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thelegendarybirdmonster wrote (edited )
In a moneyless society people often say that nobody would do anything and everyone would laze around all day and they're wouldn't be any food, but people are already quite productive during their free time: some people grow gardens, some do amateur carpentry, almost everyone repairs and builds and creates.
Even the minority of people who would only laze around all day if they could will get bored of it after some time in a moneyless society, and become"productive" without the pressure of being broke.
[deleted] wrote
LostYonder wrote
Guess it depends on how you define money, but few societies actually did, they had something of value used to exchange for other things - be it gold, beads, cowrie shells. Many of those societies also operated in more informal barter trade systems, but barter was rarely the sole form of exchange. If I remember correctly, and it has been many years, but Polanyi suggested even barter was predicated on monetary values...
LostYonder wrote
It seems the issue isn't so much money, defined broadly, but the alienation of value under capitalism and the fetishization of money that drive the profit idea of getting more and more money just for the sake of having more and more money - both for corporations but also individuals.
The question is how do we redefine money, value, and exchange that equates it with labor and social goods rather than a "free market" of supply and demand?
celebratedrecluse wrote
Money leads to inefficiencies in distribution and less-optimal production incentives, from an economic perspective. Planning production (which can happen at a regional and local scale while still federating decision making to be rational) is usually better than letting market entities haphazardly plan while in competition and operating from prima facie assumptions of 1. end-consumer scarcity conditions and 2. infinite natural resource conditions, both of which are untrue at this point in history without a doubt. Because the latter, which is what we have, is literally also central planning due to the oligopolistic nature of market economies in advanced capitalism, but in a shittier and less efficient form that has no accountability to most of the people in the system. Accountable systems produce better outcomes for everyone, by directly reducing the rewards for gaming the system.
devolving decision making to externally cooperative and internally egalitarian economic structures, would start to address a lot of problems about how particularly badly the economy functions right now. I'm not saying it would resolve the tensions inherent to industrialism in general, but it would lessen the contradictions that we are seeing right now due to corporate domination of everything and increasing consolidation.
[deleted] wrote (edited )
celebratedrecluse wrote
What sort of source would you find helpful? I can try to find one that illustrates what you would like cited.
Worker's direct ownership over the means of business and production is what I am talking about, the degree of this reorganized ownership (whether just in one business, one trade, one nation's economy, or the world economy) is the difference between cooperativism, socialism, and communism. All of these, still have valid critiques levied against them on the basis of ecology and anti-industrialism, critique of market dynamics, critique of etc. You are right to worry about how it is applied, it is hardly a silver bullet for addressing capitalism, and a misinterpretation of worker's control (abstracting it into unions, the state, etc) leads easily to neoliberal recuperation, authoritarianism and statism, etc problems.
The devil is in the details, but the fundamental ideas can be expressed in this way to get people on board with having the discussion of those details. The first step, is to recognize there are problems with capitalism. The second step, is to offer a very general framework for beginning to articulate something that would be more desirable than capitalism as it exists today. Just my two cents.
[deleted] wrote
celebratedrecluse wrote
Hm. I'm not sure if any source I can find will help, because it sounds like the people you are talking to have a material vested interest in supporting capitalism, because they benefit from it greatly. but you can make some points to chip away at the pro-capitalism stance, by highlighting some of the contradictions. Here are some suggestions, you might want to use these or not in your conversations depending on how they would be appropriate or not rhetorically for your audience:
every big company, for example like Amazon and Wal-Mart and other American big companies, they all have internal central planning. Even the franchised ones, have coordination within and between workplaces, standardization of prices, vertical and horizontal integration to some degree. That is, within their company, they do central planning and accounting, because it's the only efficient way for them to operate. However, when planning things in a coordinated way among an industry is proposed, the "common sense" is that this won't work for some reason, but it is not explained why this would not work.
Paying people living wages and providing support to those who cannot work increases spending which benefits the health of that economy more than giving money to institutions, companies, or the wealthiest people. At this time with the pandemic, it is the best way to stimulate the economy and keep it from falling apart.
Places which prioritized the pandemic response and successfully repelled the disease to negligible levels, have had the best economic recoveries from the pandemic. Vice versa, too.
Fiat money is arbitrarily decided in value by centralized institutions. Relying on money in postmodernity decreases self-reliance and personal responsibility in society, because it makes people depend on systems which can be arbitrarily manipulated to become highly unstable or serve irrational priorities, rather than developing and honing skills which are genuinely useful to real people. For example, the way that healthcare workers are quitting in large numbers due to mistreatment and overwork in the pandemic, while there is a huge surplus of unemployable lawyers.
ReadTheDebtBook wrote
Glad you asked! :D
READ DEBT BY DAVID GRAEBER!
not going to waste your time here, chapter 2 has everything you are looking for! the bits about the two specific indigenous groups in Brazil & Australia was great.
as was the explanation of how people still used currency by number and debts without relying on actual coinage after the Black Death laid waste to Europe. Totally digestable to libs who like stuff like Freakanomics or [whispering] the Bible so you can just smash that mfing share button
Folks used to practice minor forms of debt delay/forgiveness all the time (and still do, but many people now consider it immoral) mainly with "unequal" trading but also deliberately being like, ah fuck it, I know that guy, he's alright
https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf Here's the first search result on ddg for debt graeber pdf yuore' welcomed :smooch:
ReadTheDebtBook wrote
"fuck it I know that guy he's alright" is a little glib so let me be clear why this is some cool anthropology shit:
if you don't say "fuck it" and spot him those potatoes, he may be dead the next time you need to trade. a community that trades like this can survive better
ReadTheDebtBook wrote (edited )
the virgin "invisible hand" vs the chad MUTUALISTIC SURVIVAL
EDIT: btw those indigenous groups I mentioned provide great examples of how unfriendly communities traded. this isn't just about pastoral metaphors. the trades between unfriendly groups were a substitute for the hostilities which would result in one group taking the land & resources from the other. instead they work out their needs without a fight that results in dead monke. monke help monke :')
NeoliberalismKills wrote (edited )
Money only has value because of the threat of violence (and the monopoly on violence) from the issuer. But your parents clearly have no problem with hierarchy and I am unaware of any liberal/conservative argument against money.