1. Communism: Equality and Abundance

There are moments, however, where Marx allows himself to speculate in more general terms. In the third volume of Capital, he distinguishes between a “realm of necessity” and a “realm of freedom.” In the realm of necessity we must “wrestle with Nature to satisfy [our] wants, to maintain and reproduce life” by means of physical labor in production. 4 This realm of necessity, Marx says, exists “in all social formations and under all possible modes of production,” presumably including socialism. 5 What distinguishes socialism from capitalism, then, is that production is rationally planned and democratically organized, rather than operating at the whim of the capitalist or the market. For Marx, however, this level of social development was only a precondition for “that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.” 6
The reason this brief passage is important is that it provides a wholly different approach to postcapitalist politics than the one many of us have been taught.
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Marx is saying something different: work has been, throughout human history, an unfortunate necessity. It’s important to keep the lights on, and sometimes that takes work— but keeping the lights on is not what makes us human. It is merely a necessity that we can and must transcend if we are to be truly free. Freedom begins where work ends— the realm of freedom is after hours, on the weekend, on vacation, and not at work. And that remains true whether you work for a capitalist boss or a worker-owned cooperative. The space of work is still the realm of necessity and not of freedom.
Peter Frase. Four Futures: Visions of the World After Capitalism (Kindle Locations 473-477). Verso. 
Is unemployment bad for people because the experience of working is good for them, or because unemployment carries a powerful social stigma? (The question leaves aside, of course, the most obvious reason for the unpleasantness of being jobless— being broke.)
Peter Frase. Four Futures: Visions of the World After Capitalism (Kindle Locations 533-535). Verso. 
The social-democratic welfare state is often thought of as the antithesis to the revolutionary project. If twentieth-century communism was about the violent overthrow of the capitalist class, the story goes, social democracy as it developed in Western Europe and elsewhere was just about ameliorating capitalism’s worst aspects, providing a minor safety net to protect people from the vicissitudes of the market. But though it can be that, the welfare state has a more radical edge as well. The effect of the welfare state, at its most universal and generous, is to decommodify labor— in other words, to create a situation in which it possible to survive without depending on selling your labor to anyone who will pay for it.
Peter Frase. Four Futures: Visions of the World After Capitalism (Kindle Locations 596-601). Verso. 
If you extrapolate this trend forward, you reach a situation where all wage labor is gradually eliminated. Undesirable work is fully automated, as employers feel increasing pressure to automate because labor is no longer too cheap. The reasoning here is that, as I argued in the last chapter, one of the things holding back full automation of the economy isn’t that the technical solutions are lacking, it’s that wages are so low that it’s cheaper to hire humans than to buy machines. But with access to a basic income, workers will be less willing to accept unpleasant and low-paying jobs, and employers will have incentive to find ways to automate those jobs.
Peter Frase. Four Futures: Visions of the World After Capitalism (Kindle Locations 661-665). Verso. 
Rather than thinking of the capital relation as the root from which all oppression and conflict grows, perhaps a better metaphor would be that the conflict between capital and labor shapes other social relations the way a magnetic field influences the objects around it.
Peter Frase. Four Futures: Visions of the World After Capitalism (Kindle Locations 688-690). Verso. 
The capital relation is a kind of social magnet, with capital at one end and labor at the other, that tends to align all other social hierarchies with the master hierarchy based on money.
Peter Frase. Four Futures: Visions of the World After Capitalism (Kindle Locations 692-694). Verso. 
But I would still argue that the communist society I’ve sketched here, though imperfect, is at least one in which conflict is no longer based on the opposition between wage workers and capitalists or on struggles over scarce resources.
Peter Frase. Four Futures: Visions of the World After Capitalism (Kindle Locations 791-793). Verso.