Transitional phase between the seizure of power by the proletariat and the total decommodification of production. In it the economy, managed collectively by the workers themselves, is oriented towards decommodification, direct production according to needs and the increase in the productivity of the factors, especially of labor. It measures its success by the reduction of the working day, the increase in working-class consumption and the radical transformation of culture characteristic of a society that has resumed development.
Socialism as the liberation of productive forces constrained under decadent capitalism
Capitalism has generated an incredible amount of productive forces that it can hardly contain within itself any longer. Through the world market it has created the conditions for a global economic metabolism; through the development of communications, cybernetics and robotics it has created a sketch -deformed, like everything it does- of the direct application of science to production, of social knowledge turned directly into a social worker (for example, when an entire production process is directed and controlled by an Artificial Intelligence that "learns" from the iterations of that same process).
They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the objectified power of knowledge. The development of capital reveals to what degree general social knowledge has become an immediate productive force, and therefore to what degree the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been remodeled in accordance with it; to what degree the social productive forces are produced not only in the form of knowledge, but as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.
Karl Marx. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 1857-1858
In doing so, it opens up the material possibility of a society that leaves behind "labor forced by necessity" and puts an end to wage slavery and commodification. But that material possibility becomes a social and "economic" impossibility in a system whose goal is the production of surplus value by means of commodities.
Capitalism on the one hand calls to life all the powers of Science and of Nature, as well as of social cooperation and exchange, in order to make the creation of wealth (relatively) independent of the labor time employed on it. On the other hand, it sets out to measure with labor time these gigantic social forces thus created, and to confine them within the limits required for the value already created to be preserved as value.
Productive forces and social relations -both of them different aspects of the development of the social individual- appear to capital solely as means, and are for it nothing more than means to produce on its narrow foundation. But in fact they constitute the material conditions for blowing that foundation sky-high. As Charles Wentworth Dilke says, "a nation is truly rich when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time, "but disposable time, apart from that used in direct production, for every individual and the whole society".
Karl Marx. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 1857-1858
Objectives of the economy under socialism
The road to communism involves progressively "appropriating" increases in productivity, until labor "forced by necessity" is reduced to zero.
Necessary labor time will be aligned on the one hand with the needs of the social individual, while on the other hand we will witness such a growth of the productive forces that leisure will increase for everyone, while production will be calculated according to the wealth of all. And since real wealth is the full productive power of all individuals, the measure will then be not labor time but disposable time.
Karl Marx. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 1857-1858
Organization of the economy under socialism
Under socialism, that is, in a transitional economy, the productive apparatus is managed by the workers as a whole in the manner of a gigantic cooperative federation which jointly plans the broad outlines of production so as to consciously subvert the meaning of reserves, subordinating them to the needs of expanding consumption and of reducing the labor time necessary to make it possible; that is, to the strategy of simultaneously increasing the productivity of labor -and, secondarily, of natural resources- and reducing labor "enslaved to necessity", that is, wage labor.
In his main work, Marx gave and interpreted the formula of capitalist reproduction: c + v + s, where c designates constant capital or instruments of labor, v variable capital, the wages or means of subsistence for the workers, and s surplus value or value added in the labor process, part of which is consumed by the capitalists and the other part invested (capitalized) for the further growth of production. The latter therefore necessarily passes through the expanded accumulation of capital.
In bourgeois society, c increases only to the extent that the capitalists realize surplus value by selling the commodities in which it is contained. And lately, to make it easier to sell at better prices, they resort to the pure and simple destruction of part of production. For its part, v increases only in a certain proportion to c.
In a planned economy (it goes without saying: a non-capitalist one), on the contrary, the increase of c depends solely and exclusively on the needs of v, which covers the whole population, and on the magnitude of s. This turning inside out abolishes capitalist relations of production. c ceases to be capital, v is no longer the price of labor power that reduces the majority of the population to meager consumption, and s in turn appears in the form of newly created goods, ready for greater individual and collective consumption. There are no longer profits, that is, other people's labor appropriated by the bourgeois, by officials or by institutions.
Expanded reproduction must therefore be planned as a response to the direct demands of the human whole that makes up society; it has ceased to be accumulation of capital. In other words, during the transitional period the extension of consumption in its many orders presides over expanded accumulation (the former constant capital) and determines it.
G. Munis. Party-State, Stalinism, Revolution, 1974
Daily life under socialism
Politically, socialism is a dictatorship of the proletariat as a class over an organization of production that is still commodity-based. Political power is exercised by the workers through their own assembly bodies and the direct control of the cooperative structure of production.
In daily life, socialism is the battle to reduce the cost in hours of labor of producing each thing, making its consumption free. Its history will be that of the conquest of free provision of more and more products and services, in parallel with the reduction of the working day, until production as a whole loses the condition not only of commodity but of "scarce" good, at which point communism will have been reached.
The abolition of the capitalist form of production makes it possible to restrict the working day to necessary labor. The latter, however, other conditions being equal, would extend its territory. On the one hand, because the worker's conditions of life would be more ample and his vital demands greater. On the other hand, because a part of present surplus labor would be counted as necessary labor, that is, the labor required to form a social fund for reserve and accumulation.
The more the productive power of labor increases, the more the working day can be shortened, and the more it is shortened, the more the intensity of labor can increase. Considered socially, the productivity of labor also increases with its economical use. This implies not only economizing the means of production, but avoiding all useless labor. While the capitalist mode of production imposes economy within each individual enterprise, its anarchic system of competition generates the most unbridled squandering of society's means of production and labor-powers, creating in addition a host of functions that are at present indispensable, but in and of themselves superfluous.
Given the intensity and productive power of labor, the part of the social working day necessary for material production will be all the shorter, and the part of time won for the free intellectual and social activity of individuals all the longer, the more evenly labor is distributed among all the able-bodied members of society.
Karl Marx. Capital, 1867