Letter: Money system (2000)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money system

Dear Editors,

Tim Collier (Letters, July) is right when he says that reform of the tax system would be Utopian, for greed, self-interest and aggression are endemic to any money system. We are so accustomed to dealing with money that we have come to think in its terms and find it difficult to imagine a world without it.

Money was useful in the past when local conditions created temporary shortages, but had there been overall scarcity, world populations would not have expanded from a few scattered tribes to the billions we have today.

It is the money system that creates the scarcity, because money has to be limited in order to maintain its value. But since today our digital information systems can make knowledge of what is required instantaneously available, and we can manipulate the bases of matter to produce it without limit, the use of money is the only impediment to the satisfaction of wants.

We have laws to protect property so that eventually, without market pressures to buy and the need to flaunt luxury articles as a sign of wealth, the concept of possession, individual or collective, would disappear.

It is the money system that restricts choice and freedom.

M.B.A. Chapman, 

Bath

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.

Letters: Human Nature (2005)

Letters to the Editors from the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human Nature

Dear Editors,

I’m aware that Socialists often have to face the criticism that Socialism is against human nature. According to this point of view human beings are naturally selfish and acquisitive, even when they have enough to satisfy their own needs. There would certainly seem to be plenty of apparent evidence for that point of view. I thought you might appreciate a section I came across in “The Neurotic Personality of Our Time” (1937) by Karen Horney:

“The irrational quest for possession is so widespread in our culture that it is only by making comparisons with other cultures that one recognises that it is not a general human instinct, either in the form of an acquisitive instinct or in the form of a sublimation of biologically founded drives. Even in our culture compulsive striving for possession vanishes as soon as the anxieties determining it are diminished or removed.”

Horney saw “the irrational quest for possession” as one of a number of ways in which people try to cope with feelings of anxiety, and not as an expression of “human nature”.  She rejected over-generalised ideas about “human nature” and recognised how diverse people are in their attitudes and behaviour.

Adam Waterhouse, 

Bristol

Buying Life’s Essentials

Dear Editors

The aim of capitalism is to sell. I remember that in the 1939/45 war if we had food, warmth and shelter we wanted nothing, so I try to restrict my buying to essentials.

M. B. A. Chapman, 

Bath.

Reply:

We’re not too sure about this. If it caught on, employers would be able to pay us all less.

Editors.

Humanism

Dear Editors

Permit me to comment on your book review of Postmodern Humanism (November). The British Humanist Association was founded in 1896 and not as stated in 1963. A founding member was Charles Bradlaugh MP and when I ceased to be a member in 1997 there existed links with South Place Ethical Society, Rationalist Press Association and National Secular Society. I shall not comment on the reviewer’s claim “they still seem to be working out what their positive case is beyond promoting a non-religious but still ethical approach to life”. But I do assure you that they have taken an active role in the promotion of a large network of funeral celebrants and likewise for wedding and naming ceremonies. Whether these activities exist with the same momentum today, no doubt the book’s author (as a member of the North East Humanists) is  better able to judge.

E. Hirsch, 

Hockley, Essex.

Reply:

According to the British Humanist Association’s own website, they were founded in 1963. It was another body, the Ethical Union, with which they are now associated, that was founded in 1896.

Editors.

Letter: "Money dominates every facet of our existence . . . " (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the November 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Money dominates every facet of our existence . . . "

Dear Editors,

In the Socialist Standard of September last year John Bissett kindly reviewed my free booklet Question Everything in which I speak of the benefits that would accrue from living in a world without money. He pointed out that it required more emphasis on how the free and class conscious decisions of the majority would be attained. He was right, for the narrow pragmatisms, the wastes, inefficiencies and limitations of a capitalism that defeats itself by making people too poor to buy its goods, seems to have become entrenched, making it impossible that we could ever get back to those heady days after the second world war when socialism gave us hope for a better world. Even the higher standards of living that it brought, only increased the number of those who became better off and in turn became seduced by the temptations of the system. Socialism, like capitalism, tends to become a self-defeating process.

The money system that is the source of power and the root cause of all our problems, has ceased to have a purpose or any excuse for being retained now that science and technology enable us to produce anything – and in any quantity – that we want. There is enough food in the world already to feed the entire population, yet millions die of starvation, and manufacturers do not complain that they cannot increase production, only that people do not buy – mainly because they cannot afford to. It is the money system based upon the concept of scarcity that limits growth, because money has to be limited in order to maintain its value – which is why politicians fear inflation!

We spend our lives deciding what to spend, what to deny ourselves, what to save or borrow. Money dominates every facet of our existence, so that it is little wonder that, however poor we are, we imagine that a moneyless system would deprive us of the little we have.

My problem has been that I have been unable to think of any argument against a moneyless society other than that, since only a minority of us actually produce or distribute anything useful, everybody else being employed in manipulating money in one way or another, in sales promotion, in estimating cost and profit, in taxation and investment – and in making and selling arms! – that there would be so much freedom that for those accustomed to having to work to live, once they had tired of perpetual holidays and entertainment they would not know what to do with themselves. Since no healthy person could be idle for long, they would become desperate to make and do things, indeed anything, that would keep their minds and bodies active.

There would be nothing to be gained by theft or dishonesty, no advantage in pushing drugs, no more worries about which firm was reliable or about insuring against loss, so that there would be little need for police or lawyers. There would be little to quarrel or fight over, no advantage in limiting the effect of new ideas by taking out patents. Science and technology would be free to pursue imaginative ideas without having to concern themselves with their commercial significance. With few office workers commuting and public transport free and plentiful, there would be no traffic congestion.

In fact there would be plenty for idle hands and brains to do, in converting all the millions of redundant offices into homes, in bringing the third world up to civilised standards, in conjuring up and carrying out imaginative projects to enhance our lives, and in seeking activities, such as learning, research or woodwork, that they found satisfying.

Above all, no longer would we be treated as units, disposable in our millions in wars to satisfy the egos or ambitions of a few leaders.

But it would require that we learn to adapt, to free ourselves from the pragmatisms, complexities and temptations, the economic and political straightjackets of economic and party political systems, to limit ourselves to simple principles of justice, to policies that are irrefutable and incontrovertible; that we reject opinion, controversy and argument that was not supported by fact or reason, seeing ourselves as both learners and teachers instead of competitors, and recognising the overriding importance of the individual.

Because we all are conditioned by our genes and environments, to criticise or blame others for conforming to the world in which they have been conditioned and so take for granted, or to try to deprive them of that which in consequence they assume to be theirs by right, can only invite indignation, hatred, violence and cruelty – and make them cling ever closer to their possessions and beliefs.

Societies have changed little in 3000 years, but if we allow the limitations and confrontations of money and party politics, the ambitions of our leaders and governments, to play upon our defensive cowardice so that they can develop ever more sophisticated nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, we will surely extinguish ourselves.

We are not free just because we live in a so-called democracy that allows us one vote among 40 million or so every five years, enabling dictatorial leaders and governments to do virtually what they like. If we are to be free and to maximise our influence as individuals in those affairs that affect us without infringing the freedom of others, we need a system in which we can get together with our neighbours to decide what we want in our localities, a system in which those neighbourhood units in turn can commune with each other and so on in an ascending tier of decision-making that eventually develops global consensus.

A free and egalitarian society can evolve only by using reason and logic, by thinking independently of the terms and narrow pragmatisms to which we have been conditioned, and by recognising that people can be changed only if we can convince them that our criticisms are directed at the system, not the person.

To rescue humanity from its primitive pragmatisms, its intellectual stagnation its inherited greed, selfishness and aggression, seems impossible in a society in which even the most obvious and modest proposals for reform become derided, but to sit back and do nothing is to invite species extinction.

Melvin Chapman, 

Bath

Question Everything (2002)

Book Review from the September 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Question Everything by Melvin Chapman. Third Millennium Press. 

Nowhere in this book, or in his previous Third Millennium Press publications, does Melvin Chapman claim to be a socialist – he is indeed dubious of word “socialist” – but throughout Question Everything , as in his previous publications, we find the author clearly propagating the case for a world without money and articulating many of the arguments we in the Socialist Party have been using against our political opponents for decades

Chapman, for instance, tears into the concept of leadership on a number of occasions, arguing that we have been conditioned to accept that we are “intellectually deficient” and in need of betters who are “capable of organising and directing us”. And they of course cannot control events because it is the system that controls them; they too are “conditioned by the economic and political structures in which they were born”.

He is also critical of the reformist mentality, informing us how, “No reform, nor attempt to improve the system . . . can do more than ameliorate its inconsistencies.”

He is derisive of what passes for democracy in capitalist society, observing that there “can be no democracy in a complex system designed to justify inequality, a system in which the power of money carries the right to govern, in which the governed accept their own inferiority, lack of self-respect and sense of worth, a system in which crime, conflict, nationalism, racism, ethnic cleansing . . . is inevitable.”

“Only in self government can there be freedom with order.” And “freedom”? Chapman insists that “Freedom lies in a society in which we can work together free of the social structures that inhibit consensus and in a social, political and economic environment that does not actively promote differences and confrontations.” The rub is that “Freedom depends upon knowledge . . . knowledge upon information . . . [but] information is not knowledge . . . [because it is] limited and controlled . . . The individual has to have the facilities to understand and interpret, to know what there is to know and what questions to ask”

Chapman is at his best in attacking the logic of the profit system, for instance noting how “the money system has enabled the human species to develop the technology with which it dominates the earth, but it has become an excuse for ignoring the factors that impede its own social advance”. Highlighting the alienation the money system gives rise to, he comments: ”This creature Man . . . has allowed itself to be treated – and to treat itself – as of less consequence than a few copper coins, a few electronic pulses, no more than a dollar a day.”

He challenges the assumption that without money no one would work, pointing out how “the money system has given work a bad name, with connotations of long hours, stress, tiredness, monotony . . . even in this acquisitive society of ours, most of us do some sort of voluntary work . . . working for others is enjoyable provided that we do not feel that it is augmenting other people’s interests at our expense”. In a moneyless world, he maintains, “the man/woman power available would be virtually limitless. There would be plenty for them to do . . . our fellow man, our environment, our towns and cities, our talents and potentialities . . . there would be enough to keep us occupied for generations”.

He continues: “We assume that without money there would be anarchy, but it is the chaotic complexity of the money system and the governments required to maintain it that is anarchic.” There then follows a lengthy section in which Chapman envisages the benefits of a moneyless world before concluding that “the greatest benefit of all would be in the reduction or elimination of the anti-social emotions of greed, hatred, selfishness and aggression, which the money system makes inevitable and we would be able to treat ourselves and each other as the sort of human beings that we claim to be”.

A lot of this book is given over to how capitalist society conditions our consciousness; how it determines the way we think and act. Chapman is adamant we can overcome this conditioning and achieve the maturity needed to help forge a better world. And this “maturity” he contests, lies “in the ability to question our inherited assumptions and to replace our primitive responses, our need to compete with and eliminate each other, by recognition of our responsibility to ourselves and to the wider universe. To free ourselves we have to “run the gauntlet of inherited impediments”.

The book’s great weakness lies, undoubtedly, in the suggestion of how we can get from capitalism to the moneyless world of free access to the benefits of civilisation. For Chapman, “the actual process of getting rid of money would require no more than the creation of a single International currency, followed by the gradual reduction in interest rates and an expansion of the quantity of money in circulation until it ceased to have any value”. Here, a closer scrutiny of the workings of capitalism and the implications of such a process, might have prompted the author to rethink this statement.

Moreover, emphasis on the democratic road to a moneyless world, how it must be the free and class-conscious decision of the majority, would have enhanced this short book.

Accepting that Chapman does not claim to be a socialist and criticism aside, this work does have its merits in revealing, quite succinctly in places, the insanity of capitalism and in advancing the benefits of establishing moneyless system of society.

This self-published, short print-run book is available from the author at: Third Millennium Press, 51 Newton Road, Bath, BA2 1RW. No price is given.

John Bissett

Letters: Education? Education? Education? (2006)

Letters to the Editors from the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Education? Education? Education?

Dear Editors,

Rarely does a newscast pass without mention of education. New initiatives are released like frantic hounds hunting down a headline. Examinations are or are not more stringent than ever they were. Primary school leavers enter secondary functionally illiterate and/or innumerate. Eight years on from being elected promising to solve all educational conundrums, the Labour government flounders on. Recently its education ministers turned on their own enforcers OFSTED for giving good reports on schools that subsequently appeared in the relegation zone of the league tables. If ever there was a paradigm of capitalism it is education.

 

When state education was established towards the end of the 19th century rote learning, lots of copying and well marshalled callisthenics was the rule. This reflected industrial processes for which those children were being prepared. Today the direct influence of capitalism is to be seen in the managerial approach; the setting and measuring of targets, a tightly controlled and prescriptive national curriculum, all inspected by the pedagogic commissars of OFSTED.

What is not considered, despite much rhetoric to the contrary, is that each child is an individual, ironic for a system that lauds individualism. In truth there is a continuum of ability in any area, not some crass equality that can be state imposed. Socialists have no difficulty with the concept of from each according to ability, an obvious recognition of difference, to each according to need, a guarantee no one can suffer or prosper due to congenital factors. Of course capitalism cannot act on this basis. The absolute need to produce for profit requires a trained workforce, why else make school attendance a legal requirement, pupils being the only members of our society forced by law into an institution without being convicted in court. Education becomes associated with a punitive regime rather than a wide variety of ways everyone, whatever their innate abilities, could enhance their lives.

At the end of the 19th century school boards were concerned about levels of truancy and poor achievement. Their answer? Industrial schools where a more vocational approach could appeal to those who were not so academic. Little changes really and cannot, until people accept that education will only be transformed along with society in general. Abolish capitalism and promote the co-operative, moneyless and worldwide common ownership that is socialism. And only then will the economic and social deprivation that is such a negative influence on so many children’s lives be done away with. Only then will education be determined by those who want to be educated, instead of it being subjected to the pet nostrums and egos of politicians.

Dave Alton, 

Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Defeatist?

Dear Editors,

I agree with most of what Adam Buick writes in “Capitalism and the quality of life” (January Socialist Standard). Just a couple of supplementary points. He mentions Lefebvre’s A Critique of Everyday Life and Debord’s Society of the Spectacle as good on criticising commodity culture. I think socialists will find any of Andre Gorz’s books better value on that subject.

The other point is what, if anything, we can do about the spread of money-commodity relations into all aspects of life. The article says “There’s nothing that can be done to stop this within the context of capitalism …” Unduly pessimistic and defeatist, I think. We can protest at every manifestation of capitalist culture we come across.

 

I remember about 30 years ago being invited to a teachers’ union meeting in California. Just before the interval the chairperson introduced a guy who promptly started to sell insurance. I was amazed and voiced my displeasure. They all looked sheepish, but nobody said anything. I’m not saying the revolution took a step forward that day. But if a few hundred, then a few thousand, then a million of us publicly declare our opposition to capitalism…

Stan Parker (by-email)

Totalitarian

Dear Editors,

In assessing Bukharin (December Socialist Standard) we must be aware he belonged to the totalitarian Bolshevik Party. He supported the Bolsheviks’ forcible dissolution of the Constituent Assembly when electors placed them in a minority. Bukharin supported the erosion of workers’ rights and use of terror against political opponents, whether right or left, including the bloody suppression by Trotsky of the Kronstadt Rebellion which was not led by right wing people, but by Socialists. The workers in Russia enjoyed less rights and freedom than the capitalist West. Bukharin was in this so-called Marxist government. The SPGB rightly calls it state capitalist. The Socialist Party existed in Britain whereas in Russia people of similar views were in labour camps or executed.

Andrew Harvey,

 Carlisle

Russia and capitalism

Dear Editors,

In the article on the First Russian Revolution of 1905 (Socialist Standard, December) you conclude that one of the many lessons to be learnt from that event is that “any worthwhile progress in human society must come, and can only come, from the working class”, and “relying on our rulers to initiate worthwhile change is as useless as the Russian peasants’ reliance on the Tsar.”

This is an unusual argument for a Marxist to make because all Russian (and other) Marxists regarded capitalism as a progressive force notwithstanding the fact that capitalism was introduced into Russia as a direct result of state policy, on the initiative of rulers – from Alexander II’s reforms in the 1860s, to Witte’s industrialisation program in the 1890s and Stolypin’s agrarian reform of 1906.

More surprising is the fact that you fail to mention the one institution in 1905 which was wholly and spontaneously a creation of the Russian working class.  This was the soviet or workers’ council.  Despite its relatively brief life, the Petersburg Soviet in 1905 assumed the character of an organised revolutionary authority and a rival power of government.  From that experience Lenin drew the conclusion that the dynamic power of the soviets, under the direction of a group of professional revolutionaries, could be harnessed to bring about a revolution which would change society from top to bottom and ultimately lead to socialism (subject to the victory of socialist revolutions elsewhere in Europe). 

In October 1917 Lenin’s political tactics succeeded when he wrested power from the Provisional Government and, ultimately, from the soviets themselves.  The voluntaristic strain in Marxism represented by Lenin and the Bolsheviks triumphed over the deterministic (and orthodox) strain represented by Martov and the Mensheviks.

Yet you suggest that the main lesson of 1905 is that “no force can cut short the natural development of society until it is ready for change”.  Do you believe that the Bolsheviks were not such a force?  And if not, what sort of “natural development” are you talking about?

Peter Bryant, 

Sydney, Australia

Reply: 

We were alluding to the development of capitalism in Russia, which the Bolsheviks were unable to avoid. In fact, they became its agents – Editors.

Questioning everything

Dear Editors,

Your reaction to my letter in the December issue when I said that I restrict my buying to essentials, was very guarded. That was a correct view to take for as I point out in my booklet Question Everything, (available without charge from me at 51 Newton Road, Bath BA2 1RW), one should accept nothing without asking what are its implications and whose interests are involved.

You point out that if it caught on employers would be able to pay us less, but they always do so anyway in order to cut costs. What they never see is that if workers have less they can only buy less. Employers see things from their own short term point of view, condemning the unemployed as layabouts and a drain on public funds until they want government support, when one reason they give for having it is to alleviate the suffering of those same unemployed.

The simple fact remains that capitalism needs that we keep buying and when I heard that  the economy was slowing I thought that socialists would want to help it to do so further so that capitalism can give way to one that was more efficient.

No system based on the competitive greed, selfishness, aggression and conflicting interests of money can be more than marginally efficient, and in this scientific and technological age in which we can produce anything that we want and send it anywhere in the world without being impeded, distracted and negated by increasing multitudes of financial complexities, the money system has become superfluous, an impediment to everything that we try to do.

Only a moneyless society could be fully efficient .

We need to differentiate between people and societies, between capitalists and capitalism,  to stop defeating our objectives by making enemies. We all are humans conditioned by and conforming to our genetic and environmental inheritance so that no one, whether fat cat or beggar can be criticised or blamed for what they are or do. We can advance that inheritance only by developing intellect and reason.

Melvin Chapman, 

Bath

Letters: The money system (2009)

Letters to the Editors from the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The money system

Dear Editors

The letter by Ken Scragg and the articles by Janet Surman in your issues of December 2008 and January 2009 herald a further evolution for homo sapiens.

We are a primitive lot. Every few decades the money system collapses and we write tomes trying to explain why, but we still cling to it as if it were sacrosanct, an integral part of us. Yet it is no more than a reflection of the primitive assumption that resources are scarce, a set of symbols that are supposed to represent those resources; but symbols are not the resources themselves nor do they produce anything, only lead to the infinite complexities of marketing and exchange in which everything that we do is controlled by cost. In a moneyless system there would be only production and distribution according to demand, a simple matter in these days of instant communication.

Economists hope that the recession will end and once again be followed by boom, but there is a limit to the creation of ever-more trivia to employ us and to stimulate our greed, so that unemployment is likely to increase without limit.

The basic tenet of the capitalist system and the one over-riding impediment to social advance is the limit we impose on the quantity of money in circulation to preserve its value, so that to rid ourselves of the money system would require no more than to allow the quantity of it to increase until it lost all value, a process that, despite all our efforts to control inflation, is happening gradually all the time.

Without that impediment there would be an advance in human understanding as significant as were the development of speech or writing. Money is just a parasite.

We are very clever but by failing to distinguish between cleverness and intelligence, cause and effect, we have allowed our primitive emotions of greed, selfishness and aggression to control our intellectual and social development, leaving us struggling against each other in wars and political/economic cut-and-thrust that defeat all attempts at social advance.

Directly or indirectly all social problems, all human sufferings have their origin in the money system. There would be no arms trade, so none would be produced or promoted; and with drugs available only on prescription we would be healthier.

Janet Surman mentioned a few of the inefficiencies and wastes of the money system, its inequalities and use of power. Its endless complexities frustrate all human endeavour. No doubt she could have gone on and on for the simple reason that nothing can be done with money that could not be done more efficiently without it. Efficiency depends upon simplicity.

Melvin Chapman, 

Bath

Reply: 

Actually, what we want is not just to abolish money but to see established a society based on the common ownership of the means of wealth production, where money would be redundant. We don’t think this will happen through money gradually losing its value, as you seem to be suggesting. It will require a determined political struggle against those who currently own and control the means of production and benefit from the money-wages-profits system that is capitalism – Editors.

Greenpeace 

 

Dear Editors

For what it is worth (really nothing) I have supported Greenpeace over a number of years. In response to a recent questionnaire as to what I thought of Greenpeace I said that the world’s problems in my opinion could only be resolved by the dismantling of capitalism. I received a reply recommending me to have a look at the New Economics Foundation.  I did this and replied as follows.

I have looked at the NEF Website and have to say that NEF is simply another reformist outfit that thinks with a little tinkering capitalism will work. On this evening’s BBC 5 o’clock news mention was made that 40,000 homes having been repossessed in the current crisis – 40,000 homes lying empty. I heard Dyson (vacuum cleaners) the inventor saying that by encouraging children in schools to learn engineering Britain could reclaim some of the lost ground in manufacturing, etc. We live in a society in which goods and services are carried out solely with the aim of making a profit. People are ejected from good homes because they haven’t the means to repay debt. Goods are manufactured abroad because labour is cheaper and owners can achieve more profit. These are the laws of the ‘free’ market economy. Oceans are poisoned because of ‘cheap’ disposal of waste. Rainforests are cleared to make way for moneymaking industries. Farming, cattle raising etc. Despite the efforts of the likes of Oxfam and Greenpeace, etc the world situation is worse now than ever. People in the Third World starve not because there isn’t enough food but because they are too poor to buy it. Think of that.

The alternative is a cooperative form of production whereby goods are produced not for profit but to meet needs. This means that ownership of the means of creating wealth, i.e. factories, land, resources have to be taken away from the few who currently own them so that they become the property of all the people under democratic control.

Just think – governments are currently subsidising car manufacturers to keep people producing cars that are not needed in order to keep people in jobs. I have sympathy for the poor devils thrown out of jobs leading to all sorts of problems (loss of homes etc) but what a crazy state of affairs.

I received a reply saying that by their calculations we’ve only got about seven years to get on top of the problem of climate change and that the writer didn’t think the change of economic system I was suggesting could be made in that sort of timetable. Maybe not, but what if the problem just cannot be solved within the present economic system? That would be seven wasted years.

Peter Finch, 

Reading

Who needs money? (1992)

Book Review from the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money & Survival. By Melvin Chapman. Third Millenium Press. £5.85.

The basic proposition of this book is that money is the organising force in society but that it is inefficient, wasteful and inhumane and should be dispensed with before nuclear war or ecological disaster overwhelm human beings.

Many of the topics Melvin Chapman deals with, such as education, crime, human nature, production for need, and the wastefulness of the financial system are familiar to socialists. What they will find lacking, however, is any acknowledgement of the historical development of capitalism which gave rise to the universal power of money with which he is so concerned; any examination of the class structure of modern society which has been responsible for the unsatisfying and mainly unhappy lives of most of the population—the working class.

A disproportionate amount of space (twenty-two pages) early in the book is devoted to an examination of the social losses resulting from the running down of the railway system in Britain. Many readers (including this one) will be unable to judge whether his figures for tonnages of freight carried and passenger miles travelled help to justify his conclusions that the British transport system has been less efficient overall as a result. And the impact of the chapter is further weakened by his use of the term “money” to cover almost every aspect of capitalist economics. What he is trying to show, presumably, is that profitability is not the same thing as efficiency and often works against it, in spite of the loud claims made by politicians and economists. But he should have said so.

A similar obscurity or reticence blunts many of the other points made in the book. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of acute perception here of the workings of modern society and the way in which life would change when money was no longer regulating production, consumption and behaviour.

In not giving any attention to the fact that society's means of production and distribution are owned and controlled by a small section of the population, Melvin Chapman helps to make his arguments for a moneyless society seem unrealistic, and that is a pity. When he deals with the question of property he considers little other than personal property and sees no reason why the owners of fortunes should not be allowed to keep them. He does not seem to realise that the poverty and the drudgery of the working class is caused by the profits, rents and interest extracted by these fortunes from unpaid labour. Nowhere, in other words, does he consider the nature of capital.

Without this class dimension, Melvin Chapman has no suggestion of a social force to bring about his moneyless society other than the power of a "good idea”. Subscribing, if only tacitly, to the myth that ours is a united society with common interests, he lays the responsibility for the piecemeal removal of money upon "The Government”, without questioning how it is that governments have never yet made the economy operate in the interests of the whole population.

Money & Survival is interesting to socialists in that it makes a wide-ranging indictment of capitalist society without, apparently, owing anything to the Marxian tradition. But it demonstrates, yet again, how crucial was the contribution of Marx and Engels in identifying and analysing the class nature of capital.

Ron Cook

Letters: It is money that impedes everything (1996)

Letters to the Editors from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is money that impedes everything

Dear Editors,

I have been wondering whether to renew my subscription to the Socialist Standard for the coming year, for there are many differences between your views and mine on how to achieve a just and equitable society. For instance, the expressions that you use. such as capitalists, workers, class, are generally regarded as out-of-date concepts and are likely to lose support. Most of us have savings, however little, that have to be invested somewhere if they are not to lose value because of inflation, so we all are capitalists. Again, what is a worker? Few of us slave in a foundry any more. Are we to be excluded from your endeavours?

Even if elected on such a ticket, your parliamentary candidates are unlikely to have any effect on policy or public opinion, and they would only be endorsing the concept of government. Our aim, surely, is to achieve freedom from control by fallible leaders, whatever their ideology.

No-one is better or worse than anyone else. We are no more than the product of our heredity and of the environment in which we find ourselves. If humans are to change, if societies are to eliminate anti-social behaviour, the environment in which they exist must be changed first. That is our task, but change itself requires an atmosphere of reason, an education system that questions, that stimulates interest and enquiry and recognises that concern for our fellows is the greater self-interest.

Unemployment, capitalism, bureaucracy, poverty, are no more than effects. We need to look at fundamental causes. It is claimed that money is the catalyst without which the productive process would collapse in chaos. Yet in reality it is money that impedes everything that we aim to do. The amount of money that we desire to use, whether for education, health, transport or anything else has to be restricted in order to maintain its value. We are so conditioned by it that we cannot imagine society functioning without it. It is all-pervasive, all-corrupting. No socialist society, no conceivable economic or political system, could survive long enough for it to wither away, and since it creates deprivation as well as wealth, it must create conflict also. Only by first eliminating the money system will we achieve a just and stable society.

We need to recognise that we all differ from each other, have different desires and aspirations, so that what we think of as equality depends upon the view of the individual. To take from one to give to another— or even to the community at large—merely provokes confrontation. Such confrontation could be avoided only in an economy that did not impose an artificial scarcity on human and material resources, and in which production would have no limit.

We need to work together to eliminate the underlying fundamental concepts that impede us in everything we do. Fighting each other, allowing ourselves to be distracted by differences of approach and to quarrel over their effects is self-defeating.

Only by co-operation, reason, debate and listening to others rather than deriding or condemning them, are we likely to achieve our objectives.

So I shall be renewing my subscription not because I agree with all you say but because it is the better world that matters, not differences among ourselves.

Melvin Chapman, 

Bath

Reply:
We talk about class because this is the basic feature of present-day society. The productive resources of society are owned and controlled by a minority class and are run for their benefit

Figures (produced by the Inland Revenue and the Statistical Office) show that the ownership of income-yielding financial assets—which are ownership rights over productive resources—is concentrated in the hands of this minority. The top five percent own over 50 percent which is as much as the other 95 percent of us added together. Every one of them owns on average about twenty times as much as everyone else.

This enables them to live on the unearned income their ownership rights provide. Their wealth gives their children privileged access to the top posts in industry and the state, where they are enabled to enjoy bloated “salaries” which bear no relation to the work they do and are in fact a way of giving them a share of the profits produced by the useful majority in society. They are the Establishment, the ruling class, the capitalists.

The other class is made up of the rest of us, who are forced by economic necessity to seek an employer in order to get a living. This is irrespective of the sort of job or type of work we do or indeed irrespective of whether or not we are actually able to find an employer. So we are talking about office workers, civil servants, hospital workers, salespeople, even managers and supervisors, and the unwaged as well as miners, bricklayers and foundry workers—in all, well over 90 percent of the population in an industrialised and urbanised country like Britain.

There is no such thing as a middle class. The so-called middle class is merely a part of the working class. Having a small income from your savings to top up your pension doesn't make up a capitalist. For that you would need to own at least £250,000 in addition to your house—which is the capitalists’ own definition of a capitalist, being the requirement to be a Lloyd's Name.

We can’t see how you can deny that we are living in a class society and that this is the all-important social fact that those of us seeking social change must take into account. In fact, that the immense majority are excluded from the ownership and control of productive resources means that there is a group in society that has a material interest in ending this state of affairs by establishing a society of common ownership and democratic control, it means that socialism is not some ideal society to which all people of goodwill are somehow to be converted. It provides it with a basis in social reality, with a group of people—the overwhelming majority, it so happens—who have an interest in establishing it as the practical solution to the problems they face.

When the overwhelming majority—the working class, as we define it—take conscious democratic political action to do this, classes can then be abolished and a genuine community with a common social interest created. Production will be switched from production for sale on a market with a view to profit to production to satisfy people’s needs. Money—as a means of exchange, a means to buy things produced for sale— will become redundant and disappear.

The existence of money and the existence of socialism are incompatible, since the existence of money implies the existence both of exchange and of private property whereas socialism, as a society of common ownership and production for use, implies the non-existence of both and so also of the need for money.

This is why we don’t understand what you mean when you say that money would have to be eliminated before a viable socialist society could be established. Under capitalism money is very useful, indeed indispensable. Without it capitalism could not function; to try to abolish it would lead to chaos and economic breakdown. So we don’t stand for the abolition of money now under capitalism. What we stand for is the establishment of the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources; this will allow production to be geared directly to meeting people’s needs, so making money unnecessary.

A society dominated by money is one of the effects of capitalism, not its cause as you seem to imply. The only way to end the nefarious effects of money that you correctly identify is to establish socialism, where human values can flourish instead of the commercial and financial values that distort and debase our lives today. 

Editors

Reading the real thing

Dear Editors,

For years I believed I was a socialist, until I began to read socialist literature, the real stuff of course. It became increasingly obvious that I was a reformer.

The first discovery was that nationalisation was not common ownership. There's that old joke that when the coal industry was nationalised, the old lady went from the mining village to the pithead to fill her bucket up; she was promptly told to go and buy it the same as everyone else has to. Public ownership to her meant it was free. The previous owners still got their money through government bonds and the interest. Miners still had to fight for wage rises and safer and better working conditions.

The turning point for me was realising that capitalism cannot be reformed even if it wanted to. Its reason to exist is profit, without which it cannot continue.

When you read of people who say they have given many years of loyalty and have been made redundant, they of course do not understand the system they live under. They are a commodity and as such are expendable. When you hear the Opposition spokesman for education saying we must educate our children so as we can compete in an increasingly competitive world, it’s obvious he is talking about training a future workforce of commodities, not trying to get children to have a love of learning for its own sake. When you have a leader of a so-called socialist party who wants to send his son to a grant-maintained school rather than a state school, you realise what hypocrites they are.

That phrase “the manufacture of consent", or that even more apt phrase “the engineering of consent”, tells all where people accept long-term unemployment, repossessions, poor housing, going to the benefits office, plus of course wars where the unemployed are called upon to be patriots to look after the interests of capital.

In a stateless, classless and moneyless world society, from whatever angle you examine it, the problems that hitherto occurred would not happen. If only people would realise the power they have.

Gerry Geraghty, 

Colchester

The Money Barrier (1997)

Book Review from the August 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Universal Impediment. By “Chappie”, (Third Millennium Press, 51 Newton Rd, Bath BA2 1RW.)

The universal impediment is, of course, money. The author demolishes the arguments used by conventional economists to defend money, that it is a simple tool that facilitates in the most efficient way possible the production and exchange of goods and services.

Money is certainly better than barter, the author concedes, but goes on to point out that the money system requires a large and wasteful bureaucracy to control its operation, from those involved in the production and control of the currency through those concerned with tracking down and trying to suppress financial fraud (indeed, 90 percent of all crimes) to all those whose job it is to take in or pay out or count or stand guard over money. All this wastes resources and distorts production. “Money is not", he concludes, "the catalyst essential to growth and progress or to the creation of wealth, it follows or impedes them. It is their wasteful and inefficient impediment".

The author looks forward to the time when the money system will have disappeared: "With lack of funding impeding progress no longer, and the complexities of the money system replaced by the simple manipulation of quantities, of production and distribution tailored to environmental and human needs, and with information, undistorted by advertising, freely available, the possibilities would be limitless".

The author doesn’t write as a Socialist. In fact he repudiates socialism which he sees as a project, not to abolish money, but to take money from the rich to give to the poor. To be honest, since most of those who have called (and call) themselves socialists have taken this position, it is an understandable enough mistake. It also needs to be underlined that the aim of Socialists is not to simply abolish money as such but to establish the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, which will have as one of its consequences the disappearance of money.

The great weakness of this book is how the author sees a world moneyless society coming into being. He repudiates the class struggle and the winning of political power by a socialist party and instead envisages money gradually falling out of use following the establishment of a single world currency (which, somewhat strangely, he sees as a step on the road to the eventual disappearance of money).

This process is to be initiated by the UN and its agencies. No doubt when socialism is established such administrative structures will play a key role in balancing production and needs but the UN is made up of capitalist states. For it to change, political power in those states will have to pass out of the hands of their capitalist ruling class and into the hands of the working class—the vast majority of their populations constrained to work for a wage or salary.

So it comes back to the need for a consciously socialist majority to win control of political power after all. This is an essential precondition for the establishment of a world socialist society, the only basis on which Chappie's vision of a world without money can come into being.

Adam Buick

Letters to the Editors: Money must go (1997)

Letters to the Editors from the November 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money must go

Dear Editors,

I wish to thank you for your review (August) of my book The Universal Impediment, in particular because, despite having sent copies to many persons and organisations likely to be interested, I have received virtually no comment, favourable or otherwise. That perhaps is because it is difficult to imagine how society could function without money. You may have voiced the general reaction therefore when you said that the weakness of the book lies in how it could be achieved. I recognised the problem. Because we cannot visualise how something can be done we tend to assume that it can’t be done and therefore should not be attempted. That is why my suggestions were not intended as a blueprint but to point out that that which we create we can eliminate.

Again, if I do not call myself a socialist it is only because socialism itself has to move on. Just as 18th century capitalism became inappropriate in the nineteenth century, so 19th century socialism is no longer the complete answer to the problems of the twentieth. Social thinking cannot stand still. We progress only by returning to and questioning fundamentals.

But my main concern was that freedom and scarcity, the two essential features of my thesis— and of human satisfaction—were not mentioned.

Government of whatever sort, elected or not. must by definition, be dictatorial. As we have seen in Russia and elsewhere, a socialism that is imposed from above, whatever its merits, always defeats its objectives. Putting the means of production in the hands of the community is a meaningless concept if that community is itself dictatorial. Party politics, the exercise of power for years by one sector over the rest, is no exception.

As I explained, the money system justifies itself by maintaining the concept of scarcity, but today there need be no scarcity. Already, by genetic manipulation, we are able to produce enough food to feed the world. If we cannot yet duplicate all nature’s resources, we have the technology to create substitutes or alternatives to them to meet all our needs and wants, giving us a world of plenty, so that the money system—and its corollaries, power and government—become not just superfluous but a crippling impediment to production and distribution. No longer is it necessary to take from Peter to give to Paul, to fight over that which could freely and plentifully be made available to everyone.

Not only is the money system inefficient, wasteful and socially destructive, but it will corrupt any system in which it operates. This means that there can be no fundamental social advance while we retain a money system. Like all radical concepts, social organisation without money is difficult to envisage and therefore seems impossible, but we ignore the implications of refusing to do so at our peril.

Melvin Chapman,

Bath

And wages too

Dear Editors,

I would like to thank you for having reviewed Bread & Roses in your September issue, though I found myself in disagreement with a few points mentioned in the review concerning both the IWW historically and today.

The Industrial Workers of the World was founded in 1905 and was a very influential union for the first twenty years of its history. In fact, despite the attempts of the American State to crush it both during the First World War and at the time of the Russian Revolution, it continued expanding to reach a peak membership of 100,000 in 1923. The IWW began to decline in 1924 as a result of a split between those who wanted to build links with the Communist Party and those who were opposed to this.

I am not convinced that in 1907 the IWW came to be controlled by doctrinaire Anarcho-Syndicalists (the term was not then in use). The IWW refused to align itself with any political parties or ideologies because its role was to organise the workers of the world into one big union to "end the use of workers against each other anywhere—in the same plant, or in the same industry, or across oceans, in peace or war. either to cut each other’s pay or to kill each other’s kids". (Fred Thompson in the introduction Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology.)

Experience had taught them that (i) parties and ideological groups were more interested in promoting their own philosophies and taking control of the union than in promoting industrial unionism, and (ii) that, as explained by your reviewer, the membership of the union would then not have had many more members than there were members of the Socialist Party.

It is our aim to unite all workers into an organisation committed to what we believe to be the basic principles which are vital to any successful labour movement, that is, solidarity, internal democracy. a commitment to changing things ourselves rather than relying upon leaders to change things for us, and having an ultimate aim, which for us means Industrial Democracy and the abolition of the wages system.

The IWW has always had a large influence both through it own activity and also in its influence on other unions. It is because of this that the IWW is worth promoting today. Currently the IWW is in the rise and has negotiating rights and a workplace presence in a large number of towns and cities across North America. It is true that the IWW is still essentially a propagandist group, but for a growing proportion of our members it is also a functioning union. To give just one example, there is a rapidly expanding Construction workers section, some of whose members recently brought 300 building workers out on strike in support of the United Parcel Service strikers.

Our union is also spreading again throughout the world, with increasing activity not just in places where the IWW has been active before like Britain and Australia, but also in Japan, Taiwan, Russia, the Ukraine, Germany, Austria, Colombia, Sweden and. most importantly, West Africa, where our office in Sierra Leone was looted by soldiers during the recent coup there.

Bill Runacre,

Reading.