Contemporary social problems
Contemporary social problems can essentially be traced back to two intertwined contradictions. The first concerns structural inequality between the sexes. This arises from the fact that production and the market are completely subject to capitalist exploitation, while the unpaid care sector exists outside this logic. Precisely because care work is not remunerated, it remains invisible, despite its fundamental contribution to the reproduction of society. Many current efforts, such as the Economiefeministe and CloseEconDataGap initiatives, therefore aim to make the value of care work measurable so that it can be compared with the sphere of paid production.
The second contradiction, which was clearly identified in Elfriede Harth’s contribution (August 2020), among others, concerns the destructive dynamics of capitalist production as a whole: the systematic disregard for human needs, the externalisation of ecological costs, the dogma of growth, social inequality and the profound devaluation of all activities that do not fit into the logic of profit. Harth’s perspective on a care-centred society – on an order in which the yardstick is not profit but the satisfaction of needs and prosperity in the sense of time sovereignty, meaningfulness and ecological sustainability – shows how urgent a fundamental transformation is.
The phenomenon of advanced capitalism
Both contradictions can be traced back to a phenomenon that has emerged particularly in the last 50 years of developed capitalism and which did not exist in this form before. This phenomenon affects the wages needed to purchase everything that is produced in abundance in the economy. They are the cause of gender inequality, because unpaid care work is at a disadvantage compared to paid production work. Wages are also the cause of the destructive dynamics of capitalist production, because wage increases and the safeguarding of social benefits in the face of rising prices are always linked to increases in production, because the funds cannot be generated in any other way. These increases in production are increasingly leading to the overexploitation of resources, to increasing damage and acute threats to our environment due to the ever-growing quantities of waste and exhaust gases, and ultimately also to growing inequality, because profits rise along with increases in production.
We must not forget that they are also the cause of the increasing threat of war, because at some point personal consumption can no longer be increased and then the state steps in and commissions the construction of war equipment, for which generous loans are taken out. All that is needed to justify this is an enemy image, which is not difficult to create.
From economics to ecophilia
Today, on the basis of advanced scientific and technical progress and prevailing overproduction, it is possible to solve both problems at once. The starting point lies in the key features of care work: it serves the survival of humanity, it is based on need rather than market prices, and it does not produce surpluses for exploitation. The essential difference to production is therefore not the type of activity, but solely the fact that care work is unpaid, while production remains wage-bound – and thus trapped in the logic of exchange value.
The transition to a money-free, gift-based care economy is often perceived as a technically highly complex or politically almost impossible, even utopian undertaking. However, a closer look at the existing social structure shows that the decisive lever already exists – in the form of unpaid care work in the context of reproduction, which already accounts for around half of all social activities today. This work is carried out without a market, without wages, without exchange value, and yet it is of high quality, needs-oriented and stable worldwide. It thus represents not only a counter-model, but already the functioning core of a potentially money-free care economy.
What do the gifts of creation cost?
The basis of all human existence is the gifts of creation – water, soil, plants, animals, solar energy. These goods are free by nature, because they arise without human intervention and have no price attached to them. The price only arises when society forces them into the commodity cycle and artificially assigns them an exchange value. But this exchange value is nothing more than a thin shell that disappears as soon as the product leaves the sphere of the market.
If production were organised according to the principles of the care sector, both spheres would automatically coincide. However, the capitalist economic system is based on the principle that production can only take place if money is first used as capital to purchase labour. It is only the payment of wages that ‘transforms’ an activity into a commodity and creates the exchange value of the products. Without wages, the exchange value disappears – and the products logically become part of a free, needs-based supply system.
Refusal of wages
The core of this section of the theory is therefore that a revolutionary transition is possible if wages are renounced worldwide and simultaneously. For people in production, this means that they do not stop working, but on the contrary continue to work – only they refuse to accept wages. However, as soon as wages are no longer paid, production costs disappear immediately and completely. Products instantly lose their price because the gifts of creation are free and no capital needs to be advanced for wage payments.
Ownership of the means of production loses its exclusive function because owners can no longer buy anything with profits and rents. The market dissolves even before it is institutionally abolished. Global networking in conjunction with democratically controlled AI connects demand that is not influenced by advertising with producers, so that a market is no longer necessary. Production today is so flexible that no planning is necessary. This results in the unrestricted freedom of people to take exactly what they need for a life of dignity.
The allocation role of the market is eliminated because in a care economy, durable products are manufactured, almost complete recycling is possible, and there is no longer any overproduction.
Non-violent transformation
In this sense, wage renunciation differs fundamentally from traditional Marxist ideas of transition, which almost always presuppose the appropriation or expropriation of the means of production. While appropriation presupposes that something is obtained by force or political struggle, global wage renunciation has a completely different effect: it simply deprives the means of production of their capitalist function without taking away their physical properties. Machines, factory buildings and real estate continue to be used unchanged; they merely lose their significance as sources of profit. This effectively eliminates the capitalist character of the means of production without having to expropriate them. Their use value remains intact, but their exchange value disappears.
This approach automatically leads to the logic that has always characterised care work: activities are not performed because they generate wages, but because they are necessary. This standard is universally applicable: food is produced because people need to eat; clothing is manufactured because people need it; education, care and energy supply are functionally necessary, not profit-dependent. A mode of production based on wage renunciation is therefore automatically geared to social needs – not to purchasing power or expected returns.
In order for the transition to be understood and socially accepted, four key insights must be communicated:
The household perspective as a key understanding
Everything that is needed in the household – from pots and pans to potatoes to electricity – no longer has any exchange value once the purchase price has been paid. Only its use value remains. The logic of the care sector shows that what we use is free in practical life. This is not easy to understand, as we buy many different things every day and sometimes resell everyday items, i.e. return them to the market.
But if the ingredients for our food, washing powder and shoe polish were not free in the household, we would have to ask our family members for money for our activities.
Property automatically loses its exclusive function
When all products are available free of charge, ownership of the means of production and real estate suddenly changes its character. Profits and rents become obsolete because there is nothing left to buy with them. At the moment of transition to the care economy, profits and rents therefore disappear. That is why it is also important that this transition must take place globally and simultaneously.
Property formally remains in place, but loses its basis of power. The capitalist form is abolished without the need to physically touch anything.
Transition as a new type of global strike
Global wage renunciation is similar to a strike, but it is not industrial action. We do not stop working – we simply refuse to accept wages. In doing so, we deprive capitalism of its basis of existence: the exploitation of human labour. The reproduction of society remains stable, and even stabilises further, because production and care work now share the same logic.
No political or technical preparations
The transition requires no technical preparations, no changes to the law, no reforms, no new institutions. It does not change the mode of production, but merely removes the compulsion to exploit it. The existing structures can remain completely intact; they simply lose their function because the conditions for their functioning no longer apply. This is the starting signal of the post-capitalist development of the economy.
Revolutionary transition
Global wage renunciation thus creates a revolutionary moment that is completely non-violent, unbureaucratic and immediately effective. It combines feminist criticism of the invisibility of care work with Marxist criticism of capitalism to form a common practical strategy. The transition creates the conditions that make it possible to link the free gifts of creation with unpaid production. This gives rise to an economy of mutual giving, in which the value of human activity no longer lies in money, but in caring for one another.
The revolutionary transition is therefore nothing more than the decision to extend the functioning of care work to the entire social production system – and thus to create the basis for a new, egalitarian and ecologically and ecophilically stable order.
Berlin, 20 November 2025
Eberhard Licht