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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 === | ||
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=== Surplus value === | === Surplus value === | ||
{{Quote|Some people believe that socialism means the abolition of | {{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. | 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. | ||
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=== Real life === | === Real life === | ||
{{Quote|The first prerequisite for carrying out such a strategy is to establish a | {{Quote|The first prerequisite for carrying out such a strategy is to establish a 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>}} | ||
==Further reading and listening== | ==Further reading and listening== | ||
For a more humorous explanation | For a more humorous explanation see [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAGsqtqJUAY this YouTube video], courtesy of [[Luna Oi]] and her husband. | ||
== References == | == References == | ||
<references /> | <references /> | ||