how should the world’s economy develop? what companies should be developed? how should the profit be distributed? should it be illegal for companies to make a profit at all?
(note that i think that it is generally unavoidable that some companies make some profit, the grey area on the image of the supply-demand diagram (or rather quantity-price diagram) is the profit, and that would only be zero if all companies have exactly the same production costs per unit.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, speculating on the history of the origins of money, like anything else that arose in prehistory (language, religion, art, etc.), is just that: speculation relying on an incomplete picture built primarily from the archaeological record and interpretation. So it wouldn’t be fruitful to debate the likelihoods of competing theories.
I simply wanted to draw the distinction between specific instances of currency and the concept of money as a whole. I think people tend to lose sight of the abstract in favor of the concrete, but that’s not always the most accurate viewpoint. It’s entirely possible to reform or replace the way money or currency is handled in society, without abandoning the utility of money as a concept.
As for the rest, you seem more optimistic than I am. I’ve met too many self-serving people and been screwed over too many times to have that much faith in humanity.
I agree that passion projects don’t need to be monetized, but if someone wants to host a web server for instance, then that requires hardware, electricity, time, effort, etc… It’s a lot easier for someone to donate a few units of currency to support a project than it is to send a few kilowatt-hours of electricity their way or a couple MB of RAM.
I used to believe that. Now I believe it was essentialist to think that way, and that humans aren’t inherently good or bad. It’s our choices and actions which determine our character, and many of those (maybe all) are determined or influenced by an interpersonal and interdependent web of conditions and causality that none of us entirely have control over.
That’s why generational trauma is so persistent. Some people are assholes, and they treat others like shit, and that makes other people disgruntled, starting a long, slow spiral into one’s own supervillain origin story. Or less extreme, a person’s upbringing instills subconscious patterns of perception and behavior which influence their words and deeds later in life; for good or ill.
We live in a profoundly sick and broken society. Healing that would be necessary before we can ever dream of some utopian ideal. I used to firmly believe it could happen in our lifetimes if we only believed and tried, but society firmly disabused me of those theories. It can be outright hostile towards people who think like that; even the people that the idea is intended to help the most will view it with suspicion, envy, and aggression. It takes a certain level of privilege to believe in a better world, and the disenfranchised often unfortunately look at that belief itself as signaling wealth/privilege/superiority.
That being said, I agree with having a vision for a better future to strive for. Even if we never arrive there, we can progress towards it continuously. I’ve always been opposed to this “all or nothing, immediate perfection or bust” mentality that we see so often on the left. Incremental progress is the only way to move forward, because perfection itself is an unrealistic standard.
That being said, I would contrast idealism with realism. Utopian ideals are great in novels, or even for abstract speculation and thought experiments, but it’s not enough for policy. Policy needs to be pragmatic and informed by reality. It’s the difference between theoria and praxis.
Some people like to advocate for the overthrow of institutions without proposing any ideas for what comes next to replace it. I find that irresponsible, as it leads to unpredictable chaos. And if someone’s only proposition is based on utopian idealism, then I don’t view that as a practical way forward and is not much better than having no plan at all.
That’s just my view on the matter. It’s not intended to crush your dreams, just give you something to think about. It’s okay to have a “platonic form” of a utopian ideal in your mind to guide your vision, but the next step is translating that vision into a practical set of organizational structures and policies that could realistically implement the most essential parts of your ideal, even if imperfectly and incrementally.
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.
Yes, of course. Agreed.
One of the problems with modern internet discourse is that people are so allergic to disagreement. The campism is so strong that it’s nearly impossible to present an alternative perspective or even raise a concern or add a layer of nuance without being immediately flamed, rejected, and dismissed by seemingly an entire community if people you might happen to agree maybe 80% with.
Open discussion is how ideas are challenged and grow, otherwise they stagnate, get full potholes, and ultimately blindsided by some unforeseen circumstance. It’s sad that bad-faith argumentation is so prevalent that it’s what people have learned to expect, and so they accuse any disagreement as being in bad faith.
Some people want to walk us blindly into calamity though, so I won’t stop nitpicking some issues even when people seem to want to pretend there’s no other “right way.” There’s a lot of discussion that needs to happen before we’re ready as a society to just completely throw out and replace the systems wholesale. And in many cases we’re not even able to have those discussions yet.
It’s probably going to take generations at this point to undo some of the damage that campism has done to public discourse, and then we’ll only be ready to start developing the ideas for the future systems.
Sigh… Sometimes mortality is an exercise in patience more than anything else…