rockSlayer

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.

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.

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.

the main issue I see is that it ignores the division of labor.

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.

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?

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.

On top of that, what about the passion projects?

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.

Thank you, and apology accepted. I understand how that trolling could bleed into this conversation, it's happened to me before as well.

there's some other basis of exchange that could underlie a system of trade without being barter- or currency- based

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.

This conversation would work a lot better if you didn't try to insult me by implying I'm naive. I've thought about these things extensively as well, and determined that it's possible to have a moneyless society. Coming to a different conclusion does not make me naive.

Did they engage in any form of trade?

Trading is not the same thing as bartering.

did they just give things away for free?

Some of them did, yes. Gift economies exist into the modern day in Papua New Guinea. When community leader A visits community B, community B offers leader A several gifts to help community A thrive. When leader B visits community A, they do the same thing in return.

Here are a few sources. I'm not a particular fan of the one source framing the Inca empire as a "communist experiment", or their implications that a merchant class would have stopped imperialism, but it explains the dynamics.

• Inca
• Iroquois
• Wikipedia
• Aboriginal peoples of Australia
• Moka Exchange

If you're not implicitly agreeing that money has value, then why don't you burn all your bank notes

That would imply that my material conditions allow me to survive without money. Money is a social construct. I don't agree with it, but I'm forced to use it due to the violence from the state. Wherever and whenever I can, I distribute my money to help people in need.

Barter economies have always been a myth. There have been several indigenous economies that didn't rely on money or barter.

The reason currency has value is because it's backed by the monopoly of violence by the state, not a mutual agreement.

I was browsing on my alt when I noticed your comment. For some reason, your comment doesn't appear on blahaj.

The solution in my eyes is a library economy. Left unmanaged, the commons are subject to hoarding. So the solution is to distribute goods equitably.

The longshoremen unions are the most radically left unions in the country.

While I was fact checking myself, I came across a list of dwarf planets. I previously assumed that there were only 2 in our solar system: Pluto and Ceres, but most definitions include 10! One of them is called Quaoar, which is half the size of Pluto and has rings!

Quasi-satellite is the technical name, which clarifies it's exact relationship to it's orbit between the Earth and Sun. Moon is not a technical name.

Fun fact, we currently actually have 2 moons! 469219 Kamoʻoalewa is a quasi-satellite that was discovered in 2016 and has been following us for nearly a century. It's orbit (technically around the sun, not Earth) is stable enough that it will continue to follow Earth for millions of years before it decays and collides with Earth. It's about 100 meters in diameter, and the Chinese space agency is planning to land on it this year!

I swear that I'm the only person in my office that knows where the break room light switch is. I've seen it full of people with the light off

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