Feasible (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Make Capitalism History. A Practical Framework for Utopia and the Transformation of Society. By Simon Sutterlütti and Stefan Meretz. Palgrave McMillan.

The authors state that one reason for writing their book (which first appeared in German in 2023) was to get those engaged in various struggles to try to make things better under capitalism to seriously consider (rather than just in ‘late night pub talks,’ as they put it) what a feasible, rationally justified alternative society might look like.

Starting from the basic position that humans naturally want to satisfy their needs as they themselves define them, they argue that a free society can only be one where people are no longer forced to work by economic necessity and where people have secure, open access to what they require to satisfy their needs (they mention ‘places resembling modern-day supermarkets but without checkout’); work has to be freely chosen and people must be free to use productive resources to both produce and consume what they need; private ownership has to be replaced by ‘collective disposition’ (they prefer ‘disposition’ as ‘ownership’ has connotations of exclusion whereas productive resources and their products will belong to nobody but just be there to be used ). They call the new society ‘commonism’, but it is obviously socialism.

They are opposed to any form of central planning, on the grounds that it wouldn’t work and that attempting it would give power over people to the central planners. In fact, they are opposed to any central administrative body, even if unarmed and selected democratically. What they envisage is production and distribution taking place through ‘stigmergy’ (communication by signs) which apparently is how termites communicate to build their constructions. Capitalism does this without central planning with prices as the signs; ‘commonism’ would do it through (non-monetary) signals about needs.

They describe well that under capitalism the aim of production is that ‘money must be invested as capital in order to multiply itself’ (‘valorisation’)    and that this is ‘not the result of the greed of managers or shareholders’ but ‘derives from a structural compulsion to valorise that is built into the system’ and enforced through competition: ‘if producers display inferior valorisation, therefore less profit than their competitors, they will be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis advertising, the development or acquisition of new machines, the design of new products and so on. That is why, in the short or long-term, they will be defeated in competition and disappear from the market.’ The state has some autonomy to resist this as it acquires money not by exchange but through taxation; this autonomy, however, ‘remains relative, as state taxes in turn depend on a functioning economy … Therefore, the economy is the dominant sphere encompassing the state’.

They don’t regard state-dominated economies, such as the former USSR, as capitalist — in fact they follow the annoying practice of Continental academics of referring to them as ‘Real Socialism’ in the sense of a ‘socialism’ that really existed— but as being subject, through participation in the world market, to the same economic compulsions; also that state ownership is still a property form, excluding the majority.

The second part of the book is devoted to discussing how to get to ‘commonism’. Here, they insist, a free society can only be established by people who want it and freely choose to establish it; people cannot be forced to be free; a free society cannot be introduced from above by the state, as envisaged by gradualist reformists as well as by violent insurrectionists. Beyond not taking this route, the authors are fairly agnostic, though they also rule out the idea that worker cooperatives could outcompete capitalist corporations on the market or that voluntary communes (‘commons’, they call them) could spread by-passing the market. They seem to envisage as most likely the ‘transvolution’ (their alternative word for revolution) being set off by some catastrophe such as an economic collapse of capitalism or an ecological collapse.

In the last chapter they relent a bit on their opposition to political action and concede that it is conceivable that the state could support the spread of ‘commonist forms’ before dissolving itself — they write of a ‘suicide state’ — giving the movement for a free society a leg-up, or as they put it ‘a stirrup holder, an accomplice to emancipation’.

Adam Buick

Work: Paid and unpaid (part 2) (2026)

From the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part 1 of this article last month considered how people react to work according to whether it is paid or unpaid and how hierarchised and authoritarian work structures are increasingly affecting their lives. This second part looks at the feasibility of attempts to ‘humanise’ work under the current system of production for profit and points to how such humanisation is only truly feasible in the context of a different social system.

Together with the intensification of the employment process previously discussed, in recent years there has also been considerable discussion about whether there might be more effective and efficient, and at the same time more humane, ways of organising work – even within the existing system of production for profit.

Hierarchy challenged

There are examples of companies instituting freer, less rigid work structures and even more ‘equal’ pay. One of the most striking instances has been the American ‘Valve’ video game company where the owner decided to establish a ‘flat’ non-directive structure based on the conviction that people work better and more efficiently when they’re relaxed and don’t feel they’re being surveilled and constantly judged. Another example is the financial services company Gravity Payments. Here the CEO decided to pay all his staff a minimum wage of $70,000, that being the amount he decided was necessary to live what he called ‘a normal life’. This compared with the previous average salary of $48,000. At the same time, he slashed his own salary of $1.1m to the same $70,000. Then a recent programme in the ‘Analysis’ series on BBC Radio 4 asking the question ‘Does Work Have To Be Miserable?’, included the boss of the Howorth Air Tech company in Salford explaining how he had moved strongly in the direction of putting resources into helping to bring out his employees’ latent talents and not simply regarding them as ‘factors of production’.

Other reactions to hierarchy and authoritarian work practices in capitalism have included a beneath-the-radar move among some workers away from the conventional jobs market – a rejection, partial at least, of the normally life-sapping existence of wage and salary work to lead what has been called ‘a low-desire life without gruelling competition’. Those who choose this path still do of course need to carry out some paid work and to participate in the buying and selling system, but what they are seeking is an existence that offers them more freedom and less stress. This kind of choice was recently highlighted in the BBC radio series ‘The Digital Human’ where the presenter, Aleks Krotosky, talked about how, unexpectedly, in China, a country she referred to as ‘the most competitive society on earth’, a good number of young people were managing to ‘opt out’ from full-time paid work and attempt to lead that ‘low-desire life’.

Reorganising capitalism?

The more radical view, such as espoused by the Socialist Party, that the nature of work can only be fundamentally altered by a new social system, also has advocates in a significant number of quarters. In a ‘Ted Talk’ from the University of Edinburgh given by Jade Saab in 2018 and called ‘A World Without Money’, the speaker includes a section entitled ‘Why and how we work will be different’. On social media too there are groups hosting similar discussions with names that speak for themselves, for example ‘Moneyless Society’, ‘World of Free Access’, and ‘A group around the world where we are all anti-capitalist’. This is matched in book publication by more than just a few writers proposing various different kinds of non-hierarchical work organisation.

Some of these proposals, when closely scrutinised, amount to suggestions for reorganising capitalism, which we would regard as utopian, since it would be impossible in reality for the capitalist system, given its profit-seeking basis, to implement them. We would agree with Anitra Nelson, in her book Beyond Money. A Post-Capitalist Strategy, that ‘modified forms of money and markets … are bound to fail’ with the vast majority being ‘unable to enjoy the full benefits of their everyday work and have little say in how they live or work’. Her conclusion is that we cannot ‘tweak the system to overcome its weaknesses’.

Such flaws as pointed to by that writer are also to be found in otherwise perceptive books about work such as Daniel Susskind’s A World Without Work. Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond (2020) and Michael D. Yates’s Work, Work, Work. Labour, Alienation and Class Struggle (2022). But even if the conclusions of those writers fall short of advocating a completely different social order or of being convinced that this may be possible in the foreseeable future, they can still have a lot of powerfully relevant things to say about work and its meaning in human society. Susskind, for example, while in the end not venturing beyond the idea of buying and selling, describes work as ‘a source of meaning, purpose and direction in life with community recognition of that work rather than wages fulfilling the human longing for personal fulfilment and social interaction’. Yates, for his part, states: ‘Regarding work (…) we should strive for a society in which this word is no longer used except to describe the past. What we are, as human beings, is a species that can thoughtfully produce what is needed for survival and enjoyment (…) only cooperative and beneficial production, with substantive equality in all aspects of life’.

Work in a non-market society

But others go further in seeing as a practical possibility a society where work in exchange for payment would not need to take place at all – and this within the framework of a completely different social system than the one that dominates the world at present. Recent examples of this outlook are to be found in Matthew Holten’s book, Moneyless Society. The Next Economic Evolution, in Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work, and in Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass. These writers stress the downsides of employment for money with its imposition of a daily stretch of work, lack of variety, hierarchical organisation, and the potential precariousness of keeping your job. And they are generally keen to point to the fact that, in a future post-capitalist, non-market society, non-socially productive activity (e.g armaments, insurance, banking, sales promotion, taxation, legal contracts, etc) will disappear and all the work that takes place will have a useful and necessary function with no stigma attached to any of it.

As to specific details of how work could be organised in a non-monetary society and the nature it would take, it is probably Benanav who puts his finger on it most tellingly. In his final chapter, entitled ‘Necessity and Freedom’, he argues for ‘the abolition of private property and monetary exchange in favor of planned cooperation’, and ‘a world of fully capacitated individuals … in which every single person could look forward to developing their interests and abilities with full social support’ and which will be ‘the first time in their lives that they could enter truly voluntary agreements – without the gun to their heads of a pervasive material insecurity’. He goes on to say that ‘we would divide up responsibilities while taking into account individual aptitudes and proclivities’ with some tasks needing to be performed locally, but many capable of being ‘planned on a regional or global scale, using advanced computer technologies’. And finally: ‘The realm of freedom would be the one giving rise to all manner of dynamism: that is where human beings would invent new tools, instruments, and methods of accounting, as well as new games and gadgets, rapidly reallocating resources over time and space to suit changing human tastes (…). The world would then be composed of overlapping partial plans, with interrelated necessary and free activities, rather than a single central plan’.

Commentators such as these are clearly not talking here about strategies within capitalism for dealing with problems thrown up by that system, for example climate change or environmental degradation. They are not looking for more ‘sustainable’ ways for production, consumption and work to continue much as before, for ‘green deals’ or for ways of finding replacement work for those who lose their jobs through automation. They are talking rather about a society in which people will no longer have to do jobs they do not necessarily like (or may even hate) just for the money but will be able to do work they want to do and ideally enjoy doing. And for any ‘less popular’ jobs, there would be a focus on automation and the use of robotics to give assistance.

Above all one of the first things that will end in the kind of society being envisaged, which we would call socialism, is the link between work and consumption: what people will consume will not depend on the amount of work they do. Above all people will cooperate to do the work that makes society function and they will make decisions democratically – in workplaces, in their local communities, in their regions and, in some overarching cases, no doubt even globally. Above all there will no longer be top-down control by leaders, governments and bosses and no more money controlling people’s lives, wasting so much of our time and energy. There will be no useless toil, only useful work.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

The following books that were mentioned in the article have been previously reviewed in the pages of the Socialist Standard:

• Mar 2020: A World Without Work. Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind
• Feb 2021: Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav
• Oct 2022: Beyond Money. A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson
• Jan 2023: Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution by Matthew Holten
• Mar 2023: Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass
• Oct 2023: Work Work Work. Labor, Alienation and Class Struggle. By Michael D. Yates

The dictatorship of employment (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a recent article in the Guardian, two of the most active voices in the ‘degrowth’ movement, Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis, argued the need to ‘move beyond the capitalist model and save the climate’. They laid out the paradox of an Earth with the technology to produce everything everyone could reasonably need while at the same time ‘millions of people suffer in conditions of severe deprivation’.

They attribute this to capitalism, which they explain as ‘an economic system that boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets’. They go on to say that, even in political democracies where the majority can choose which party shall govern, nothing seems to change and the majority who do the producing have no say in ‘what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit’.

What they are saying, in other words, is that the economic system, whichever regime or government oversees it, is the same. And that system has the objective of producing ‘to maximise and accumulate profit’ rather than to satisfy human needs or have regard for the earth’s ecology. This, the writers continue, compels a ‘perpetual growth’ imperative which leads to production being focused on goods and services that are likely to find a market regardless of whether they are genuinely useful. Examples they give of this are ‘massive production of things such as SUVs, mansions and fast fashion’, as well as the use of fossil fuels rather than renewable energy, They point out that, though renewables like solar are much cheaper to produce than fossil fuels, ‘fossil fuels are up to three times as profitable’, causing environmental considerations to be swept aside, ‘even while the world burns’.

The article sums this up in the following resonant fashion: ‘Here we are: trapped in capitalism’s set of priorities, which are inimical to humanity’s. Human ingenuity has bequeathed us splendid technologies and capacities. But, like a cruel divinity, capital not only prevents us from using them for our collective good, but in fact coerces us to deploy them towards our collective doom.’ And in this connection they point to another undeniable and very current reality: how the imperatives of capitalist production lead to violence and wars as advanced economies, via their governments, jostle for advantage over others using tools such as ‘debt, sanctions, coups and even outright military invasions’.

So what is the remedy Hickel and Varoufakis propose for all this? We must, they argue, ‘democratise our economy, so that we can organise production around urgent social and ecological priorities’, since ‘we are the producers of the goods, the services, the technologies’, and it is ‘our labour and our planet’s resources that are at stake’. To achieve this they recommend actions such as an extension of ‘public finance for public purposes’ via ‘a new public investment bank … in association with the central banks’, and an injection of ‘deliberative democracy’ into the economic sphere via a ‘Great Corporate Reform Act’ so that the workplace ceases to be ‘a dead end dictatorship’ and each employee gets to have a say in the operation of the company they work for. ‘We live’, they conclude, ‘in a shadow of the world we could create’, one in which ‘the abolition of economic insecurity, precarity, poverty, unemployment and indignity is possible, while we lead meaningful lives within planetary boundaries’.

A good deal of this is attractive, even inspiring, stuff, laying out an analysis of capitalism and a vision of the future that we could at least partly endorse. Only partly, however, since it fails to take into account certain important considerations, making similar mistakes to a number of recent commentators whose ‘post-capitalist’ ideas have often been discussed or reviewed in the pages of the Socialist Standard. This lies in the notion – utopian we would call it – that it is possible to have a society of equality, of choice of activity and of workplace democracy while retaining finance, money and governments. Even if governments were to intervene to a greater extent than they do now in the market and the buying and selling economy of capitalism, as these commentators would like, they could not resist that system’s economic laws and, if they tried, would end up triggering financial crises leading to lay-offs, unemployment and the majority of people turning against them.

Other policies ‘post-capitalist’ commentators advocate such as a guaranteed minimum wage or universal basis income would be equally subject to extreme strain under pressure of the need for each company to produce goods for profit in competition with others. And this would be the case even if somehow workers were allowed to have some form of control over the running of production or services in their workplace. As Anitra Nelson in her 2022 book, Beyond Money: a Post-Capitalist Strategy, explains, all attempts, no matter how well meaning, to ‘mould money to progressive ends’ are bound to fail. We simply cannot, as she puts it, ‘tweak the system to overcome its weaknesses’.

So while the world that Hickel and Varoufakis – as well as others with similar views – refer to as ‘post-capitalist’ might, in many of the ways they frame it, seem tantalisingly close to the Socialist Party’s vision, it could only at best amount to a more benign form of capitalism, and at worst lead to economic chaos stemming from the fact that production under the money and buying and selling system cannot, by the very nature of that system, be redirected from profit-seeking to meeting people’s needs. All this would be like trying to build safely on seismic ground. A true ‘post-capitalist’ society can only be established once the current economic system has been abolished democratically (ideally voted out) by a majority of the world’s workers and society reorganised on the basis of common ownership and democratic control of the world’s productive forces – a system of production and distribution for human need where each individual has free and equal access to a common store of goods, services and amenities.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Anitra Nelson's book, Beyond Money: a Post-Capitalist Strategy, was reviewed in the October 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard by the author of this article.

What if there’s a shortage? (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

For a socialist post-capitalist society to come about presupposes two basic things. In the absence of either of these (and, even more so, both), this society would not be realisable.

Firstly, you have to have a majority of people who want it, understand what it entails and are committed to seeing it flourish and succeed. It cannot be imposed from above by a minority, however enlightened or well-meaning.

Secondly, you have to have in place an advanced technological infrastructure that has at least the potential to enable us to adequately meet the reasonable needs of the population. In other words, to more or less ensure ‘plenty’. The more output were to fall below the level required to meet these needs, the greater the strain that would be imposed upon the particular kind of social arrangement that defines a post-capitalist society – a society characterised by the free distribution of goods and services provided by the voluntary work of its members.

What is plenty?

Of course, what is meant by ‘plenty’ is something relative; it depends not just on physical output but, also, on our values. When we talk of ‘plenty’ the question always arises – ‘in relation to what’?

If what you deem to be minimally acceptable as a standard is something so extravagant as a sprawling multi-bedroomed mansion set in its own spacious grounds along with a fleet of luxury cars parked in the garage and outbuildings for the servants then, very clearly, in per capita terms, we are not going to achieve ‘plenty’ by this yardstick, in a post-capitalist society.

You can therefore forget about achieving such a society in that case. However, by the same token, you can also forget about ever extricating yourselves from the circumstances you find yourself in today which for a great many people are grim and precarious. In short, you will be lumbered with capitalism for the foreseeable future.

To achieve ‘plenty,’ then, will require us to lower the bar to something rather more realistic. This is precisely why the first of these preconditions of a post-capitalist society cannot be separated or considered in isolation from the second: to some extent they mesh together.

In principle, achieving and maintaining a state of ‘plenty’ would eliminate the need for any form of rationing – money, of course, being the means by which goods are rationed today under capitalism. However, we cannot entirely rule out the possibility of some shortages arising in a post-capitalist society, whether in the early days or from a natural disaster. That being the case, we cannot rule out some form of rationing in the sense of restrictions on the consumption of some goods.

Prior to the 20th century it probably would not have been feasible to establish such a society given that the means of production would not yet have been sufficiently developed to materially support it. This is no longer the case. Indeed, it has not been the case for quite a long time now. As a generalisation, one can say that it is fairly indisputable that the technological potential to satisfy most, if not all, of the needs of the population, globally speaking, exists today.

Not erased overnight

The legacy of capitalism’s self-inflicted shortcomings would not be able to be erased overnight. We cannot expect universal ‘plenty’ to suddenly materialise the ‘day after the revolution,’ so to speak. The apparatus of capitalist production is geared to creating and maintaining artificial scarcity. It will take some time, however short, to restructure and reorganise industry to fully meet human needs as well as ensure it is effectively managed in an environmentally sustainable fashion.

This means that at the beginning, post-capitalist society is likely to have to contend with some shortages of one kind or another for a while. However, this should not present too great an obstacle to such a society functioning properly as intended.

The reorganisation of productive capacity to realise its full potential to meet the reasonable demands of people everywhere would be happening under new conditions in that effective market demand would no longer be the determinant of what gets to be produced, as it is today under capitalism.

In a post-capitalist society, the relationship between our subjective preferences and the products we desire would be a direct one – not one mediated by money or, for that matter, labour vouchers. Insofar as comparisons need to be made between products in terms of their value to us, this would be effected entirely according to our preferences, which would simply be ranked.

Productive activity would be guided by a flexible hierarchy of production priorities, responding to shifts in the pattern of supply and demand. Our values would thus be able to directly engage with, or find expression in, the process of material production itself – by continually informing and guiding it rather than production being dominated or regulated by the impersonal laws of the capitalist market economy.

The single most important way in which productive capacity to meet human needs can be rapidly increased in a post-capitalist society is to convert that large chunk of existing productive capacity currently having nothing to do with directly meeting these needs and diverting enormous quantities of resources and labour away from those needs. This means progressively eliminating the enormous legacy of capitalism’s structural waste.

As a result a lot more in the way of socially useful output could be produced while, at the same time, the amount of resources needed overall or in the aggregate would decline significantly by comparison with what is required today. This will alleviate the unsustainable pressures currently being exerted on our global ecosystem.

In post-capitalist society we will see a dramatic shrinkage in the extent of the social division of labour, with many of the socially useless jobs we are obliged to do today no longer being required. This will allow much more labour and resources to be redirected towards socially useful production. The resultant increase in socially useful output will have obvious implications for the question of any shortages.

Dealing with shortages

Given that some shortages are likely to remain in the beginning – even if to a steadily diminishing extent, how would we deal with these shortages under the very different set of circumstances of a post-capitalist society?

In considering what form of limitation on the consumption of some goods might be most appropriate in a post-capitalist society, the possibility, however remote, needs to be taken into account that it might lend itself to the re-emergence of some form of market exchange through the back door, as labour vouchers might. Any system that would need to be implemented in a post-capitalist society would need to be scaled down to only what it was absolutely necessary to limit. It would need to be, in other words, a limited, partial system, targeting only those goods that are clearly in short supply.

What kind of goods are we talking about whose consumption might require limitation in the early years of a post-capitalist society? These would be goods that figure rather low down in our hierarchy of production goals – most notably, inessential or luxury goods. The objective would be to strictly limit or restrict only those goods subject to shortage. This would minimise the adverse psychological, cultural, and administrative costs that any system of restricting consumption unavoidably entails.

Targeting only some goods is exactly what a system of labour vouchers disallows; by its very nature, it is a universalistic form of rationing. However, the need to restrict the consumption of some good arises only in the case where there is a shortage of the good in question. Consequently, a universal system of rationing, which is what a system of labour vouchers amounts to, would therefore seem to imply, on the face of it, a condition of generalised or widespread scarcity applicable to each and every good.

But how can this be reconciled with the claim that a communistic post-capitalist society is firmly predicated on the real prospect of material abundance? How can we even envisage that such a society might be possible if all around us we see, not the portents of post-scarcity, but a chronic and all-pervading shortage of everything?

While there might well be some shortages in the very early stages of a post-capitalist society, the idea that there will be shortages of everything – universal or generalised scarcity – is hardly credible. Even today under capitalism this is not the case, as for example in food production and housing.

For a system of ‘free distribution’ to come about, people need to be mature and adult enough to recognise what is and what is not possible. They also need to feel confident that, broadly speaking, all their reasonable requirements for food, shelter, clothing, medical attention and so on are capable of being satisfactorily met under this arrangement, allowing for the occasional shortage of some items.

Robin Cox

Letter: Beyond money (2025)

Letter to the Editors from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Beyond money

Dear Editors

I want to thank the Socialist Standard for the thoughtful and generous review of my book Unchained: Living Without Money in the September 2025 issue. It is both humbling and encouraging to see my work placed in conversation with such a long tradition of literature and activism envisioning a society beyond money.

Your review captured well the spirit in which the book was written: to help people imagine what it might look like to move from a system based on scarcity and profit to one rooted in cooperation, equity, and access. I especially appreciate your recognition of how Unchained seeks to address common objections — from ‘human nature’ to so-called ‘dirty work’ — in ways that reframe the conversation around what capitalism itself conditions us to believe.

At the same time, I want to briefly clarify the ‘non-political’ framing you note. My intent was not to dismiss the necessity of political action, but to emphasize the power of grassroots practice, imagination, and lived experiments in shifting consciousness. Free stores, time banks, mutual aid networks, and community projects may not abolish capitalism on their own, but they expand people’s horizons of possibility. They give form to what many assume is impossible and, in doing so, prepare the ground for larger systemic change.

I understand and respect the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s long-standing position that governments under capitalism cannot be instruments for emancipation. Where I differ is in leaving space for the possibility that policies such as universal housing or healthcare, while constrained, can normalize access-based thinking and open cracks through which movements grow. History is full of examples where small openings in the system gave people the courage and imagination to demand far more. I do not view these reforms as endpoints, but as catalysts.

What encourages me most is the clear common ground between us. Whether we emphasize revolutionary political action or grassroots contributionist models, the destination we envision is strikingly similar: a democratic world without money, bosses, or exploitation, where governance becomes the transparent administration of things and not the rule of people. I believe the diversity of approaches can be complementary rather than contradictory. Political strategy and cultural practice need not compete; together they can reinforce one another in the shared project of building a society based on need, not profit.

Thank you again for your generous reading. I hope Unchained can continue to serve as a small contribution to the broader movement the SPGB has long championed. The task before us is too urgent and too vast to allow our differences of approach to overshadow the deep unity of purpose that animates us both.

Justin Fairchild

Unchained: living without money (2025)

Book Review from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent times we have reported on and reviewed a variety of books and other publications which have made the case for a world without money and buying and selling. Some of these, such as Description of the World of Tomorrow: A World Without Money or Barter or Exchange: a Civilisation of Free Access by Jean-Francois Aupetitgendre and Marc Chinal and Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution by Matthew Holten, are essentially ‘non-political’ in that they see the new society they advocate as evolving somehow ‘naturally’ through an extension of social developments they see as already taking place in the currently existing order. Others, like Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass and Beyond Money: A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson, see the change to a new moneyless, wageless, leaderless society of common ownership, democratic decision-making and free access as ultimately coming through revolutionary (albeit peaceful) channels with a focus on the need for political action by the majority to bring about that revolution.

Now to add to the list we have Unchained. Living Without Money by Justin Fairchild (2025, 269pp), which makes much the same case – and in its own refreshing and plausibly argued way. It falls very much into that first ‘non-political’ category, picking up as it does on many aspects of existing society and activities by certain groups and individuals which it sees as leading towards a different kind of society – one based on a moneyless form of living. In this objective it aligns closely with what the Socialist Party has advocated over the last 120 years: a wholly democratic society of meaningful work which frees all humans from the threat of poverty and where the government of people is replaced by the administration of things. This book staunchly argues the need for a move from – in the author’s own words – ‘a system built on scarcity and competition to one grounded in cooperation, equity, and access’.

Objections and roadmap

It also confronts very effectively indeed many of the typical objections to the possibility of this kind of society. Examples of this are the ‘human nature’ argument (ie, aren’t human beings selfish, competitive and aggressive by nature?), the ‘dirty work’ criticism (ie, ‘If there’s no money, who will take out the trash? Clean the toilets? Work in sewage treatment plants?’), and the ‘resources’ challenge (ie, would there be enough to go round?). The author answers all such objections in a convincing and well-reasoned way while providing evidence of the social conditioning that puts them in people’s heads in the first place and showing how these arise from processes fundamental to the society we live in – capitalism. He points to the way in which ‘capitalism centers money as the organizing force of life’ and ‘incentivizes cost-cutting over care, scale over sustainability, and individual gain over collective well-being’. At the same time he shows a compelling awareness of the difficulties of overcoming the existing mindset and of imagining a society without money, given that ‘the use of money is so woven into daily life’ and ‘shapes nearly every decision we make—from what we eat to how we live to what we dream about’. Yet he is clearly optimistic about the possibility for change.

But how? How will humans go about organising an interconnected world system of living without the intermediary of money? How will they, as the author puts it, ‘distribute food, housing, tools, and medicine without the invisible hand of the market or the coercive power of profit?’ To attempt to answer this, he lays out what he calls ‘a roadmap’, or ‘a framework’, for the ‘journey to a moneyless society’. And certain elements of this we would fully accept, in particular the idea that public dialogue and consciousness-raising are necessary to ‘normalize the idea that economies can be organized around needs and contributions, not scarcity and profit’ and ‘to inspire people to question the assumption that money is natural or inevitable, and to help them imagine alternatives’. We would also agree that, without widespread acceptance of the idea of a society based on need not profit, such a society could not be established. No minority group could hope to lead the majority to such a society until that majority understand it and are active participants in its establishment.

Governments and elections

But we would part company with the author in his idea that the necessary raising of consciousness can somehow be contributed to by governments. The previously mentioned ‘non-political’ nature of his vision means that he does not share (or has perhaps not considered) the Socialist Party’s view that the unchangeable role of any government in modern capitalist society is to defend and support the interests of the minority owning class – those who do not have the need to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary in order to survive. So we see as a non-starter his idea that governments can somehow be used to facilitate this process of ‘systematic transformation’ by granting, for example ‘universal access to housing, food and healthcare’, or bringing in ‘ownership laws that support open collaboration’.

Of course, there is one aspect of the current system of government that can be used to establish a marketless, free-access society – and that is the ballot box. Democratic political action by the majority class (ie, wage and salary workers) can be the instrument for establishing the kind of society whose salient features are laid out in this book. But this can only happen once this majority has the necessary consciousness and understanding of the society they wish to establish and take the necessary political power to do that. So, though, in these circumstances, a transition in people’s thinking and decision-making will have taken place, the new society will be brought in by a political revolution and not just a social ‘transition’ with capitalism being democratically voted out of existence. The point is that this new society cannot coexist with capitalism, not even, as the author has it, ‘in transition’, where, as he would like, ‘hybrid models—local currencies, time banks, free stores—can operate alongside capitalist economies’.

‘Contributionism’

Having marked this difference in perspective with the author, we can only welcome his overall vision and indeed his interesting attempts to draw a picture of a society in which ‘cooperation replaces competition, access replaces ownership, purpose replaces profit’. To this society he gives the name ‘contributionism’. He talks about education in it as being ‘holistic – teaching emotional regulation, empathy, and conflict resolution from an early age’, and as ‘no longer preparation for a career’ but ‘preparation for a life of meaning, contribution, and community’, teaching ‘people to care, to think, to connect, and to act, and nurturing ’potential, curiosity, and joy’. As for economic organisation, he lays down, in broad terms, that ‘planning and transparency replace pricing’, but also offers much more detailed proposals, stating, for example, that ‘without markets, goods must be distributed differently’, with ‘direct resource allocation’. Some ‘working models’ he puts forward are ’centralized or decentralized hubs where people access food, clothing, tools, or medical supplies based on need’, ‘digital or in-person boards where people list what they need and what they can offer with matching taking place automatically or through community coordination’, and ‘rotational use systems’ where ‘items like cars, equipment, or appliances are used on a rotating basis, tracked by open systems’. He stresses the potential of automation and AI in this process, whereby ‘resource use is tracked, shared, and constantly rebalanced to reflect actual needs, not artificial demand’. And sharing our own insistence on fully democratic organisation and decision-making, he goes on: ‘Decisions are made publicly. Everyone has a voice. Governance becomes a tool of the people’. And all this with ‘no cash, no boss—just shared trust and transparent systems.’

Wide-ranging

He has thought-provoking insights into a range of other areas too. Examples of this are the forms that art, culture and creativity would take in his ‘contributionist’ society and how ‘crime and punishment’ would be approached (‘justice is no longer synonymous with punishment’ but ‘becomes restorative—focused on healing harm— and transformative—focused on changing the conditions that created it’, and ‘without a system of winners and losers, the desperation that drives theft, fraud, and exploitation fades’). He recognises of course that no human society can eliminate all disputes between groups or individuals (‘a moneyless society does not assume perfection’), but he has clearly reflected closely on how dispute resolution in the society he is arguing for might be managed and his views on conflict resolution are nothing if not instructive and broadly summed up in the insistence that such resolution should be ‘rooted in values of restoration and community’.

In a relatively short space, it is difficult to do full justice to the wide-ranging exposition of ideas that this book presents. However, to give some idea of both its depth and breadth, we would draw attention to examples both of the trenchant nature of the author’s overall take on capitalism and of his characterisation of some of the salient features of the ‘contributionism’ (we would call it ‘socialism’) which he advocates to replace it. So, it is worth quoting the following: ‘While capitalism has generated immense material wealth and technological progress, it also rewards exploitation and short-term thinking. It incentivizes cost-cutting over care, scale over sustainability, and individual gain over collective well-being’; ‘Without money, work becomes cooperative by necessity … Instead of rigid hierarchies, decision-making is decentralized and democratic. Projects are launched based on needs, and people opt in where their interests and abilities align’; and ‘without profit pressure, decisions can center on resource stewardship, renewable energy, and ecological balance—not quarterly returns. Finally, as the author also writes: ‘A moneyless society doesn’t claim to be perfect. But it directly addresses the root issues [of] inequality, alienation, and environmental ruin.’

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Oct 2022: Description of the World of Tomorrow: A World Without Money or Barter or Exchange: a Civilisation of Free Access by Jean-Francois Aupetitgendre and Marc Chinal 

Jan 2023: Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution by Matthew Holten

Mar 2023: Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass

Oct 2022: Beyond Money: A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson

What is 'post-scarcity'?

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A post-capitalist society has to be, by its very nature, a ‘post-scarcity’ society. It has to be a society technologically capable of adequately meeting the needs of its people. This capacity constitutes the material foundations upon which the kind of social outlook and values indispensable to the very existence of such a society can arise and truly flourish. Without it, without an ample supply of the goods and services we all need to enjoy a reasonably decent standard of living, a debilitating and scarcity-driven competitive scramble will inevitably set in, undermining our willingness to cooperate with each other and sapping our desire to work for the common good.

But what exactly does an ‘ample supply of goods and services’ mean in practical terms? Obviously, what is ‘ample’ is dependent on how much we are able to produce in the first place, but it is also crucially contingent on what we ourselves consider to be ‘ample’ – our cultural values. That is to say, it is culturally conditioned.

Consumerism

In a capitalist society, your status correlates positively with how much you conspicuously consume in the form of material wealth. This is what makes consumerism such an integral aspect of our way of life under capitalism.

The point about consumerism is that there is technically no upper limit to the quantities, or money values, of goods and services you could strive to consume. Hence the emphasis on it ‘always’ being a desirable goal that one should consume more – a suggestion that conveniently chimes with the commercial interests of businesses wanting to increase their sales. More is always better. That there is no limit on how much you should consume stems from the fact that status competition itself is essentially a zero-sum game. I can only boost my social status within a status hierarchy at your expense (and vice versa).

According to the argument, it is not just that your sense of well-being and happiness is said to grow in line with your rising level of material consumption; crucially, it is also because this rising level of material consumption works to enhance your status in the eyes of others. The corollary of this is that those lower down this status hierarchy must therefore feel, to that extent, a little less satisfied and less happy with life — at least according to consumerist ideology. The only way in which they might mitigate this relative sense of dissatisfaction or deprivation is by striving to consume more – not just more but relatively more than others around them are consuming.

Our capacity to consume more is, however, dependent on us improving our economic circumstances and increasing our purchasing power, in comparison with others. But, of course, this cannot logically happen for most people in a capitalist society since the very mechanism of capitalist incentivisation itself depends on the systemic entrenchment, and even deepening, of economic inequality. Capitalism needs us to feel dissatisfied with our lot in life, by comparison with others, so we can all the more enthusiastically buy into, and embrace, what it is (literally) attempting to sell us. And, of course, work harder to achieve it.

This is an example of contrived or artificial scarcity. It is contrived because what the system is attempting to implant in us are what Marcuse called ‘false needs’.

Produce more stuff?

What can we do about it? It cannot be emphasised too much that ‘scarcity’ in this sense will not diminish and disappear simply by augmenting or adding to our capacity to produce yet more stuff – that is, by further expanding the already formidable forces of production at our disposal.

The problem is not that we lack the technological wherewithal to make a post-scarcity and post-capitalist society feasible. The problem is, rather, that we allow a system of profit-oriented and market-based production to continue to exist and to fundamentally get in the way of fully realising the productive potential we already possess.

A post-capitalist society, while it is not a recipe for a kind of stoical belt tightening is, on the other hand, not an excuse for some sort of turbocharged consumerism. The grounds for rejecting the latter are as compelling as the grounds for rejecting the former

Instead, there is a middle way, if you like. According to this approach the technological potential to meet humanity´s basic requirements for food, shelter and so on, to a reasonable level, should be looked upon as providing us with the means and the opportunity to better accommodate, or attend to, those other (and often neglected) needs we all have as human beings quite apart from our physical or material needs.

Lifestyle changes?

One thing is for certain: just privately reflecting upon the subject of consumerism and consciously seeking to adjust your own consumer behaviour, however much this might be welcomed, is not going to be enough. Not nearly enough. ‘Consumerism’ as it has been defined here is fundamentally a social phenomenon.

This is the problem with much of the currently burgeoning literature on the theme of a post-growth – and even, post-capitalist – society, awash, as it often is, with informative and penetrating insights into the negative social and environmental consequences of ‘consumerism’. The focus is too much on the particular lifestyles of particular individuals.

With some notable exceptions, there seems to be little in the way of a well-grounded analysis linking this phenomenon we call consumerism with the underlying socioeconomic relations that define our existing capitalist social order. The general tenor of the approach is essentially moralistic in tone and, ultimately, the solutions offered seem to hinge more on reforming or tinkering around with the system than getting rid of it.

Of course, changing values is undeniably important if we are to fundamentally change the nature of the society we live in. The point is simply that we cannot just rail against the ‘consumerist values’ of this society, as we see it, without understanding where they originate from, the material circumstances out of which they have arisen. Criticism has also to be coupled with a clear commitment to changing these circumstances.

Not just subjective

We need also to look at the supply side of the equation as well – not just the demand side. We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society where we can just go out and kill an antelope or gather roots whenever the hunger pangs prompt us to do so. We depend instead on a highly developed system of food production linking the farmer and the consumer through a complex chain of intermediate stages.

In other words, ‘artificial scarcity’ has an ‘objective’ dimension, aside from being rooted in an ideology. It would be absurd, for instance, to accuse a starving person or a homeless person of ‘consumerism’ because they wanted food or shelter. The scarcity they experience is real enough, but the point is that the reason for it occurring is both contrived – artificial – and inexcusable. Quite simply, people should not have to go without in this day and age. Yet they do.

One very obvious reason why this happens is the enormous diversion of human and material resources away from socially useful production into socially useless forms of economic activities. The purpose of such activities is not to meet human needs but to keep the capitalist system ticking over on its own terms.

Keeping the capitalist money system ticking over involves quite literally reducing the human and material resources available for meeting human needs. These are the very real opportunity costs of propping up a system of capitalist production, which cannot be denied or just brushed under the carpet. There are other, more direct and visible, ways in which human needs are blatantly disregarded and ignored as well. Thus, while we talk of starving and homeless people, we surely cannot be unaware of the grotesque spectacle of millions of empty homes languishing in the face of a growing problem of homelessness or food being destroyed in the face of hunger for no better reason than to push up prices or keep them high.

Such scarcity is ‘artificial’ in the sense that there is no logical reason whatsoever why it should exist other than the fact that it arises from the nature of the society we happen to live in. It will not cease to exist until this society ceases to exist and replaced by one in which meeting human needs is the sole concern.

Robin Cox

Progress perverted (2024)

Book Review from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

After Work. A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time. By Helen Hester & Nick Srnicek. Verso, 2023. 282pp.

A key concept in this book is ‘social reproduction’. What the authors mean by this is work in areas such as healthcare, education, catering and social services, as well as the essential, ‘unpaid’ work people do outside of the workplace and largely at home (cooking, caring, cleaning, etc.). They examine the contribution of this kind of work to keeping human society operating across the whole range of other work taking place in the production and distribution of goods and services. Their approach to this is to trace the evolving history of that social reproduction, in particular as it has operated in the domestic sphere over the last century and a half, the influence on it of advancing technology (eg electricity, gas, sewerage, running water, waste removal), and the changes in attitudes and expectations this has brought about. Referring to themselves as ‘socialist republicans’, they devote the final chapter of their book to examining what the future might hold for social reproduction and the home generally, especially in an imagined new social context referred to variously as ‘post-work’, ‘post-capitalism’ or ‘post-scarcity’.

This is a detailed many-faceted exposition which draws upon multiple sources and studies. They point to how capitalism forces many workers ‘to waste precious hours of their lives on work that is neither stimulating, creative nor productive’, how much of the ‘free time’ spent at home is taken up with unsatisfying chores, especially for women, and how wasteful (‘a colossal squandering of human time, effort and labour’) is the organisation of people into atomised individual housing units which makes each person or family continually repeat activities such as cooking, laundering, washing up and cleaning rather than save energy, time and trouble by making communal activities of them. In their analysis of how the organisation of work and home in capitalist society presents obstacles to activity that satisfies individuals’ needs and talents, they also point tellingly to how, in ways we will all recognise, technology, ‘rather than reducing the amount of time spent on work …more often than not … seems to lead to more work’, while, if the social conditions were different, that same technology could ‘serve as an ally in the quest for temporal autonomy and for the recognition, redistribution and reduction of reproductive labour’.

It is in their final chapter, entitled ‘After Work’, that they put the most detailed flesh on what they consider could, given the right social conditions, constitute truly fulfilling non-coercive progress for human society. After offering a thoroughly recognisable picture of work under capitalism (eg, ‘the majority of us must give up forty hours or more per week in exchange for survival, typically selecting from a narrow range of possible jobs where decisions over what we do on a daily basis ultimately lie outside of our hands’), they talk about how ‘real freedom requires the absence of domination’, which currently workers are subject to both from their bosses and from impersonal market forces, while what is needed is for work to become ‘the focus of more freely chosen commitments’. What do they envisage? While not claiming to offer a ‘sketch’ rather than a blueprint, they look, for example, to ‘a free time infrastructure’ where ‘people have opportunities to develop their capacities and pursue collective projects’ with ‘infinite possibilities for human interaction’. They look to provision of ‘non-nuclear living arrangements’ with ‘more experimental models of early years care’. They look to communities being ‘turned from passive recipients of technologies into networks of active creators’. And, commendably, all this is envisaged as being within a framework of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’.

There is, however, is a key criticism to be made of the way this ‘imaginary’ (a word frequently used by the authors) is presented, in that it all seems to be seen as doable within the framework of the current society of money and wages, buying and selling and government control – in other words within the market system which the book has previously and quite rightly condemned as drastically limiting personal and social freedoms. So, for example: it expresses support for ‘government policies’ aiming ‘to provide support for public and community-based systems of care; ’it talks of ‘a free time infrastructure’ that provides ‘free museums’ and ‘free school meals and breakfast clubs’ for children’ – implying of course the continuation of overall social transactions via money; and, even more explicitly, it advocates ‘decent wages and better conditions for domestic workers’. In other words everything it commends is envisaged as happening via government action within the money system and without – or at least prior to — the establishment of the society of voluntary work, democratic control and free access to all goods and services that is the very essence of socialism. This seems to indicate a failure on the part of the authors, despite their obviously positive intentions and explicit aspiration for the ‘construction of a better world’, to accept that, so long as we have a system of governments overseeing the money and wages system, that system itself will not allow well intentioned reforms to come to fruition willy-nilly and any reforms that do get enacted can just as easily be reversed if those ‘impersonal market forces’ they refer to dictate it.

So, while there is much to reflect on here in terms of the kind of life that might be possible if workers were set free from ‘the realm of necessity’ that capitalism imposes, a good deal of that will only be feasible once workers in a majority take the necessary political action – ideally via the ballot box – to do away with governments and with money, wages and profit and cooperatively organise society. The Socialist Party is sometimes – unfairly — called ‘utopian’ for advocating this, but the true utopianism lies in trying to somehow see as possible true freedom in work and association within the framework of a social and economic system that by definition cannot allow it.

Howard Moss

Not So Radical (2020)

Book Review from the November 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clear Bright Future: a Radical Defence of the Human Being by Paul Mason (Penguin £9.99.)

In Postcapitalism (reviewed in the September 2015 Socialist Standard) Paul Mason argued for what he called revolutionary reformism, a gradual transition to a supposedly new kind of social system. There would be a basic income for everyone, while essential goods and services would be made cheaper, with more and more of these becoming free. Yet there would still be money, markets, profits and banks, so it was hard to see how what he was proposing was really ‘post-capitalist’.

In his latest book Mason advocates a similar system, but he goes by a rather roundabout route to get to this proposal and then makes a detour at the end that promises very little. He looks at why people support Trump, a man who thinks facts are irrelevant. Racism and misogyny, he says, are the key factors driving white voters to Trump. We then get a discussion of many topics – including neoliberalism, the alt-right, post-humanism, trans-humanism, postmodernism – and various writers, such as Nietzsche, Arendt and Foucault.

Mason supports radical humanism, which means achieving freedom by transforming technology and society. Artificial intelligence should be placed under human control and made subject to an appropriate ethical code, and information technology (as argued in Postcapitalism) can be part of what makes economic abundance viable, as it creates goods that can be copied at minuscule cost. IT "makes Utopian Socialism possible: the appearance of islands of cooperative production for sharing, the massive reduction of hours worked and the expansion of human freedom and self-knowledge".

Two chapters are devoted to the views of Karl Marx, with both positive and negative comments. Marx suggested that humans can set themselves free by changing their social circumstances, which would involve abolishing private property. But he did not give an adequate account of women’s oppression or of reproductive labour as a specific form of exploitation. There is something in this critique, but no merit at all in the claim that Marx saw the revolution as "the blind actions of a single class", as it would in reality be the achievement of class-conscious workers (it is not clear, but it may be that Mason sees the working class as manual workers only). His vision is of the networked individual taking part in collective action, but this differs only in that it would now be far easier than just half a century ago for a revolutionary working class to communicate with each other and co-ordinate their activities.

Later comes a totally pointless chapter which argues that what passes for Marxism in China is nothing like the real thing. The book ends with a chapter on how to ‘live the anti-fascist life’ that is pretty vague and makes little connection to what has been said previously. More on the supposed ‘Utopian Socialism’ and how it could be a global system rather than just ‘islands’ would have been a more appropriate conclusion.

Paul Bennett

Post-capitalism: what will it look like? (2022)

Book Review from the October 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The term ‘post-capitalism’ has come much to the fore in recent years. It is used, generally by left-wing critics of capitalism, to mean the social arrangements they would like to see replace the current global system of society in which a small minority of people own and control the large majority of the wealth and resources. This has been widely referred to as the ‘top 1 percent society’, meaning that 1 percent of the population own 99 percent of the wealth. Though this figure may be something of an exaggeration, not many would dispute that capitalism, now dominant throughout the world, is a system of massive inequality. Among the justifications offered for this by its supporters is that those who benefit overwhelmingly deserve to do so because they possess and apply such valuable skills as judgement, forethought and entrepreneurial ability. It is portrayed as providing the incentive and the drive for people to constantly improve their conditions and those of the whole of society. The system’s critics, on the other hand, point to the ingenuity and cooperative ability of the human species as a whole as well as the existence of technology beyond the wildest dreams of earlier societies, to argue that modern society could produce an abundance of goods and services to provide everyone on earth with a secure, comfortable existence if only it were organised on the basis of the satisfaction of needs rather than the maximisation of profit. However, what these critics differ on is how such a society is to be brought about and, an obviously connected matter, the details of how it should be run.

Beyond Money

Precisely this problem is the focus of a new book entitled Beyond Money. A Post-Capitalist Strategy (Pluto Press, 2022, xviii+205pp) by Anitra Nelson, a writer and activist in Australia. Nelson may be known to readers of the Socialist Standard for the 2011 book she co-edited, Life Without Money, in which socialism is referred to as ‘a money-less, market-less, wage-less, class-less and state-less society that also aims to satisfy everyone’s basic needs while power and resources are shared in just and “equal” ways’. In this new book, she reiterates and amplifies this concept characterising money as ‘the driver of political power, environmental destruction and social inequality’ and arguing that it has to be ‘abolished rather than repurposed to achieve a post-capitalist future’. It is in this understanding, that post-capitalism must mean the end of money or it is not post-capitalism at all, that Nelson goes beyond those left-wing critics of capitalism who argue that the system can be run in a somehow more ‘benign’ way with money being retained. As John Holloway puts it in his introduction to this book, ‘modified forms of money and markets are included or inferred in practically all visions of post-capitalism’. Nelson is intensely and coherently critical of all such visions with their recipes for ‘post-capitalism with money’. Here she is referring to such schemes as guaranteed minimum income, universal basic income, local community-based currencies, forms of alternative monies or labour exchange systems such as LETS, all of which she rejects as ‘hardwired to capitalist imaginaries and practices of markets and trading’ … ‘Reformers still imagine that they can alter capitalism in various ways to enable us to meet the challenges of socio-economic inequalities’, she states, insisting that ‘unless post-capitalism is money-free, we will fail to establish a world beyond capitalism’.

Late-stage capitalism

In this compellingly written book, she sums up what she calls ‘late stage capitalism’ in the following highly recognisable terms: ‘We witness flagrant overconsumption, massive waste and obesity alongside food shortages, starvation, famine and absolute poverty both within and between nations’, with the vast majority ’who cannot enjoy the full benefits of their everyday work and have little say in how they live or work’. And she sees all attempts, no matter how well meaning, to ‘mould money to progressive ends’ as bound to fail. We simply cannot, as she puts it, ‘tweak the system to overcome its weaknesses’. The words she quotes from the writer Eduardo Galeano sum this up well: ‘Capitalism is sold as freedom but experienced as control’. In two powerful early chapters on ‘Capital and Crises’ and ‘Money: the Universal Equivalent’, minutely researched as all areas of this book, she points up capitalism’s inability to respond to the planetary environmental crisis which it has created, providing jaw-dropping figures on, for example, the rate of climate change and the loss of biodiversity. She dismisses ‘green’ solutions to all this, even those current among people who called themselves ‘socialists’ or ‘anarchists’, since they invariably involve ‘finance, trading and production for the market’, part of what she ironically terms ‘this market-based wonderland’. None of this, she argues, can be proof against the systemic crises which capitalism with its tendency to overproduction for the market (though not for real needs) is irreparably prey to. The core problem, she insists, lies in the very practice of trade involving exchange of goods and services via a so-called ‘universal equivalent’, in most cases money, but even characteristics of other forms of exchange, such as barter and ‘other monies’. Her conclusion here is that ‘we can neither address inequalities and unsustainability nor establish post-capitalism without moving beyond money’. And she sees post-capitalism in these terms as ‘already emerging in enclaves and practice’ both locally and globally among ’numerous distinctive social and environmental activists’ and movements. For this kind of activity she coins the concept ‘real valuism’, to distinguish it from activity based on the kind of value that is fundamental to capitalism, ie, exchange value practised through trade.

Ecological Solutions?

It is in her chapter ‘System Change not Climate Change’ that she systematically tackles what she calls ‘inappropriate approaches’ to solving the ecological problems caused by capitalist production. She makes short work of ‘green innovations’ and ‘green technologies’ that continue to ‘focus on trade, markets and money’ using such tactics as trying to ‘price the environment’ and ‘integrate costs of externalities’. So she dismisses as futile such policies as carbon trading, carbon offsets and water trading and explains in meaningful detail why, in a profit-based, or even just money-based, society, they cannot have significant impact. She tackles even apparently radical critics of capitalism for their lack of imagination in wanting to maintain money in some form, for example with alternative currencies or ecological footprint accounting. She sees money as ‘social not natural’, but also recognises that monetary practices are so ingrained that even some of the most radical thought finds it difficult to dispense with ‘economic contortions and statist dead ends’. A case in point is Extinction Rebellion, one of whose newsletters she quotes as stating ‘Money is an ingenious technology that allows for social energy to operate across space and time’. Other targets are ecological economist Joe Ameni for his description of money as ‘a foundation of human civilization’ and Alf Hornborg, the human ecology anthropologist well known in environmental justice movements, who talks about redesigning money on the basis that he ‘cannot believe that it would be feasible to completely abolish money and markets in human societies’. ‘Hornborg’s “post-capitalism”’, she goes on, ‘retains wage labour, entrepreneurs, taxes, trade, production for trade and banking’. Others who are able to see beyond the limits of monetary arrangements are regarded more favourably. Examples of this are of course Marx, but also mid 20th century Austrian economist Otto Neurath and, in the present day, philosopher John O’Neill with his book Life Beyond Capital, eco-feminist Friederike Habermann for her chapter in the 2017 book Society After Money, and Adam Buick of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, contributor to Life Without Money (2011) and long-standing contributor to this journal.

Progress Perverted

The role of technology is also an important element in Nelson’s analysis. In her chapter entitled ‘Technology and the Real Debt Cycle’, which includes an illuminating section on ‘Marx on capitalist technology’, she brings out vividly the way in which the progress inherent in new technologies and new inventions is perverted by the use they are put to by the profit system. So rather than use technology for ecologically and socially beneficial ends, ‘the bottom line of capitalists’ decision making over what is produced is profitability’ and not efficient operation, despite capitalism’s frequent claims to efficiency. The solution proposed to capitalism’s inefficiency and inequity in its use of technology is non-monetary production using the collaborative capacities inherent in the human animal to allow collective decision-making on which technologies should be developed and used and how. And, above all, such decisions should be based on ‘the common good, all the while being restrained by the implications and ramifications for the Earth’.

‘Commoning’

Genuinely democratic decision-making on the appropriate use of technology and on all aspects of social life, whether at a local or wider level, is fundamental to this book’s vision and encapsulated by the author’s use of the word ‘commoning’, a concept which occupies a central chapter of her book. She demands ‘end game clarity’ and insists that this can only mean dispensing with private property, with the ‘world of things and beings’ being held in common. Nor does she refrain from putting flesh on the bone by explaining ‘commoning’ as a world society consisting of ‘ecotats’, ecologically balanced human communities, whose members fulfil all their own basic needs creating what is needed and necessary on demand and entering into agreements with other communities when necessary through temporary or ongoing ‘compacts’ whereby goods and services are shared and exchanged (even though non-monetarily). She provides significant detail on how she envisages such arrangements and networks would operate and in so doing gives profound food for thought about human nature, children’s education, the ability of humans to cooperate and the interest they have in doing so. The mature development of such a moneyless, cooperative system she terms ‘glocal integration’, giving it the overall title of ‘Yenomon’ (anagram of No Money). It is also a world in which ‘we make a concerted effort to meld the sustenance of our human selves with the regeneration of non-human nature’.

In a later chapter, ‘Indigenous Peoples, Real Values and the Community Mode of Production’, she goes on to give examples of small-scale attempts at establishing the kind of social set-up she would like to see established on a world scale and in so doing exhibits the kind of impressive in-depth knowledge and research which inform all aspects of this book. Her description and analysis of pre-colonial Australian aboriginal societies illustrates ‘their diverse, subtle and ecologically appropriate forms of collective provisioning … testimony to culturally attuned and sophisticated inhabitation of their lands and waters’. Equally insightful are her portrayals of the ‘horizontal’ social and economic organisation of the Zapatistas in 20th century Mexico, of the cooperative economy of the Kurdish Rojavan communities in very recent times, as well as of short-lived attempts at the abolition of money and trade and ‘free consumption’ in certain Republican communities during the Spanish Civil War. She adds to this what she calls the ‘living embryonic version’ of commoning to be found in the Twin Oaks Community in Virginia, described as co-governing and self-organising and ‘based on commons principles and values supporting non-violent, just, collaborative, cooperative and sharing practices that respect earth and people’. All these attempts at non-monetary life are seen as characterised by ‘grassroots substantive democracy’ and as showing the way to ‘a decentralised community mode of production’ where people ‘co-design, co-plan and co-produce’ what is then made freely available on the basis of need, which the author sees as characterising a future post-capitalist and non-market world. She sums this up as ‘targeting the direct needs of people without the unnecessary, indeed confusing, contorting and destabilising, mediation of money.’

So Nelson makes a clear and refreshing distinction between these attempts at horizontal, decentralised and egalitarian communities and the actions of the left-wing social and environmental reformers who focus on activities like fair trade, social entrepreneurship and alternative ways to manage money. She sees the latter as ‘naïve experimentation and wasted energy’, the former as ‘really appropriate approaches’, exhibiting and exemplifying ‘community-based empowerment and self-organisation and social and environmental responsibility.

Acts of self-organisation or the ballot box?

While all this represents a refreshing antidote to the ‘post-capitalism with money’ camp, what is less persuasive is the author’s strategy for achieving on a large scale the kind of social arrangements she describes as existing in various places in a small way. Her advocacy of groups and movements that offer examples of democratic cooperation and sharing of resources and goods produced without the intermediary of money, which she wants to see ‘made more highly visible and replicated’ can only be commended. She considers that ‘acts of non-monetary production and exchange have the potential to disable and dismantle capitalist forces’, but it is hard to see how of itself this can be effective. Above all it seems to eschew the kind of democratic political action via the ballot box that we see as the most fertile route to the establishment of a democratic, moneyless, marketless society once the necessary spreading of consciousness of the need for that has been achieved. Without this instrument (ie, the ballot box), it is difficult to see how a socially conscious working class can take the power necessary to abolish capitalism and set about organising a genuine socialist society. Yet, positively the author does mention the SPGB and seems to identify her aims with ours (ie, ‘socialism will, and must, be a wageless, moneyless, worldwide society of common (not state) ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution’). With one possible difference, however – that, in the ‘small communities’ system she advocates, she appears to contemplate the idea of some form of (non-monetary) exchange between communities. But, despite these differences in ‘strategy’, there can be no doubt about the importance and value of this book, putting centre-stage as it does ideas and discussions about how to dispense with capitalism and establish a new society based on collective production for direct use.

Howard Moss

Is a free-access society possible? (2022)

Book Review from the October 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

‘Without money we would all be rich’ 

‘It is not money that produces and distributes, but human organisation and knowledge’

It’s always heartening when the idea of a society of free access without buying and selling gets voiced in quarters other than our own and in countries other than Britain. We already of course have companion parties and groups in Canada, India, New Zealand and the USA and members and sympathisers in countries such as Denmark, Norway, Italy, Spain, Poland and Japan. But, just as the best ideas seem to arise spontaneously and independently in many different places when the time is ripe for them, so now we also have writers in the French language putting forward the idea of a moneyless, wageless, democratic world society – the society that we call socialism. Two writers in particular have recently published their own substantial studies explaining the need for this kind of society, the reasons it is eminently feasible and how it might be organised. Their book, Description of the World of Tomorrow. A World Without Money or Barter or Exchange: a Civilisation of Free Access (Description du monde de demain. Un monde sans monnaie ni troc ni échange: une civilisation de l’accès) by Jean-Francois Aupetitgendre and Marc Chinal (Editions Réfléchir n’a Jamais Tué Personne, Lyons, 2021, 288pp), is divided into two long essays, one by each author, mapping out their own particular ‘take’ on why the current society, based on commerce, exchange, competition, hierarchy and production for profit (i.e, capitalism), does not suit human beings and why it must urgently be superseded by a different kind of society based on mutual cooperation, real democracy and production for need.

Money problems

Both writers begin by examining the multiple problems prevalent in a money-based society (e.g, poverty, social inequality, insecurity, corruption, homelessness, war, environmental degradation, misuse of technology) and then go on to detail how they see a ‘post-monetary’ society overcoming such problems, or indeed how most of those would simply not arise in a post-money world. The two then discuss in more detail how the solutions they advocate would play out. And in this they differ somewhat from one another. So, in Aupetitgendre’s vision, while we see an insistence that the means, technological and otherwise, already exist to provide a comfortable life for all if the focus is placed on producing for need (‘a mental rather than a technical problem’, he calls it), at the same time he emphasises the difficulty of being able to forecast the precise details of how the moneyless system will be organised once established. He is likewise somewhat vague on how the changeover from a commercial to a free-access society will take place, simply describing it as ‘a great upheaval’ which might last ‘two or three decades’ and talking about a ‘step by step’ transition.

Chinal, on the other hand, proposes detailed scenarios of how a society based on production for need might establish itself and operate as a worldwide system (his final chapter is even given over to an imagining of ‘My day spent in a society of free access’), but he sees it as coming most likely via ‘oases’ of people espousing and practising the idea to the greatest extent they can and then spreading the idea to others who will come to see its benefits and advantages until the vast majority are reached. And he theorises that, even when a post-monetary society is set up, in the early stages a system of labour-time vouchers might need to be used. Neither writer seems to share (or perhaps even to have considered) our view that socialism can most easily be established once the majority of the world’s people are ready to take democratic political action to do that via the ballot box, and, once they are, no transition period will be necessary since the plans for organising the new society will already have been amply discussed and agreed by that majority and free access for all can be established immediately. However, both writers are clear that socialism must and can only be a wholly democratic society at all levels (a ‘real direct democracy’) and that it will not work under any other conditions.

The dirty work

They are also both expert in demolishing the various myths about the ‘impossibility’ of people living cooperatively in a situation of economic equality. They line up the most common objections one by one and show how flimsy they are. So arguments about ‘the lazy person’, ‘the greedy person’, ‘the violent person’, ‘the competitive person’, the person who will want luxuries like a personal swimming pool, all these are patiently considered and expertly put to bed. They are shown to be rooted in the behaviours and mentalities intrinsic to a society that both alienates and rations people via money, wages and the pursuit of profit. As Aupetitgendre puts it, ‘Rather than engage in the futility of looking for humans to become “better” people, rationality dictates that we establish a new form of society which will inevitably bring with it new mentalities’.

The ‘who will do the dirty work’ argument in particular is exceptionally well dealt with by both authors. They outline how, in a society in which work isn’t done on the basis of people cooperating to do what’s socially necessary but to make profit for the owners of capital, people have to sell their physical and mental energies to an employer in order to earn the money that will buy them the necessities of life. Then once they have contracted to sell their energies as, say, dustbin collectors or teachers or bank workers, they have to carry it out for much of the time they are awake and perhaps for the rest of their active lives. The imposed daily stretch of work and the lack of variety make most work unsatisfying, as does the hierarchical organisation and potential precariousness of that work. In these unattractive conditions most jobs become objectionable and ‘dirty work’ can become positively offensive. They contrast this with what conditions will be in a ‘post-monetary’ society where people will no longer work for an employer or for a wage or salary but simply to achieve a socially desired result. All the completely negative work that has to be done today — a prime example is the production and use of armaments — will disappear. So will all the useless non-productive work associated with money and production for profit — insurance, banking, sales promotion, taxation, legal contracts, etc. All work will be equally useful and necessary to society and no stigma will be attached to any of it. People will be free to create conditions that will make any task pleasant and interesting, and in the process they will be able to put technology — no longer ensnared by the profit motive — to its best use. They conclude that people don’t mind getting their hands dirty or their bodies tired. What they do mind is having to work under conditions that have taken the pleasure out of work. Change the system, they argue, and then the very concept of ‘dirty work’ will disappear.

Post-capitalism with money

They also counter the arguments of those who claim to be ‘post-capitalist’ yet still cannot tear themselves away from the idea of money, exchange and buying and selling. Even if efforts are made to organise this in a more ‘moral’, a more benign way than now, they argue, it will still inevitably be ‘a primitive way of organising society’. In this context the writers point out, as the Socialist Standard has in a number of recent articles, that ideas like ‘Universal Basic Income’ and the so-called ‘Green New Deal’ can do little to resolve the overwhelming problems inherent in a society based on the profit imperative and are doomed to failure even as ways of significantly alleviating the pressures that capitalism puts upon its wage and salary workers. Campaigners who involve themselves in well-meaning reformist activity along these lines on the grounds that we need to be ‘realistic’ are seen as just ‘prolonging the agony of buying and selling society’ and effectively delaying the growth of consciousness among many. In other words their task is a futile one, as what they are doing is trying to ‘repair the very thing that is destroying us’. Another writer, Anselm Jappe, is quoted in this book for the way he reverses the ‘realism’ argument and, in The Self-Consuming Society (2017), writes: ‘The abolition of money and value, of exchange and wage labour, of the State and the market needs to happen without delay. It is not someone’s “maximalist” programme” or utopia but rather the only true form of realism.’

Chinal too has a novel way of framing the futility of reformism: ‘As soon as you move a domino piece, that just pushes another or other pieces elsewhere and in the end you can never reach a solution that is equitable and stable’. And Aupetitgendre has a different but equally effective formulation: ‘Wanting to create an egalitarian, ecologically sound and peaceful society without free access is like wanting to build a car without inventing the wheel.’ So, they argue, avowed anti-capitalists should not, as they often do, seek to find ‘a way of managing capitalism better, of giving it a human face’, but rather ‘seek to abolish it’.

Absurdities or abundance?

These writers’ patient exploration of the incurable ills of current society offer striking insights into the many absurdities and paradoxes of the money system. Chinal points to how the very existence of money, far from creating wealth and abundance for the many, actually creates uncontrollable penury and, no matter how much of it is in circulation, it never ceases to be seen as in short supply (‘Money is a tool of exchange, but also a tool of exclusion’). He illustrates the many unpredictable and unforeseen consequences of the money system and its knock-on effects. How, for example, the supply of such basic necessities as food and accommodation is constantly subject to the destabilisation brought about by the working of the market – something that can seriously affect those on both the buying and the selling side. So, for example, ‘If food becomes more expensive, it sells less well, meaning that buyers have to make do with less and that local producers may “disappear” since their market is reduced’. There is also much commentary on how today’s money-based society has the effect of setting human beings against one another rather than bringing them together: ‘In a money society we are at war with one another to get money and even our neighbour may be competing with us for a job that we both need.’ Again: ‘If the work environment or the wider system is aggressive, human beings become aggressive to survive, even if in their hearts they would prefer to seek harmony and cooperation.’

So what we have overall in the commentaries of these two writers is an impassioned plea for a society of ‘comfortable abundance’ organised via a system of ‘real direct democracy’, where available resources provide for essential needs and reasonable desires and there is not the constant need and pressure to grow and innovate that capitalism experiences as an essential feature of its profit imperative. As the kind of arguments that the World Socialist Movement has been putting for a long, long time, it can only be heartening to see them coming from others too and so appearing to be taking root and spreading.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Translated excerpts from the book can be viewed at the following link.