If we decide money no longer matters it’d be petty easy to eliminate them all. If we continue to let money run our lives then it’ll continue to be pretty easy for the people with money to keep all their power.
If we decide money no longer matters it’d be petty easy to eliminate them all
Okay, but then where will I get my passive income? I worked 40 years in the shit and rusty needles mine to build up a big enough nest egg to get passive income. Now I’m too full of staff infections and lacerated limbs and shit lung to work anymore.
I can’t afford not to make the next guy work himself to death in the shit rust needle mine.
No one needs to work in a shit rust needle mine. Without money you would have community helping & taking care of you based on your needs & listening to your ideas. You would take as much as you need but as little as you can to live happily & work to contribute back.
I mean… money does matter. It matters to the individual because it is how they pay their bills, and it matters to all of humanity because it is how we are able to take coordinated action despite the lack of any central organizer.
Taking money out of the picture would also take bills out of the picture. And humanity absolutely has the ability to coordinate action without money at least as well (if not better) than how it is now, the only difference is it would be harder for individuals to be the sole coordinator. Money, and who has it, is our current central organizer and will continue to burn the planet if we fail to take away its power.
Not that huge of a claim, especially when now is so chaotic and dysfunctional. Here’s a nonexhaustive list of moneyless economies (obviously with varying degrees of feasibility)
The huge claim is the present tense, “has the ability”. It’s not a huge claim to say that humanity has the potential to one day transcend money, but that wasn’t the claim. Humanity has a long road before that’s possible, it does not presently have the ability to continue to function if we just snapped our fingers tomorrow and eliminated money.
An “ability” is not a vague notion bolstered by historical curiosities. An “ability” involves a detailed, immediately actionable plan that can be implemented in the modern economic landscape without destroying crucial productivity.
Resources have to be allocated. People need to accept the resource allocation method in order to contribute their labor to do things that must be done. Money is an imperfect solution. Eliminating money leads to reinventing it (e.g. “energy credits”), reverting to less efficient models (e.g. barter), developing a central planning body that replaces wealth corruption with administrative corruption, or widespread social loafing where nothing gets done.
Without an actual plan of implementation that gains the trust of the workers, there is no “ability”, merely aspiration.
I disagree with a few points you bring up, but beyond those, it sounds like your biggest problem with my statement is in the semantics. I don’t find that to be very useful when obviously the logistics of such a system are complicated enough to warrant a whole doctorate degree. Comments on social media between strangers with no verifiable education isn’t really the place to harp on precise wording and definitions. I think it’s possible for humanity to coordinate without money. Is that better? Or do you still disagree?
Semantics are how we communicate ideas. If you change the semantic content, you change the idea.
I think it’s possible for humanity to coordinate without money.
Depends on what you mean by possible. At some point in the remote future? Sure, I agree. At the present time? I disagree. We’re not there yet, and you can’t just snap your fingers and change the fundamental beliefs, and logistics administration, of 8 billion people overnight. Best case scenario that’s a multi-generational endeavor.
We can get there one day, we can’t outlaw money tomorrow.
Words are how we communicate ideas, and words are messy and can mean different things in different cultures and contexts (and a lot of times people use them incorrectly). Semantics matter in science and academia when you’re trying to be precise for the historical record so things don’t get misinterpreted by people who usually don’t have the ability to ask you what you mean by “has the ability” or “humanity”. A very broad statement I might add. Too broad of a statement for most academic literature.
An early step in the process of ending our reliance on money is broadly accepting that it isn’t a necessity. I never claimed that that kind of global shift would happen overnight, and I don’t find it useful to use that kind of prescription to undermine the concept unless your goal is solely to undermine the concept.
And humanity absolutely has the ability to coordinate action without money
Please provide a non-authoritatian answer that has scaled and has produced advanced technology like modern medical devices and telecommunications devices.
While you’re correct that there are no examples of such a society*, that isn’t because money is crucial to development. It’s because the time of technological breakthroughs happened in a global capitalist economy. Just because that’s the way history played out doesn’t mean that was the only way it could’ve. Money didn’t invent those things, people did. They had the time and resources to make that stuff happen. And yes, they got those resources via a moneyed economy, but that doesn’t mean those same people couldn’t have gotten the same time and resources had they existed within say a library economy.
I apologize for not being clear in what I was asking for. I didnt mean that I wanted an example of a society that, say, developed MRI technology outside the capitalist framework. I simply wanted an example of a society which could produce and use an MRI without the use of money or authoritatian force. They can have access to all the underlying science and technological know-how. But they need to get someone to mine the iron ore that will be smelted to be turned into streel which will become a tool which will be used in the manufacture of an MRI machine… without paying them.
Problem being - no one wants to mine iron ore. There are limits on how much prestige a society can distribute, and little will go to iron ore miners. The actual benefit of the labor is so far removed that the likelihood for personal gratitude from a beneficiary is vanishingly small - for example, someone who has a torn meniscus diagnosed with an MRI is unlikely to send the iron ore miner a personal thank you card. Of course, we could pay our miner in clothes and food and housing - but then we’ve just reinvented money but less efficient. Seeing no personal benefit to breaking his back every day in a dark hole, out miner would want to find something else to do with his time, resilting in no iron ore, and thus, no MRIs.
If we decide money no longer matters it’d be petty easy to eliminate them all. If we continue to let money run our lives then it’ll continue to be pretty easy for the people with money to keep all their power.
Okay, but then where will I get my passive income? I worked 40 years in the shit and rusty needles mine to build up a big enough nest egg to get passive income. Now I’m too full of staff infections and lacerated limbs and shit lung to work anymore.
I can’t afford not to make the next guy work himself to death in the shit rust needle mine.
*Staph.
His people are infected. I think he might be a billionaire in disguise.
No one needs to work in a shit rust needle mine. Without money you would have community helping & taking care of you based on your needs & listening to your ideas. You would take as much as you need but as little as you can to live happily & work to contribute back.
It doesn’t take long for that system to collapse.
I mean… money does matter. It matters to the individual because it is how they pay their bills, and it matters to all of humanity because it is how we are able to take coordinated action despite the lack of any central organizer.
Taking money out of the picture would also take bills out of the picture. And humanity absolutely has the ability to coordinate action without money at least as well (if not better) than how it is now, the only difference is it would be harder for individuals to be the sole coordinator. Money, and who has it, is our current central organizer and will continue to burn the planet if we fail to take away its power.
That’s a huge claim, you need to support that.
Not that huge of a claim, especially when now is so chaotic and dysfunctional. Here’s a nonexhaustive list of moneyless economies (obviously with varying degrees of feasibility)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monetary_economy
~edit: wording~
The huge claim is the present tense, “has the ability”. It’s not a huge claim to say that humanity has the potential to one day transcend money, but that wasn’t the claim. Humanity has a long road before that’s possible, it does not presently have the ability to continue to function if we just snapped our fingers tomorrow and eliminated money.
An “ability” is not a vague notion bolstered by historical curiosities. An “ability” involves a detailed, immediately actionable plan that can be implemented in the modern economic landscape without destroying crucial productivity.
Resources have to be allocated. People need to accept the resource allocation method in order to contribute their labor to do things that must be done. Money is an imperfect solution. Eliminating money leads to reinventing it (e.g. “energy credits”), reverting to less efficient models (e.g. barter), developing a central planning body that replaces wealth corruption with administrative corruption, or widespread social loafing where nothing gets done.
Without an actual plan of implementation that gains the trust of the workers, there is no “ability”, merely aspiration.
I disagree with a few points you bring up, but beyond those, it sounds like your biggest problem with my statement is in the semantics. I don’t find that to be very useful when obviously the logistics of such a system are complicated enough to warrant a whole doctorate degree. Comments on social media between strangers with no verifiable education isn’t really the place to harp on precise wording and definitions. I think it’s possible for humanity to coordinate without money. Is that better? Or do you still disagree?
Semantics are how we communicate ideas. If you change the semantic content, you change the idea.
Depends on what you mean by possible. At some point in the remote future? Sure, I agree. At the present time? I disagree. We’re not there yet, and you can’t just snap your fingers and change the fundamental beliefs, and logistics administration, of 8 billion people overnight. Best case scenario that’s a multi-generational endeavor.
We can get there one day, we can’t outlaw money tomorrow.
Words are how we communicate ideas, and words are messy and can mean different things in different cultures and contexts (and a lot of times people use them incorrectly). Semantics matter in science and academia when you’re trying to be precise for the historical record so things don’t get misinterpreted by people who usually don’t have the ability to ask you what you mean by “has the ability” or “humanity”. A very broad statement I might add. Too broad of a statement for most academic literature.
An early step in the process of ending our reliance on money is broadly accepting that it isn’t a necessity. I never claimed that that kind of global shift would happen overnight, and I don’t find it useful to use that kind of prescription to undermine the concept unless your goal is solely to undermine the concept.
Please provide a non-authoritatian answer that has scaled and has produced advanced technology like modern medical devices and telecommunications devices.
While you’re correct that there are no examples of such a society*, that isn’t because money is crucial to development. It’s because the time of technological breakthroughs happened in a global capitalist economy. Just because that’s the way history played out doesn’t mean that was the only way it could’ve. Money didn’t invent those things, people did. They had the time and resources to make that stuff happen. And yes, they got those resources via a moneyed economy, but that doesn’t mean those same people couldn’t have gotten the same time and resources had they existed within say a library economy.
*
Not exactly a perfect society (what is) but the Incas developed cutting edge technology for the time within a moneyless society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_technology
I apologize for not being clear in what I was asking for. I didnt mean that I wanted an example of a society that, say, developed MRI technology outside the capitalist framework. I simply wanted an example of a society which could produce and use an MRI without the use of money or authoritatian force. They can have access to all the underlying science and technological know-how. But they need to get someone to mine the iron ore that will be smelted to be turned into streel which will become a tool which will be used in the manufacture of an MRI machine… without paying them.
Problem being - no one wants to mine iron ore. There are limits on how much prestige a society can distribute, and little will go to iron ore miners. The actual benefit of the labor is so far removed that the likelihood for personal gratitude from a beneficiary is vanishingly small - for example, someone who has a torn meniscus diagnosed with an MRI is unlikely to send the iron ore miner a personal thank you card. Of course, we could pay our miner in clothes and food and housing - but then we’ve just reinvented money but less efficient. Seeing no personal benefit to breaking his back every day in a dark hole, out miner would want to find something else to do with his time, resilting in no iron ore, and thus, no MRIs.
But I mean, prove me wrong.