PORT ELIZABETH, SOUTH AFRICA, October 5— Last week, we went to see a group of workers who we have been trying to recruit to our movement. As we were talking to them, one of the workers asked the difference between us and the South African Communist Party. One of our comrades explained that it was money.
While other parties don’t see money as a problem, we see money as the material basis for most of the problems we face in capitalist society: the problems of greed, corruption, poverty, inequality, racism, sexism (men seeing themselves as superior to women). We see money as a fundamental problem. For us to achieve a sustainable, flourishing society, it has to be eradicated.
They were really intrigued. They had never heard anyone proposing this, so obviously they wanted to know more about how society will work without money.
This is a challenging subject for all of us. We struggle to explain to people in simple terms how society will function without money. Sometimes we rely on some sophisticated terms which are not even familiar to the workers, most of whom didn’t go to college. We need to find more practical examples to show how society without money will function—instead of some theoretical explanations.
As we were talking, we recognized that we had kind of lost them. We adapted our approach so they could be more engaged. We needed to focus the conversation on how society would function without money.
Then they asked a really important question: “How would healthcare function in a society without money?”
We were able to come up with some interesting observations. We talked about how in today’s society, most of the things we eat are more harmful to us than healthy because they make profit off them, like drinking Red Bull and other things like that which are easily available. Many people today have diabetes because of the things we eat.
In Communist society, we will eliminate the things that are harmful to us but are sold to people for the sake of profit. We will produce things that will encourage more healthy living among the working class.
That will reduce the number of people who require treatment. Instead of producing things for profit, we will be producing them because we need them. We won’t produce the things we don’t need.
We came to this insight out of the discussions we had with those comrades.
We also focused on the question that workers create value. We explained that the most valuable commodity in capitalism is our human labor power because it creates all value. The bosses steal that value we create and pay us in peanuts—wages.
Most workers are not aware of how profit is made and also how the bosses steal that profit, surplus value. They were surprised. At the same time, they understood that what they are creating is far more valuable than what they are getting in return.
It was interesting. This is the conversation we will continue to have with the comrades.
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