The core of capitalist society is, in one-half, the myriad of competing [[Private property|private firms]] working to produce commodities as cheaply as is possible and [[Markets|sell]] these commodities in as large a quantity as is possible. The other half is the [[Wage slavery|wage-labor system]] which generates [[Surplus-value|surplus value]] to the maximum extent possible, keeps workers working and so on. Each of these elements is abolished '''and''' replaced in [[communism]]. In [[socialism]] these are unevenly or partially replaced.
How are each of these elements to be replaced? We shall see this thru Nia Frome's work, How Is It To Be Done?<ref>{{Web citation|author=Nia Frome|newspaper=RedSails|title=How is it to be done?|date=2023-07-17|url=https://redsails.org/how-is-it-to-be-done/}}</ref> a basic sketch of how each element is moved beyond, in part, using both Marx's theories and the real experience of [[Actually Existing Socialism|Actually Existing Socialist societies]].{{Quote|The opposite of wage labor is non-wage labor. A volunteer is doing non-wage labor, but so is a slave. What distinguishes the former from the latter is the volunteer’s right to walk away. What wage labor offers is a positive incentive to keep workers from walking away, so as to keep the surplus value flowing. Even if production is no longer organized around maximizing surplus value, though, there are still jobs that more or less objectively need doing. If those jobs don’t get done under socialism, then capitalist relations of production will enjoy greater prestige, and socialism can’t win. Reaching communism therefore means displacing the wage form of motivation with other forms. One labor system that would no longer count as wage labor would be conscription into armies of labor, but this is not very appealing, and makes sense only as an emergency measure, not the norm. That leaves volunteer labor. For work to be done increasingly on a volunteer basis, social validation needs to be made much more widely available and refocused around those jobs that are most necessary. Life’s necessities need to be increasingly guaranteed, reducing one’s dependence on any given employer.|<ref>{{Web citation|author=Nia Frome|newspaper=Red Sails|title=How is it to be done?|date=2023-07-17|url=https://redsails.org/how-is-it-to-be-done/|retrieved=2023-07-24}}</ref>}} Generalized commodity exchange
{{Quote|Full decommodification consists in the total extension of these guarantees, the rights-ification of consumption. It is unthinkable, however, that such guarantees could be made without massive improvements in productivity. This is what it means to say “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.” The material basis of generalized commodity exchange is the privacy and independence of production, the results of which are socialized only after the fact. Eroding and ending commodity exchange thus requires socializing production before the fact, bringing about transparency and interdependence that transgresses the boundaries of firms. These ties cannot be mediated by commodities but must instead be interpersonal, and they must transmit a logic distinct from that which governs capitalist firms. That logic can only be the logic of [[use-value]], i.e. the rigorously enforced authority of a democratic deliberation about society’s many needs. The privacy and independence of firms, however, plays an important role at a determinate stage of development of the productive forces insofar as it distributes risk — only a supremely rich and powerful state could afford to assume all the losses in an economy, and no socialist state starts out in such an enviable position. Generalized commodity production should be seen, then, as a form of delegation that is historically specific to conditions of underdevelopment.|<ref>{{Web citation|author=Nia Frome|newspaper=Red Sails|title=How is it to be done?|date=2023-07-17|url=https://redsails.org/how-is-it-to-be-done/|retrieved=2023-07-24}}</ref>}}{{Quote|In a pure market economy, firms’ only incentive is [[Profit|profit]]. Competition between them creates a race to the bottom in terms of wages, working conditions, and all kinds of negative externalities. A reduction in competition is necessary if we are going to see firms make decisions in a more pro-social way. That, or competition according to different metrics than sheer value extraction. Limiting competition is known in other contexts as nationalization, cartelization, monopoly, or favoritism. Interference with the market has a bad reputation for reducing efficiency. But this commonplace, like most others, grossly oversimplifies a hotly debated issue. Some authors question the priority of efficiency as a value (as compared to, e.g., redundancy or resilience), others counterpose productive to allocative efficiency (where gains in the latter under socialism may outweigh losses in the former), and others argue that planned economies do just fine even in terms of productive efficiency. What is uncontroversial is that, insofar as the position of a firm in the economy is secured, it can afford to pursue objectives that are not merely cutting costs. Which firms deserve this “securing” and which firms need to focus on improving efficiency are political matters, to be negotiated democratically rather than unaccountably and spontaneously through market-mediation. In capitalist economies, “winners” earn the right to dabble in non-profit activities only insofar as they have previously demonstrated their ability to ruthlessly serve the bottom line. In a socialist economy, political incentives reward and cultivate other virtues, even in institutions.|<ref>{{Web citation|author=Nia Frome|newspaper=Red Sails|title=How is it to be done?|date=2023-07-17|url=https://redsails.org/how-is-it-to-be-done/|retrieved=2023-07-24}}</ref>}}{{Quote|Some people believe that socialism means the abolition of [[surplus value]]. The simplest way to do this would be to divide all of a firm’s profits among the workers. This would not, however, do away with generalized commodity exchange or the resulting competition. Co-ops by themselves don’t do away with commodity exchange, and competition follows from commodity exchange — if you’re imagining co-ops you’re imagining commodities. Workers would still find themselves competing against other workers, obliged to work longer hours, push themselves harder, and cut costs at any cost, or else be punished by the market. Empirically, worker-owned and -managed co-ops in capitalist economies often fall behind for precisely this reason, since they tend to reinvest a smaller part of their revenues than capitalist firms do. This is because it’s easier for a capitalist to bilk workers than it is for workers to bilk themselves. In the aggregate, such chronic underinvestment is acceptable only if other countries aren’t hell-bent on outcompeting one’s own, i.e. if the whole world is socialist.Another approach to the abolition of surplus value would focus on the distinction between surplus value and surplus labor or surplus product. The fact that people work more than is strictly necessary to keep themselves alive — i.e. perform surplus labor — is not specific to capitalism. Any society must perform surplus labor and produce a surplus product to provide for those of its members who can’t work. In class society of any kind, work far exceeding these requirements is done to enrich and empower the ruling class. What is specific to capitalism is surplus labor’s appearance as value, as money, a quantity that is freed from all quality because it can stand in for any of them, indifferently. Surplus value extraction is the primary motor of capitalism. A one-dimensional magnitude lends itself to single-minded maximization. “Value’s self-valorization” is an introverted, narcissistic, solipsistic obsession. Money’s indifference, the abstractness of abstract labor, infects production and dehumanizes it. Socialism, rather than abolishing surplus labor, seeks to democratize the ends to which it is put, demoting the question of its magnitude to one consideration out of many, along with e.g. the length of the working day, what products get made, how they’re made, and who gets them. Socialism rehabilitates firms, making their revealed priorities match our own. The means of production must cease to be ends in themselves through better (more participatory, holistic, long-term, etc.) accounting and management. “Externalities” must cease to be external.
This does not mean that economic growth in the traditional sense becomes irrelevant. Any single country where socialism takes root faces a scenario analogous to that faced by a single worker-owned firm competing against capitalist ones. In this situation, no one — especially not the poor — can afford to disdain economic growth, which is a matter of survival. Socialism cannot beat capitalism except through protracted economic war.|<ref>{{Web citation|author=Nia Frome|newspaper=Red Sails|title=How is it to be done?|date=2023-07-17|url=https://redsails.org/how-is-it-to-be-done/|retrieved=2023-07-24}}</ref>}}{{Quote|The first prerequisite for carrying out such a strategy is to establish a [[dictatorship of the proletariat|people’s democratic dictatorship]], because a bourgeois dictatorship will never allow the needed steps to be taken. Substantive, rather than merely formal, democracy requires that the government track the interests of its citizens closely. These interests are both short-term and long-term, but the government’s job is to specialize in defending shared and general interests, those that are collective and lasting rather than mutually exclusive and passing. Substantive democracy therefore requires hierarchical elections in which money plays as small a role as possible and several levels of selectivity insulate the highest bodies, filtering out short-term particular interests. Political freedom for the capitalist opposition cannot be guaranteed, since this may very well contravene the interests of the majority — consider any number of imperialist coups, color revolutions, and lawfare carried out against socialist governments.|<ref>{{Web citation|author=Nia Frome|newspaper=Red Sails|title=How is it to be done?|date=2023-07-17|url=https://redsails.org/how-is-it-to-be-done/|retrieved=2023-07-24}}</ref>}}