When we learn as children that getting money allows us to do things (without necessarily understanding the obligatory character of it), that realization generates an expectation that is lifelong in its durability. One of childhood’s many lessons, in a society that runs on buying and selling, is that getting money makes things happen. People routinely rely on this institutional or systemic paradigm and pass the information on, in the process, to each subsequent generation, which incorporates it behaviorally without question as a fundamental assumption. When a four-year-old expresses a relationship between “going to the place where the monkeys are” and “getting some money,” he or she has learned to formulate even before understanding the somewhat abstract term, “zoo” the assumption that getting money makes things go. Contradicting that assumption years later stating that people can run society without buying and selling (or in general trading) anything will produce a “gut” reaction tantamount to, “You mean none of my peers and my elders knew what they were talking about? Go fish!” The childhood lesson has acquired the force of a belief or conviction.
That this belief is expectation-driven thus implies, on the one hand, that it constitutes a popular, behaviorist version of a system paradigm (Capitalism Works) and, on the other hand, that the popular (i.e., working-class) acceptance of capitalism rests on an assumption dating back to childhood. People will use this assumption relentlessly in pursuit of some kind of advantage or other, even when the facts might counsel otherwise. In this case facts become awkward (or even preposterous) counter-instances, and people ignore or trivialize them because they fail to mesh with the system paradigm (in the version they understand it) that is generic to whichever class has offspring to raise. We might even call this the “generic” version of the system paradigm (“getting money makes things go”).
Nothing said thus far is in itself socialist. A socialist implication turns on some element of reasoning that implies, explicitly or implicitly, the abolition of the wages system (and beyond that, common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production); which in turn rests on the assumption that we can operate society efficiently on the basis of the rule, “From each according to ability and to each according to need” (without in other words subordinating human social interactions to the precondition of making transactions in the marketplace).
From the socialist perspective, the question is, How does the “capitalist assumption’s” failure to live up to expectations translate into the perception that abolishing the wages system on which it rests will “make things go?” How does a crisis of confidence in capitalism become a new consensus that production for use is socially functional for purposes of satisfying everyone’s assumed needs (the basis for assuming them originating with the individuals themselves), where capitalism’s production for exchange has manifestly failed to deliver the goods? For the real problem is that understanding the system doesn’t work in random instances does not mean understanding it cannot work. To make that connection, people need to have a sense or model of what does work.
The question for socialists therefore remains standing. Its resolution will come at the same level as the childhood lesson: when people begin to realize they can make things go without depending on capital. They might specifically find themselves, for instance, having to make capitalism work in some acceptable way but learning the hard way they cannot by investing the capital themselves. At that point the criterion of production for use finds its natural application, and it enters the system’s agenda as a strategic contender.
World Socialist Review, Summer 2001
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