Skip Navigation

You're viewing a single thread.

35 comments

  • Money is a symptom, not the root of the problem.

    If you have scarcity of production and means of production, you need an algorithm to allocate the resources. Most widely used ones are free markets and central planning (both used by most systems whether they call themselves capitalist or not). Money is a convenient unit to convert resources to a single comparable value. To get rid of money you need to propose an algorithm that do not use it.

    I guess people will call "money" any fongible item that can be exchanged for useful things but money can take various forms. For instance a dollar would mean something very different in a world where wages do not exist because work is done voluntarily: you would not be able to buy someone's time.

    I personally think that if things move peacefully in the correct direction, money will not downright disappear but will slowly morph into something that's more reserved for vanity items that are scarce by design. I don't mind money still being around if I can get food and cloth at the local depot for free but that "limited designer shoes" or VIP tickets at the latest pop star concert still cost money. I live in France and often compare it to nobility titles: they used to determine your place in society and were the most important thing about you. Nowadays they are still around, you can stumble upon a baron or a viscount who proudly wear their sigil, but they do not matter anymore outside circles that exist only to make them matter, and are mostly folklore. I can imagine a world where being a billionaire would be similar.

    I think it is wise to account for the existence of competitive people and obsessive hoarders. They would recreate money in a world that got rid of it. That's fine by me, everyone needs a hobby, just make it optional for people who do not enjoy that rat race.

    • I think a lot of arguments put money at the root. The point of money is to remove context from the equation. The example is:

      • I will bake you a cake because I like you, but
      • I will not bake a cake for the king because fuck that guy.
      • Oh wait he's threatening to kill me.
      • The king is annoyed that he has to threaten to kill everyone all the time.
      • King invents money and taxes. Now he only threatens people who don't pay tax
      • He has money so he can ask baker to make him a cake.
      • Baker now has no option. Money is effectively a proxy to violence
      • Baker has to buy cheaper flour from his enemies across the river
      • Enemies across the river get flour from slave labour and profit massively
      • Globalisation.

      So, money is the tool, yes, but it's also how the king can be completely evil and get away with it. Being evil in non-fungible, but you can turn that into money, which is fungible.

      • Today there are people who turn down some clients for political reasons.

        In your scenario, the King could very well go through Martha, that everyone loves, because "she doesn't do politics". Note that in ye old time, money was not necessary as a proxy for violence, the king could order things. And I mean order: By order of the king, you have to bake a cake. Usually it comes with a nice remuneration but it was not a trade: there was no negotiation, no possibility of refusal, the threat of violence was there. And you were to be happy about the honor.

        If you have freedom to choose your clients, that your providers have the same, and that it somehow works without money, it is usually because everything happens within a small community where all actors have a social and trust relationships with each other. And the sharing culture to make it work and punish the abusers. Money starts being necessary at the scale where you do not know all the people who may use your services. Basically as soon as you need to trade between towns, you will need some kind of value abstraction.

        I agree that abstracting everything through money allows for out-sourcing of slavery in a way that reputation economics would not as easily allow. I would argue however that if somewhere the conditions for slavery exist, they would probably exist as well in a non-globalized world. It means you have a population of rulers able to oppress a population of slaves. They don't do it through money (if we talk actual slavery) but through weapons, whips and chains. Money or not, we can and we must fight against these mechanisms.

        Actually money can be a double-edged sword there. Social tariffs, that would impose additional taxes to imports from countries with bad labor rights can use the power of money to decrease the profitability of slavery.

        Money is just a tool. We use it for exploitation today, but set up correctly it can help reverse the incentives.

        • the King could very well go through Martha, that everyone loves, because “she doesn’t do politics”.

          What do you mean "go through"? You mean Martha would just do the King a favour by asking everyone for cakes and things? And Martha would do this because??? Remember the King needs to do this at scale, so eventually I think people would get sick of Martha asking for everything all the time.

          the threat of violence was there

          Yes, that's what I said, but the king needs some way to be a middleman between soldiers and cake. Otherwise the soldiers can just be warlords. Yeah, kings do try on the whole "we are ordained by god" or whatever, but I think the only thing which sticks is the knife.

          Money starts being necessary at the scale where you do not know all the people

          "necessary" would imply that it would exist without the king, which is not the case. Not knowing the people means not knowing the context. My whole point is: "The point of money is to remove context from the equation". It doesn't matter that my flour is from slavers. Money launders the context. The only people who actively want to do this are bad people.

          They don’t do it through money (if we talk actual slavery) but through weapons, whips and chains

          Err no, they do it through money? Almost all slavery today happens through a debt.You could call the debt "made up" or whatever, but the intent of the debt is to claim that the slave could theoretically pay it off and then they are free. It's not an equal contract.

          Money only has the purpose of exploitation, it is only a proxy for violence. If you didn't have to pay your debts, then how exactly would a monetary system work?

          • Yes, that’s what I said, but the king needs some way to be a middleman between soldiers and cake.

            They used actual middlemen yes.

            Otherwise the soldiers can just be warlords. Yeah, kings do try on the whole “we are ordained by god” or whatever, but I think the only thing which sticks is the knife.

            Well, lords becoming warlords did happen. But more than the "ordained by God thing", aristocracy was a system fueled by loyalty and a value that was more important to aristocrats than money or military might: honor. A kind of reputation. Had you failed your duties, no one would obey you anymore. Yes, some became warlords, and considered traitors but all in all the honor system worked remarkably well and the threat of violence was there but very indirect.

            “necessary” would imply that it would exist without the king, which is not the case.

            An interesting theory. Did you know that for a long time kings of France tried to impose their currency and their coins but that it failed because an alternate traders currency minted by monks (called livre tournois) was more popular among merchants than the official king's currency? (livre parisii). No, money appeared because people wanted to trade things with people they did not know.

            Err no, they do it through money?

            Are you prevented to change employer? Is the employer allowed to physically punish you? If no, calling it slavery is an insult to actual slaves. It may be exploitation and still be pretty bad, but slavery exists and means something specific. "wage slavery" is a metaphor.

            Also, most sane countries have personal bankruptcy laws and limitations to the amount of debt you can legally contract (with loaners being in the wrong if they exceed it) especially in order to avoid that type of slavery.

            Money only has the purpose of exploitation, it is only a proxy for violence.

            Well, that's just wrong. Money is a proxy for violence but it is not exclusive. People using local currencies or crypto-currencies for instance are not backed by violence.

            If you didn’t have to pay your debts, then how exactly would a monetary system work?

            Money is actually about paying upfront, not contracting debts, not having to trust people you don't know. The first currencies were made of precious metal so that the value of the exchange happened on the spot. Paper money is a debt towards the state which has a known track record in paying its debts to the point that people now just attribute value to the paper and debt itself.

            But do not confuse "debt by the state" and "debt by individuals". The fact that paper money is technically debt does not make it unreliable, nor does it make it backed by violence. It is actually backed by the belief that it is exchangeable for useful goods and that its value wont vary too randomly.

    • Yeah, the sticky thing is that money is a useful, often convenient social construct, but I am not educated enough to know if it's possible to effectively uncouple it from the baggage of capitalism.

      Like how marriage can be a useful legal construct, buuuuuuut most of that is about property rights, and originates from when women WERE the property to be regulated. :/

      • My advice is that as soon as you use the word "capitalism", you have a very clear and very precise idea of what you mean by it. There are tons of definitions of the word and most discussions about capitalism, anti-capitalism and post-capitalism I have seen were people talking past each other about different things.

        My own personal path has been to trade marxist views, where everything is a struggle between two classes, into an anarchist view, which sees social problems in terms of oppression and coercion, but do not try to shoehorn everything into the marxist class struggle paradigm. I am still thinking the shareholder-employee oppression is one of the most central one to fight, but it must not make us blind to the other, decorrelated fights that must be fought: feminism, anti-racism, etc.

        I am anti-capitalist as a side effect. Actually I would not mind capitalism if it did not lead to coercion (which I don't think it is possible, but some people do). What I want is that people stop exploiting and oppressing each other.

        About money I came to the conclusion that it is not the problem, scarcity is, resources allocation is. You can create an equally oppressive society without money, you can create a much nicer society with money, the presence of money or not is irrelevant: if people need to work for the right to live, that's the problem.

35 comments