Functional socialism

CAPITAL 135

Now if we base value on need and not on labour, coupling this with a recognition that labour is the source of wealth, it leads to fruitful conclusions. First, all values are excluded from all idlers, since they do not add to the source of wealth. Secondly, labour is recompensed, not as a commodity, but as an owner. Thirdly, the work of the community creates value only as it supplies our needs irrespective of exchange price. A need may or may not have exchange value; function’s problem is to satisfy our needs in the precise order of their utility and urgency. Without a true appreciation of value, political economy is as a ship without a rudder.

This ‘‘transvaluation of values’, inevitable if we are not to sink into utter disorder and disintegration, involves a new understanding of capital. You cannot create this new hierarchy of values under Capitalism because they must still be subject to the higgling of the market. Only in function can the new order of society create its new values. It therefore resolves itself into the question: what use has a functional society for capital? We have seen that Adam Smith and his followers assume that capital is the child of savings, of parsimony. They then divide capital into two parts—fixed and circulating; or, as Marx puts it, constant and variable. They further assume that capital is as essential to production as labour. It is as foolish as it is futile to hark back and condemn the former methods by which capital was accumulated. It was actually