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{{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>}} | {{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 === | === 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 | {{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>}} | ||
=== Competitive markets === | === Competitive markets === | ||