Letters: This Money Business

Sir,
Socialists must be “suckers” if they swallow the half-baked stuff written by Dick Jacobs in the December “SS”.
Money is indispensable in a complex industrial society such as ours. It represents a claim on societyfewer and fewer people are actually needed to do the necessary work of society. The rest have to find unnecessary work through industries designed to induce people (with or without money) to acquire unnecessary wants, or in expensive war preparations etc.
Dick Jacobs definition of money—a “medium of exchange and measure of value” is only something he has read out of a book! Money—whatever its form—is the country’s credit.
Today, this is mostly manipulated by the Joint Stock banks for their own profit, when this function should belong to society. Hence, what should be free, accumulates as debt, with interest. This, with our huge National Debt, leads to inflation.
While shells, gold, or anything else that is scarce, can be used as currency—in Europe in 1945 cigarettes filled the role—paper does just as well if there is confidence in it. It is costless, and in a properly organised society it can be scientifically adjusted to society’s actual needs.
Common ownership of wealth doesn’t touch the problem, let alone solve it! That way can only lead to another tyranny! It is society’s control over its own credit that matters. For then, but only then, will it be possible to make everyone, unconditionally, and as by right, a shareholder in Great Britain Ltd?. And whether we call that “Capitalism” or “Socialism ” won’t matter two hoots!
This is neither more nor less than practical Christianity.
L. Knight
Guernsey, C.I.

REPLY

You criticise the article in the Socialist Standard for December, 1962, and attempt to show why money will continue to be necessary.

Both on grounds of historical accuracy and of theory your arguments are quite unconvincing.

Your first contention is that money is indispensable because we live in a “complex industrial society.” You omit to say which complexities you mean. They are of two kinds (a) the technical complexities of production and transport and (b) the financial and commercial complexities of capitalist private property.

Of course, money is indispensable to the latter. But equally the existence of money is not related to the complexities or absence of complexities of production and transport. This you know very well because you accept that money functioned in primitive communities where there were no such complexities.

Your second line is that “money—whatever its form—is the country’s credit yet, as you know, it functioned when and where there was no credit system and no banks.

As a side line you link up inflation causally with the existence of a huge national debt. It is no more true than its converse. The currency deflation in Britain in the nineteen twenties was carried out alongside a huge national debt.

We accept (we have been saying it for half a century) that with capitalism removed the production of socially useful articles and services could be vastly increased, so that a Socialist world, with people taking freely what they need, is a practical proposition. But you, without giving any reason whatever, still want the consumption of these articles to be dependant on the possession of money.

You actually use the phrase that living by right should be “unconditional,” yet you want it to be conditional on the possession of money.

You manage to discuss the existing social system without mentioning its fundamental basis, that the means of production and distribution are privately owned and concentrated in the hands of a small minority. It is precisely because you turn a blind eye on this basic fact of capitalism that you can pretend that the difference between capitalism and socialism is a mere matter of words.

It also leads you into the absurdity of supposing that armaments exist to provide work for redundant workers. The armed forces exist for the purpose, very necessary to the capitalists, of protecting their ownership against the dispossessed class at home and foreign capitalist groups abroad.

Our contributor was quite right; and it is not Socialists who are (to use your word) “suckers” but those who cannot see the realities of capitalism.

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE