the playing field, and sure, it probably would take quite a while before we were off and running . . .
Karl M: I still don’t see how the “general public” fits into this. Nothing seems to change for them. You keep all the old rules—work for pay, return on investment, everybody still needs money to get what they need, and nobody sinks any capital into anything unless they’re sure they’ll at least get it back. Where’s your revolution?
Nick L: Eventually, everything will work out.
Leo T: Yeah, provided all the team members play by the rules—
Joe S: You heard him, everything works out. Period.
Nick L: Things just sort of unfold automatically: A team with its head on its shoulders, sticking together and teaching the public, step by step, how to end the game of exploitation, you know, with lots of feedback and all that crap—I mean, hey! How can we go wrong?
Karl M: You call it a revolution, but there’s nothing socialist about it—that’s what can go wrong! You can’t just expect to replace one set of managers with another. “Eventually” never comes. The only change that works is right now.
Mao Z: Oh, come on! You mean right here—in this room?
Leo T: [Sotto voce] Hey, be careful! There’s somebody over there who might be listening . . .They might be police—
Karl M: No, that isn’t what I mean: that’s closer to what you meant, in fact. What I meant was, you have to get rid of capital and wage labor everywhere as your first move. If you don’t do that, no amount of screwing around with the machinery of state is going to matter. Your “team” will only get caught up in making it work. You’re dreaming if you think you can “guide the masses” like that. The relations of exploitation you start out with—based on wage-labor and capital—won’t waste any time telling you what to do.
Mao Z: Oh, now wait a minute . . . You don’t just announce to the public that the game is over as soon as they’ve all sat down! The struggle against exploitation is like any good match: it could last forever if need be. The play is everything.
Leo T: The public needs to be led!
Nick L: There—you see? Outvoted!
Karl M: We’ll see about that.
Leo T: Listen, keep your voice down—someone could be listening!
Karl M: The point is simply to end the game. According to the rules, certain people own capital and they invest it, deciding in the process how everyone else will live and work. That just isn’t a community in any basic sense of the word. What we need is another set of rules: people in general decide what they can’t do without and make it known to whoever produces it. In the process everybody decides for themselves how they will live and work. We all take turns making sure production happens.
Nick L: Hello-o! Hello-o! I’m sure that’ll work just fine. How will you manage all of a sudden to turn people made passive or lazy and irresponsible by centuries of repression into paragons of reason? Think! Think!
Karl M: Think for yourself! Sooner or later, we’ll all have to.
Joe S: But without capital, how can you run the state? And who’s going to invest what you, sitting there in your nice easy chair, have “abolished” in your head? We’ve got to have a ruling class to struggle against—or are you just thick?
Karl M: Enough people have to abolish capital “in their heads” before any revolution can get off the ground. Without capital— you’re so right—the ruling class disappears. Like smoke from an extinguished fire. But it can’t just be in my head: it’s got to be in everyone’s head. No more goods and services for sale at a profit. The ending of the game means the starting of the real play, a game without spectators! People say they need certain items— wealth; producing and distributing those items implies only the administration of wealth. No one “rules” anyone, and everyone has control. From each according to ability and to each according to need.
Nick L: Oh, hey, look, I can see you don’t really belong in this group; you’re just too weird to be a real activist like us . . .
Karl M: You’ve just got to start out by replacing the wages system with a system of free access. I can say that here and now, in this lobby, but the only way anything’s going to happen is if a large enough majority of people come to have some idea of how they want to reorganize production the world over—
Mao Z: Will somebody please shut him up?
Karl M: No, I’m serious! Without ending the class struggle first, people will be unable to see an end to their powerless, downtrodden status and will just go on trying to make the world “a better place”; what we all really need is to replace this reality of fragments with an interconnected reality of whole people. Around the world, now . . .
Nick L: So you’re saying history won’t be able to distinguish my team from—
Joe S: [Walking to the doorway] That does it! I’m leaving.
Mao Z: [Getting up] Yeah, I really can’t deal with this doctrinaire stuff, either. See you in St. Louie.
Leo T: [Huffily] I’m history. [The door to the stairwell slams closed]
Nick L: [Rising and turning around] Happy? You just ruined a perfectly good revolution!
Karl M: I didn’t ruin mine. Look, I really have done a lot of work on the subject. People have fought the introduction or confronted the reality of the wages system with a persistence that is positively impressive: the German Anabaptists who followed Thomas Muenzer in the Peasant Wars around 1525; the English “true Levellers” or Diggers in 1649; 19th- and 20th-century Utopian experiments too numerous to mention—among them, communities based on the writings of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Each of these tried, in its own way, to break with the system of wage labor and capital—and all of them failed for lack of ability to reorganize the entire system of production—
[The stairwell door slams shut]
Ron Elbert
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