The Emancipation of Labour

The constraints on productive choices are prima facie the same in communism as we would find in a capitalist economy, since limitations depending on technology, industrial organization and scarcity would remain in force anyway. Yet Marx tries to highlight the qualitative change that would ensue from communism. Capitalists make choices to increase profits and the value of capital, and are unconcerned with the substance of the use values they produce and the quality of labour activity except insofar as labour productivity and commodity saleability are involved. When a firm’s governance setting changes, the hierarchy of values presiding over productive choices changes too. If production decisions are made by the workers, the quality of labour becomes a superior motive and the development of human personality and creative abilities enters the field of choice. Opportunity sets widen considerably, for the workers take choice options into account (as for example working in a more satisfying way) which the capitalist firm tends to rule out. Moreover, since the workers produce indirectly for themselves in a communist society, the producer and the consumer cease to be two extraneous entities. Thus the quality and nature of commodities, as well as the direction of technical progress, take on another significance; and this change too may contribute to widen production opportunity sets.