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  • 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.

    • 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.

  • Many down-votes but no comments?

    I think as long as they serve the community as a means of exchange (as opposed to a store of value) and are freely inflated as by need of the community, many local currencies can co-exist in a Solarpunk world. But they would probably play a more minor role in day to day life.

    A local currency could for example be created by an community fund to pay the workers of a larger public project and people accepting this money would in a sense become investors into this community structure then.

  • I think about this a lot it's an interesting one, the current system of money is kinda crazy but the principle of having a token that can be used in trades is great.

    Like @keepthepace said I can see it's significance diminish but not entirely vanish, if I want you to come and do the colour scheme for my living room then it's taking time from your life which i'd like to repay you but you might not need anything i know how to do -however personC might want something i can do and be able to do something you need - rather than having to work out every trade and find the people to agree we just use a token, that token is money.

    The problem comes when you need that token to live and they're all in the hands of a greedy group of crazy people obsessed with having the most tokens - maybe we actually need more types of money not less, like maybe we should get land tokens that allow us to trade land but everyone gets a set amount and you can't just buy a thousand acres because your great-grandfather sold opium... Maybe even two types of money to buy food, a basic ration that affords for a complete and healthy diet of your choice plus a surplus coin which is earned by supplying the economy with foods or materials required (e.g. if you grow apples and supply them to the community pool you get 1 surplus token per kg but strawberries you get 1.3 st per kg due to local demand) these tokens can then only be spent on luxuries, rare items, and non-essential services.

    I'm certainly not saying that's the system i propose or support simply that there's a lot more options and possibilities than we normally consider - maybe one land token gets you a small beach-front property or a huge bit of old farmland to restore, that gives everyone personal choice and helps manage demand with all sorts of interesting challenges - if you move onto a ruined plot of land and make it beautiful then you deserve more tokens than it cost you to get there but that opens of the possibility of someone purposely getting a rough bit of land, paying others to work on it using their excess surplus tokens then claiming the extra land tokens for themselves... and is that a bad thing or a good thing?

    Thinking about things in obscure ways can really help to crystallise the interesting and important parts of something we're so used to thinking of in everyday terms, like what really is money and what is money supposed to be.

    • Perhaps the solution is a credit system that can be traded for goods and services, but can't be invested. There's no stock market, only goods and services in your community.

      I'm generally in favor of Market Socialism as a medium term, achievable goal. Workers own the company and all profits go either to them or to expand the company as a whole. They still compete with other worker-owned cooperatives in the market. It wouldn't solve all the problems, but it'd be a whole lot better than the system we have. Probably won't be the final form of humanity, though.

      • Yeah that makes a lot of sense, personally I think a big part of the solution will have to be some form of community focused solution to end the culture of conspicuous consumerism and economic based social value - i don't think it's wrong to want good things or beautiful things but valuing something more because it's got a certain logo is absurd, even more so when you're valuing people simply based on which logo's they can afford. I fear when worker run cooperatives compete it'll still create that imperative to advertise and gain market edge which has caused so much of our twenty-first century woes.

        My solution would have to involve a strong attack on not just copyright, patents and monopolies but on the very structure of our industrial economy. We need school and universities to be actively participating in community science and design projects to create verified and tested open source designs which can be fabricated locally anywhere in the world - it's a pretty radical idea really because it involves changing pretty how we do and think about pretty much everything but it's got a lot of positives.

        Firstly it's basically how the PhD system was intended, you put all that effort into doing a bit of science and when you've done it they check it's ok and say 'yep, you're a real scientist now' and that science gets added to the public storehouse of knowledge for the benefit of all - we could extend that so the education system teaches and guides participation in community benefiting projects like citizen science and collaborative design -- for kids things like data gathering, group experiments, etc while university students are doing design work, materials testing, creating documentation, user guides, or other related media depending on specialisation. Projects will be worked on by community members in various ways, either as part of official efforts, community projects or individual work - basically the same model as social media, sometimes a random person goes viral for making something cool and sometimes a big company uses their budget to make good content.

        The thing i always think about is washing machines because they're so painfully simple and yet when you look at the choices available in stores there's a crazy amount of totally meaningless choice - we ended up having to pick between one with 'sport' mode and one with 'sanitary' mode - presumably actually essentially the same thing but my why do they have these weird settings? because then they can have one with limited choices as the cheap one, then the next level up one that can do most the things you'll probably want and expensive ones that can do it all and have an app.. it's all just software settings, it doesn't cost them anything to have a mode that spins the drum for X seconds and runs the heater for X seconds - we could have a really simple design for a washing machine that's easy to fabricate and repair, an easy to flash microprocessor connected to controls so you can easily choose the modes you're likely to want and change your mind if the situation changes (for example you take up sports and require a longer soak and wash cycle or a new cleaning agent is developed which works better when used differently)

        school kids could do supervised and documented tests to determine ideal washing conditions, it'd be a fun way to learn about science and how it relates to real-life plus they'd have more of a connection to the world they're part of, the washing machine wouldn't be a weird alien device from on high it'd be something they actually helped create - a wonderful feeling.

        design students could participate in various design related challenges and projects such as creating custom displays and dial configurations, art students on making various options for making them look cool and beautiful - all passing work (i.e. work that meets the required criteria) is added to the general database of designs and options which people anywhere around the world can access when ordering an open source washing machine fabricated from their local small industrial firm, community run fablab, or to create with their own tools.

        Again not saying this is the final or ideal solution but everyone should be used to having access to the very best, most efficient, and well designed things - if someone wants to show off then they should show off their good taste not their ability to outspend people without generational wealth. A community working together to design and create is always going to be better than a community battling itself.

      • Interesting. Would love to invest my time and energy into this idea as a solution

  • I would check out Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein for a thoughtful analysis of money and its corrosive effects on human society. It goes beyond capitalism. He also has suggestions for how money could be changed into a more neutral or even positive influence. It is long and a bit of a slog through. Curious if there are any authors that summarize the same ideas a bit more succinctly.

    • early chapters of The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber points out that several indigenous North American societies had concepts of wealth but there was no connection between wealth and power (“its corrosive effects”) like there is in European societies

  • (maybe I'll make a separate comment about currency, but I feel I need to get on the soap box for a moment here)

    This might be controversial so hear me out. I don't we should assume capitalism is destroyed. But more importantly I think the reason is absolutely critical to the success of solarpunk.

    We like to pretend "direct democracy good, other systems bad", but almost all forms of governance; dictatorships, oligarchies, capitalism, republic democracies, communism, direct democracies, and socialism have their own applications. We use them all over the place; militaries almost always function as a mostly-dictatorship with some distributed autonomy. Courtrooms function as an ad-hoc oligarchy. Companies, Unions, Churches, and Cities have thousands of different governance models, from Gabe Newell leading Valve with one of the most flat companies ever, to Steve Jobs being effectively a dictator.

    Yes, Solarpunk is a rejection. But it's a rejection of the dystopian outcome.

    We give the middle finger equally to Xi Jinping, Ben Shapiro, and Joseph Stalin and any other spokesperson who prescribes one medication for all problems while ignoring the dystopia flourishing around them! All of them were/are so infatuated by style of governance that they forgot the original mission.

    That's where we can be different. Solarpunk doesn't have "a prescription". All of us have extremely different views, backgrounds, ideas, and values. The only commonality is "we want a society worth living in".

    I strongly feel the Solarpunk ideology is:

    1. "prescribe" systems of governance for specific things
    2. See if symptoms improve
    3. and $&!#-ing change the prescription when it doesn't work

    We should angrily reject the current prescription (and in the US that means rejecting our pay-politicans-to-win, fake-freedom, megacorp dominated capitalism)

    But.

    We should not get so angry as to forget; the difference between medicine and poison is the dosage & situation.

    Okay, I'll get off my soap box now.

35 comments