Probably everyone is familiar with a few points of Marxist imagining of the Revolution.
Marx says
after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
Marx Critique of the Gotha Programme section 1
And Engels
As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It dies out.
Anti-Duhring
The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong–into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.
Origins of the Family
Will labour stop after the Revolution, or people become parasites? This seems to be a standard capitalist response – stop workers collaborating for fear they might end up supporting others as they do now….
To be a bit simplistic, Marx believed that all value and human life itself depended on human labor, so people would always have to work. The issue was that they would not have to work and have the value of their labor taken away from them. They would work freely without compulsion, for the pleasure of it.
In capitalism a person works for a capitalist or a boss, who pays them less than their labor is worth in order to profit. On the whole capitalists conspire to make this gap as big as possible, and they also try to make sure that people cannot be self-supporting (even in small business if possible) – so most people have to have a job and compete with others for that job to keep wages down.
In feudalism, the Lord take a conventional and usually religiously sanctioned percentage of what you grow on the land, so you labor for him some of your days. Technically, the Lord cannot stop you from supporting your family, or throw you off the land, without you having committed a crime.
In a slave society, slaves work under the threat of death and violence – this can be considered to be true in capitalism, hence the idea of ‘wage slavery’: most people have to work in a job or starve.
In ‘primitive societies’ you labor for yourself, your ‘extended family’ and other people and gift what you have in excess to others, or do whatever else you like – as nobody is taking anything away from you that threatens your ability to survive, and it is recognized that ‘economics’ and profit are not the only good things in life..
Part of the reason the State exists, according to Marx, is to separate you from your labor, so that it goes to your boss your lord, or your owner, and to protect the property and power of the dominant group from popular uprising. Adam Smith and David Hume said something similar. Capitalists will always want a State to protect them.
Without the State and enforced inequality, then Marx thought that people would again labor as they did in primitive societies; “each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” In more modern terms we would say that this would probably be a status economy. If you produced for others you would gain status and respect, but it would not be an accumulative economy in which inheritance preserves inequality and status, so that the untalented children of the talented would be able to rule, but those ‘useless children’ would not starve, any more than anyone else. Everyone has to actively prevent class and power groups from arising.
It would be a real free enterprise economy that would not oppress others, destroy the earth and continually undermine its own functioning in other ways.
Marx chose to let the societies to come, find their own way forward as he had no idea what post-capitalist societies would be like, or what conditions they would face.
Yep rather than spend your days laboring for someone else and having no time for your self or your family, after the Revolution and the withering away of the State, it would be up to you. You could also work to improve things that others valued.
Personally I doubt this is possible, but it serves to remind people there are better ways of living than we have now.
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