how should the world’s economy develop? what companies should be developed? how should the profit be distributed? should it be illegal for companies to make a profit at all?
(note that i think that it is generally unavoidable that some companies make some profit, the grey area on the image of the supply-demand diagram (or rather quantity-price diagram) is the profit, and that would only be zero if all companies have exactly the same production costs per unit.)
Thank you, and apology accepted. I understand how that trolling could bleed into this conversation, it’s happened to me before as well.
That’s literally what the moka exchange is in Papua New Guinea. They exchange things like pigs and other goods for prestige. I agree with your point that it doesn’t scale well for our modern global economy, but we don’t need to revert to historical examples for a moneyless society. I’ll give you my idea for a moneyless society further down in this comment.
You make a great point about social constructs in general, and it’s one that I agree with in most cases. However in the case of money, I’d argue that money as a construct has been forced upon us by the powerful and enforced by the state. Money as a concept arose by the powerful to control the weak. In ancient Rome, money was the basis for their politics. The Plebian class had a single vote, and it required immense amounts of money to be a senator (still true, but I digress). To earn favor politicians would absolve the debts of Plebians, especially in the late Roman period by Emperors. Sometimes, their debts would force Plebians to sell themselves into slavery.
The Plebians did not get to choose whether they should use money, but rather it was imposed on them by the wealthy. I’d argue that money as a social construct was agreed upon by the powerful, and then imposed upon the working class throughout history. The lines have blurred for us, because through the centuries the merchant class arose and has become distinct from the political class. Money became a convenient method of control, especially in feudal and now capitalist society.
I feel like now is a good time to explain what I think a modern moneyless economy would look like. It’s called a library economy. Goods are distributed through libraries, which function as a central hub for a community economy. The entire community contributes to meeting the needs of the community. When housing needs to be built, the whole community contributes. When food needs to be grown, the whole community devotes some time to tending community farms, and then distributes food through food banks. The community ensures the needs of their community members are met. Goods beyond necessities are created by people doing what they want at a sustainable pace. Because the community relies on each other for everything, there is a huge incentive to return things like tools when they are no longer needed. If an emergency occurs and there’s an immediate need for a good, the library can employ any number of mutually agreed upon methods for meeting this emergent need.
Groups of people can work together on an equal level to create more complex goods. The library manages all of this, and the workers utilize a union to ensure that there is no abuse from the library. The library and the unions work together to coordinate with other communities to meet the needs of each other. E.g. a community with workers skilled in manufacturing a part for a cellphone negotiate with another community through their unions, facilitated by the libraries, to meet the needs of cellphones for both communities. The workers then vote on the negotiated deal.
I disagree. I find that specific instances of money arise that way (drachma, shilling, petrodollar, etc.); but the concept of money itself likely arose more organically. A sheepherder needed some supplies and instead of trading wool for grain, at some point some token arose which was commonly agreed to as a standard to represent a certain amount of value. Something more shelf-stable that can be stored for longer than grain or wool.
Cuneiform illustrates this, although as a writing system it was of course limited to the privileged literate class. But it was originally a tallying system used for accounting. It standardized measures of grain and the value associated with them, and recorded them in a way that could be stored, added to/subtracted from, and exchanged.
I don’t think a monopoly on violence was necessary to enforce “two pounds of grain is worth more than one pound of grain.”
While true, that pattern arises irrespective of money. The wealth of the Roman patricians was largely based on land holdings. They “owned” the land and paid people to labor to produce value from it, and that’s how they built their wealth. They didn’t acquire their wealth by buying and selling publicly traded stocks like in modern capitalism.
The point is that eliminating money doesn’t eliminate private (or corporate) ownership of the land and the means of production. It just makes it impossible to fairly compensate the laborers who generate value from those things.
Your library economy is an interesting concept, and I can tell you’ve put a lot of thought into it, but it seems too utopian in my opinion. It’s a lot easier to imagine an idealistic society than it is to create and maintain one.
Other than the level of trust in one’s fellows that it would require, which I don’t take as a given, the main issue I see is that it ignores the division of labor.
Producing crops or building homes or making water drinkable aren’t things that people can just do as-needed. They need to happen year-round. And each one requires specialized knowledge and skills.
So it makes sense to have farmers, and homebuilders, and water technicians, and everything else that you need to support a society. People who spend time in education and training, learning and practicing a career, and then can spend each workweek throughout the year focusing on that.
If you manage some sort of collective ownership where everyone does their part and has one job that they do and maybe a second passion project if we can reduce the hours of the workweek, and is guaranteed to get all their needs met in exchange for a baseline amount of work (like a 20 hour workweek for guaranteed food, housing, utilities, healthcare, etc), then I suppose you could make it work without a concept of money or any form of currency.
But how do you give people the option of choice in that situation? Do you assign them to a specific career, assign them housing, and give them whatever food is designated by the distribution system? With money, people get compensated at an agreed-upon rate (even if it’s unfair and heavily skewed by decades neoliberal policy), and they can choose how to spend it. They can choose an apartment or a neighborhood (even if in this current economy people are limited by overpriced and artificially inflated rent and manufactured scarcity), they can choose if they want to buy oats or spaghetti or cauliflower or broccoli, etc. How do you implement that level of choice and autonomy in a moneyless society? How do you prevent people from hoarding more than they need?
On top of that, what about the passion projects? Presumably it helps them afford more than the bare essentials. Another 10-20 hours a week to generate enough value to exchange for something nice or on a leisure activity. But how do you implement that without somehow representing that value in some tokenized and standardized form such as currency?
That’s absolutely true, abolishing money isn’t a solution on it’s own, it’s part of a larger sea change in structuring a socialist economy. I’m not sure that we’ll be able to come to an agreement on the origins of money, but I appreciate your insights about the concept. There’s a lot more anthropological research necessary to analyze the origins of the concept. I’m open to continuing this aspect of the conversation, but I feel like we’ll end up continually circling around each other with various historical analyses. While that is fun to do, unfortunately I can’t talk about history all day. I’m forced to earn money instead.
Yes that is a flaw, and unfortunately it’s a common one with ideas for anarchist communities. I don’t have all the answers and I’ll certainly never see this in my lifetime, but I think there are various ways to counteract that problem and I don’t think it’s as big of a problem as most people tend to view it. Housing is a constant need, but we don’t need to be constantly building houses. Some people will have to manage the crops without rotating to other work, but with consistent help from the community, their workload is significantly reduced.
I think people will fill societal roles if we emphasize that society only works when we all pitch in together. We can encourage people to find something that interests them throughout their education, and then show that their work is valuable by celebrating their work in some manner. People want their work to be valued. We should allow people to find the work that fulfills them without coercion.
Well, that’s the point of the libraries and food banks. The community will have to mutually agree upon standards for distribution, but think about libraries and grocery stores now. At a library, you check out a book for a specific amount of time and then you need to return it. Why wouldn’t this scale to other goods? For things like beds, the check out time could be marked as indefinite by the library and you can’t check out another one until you return the one you have or can prove that you need another one. When you go to the food bank, they document how much food you’ve taken and prevent you from taking more than you need, but they don’t decide what you’re allowed to get. I’ll admit that I’ve spent far more time thinking about durable goods, so the mechanisms of the food bank aren’t anywhere near as fleshed out.
I think people will always seek to fulfill their passions. Look at Wikipedia. Look at Linux and other open source projects. Look at art. All of these things exist because of pure, unbridled passion from people over the years. I don’t think that will ever go away. Money may have been a benefit for doing these things, but it was very clearly never the goal.
While I have ideas on how these things should function, ultimately it will be a democratic decision on how these institutions function. I believe that people are inherently good. If that’s utopian, then fine by me. I think we should have a vision for our ideal future and strive for it, even if we fall short.
Yeah, speculating on the history of the origins of money, like anything else that arose in prehistory (language, religion, art, etc.), is just that: speculation relying on an incomplete picture built primarily from the archaeological record and interpretation. So it wouldn’t be fruitful to debate the likelihoods of competing theories.
I simply wanted to draw the distinction between specific instances of currency and the concept of money as a whole. I think people tend to lose sight of the abstract in favor of the concrete, but that’s not always the most accurate viewpoint. It’s entirely possible to reform or replace the way money or currency is handled in society, without abandoning the utility of money as a concept.
As for the rest, you seem more optimistic than I am. I’ve met too many self-serving people and been screwed over too many times to have that much faith in humanity.
I agree that passion projects don’t need to be monetized, but if someone wants to host a web server for instance, then that requires hardware, electricity, time, effort, etc… It’s a lot easier for someone to donate a few units of currency to support a project than it is to send a few kilowatt-hours of electricity their way or a couple MB of RAM.
I used to believe that. Now I believe it was essentialist to think that way, and that humans aren’t inherently good or bad. It’s our choices and actions which determine our character, and many of those (maybe all) are determined or influenced by an interpersonal and interdependent web of conditions and causality that none of us entirely have control over.
That’s why generational trauma is so persistent. Some people are assholes, and they treat others like shit, and that makes other people disgruntled, starting a long, slow spiral into one’s own supervillain origin story. Or less extreme, a person’s upbringing instills subconscious patterns of perception and behavior which influence their words and deeds later in life; for good or ill.
We live in a profoundly sick and broken society. Healing that would be necessary before we can ever dream of some utopian ideal. I used to firmly believe it could happen in our lifetimes if we only believed and tried, but society firmly disabused me of those theories. It can be outright hostile towards people who think like that; even the people that the idea is intended to help the most will view it with suspicion, envy, and aggression. It takes a certain level of privilege to believe in a better world, and the disenfranchised often unfortunately look at that belief itself as signaling wealth/privilege/superiority.
That being said, I agree with having a vision for a better future to strive for. Even if we never arrive there, we can progress towards it continuously. I’ve always been opposed to this “all or nothing, immediate perfection or bust” mentality that we see so often on the left. Incremental progress is the only way to move forward, because perfection itself is an unrealistic standard.
That being said, I would contrast idealism with realism. Utopian ideals are great in novels, or even for abstract speculation and thought experiments, but it’s not enough for policy. Policy needs to be pragmatic and informed by reality. It’s the difference between theoria and praxis.
Some people like to advocate for the overthrow of institutions without proposing any ideas for what comes next to replace it. I find that irresponsible, as it leads to unpredictable chaos. And if someone’s only proposition is based on utopian idealism, then I don’t view that as a practical way forward and is not much better than having no plan at all.
That’s just my view on the matter. It’s not intended to crush your dreams, just give you something to think about. It’s okay to have a “platonic form” of a utopian ideal in your mind to guide your vision, but the next step is translating that vision into a practical set of organizational structures and policies that could realistically implement the most essential parts of your ideal, even if imperfectly and incrementally.
I think we can come away from this discussion with an agreement that modern capitalist society is broken, harming the working class, and destroying our future. I think we both implicitly know that there is something better than our current system. We just disagree on what that better society would look like. And that disagreement is ok.
I’m glad to have had this conversation with you. Ideas can only grow and improve if they are challenged, and I’ve never really had a discussion about these thoughts and ideas with another informed person before.
Yes, of course. Agreed.
One of the problems with modern internet discourse is that people are so allergic to disagreement. The campism is so strong that it’s nearly impossible to present an alternative perspective or even raise a concern or add a layer of nuance without being immediately flamed, rejected, and dismissed by seemingly an entire community if people you might happen to agree maybe 80% with.
Open discussion is how ideas are challenged and grow, otherwise they stagnate, get full potholes, and ultimately blindsided by some unforeseen circumstance. It’s sad that bad-faith argumentation is so prevalent that it’s what people have learned to expect, and so they accuse any disagreement as being in bad faith.
Some people want to walk us blindly into calamity though, so I won’t stop nitpicking some issues even when people seem to want to pretend there’s no other “right way.” There’s a lot of discussion that needs to happen before we’re ready as a society to just completely throw out and replace the systems wholesale. And in many cases we’re not even able to have those discussions yet.
It’s probably going to take generations at this point to undo some of the damage that campism has done to public discourse, and then we’ll only be ready to start developing the ideas for the future systems.
Sigh… Sometimes mortality is an exercise in patience more than anything else…