A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

and it is not by accident that a Cuban engineer received the Goldman
Environmental Prize (known as the ‘Green Nobel prize’) in 2010. 50
Self-determined labour
Giving priority of use value to exchange value has to be applied first of
all to labour. Labour can no longer be seen and instrumentalised as a
‘thing’, as a commodity, bought and sold on a market. Labour must be
emancipated in a qualitative way. That implies that we have to end alienation
and abolish exploitation. Workers must control the conditions of
production and dominate their own products. Self-determined labour
means going beyond both personal and material dependence. 51 Firstly,
we have to end the domination of the owners of the means of production
over people who, in order to survive, have ‘to sell’ their labour
power. Workers must become the real subjects of their labour and their
life-activity, they must become free and associated producers. Secondly,
we have to end the domination of the product over the producer. In the
words of Foster et. al.: ‘The ultimate goal is the rich development of individual
human powers. … This requires the creation of free, disposable
time, and distancing of society from the treadmill of production.’ 52
This aspect is not explicitly elaborated in the text. Paragraph 62 focuses
on the outcome of the production in function of exchange value and not
on the production process itself. Human beings are both consumers and
producers. Both aspects are affected by the domination of exchange
values over use values.
I further completely agree with paragraph 61. As a matter of fact the
goal of self determined labour supposes ‘challenging the private ownership
of the principal means of production’, which indeed doesn’t imply
the ‘total State control’ [61].
50 The prize went to Humberto Rios Labrada. See
http://www.goldmanprize.org/2010/islands. For the discussion on the ecological
question in Cuba, see Vanbrabant I. & Demuynck K., Cuba. La révolution au cœur
vert, Brussels, 2010.
51 Chattopadhyay P., ‘Towards a Society of Free and Associated Individuals: Communism’,
in Saad-Filho A., Anti-capitalism. A Marxist Introduction, London 2003,
247-58, p. 250-1; Mészáros I., op. cit., p. 152f.
52 Foster J., Clark B. & York R., op. cit., p. 396.
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