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Here's our review of Desai's book:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2002/no-1179-november-2002/book-reviewsand what it said on this issue:

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According to Desai, Marx argued that socialism could only be successfully established when society's productive capacity had been fully developed under capitalism. This was certainly not the case in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Desai, however, maintains that capitalism is still far from having reached its potential. Although, he entertains the possibility of genuine Marxian Socialism, he relegates it to a distant future.

In the meantime, while waiting for capitalism to fully develop, Desai sits in the House of Lords for the Labour Party.But capitalism is already developed enough, and has been for many years, for society to go over to a classless world society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, with production for use not profit and distribution on the principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs."

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We did mention "the abolition of money" in the early days, as in this article the July 1913 Socialist Standard:

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With the abolition of private property, wages, and money, it will be very easy to assure that each person shall perform his or her share of the necessary labour of production, and the "problem" of distribution then would be no problem at all — as we shall see in a future contribution.

And there's this article from May 1910 entitled "Tariff Reform, Free Trade or No Trade? The fiscal fraud exposed" which ends:

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Economic development has made trade an anachronism, and the next step in social evolution, that is Socialism, means a system where trade “free” or “protected”, is rendered impossible by the fact of the common ownership of the means of wealth production. Socialism therefore – a society wherein we have the free and equal association of the wealth producers, operating the means of production they commonly own, making everything for use and for use alone – is the next stage in social progress. Onward! Speed the day!

This article from 1934 makes it quite clear that, in our view,  socialism involves the disappearance of money:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1930s/1934/no-354-february-1934/money-business

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Nearly all currency cranks (except for those who want to go back to the gold standard) are underconsumptionists, on the basis of varying theories, and so propose the state printing more money (claims on wealth) to overcome the chronic shortage of purchasing power they believe is built-in to the existing economic system. It's not just Major Douglas and Social Credit.Here's John Keracher on the "money bugs" (the US word for currency crank) of his day (mid-1930s) in his Economics for Beginners:

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In some parts of Michigan and Indiana, the “Direct Credits” movement has kindled a new flame in the old bimetal lamp and is attracting quite a few money bugs. Direct Credit for Everybody is the title of a small book, chock-full of economic errors, the author of which is one Alfred Lawson, who modestly tells his readers that his book “is as close to the truth as it is possible for the human mind to make it.”This Lawson is the pole star of the “Direct Credits” movement which aims to abolish interest and leave rent and direct profits. This is to be achieved by the government printing unlimited quantities of currency and providing without interest “direct credits for everybody.” Lawson conceives of money as being nothing but a government stamp, anyway. In some of the western states a similar movement calls itself “Social Credits.” The “Liberal Party” is another small group, led by “Coin” Harvey, which aims to remedy all social ills by reforming the monetary system.

I'm not sure if helicopters existed in those days but the idea of money from heaven did..

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Michael Tom West wrote:

SPGB's position : Neither be part of a European imperialist bloc nor become an offshore centre for usury capital under the umbrella of US imperialism and to expose this with an "active boycott"

For the record this is the RCG's formulation not that of the SPGB, although our position is clear enough as you say: don't take sides. See:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2016/no-1342-june-2016/problem-not-eu-%E2%80%A6-it%E2%80%99s-capitalism

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How naive can you get? Hand out free money to everyone and expect this to have no effect on either wages or prices. And this is just plain wrong:

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The bankers haven’t raised much interest here but they are the elephant in the room. One which British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn recognized with his proposal of a “People’s Quantitative Easing” in which the Bank of England would channel new money directly to citizens, not leave it up to the banks to do with as they please. In other words: take the control of money away from the banks, and in doing so, alleviate poverty and create a multiplier effect on job creation.

I don't think Corbyn promised that the Bank of England should "channel new money directly to citizens", did he, only directly to the government. He may be an old-fashioned leftwing Keynesian reformist, but he's not a currency crank.

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I think I agree more with KAZ than YMS on this  but January last year the Oxford Communist Corresponding Society ran a meeting entitled "Red Scissors: the socialist case for reducing the regulatory burden on business" in which the speaker argued that when the working class won control of political power they should end all regulations and subsidies for private capitalist businesses and let them sink or swim without any state aid on the assumption that most of them would sink. Probably true, actually.

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The RCG has replied:

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Dear comrade, Your article is wrong, we are for a boycott. So perhaps not so different from yourselves. Maybe if you asked us you wouldn't get it wrong. Solidarity,  Anthony.

We did include them as "against the flow" of most of the Leninist group of urging "Vote Leave", saying that they are "yet to declare". Which seems to have been true at the time of writing. But since then they have declared: See:http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/capitalist-crisis/4349-eu-referendumdated 1 June.Not so different from us, though for rather difference reasons:

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We reject totally taking sides in what is essentially a dispute between sections of the ruling class over what would be for Britain necessarily totally reactionary outcomes – part of a European imperialist bloc or becoming an offshore centre for usury capital under the umbrella of US imperialism. The only principled communist position is to call for a boycott of the referendum while exposing the reactionary intentions of those on either side.

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Actually, Von Mises himself  in his Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth conceded that socialist society could survive "for a time" using the calculations (of what resources to use to produce things) inherited from capitalism. This from section 2:

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For a time the remembrance of the experiences gained in a competitive economy, which has obtained for some thousands of years, may provide a check to the complete collapse of the art of economy. The older methods of procedure might be retained not because of their rationality but because they appear to be hallowed by tradition.

He thought that if this continued for any longer period it would lead to economic chaos and the collapse of socialism. Maybe but we're only talking about a relatively short period at the very beginning of socialism. "For a time" would suffice until socialist society applies better ways (which we can assume will already have been worked out) of organising the production and distribution of goods and services that don't reflect what happened in the days when monetary calculation prevailed.

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Depends what you mean by "money". We always said that in the early days of socialism there might not be able to be full free access to everything. In which case there would have to be some sort of "rationing" of the goods and services in short supply. Personally, I'd have thought coupons for those goods and services only would be best way to deal with this.  Certainly not "labour-time vouchers". But if these are not regarded as "money" then nor would any other all-purpose circulating vouchers be that could be used to acquire anything. An option, I suppose, but only slightly not as bad as labour-time vouchers and not really "money" (though we wouldn't be able to stop people calling it that. After all some, eg the pre-war Dutch Council Communists,  call "labour-time vouchers" "labour-money".)

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Zeitgeist is back in the news, at least in the New York Times of 26 May (as a sympathiser has drawn to our attention).  Here's a description of a discussion in a vaping bar in a small town in North Carolina:

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One Friday afternoon someone brought a pair of virtual reality goggles hooked up to a laptop to the shop. Mr. Foster exhaled a cloud that smelled like a Popsicle. He said he had been reading up on the idea, explored in the “Zeitgeist” movie, of a “resource-based economy” — a system in which, he said, “There’s no money and everything is controlled by computers and resources are equally distributed and there’s no ownership or anything like that.”“The system we have now is going to collapse,” he said. “And technology, the automation process, is going to keep taking over and over.”That, he said, would free up people to do what they wanted.Chris Lentz, 36, a worker for a utility company in a pair of mud-caked boots, frowned and asked, “If people were just given everything they ever needed, then what’s the point of going to work?”

Good to know that these sort of ideas are being discussed in the obscurest of places.

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They won't do it, though something similar was tried on a mini-scale in Taiwan in the early years of the Great Recession after the Crash of 2008:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2009/no-1254-february-2009/cooking-books-1-free-money-everyoneThe result would obviously be massive inflation. Interesting, though, that 8 years later they still thinking of ways of trying to get capital accumulation going again at its previous rate. From the article:

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Central bank-issued money could be used to fund tax cuts or infrastructure spending in an attempt to boost growth.

The British Labour government under James Callaghan tried this to get out of the slump of the 1970s. Here's his verdict on it, at the 1976 Labour Party conference:

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We used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you, in all candour, that that option no longer exists and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting bigger doses of inflation into the economy, followed by higher levels of unemployment.

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Letter published in Friday's Richmond and Twickenham Times:

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Big Business or Little England? That's the choice in the referendum the Tory Party has organised to try to settle its internal differences. So, to that extent, it is not the concern of the rest of us. The trouble is that, if things go wrong and there's an unexpected vote to Leave, we risk being collateral damage in the temporary economic and financial crisis that would follow. The nostalgic dreams and rosy future promised by the Leave campaign won't happen. On the other hand, leaving wouldn't be as dramatic a change as the Remain side is suggesting — it can't be as the British capitalist economy is so intertwined with that of the rest of the EU that it can't withdraw from it. So there'd be a deal with Britain ending up something like Norway. The rest of us won't notice the difference.

I see that both sides are being criticised for exaggerated and unsubstantiated claims, but what do they expect? The protagonists on both sides are professional politicians used to telling lies and making false promises. They are not going to change their spots just because it's a referendum and not an ordinary election. All this is grist to our mill and publicity for our meeting the Sunday afternoon before the vote entitled THE EU REDERENDUM CAMPAIGN: LIES AND COUNTERLIES. Details here

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Also available, in a more readable form, on the WSP (India) website here:http://www.worldsocialistpartyindia.org/paresh.pdf

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Comrade Binay Sarkar of the WSP(India) has written a criticism of Chattopadhyay's article here:https://www.academia.edu/25627820/Critique_of_Paresh_Chattopadhyays_Twentieth_Century_Socialism_

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Actually I wouldn't deny that there is a sense in which we are "selfish", only that this is determined by our genes rather than the social environment in which we grew up or live. As we say in our pamphlet Are We Prisoners of Our Genes?:

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Nor does socialism require us all to suddenly become altruists, putting the interests of others above our own. In fact socialism doesn’t require people to be any more altruistic than they are today (a behaviour which is greater than biological determinists like to admit and which presents them with the insoluble theoretical problem of how a gene for such behaviour, which they have obliged themselves to believe in, could have evolved). We will still be concerned primarily with ourselves, with satisfying our needs, our need to be well considered by others as well as our material and sexual needs. No doubt too, we will want to “possess” our toothbrush, our clothes and other things of personal use, and to feel secure in our physical occupation of the house or flat we live in, but this will be just that—our home and not a financial asset.Such “selfish” behaviour will still exist in socialism but the acquisitiveness encouraged by capitalism will no longer exist. Under capitalism we have to seek to accumulate money since the more money you have the better you can satisfy your material needs, and as an insurance against something going wrong (like losing your job) or as something to hand on to your children or grandchildren. People are therefore obliged by their material circumstances to seek to acquire money, by fair means or foul and if need be, when push comes to shove, at the expense of others. This is why capitalism has earned the name of “the acquisitive society”.Socialism won’t be an "acquisitive society" and won’t need to be, as everybody will be able to satisfy their material requirements as of right and without needing to pay money.

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