Right but what point is it trying to make by pointing it out?
Yes, money is a social construct, but it’s a construct that represents something real, i.e. trade. Without money we’d replace it with something else, but it ultimately comes down to the same thing.
Like, I can understand the perfect world without landlords or billionaires and so on, but what’s this perfect world look like that has no currency?
Typically societies without money historically operated in what’s called a gift economy. Basically most goods were shared amongst the community. However there are very few remaining today.
Money is fiat currency. Literally a stand in for something with actual value. Money holds no intrinsic value. You can’t eat it, you can’t breathe it or use it in anyway except to trade for things that do have actual intrinsic value. The only thing money allows humans to do is go into debt. That debt has created a society with insane leaps and bounds in innovation, but the cost is that it’s a ponzi scheme that will collapse spectacularly.
Only if you treat debt as something absolute that has to be repaid no matter what.
In reality in many cases debt is written off as impossible to claw back and sold off to unscrupulous debt enforcement companies at a fraction of the nominal value. Who in turn also rarely manage to get the money.
We as society could simply decide to forget certain types of debt and basically that is what states do via inflation and which historically many societies have done via debt jubilees.
The book “Debt the first 5000 years” gives good overview on this matter and fiat currencies in general.
You can disagree with giraffes too, to the same effect.
You’re going to hate something because of the way governments distribute the thing it represents? How is that not like hating all water because you had a flood? Hating air because it’s too windy?
You think social constructs are akin to animals and biological imperatives?
By that strange logic, humans, Manifest Destiny (aka the kill all the natives cause we’re white and want their shit social construct of colonizing Americans), and thirst are all comparable concepts.
I hate to tell you, but almost every economy that has ever existed has at some point collapsed, just as ours will one day. We can always kill all the giraffes, and we’re sure as shit the type, but I promise you, being thirsty will exist long after our currency and nation are nothing but a dull history lesson or forgotten all together.
The owners of this system would have you believe it’s invulnerable, absolute, and forever, just like the Roman Emperors of old did.
The barter economy is a myth, based on absolutely nothing other than a guy just deciding he was right with no evidence. Indigenous peoples had all sorts of complex, non market, moneyless economies. One of them is known as a gift economy, where there is competition between communities and individuals to give gifts larger than the gift they received before. A modern moneyless economic concept is a library economy: think of libraries, but for everything non-consumable.
I wouldn’t like the library system because it requires you to treat things a certain way.
If we think of it from the perspective of a book (since we’re talking about libraries here), if I borrow a book from a library, I have to treat it well and return it in a condition that somebody else can read it.
If I own a book, I can do whatever I want with it, I can burn it as firewood, I can cut out the words that I don’t like from all of the pages, or I can just scribble all over it with a permanent marker, it’s my book after all.
A library economy doesn’t mean you can’t own anything. If you want to own something you can make it or check it out indefinitely. For an example of this, let’s think of checking out a phone.
You’d check it out indefinitely, and you can consider it yours. Since there’s no money or profit incentive, the phones are designed to be durable, easily repairable, and have interoperable parts. Because the library is the means by which we manage the commons, parts are readily available and you can return the broken part (or entire phone) to be recycled and get the replacement.
Dude. Capitalism kills innovation. I hate that myth so much. Capitalism is more likely to stifle innovation than create it. The goal of capitalism is profit and nothing else. Innovation requires risk, which could cause a loss of profit, so it’s a last resort. It’s more profitable to hinder your opponents than to create something innovative.
For example, much of our innovation in our society comes from research universities. These are, generally, outside of capitalism. They do research and make discoveries for the benefit they bring to society, or sometimes just to improve our knowledge. They don’t do it for profit.
Humans like to improve things and to learn things. There’s no need for it to be profitable. Creating a system that prioritizes this is possible, but it isn’t capitalism.
From competitions, individual interests, passion, necessity, etc. We don’t need money or markets for people to seek innovation. A library steward should also be responsible for automating means of production as best as possible, which would also drive scientific advancement.
The problem then is that all of those, besides nececities aren’t really good at encouraging any innovation.
Yes, inventing something like a heater so people don’t freeze to death or a plow to make tending to a field easier could come out of necessity.
But the dangerous part is that it creates a risk of people just going “yeah, we are comfortable enough already” and the technological development just stopping. If you go back 40 years and 99% of the people would have said that they are perfectly fine living with a CRT TV and a landline phone. There would be no reason for doing any research into any further technology
Without considering how your free use however you want effects others?
Define the others, I’m not out here throwing trash on the streets or smashing windows, I don’t mind helping the people in my community or lending the things that I own to them.
If you don’t value the thing for it’s intended function why are you bothering to take one?
Also, if you destroy or misplace the thing, there’s no reason to give you different things. If you want another thing, you are going to be made to work for it.
If you don’t value the thing for it’s intended function why are you bothering to take one?
That’s beside the point, the point is that I don’t borrow things because I like to have the ability to use them however I want and according to my current needs.
I have a paint can that I can’t get open, but I own a flathead screwdriver. It’s not the intended purpose of a flathead screwdriver, but I can use it as a prybar to open the paint can, if the screwdriver breaks, now I have 2 pieces of metal to use for something else.
I don’t mind working, but I would like to work for a currency that I can use to buy things that I will own and see to use however I see fit for it to be used.
Define “right” in this context please. If you mean legal right, we’re talking about an entirely different system that would have different laws. The rights you have now may not apply. If you mean moral right, what gives you the moral right to consume resources that need not be consumed that could serve others also? Those seem like some pretty horrible morals if that’s what you believe.
The barter system is a myth, it never existed. Not in the ‘I want bricks but only have a sheep and you don’t want a sheep so we both get nothing’ way that it’s taught in highschool econ class.
Before cash, trade could use items of high constant demand - salt, cacao beans, dried tea, etc. - as a medium of exchange. Maybe you’re fine for salt, but someone will always want more salt. It was also much more common to just rely on debt. Sure, take my extra bricks and when you have something of equivalent value that I want, you discharge your debt.
Honestly currency is fine, but not bastardized by the real villain: capital markets. It has made our currency representative of backwards, antisocial values, and in great quantities, proof of how good one is at extracting value from their fellow humans.
Capital markets have gone from supposedly a means for seed funding for businesses to the final word, despite contributing NO LABOR to the products or services they take almost all the produced profit from. And in our terminal state market capitalism, they’re eating one another and playing economic tricks for short term cash grabs they enforce on companies through threats of lawsuit, breaking entire economic sector’s ability to make the products/services they literally existed to provide in the process. LABOR makes the world run, grows the food, makes the discoveries, capital investment just takes all the fruits and leaves a few crumbs.
We’re going to collapse, but if we cared, we’d remake our economy that rewards cooperatives and punishes corporations, and capital investment would receive a small fraction of what labor produces instead of the opposite as it is today.
And yes, going back to a barter system would be better than this. We might even still be able to breathe above ground in 50 years.
I know this is going to be necessary, but I’m selfish enough to hope it happens after I get old and die. I really don’t want to have to live through the violent revolution it will take for that to actually get done.
A least you’re more honest than the relatively small class of benefactors of this corrupted economy who don’t even acknowledge that, being supported by skilled laborers at every level of profit and life, but truly self-deluding themselves and others into believing they earned and should have society/politics/media warping levels of wealth. Reward good ideas and harder work yes, but within reason.
That’s a function of power, not money. Even if you magically made the concept of money disappear, there will still be people who find a way to gather power over other people.
But money is much easier to amass in larger amounts for all time than say cacao beans. A perfect world is not possible, but a better world is very possible.
Yes. We have all agreed to exchange tokens (which have little to no inherent value) for goods and services, in lieu of trading other goods and services directly.
All other mechanics surrounding money are up for debate, but for any society more advanced than the hunter-gatherer stage, some form of “money” is required to facilitate trade.
There’s a significant difference between recognizing the irredeemable, systemic corruption of this economy, and believing no society or economy should exist ever.
The former wants a just, equitable society, and recognizes this is the opposite of that, and the latter just openly wishes they could shoot their way through life with impunity.
When you say “I never agreed to it” as a retort to a comment that boils down to “I think that money is real”, you are either using the same logic and talking points of a Sovcit.
Maybe you are just wording things poorly, but you sound like a Sovcit.
Sovcits are gullible fools that think that saying incantations to police about moving vs travelling will somehow make them immune to the law. They generally have nothing to say about the application of money as they still attend jobs and bring home incomes.
Problem is the majority of money is tied up overseas and in shit like the stock exchange, the insurance market, crazy real estate speculation and various other investments. If any decent portion of that gets leveraged back into material goods everyone trying to simply live is suddenly poor as fuck and starving to death. The value of money is based on so many assumptions it’s unsound.
Not that you’re wrong in practice, but there’s nothing at guaranteeing that practice is stable and people’s lives depend on that very stability.
Careful with that thinking there, mister. Soon enough you’ll be rederiving civilisation and suggesting things like power structures and statutory social order.
the origin of the idea is that since you can no longer simply go exchange your money for its equivalence in actually valuable metals, you can’t expect prices to be based on the value of their material components and labour any more. Money is no longer a promisory note for gold. Admittedly, that logic is a little iffy, and yet the threat has come true:
the more updated version of that is to simply go to any big store and look at the prices - say, $65 for a DVI to HDMI signal converter - and see that price has been divorced from the real value of products in favor of capitalist bullshit like artificial scarcity and the total enshittification of society, which i daresay has already been achieved.
I don’t think I’m getting the “money if fake” one. Money is just an IOU that we’ve all agreed on the value of to simplify bartering.
Sounds like you are exactly getting the “money is fake” one
Right but what point is it trying to make by pointing it out?
Yes, money is a social construct, but it’s a construct that represents something real, i.e. trade. Without money we’d replace it with something else, but it ultimately comes down to the same thing.
Like, I can understand the perfect world without landlords or billionaires and so on, but what’s this perfect world look like that has no currency?
Typically societies without money historically operated in what’s called a gift economy. Basically most goods were shared amongst the community. However there are very few remaining today.
Money is fiat currency. Literally a stand in for something with actual value. Money holds no intrinsic value. You can’t eat it, you can’t breathe it or use it in anyway except to trade for things that do have actual intrinsic value. The only thing money allows humans to do is go into debt. That debt has created a society with insane leaps and bounds in innovation, but the cost is that it’s a ponzi scheme that will collapse spectacularly.
Only if you treat debt as something absolute that has to be repaid no matter what.
In reality in many cases debt is written off as impossible to claw back and sold off to unscrupulous debt enforcement companies at a fraction of the nominal value. Who in turn also rarely manage to get the money.
We as society could simply decide to forget certain types of debt and basically that is what states do via inflation and which historically many societies have done via debt jubilees.
The book “Debt the first 5000 years” gives good overview on this matter and fiat currencies in general.
You mean ‘any way’, right?
I never agreed to it, and the way it’s dispersed only benefits the people that already have too much of it from exploiting other people’s labor.
You can disagree with giraffes too, to the same effect.
You’re going to hate something because of the way governments distribute the thing it represents? How is that not like hating all water because you had a flood? Hating air because it’s too windy?
You think social constructs are akin to animals and biological imperatives?
By that strange logic, humans, Manifest Destiny (aka the kill all the natives cause we’re white and want their shit social construct of colonizing Americans), and thirst are all comparable concepts.
I hate to tell you, but almost every economy that has ever existed has at some point collapsed, just as ours will one day. We can always kill all the giraffes, and we’re sure as shit the type, but I promise you, being thirsty will exist long after our currency and nation are nothing but a dull history lesson or forgotten all together.
The owners of this system would have you believe it’s invulnerable, absolute, and forever, just like the Roman Emperors of old did.
OK, let’s say I agree with your reasoning. Do we go back to the barter system?
The barter economy is a myth, based on absolutely nothing other than a guy just deciding he was right with no evidence. Indigenous peoples had all sorts of complex, non market, moneyless economies. One of them is known as a gift economy, where there is competition between communities and individuals to give gifts larger than the gift they received before. A modern moneyless economic concept is a library economy: think of libraries, but for everything non-consumable.
Produce excess; give it away for bragging rights
What a glorious world it could be, instead of this colossal fucking piece of shit
I wouldn’t like the library system because it requires you to treat things a certain way.
If we think of it from the perspective of a book (since we’re talking about libraries here), if I borrow a book from a library, I have to treat it well and return it in a condition that somebody else can read it.
If I own a book, I can do whatever I want with it, I can burn it as firewood, I can cut out the words that I don’t like from all of the pages, or I can just scribble all over it with a permanent marker, it’s my book after all.
A library economy doesn’t mean you can’t own anything. If you want to own something you can make it or check it out indefinitely. For an example of this, let’s think of checking out a phone.
You’d check it out indefinitely, and you can consider it yours. Since there’s no money or profit incentive, the phones are designed to be durable, easily repairable, and have interoperable parts. Because the library is the means by which we manage the commons, parts are readily available and you can return the broken part (or entire phone) to be recycled and get the replacement.
Then the question is where does the incentive to do it that way and the incentive to innovative come form?
Dude. Capitalism kills innovation. I hate that myth so much. Capitalism is more likely to stifle innovation than create it. The goal of capitalism is profit and nothing else. Innovation requires risk, which could cause a loss of profit, so it’s a last resort. It’s more profitable to hinder your opponents than to create something innovative.
Here’s a good breakdown of some of this.
For example, much of our innovation in our society comes from research universities. These are, generally, outside of capitalism. They do research and make discoveries for the benefit they bring to society, or sometimes just to improve our knowledge. They don’t do it for profit.
Humans like to improve things and to learn things. There’s no need for it to be profitable. Creating a system that prioritizes this is possible, but it isn’t capitalism.
From competitions, individual interests, passion, necessity, etc. We don’t need money or markets for people to seek innovation. A library steward should also be responsible for automating means of production as best as possible, which would also drive scientific advancement.
The problem then is that all of those, besides nececities aren’t really good at encouraging any innovation.
Yes, inventing something like a heater so people don’t freeze to death or a plow to make tending to a field easier could come out of necessity.
But the dangerous part is that it creates a risk of people just going “yeah, we are comfortable enough already” and the technological development just stopping. If you go back 40 years and 99% of the people would have said that they are perfectly fine living with a CRT TV and a landline phone. There would be no reason for doing any research into any further technology
That’s cause you’re selfish.
Well I’m sure he’s the only one. This system sounds great.
Selfish for wanting to own the things that I use and having the right to use them however I want?
Without considering how your free use however you want effects others?
Absolutely.
Humans are social animals, hyper-individualism is antisocial.
Contrary to what the oligarchs tell you, greed and selfishness are character deficits and personal failings.
Not that they haven’t spent the last century propagandizing attempting to rebrand them into virtues like the Orwellian rational self-interest.
Define the others, I’m not out here throwing trash on the streets or smashing windows, I don’t mind helping the people in my community or lending the things that I own to them.
If you don’t value the thing for it’s intended function why are you bothering to take one?
Also, if you destroy or misplace the thing, there’s no reason to give you different things. If you want another thing, you are going to be made to work for it.
There’s always a bellows that needs pumping.
That’s beside the point, the point is that I don’t borrow things because I like to have the ability to use them however I want and according to my current needs.
I have a paint can that I can’t get open, but I own a flathead screwdriver. It’s not the intended purpose of a flathead screwdriver, but I can use it as a prybar to open the paint can, if the screwdriver breaks, now I have 2 pieces of metal to use for something else.
I don’t mind working, but I would like to work for a currency that I can use to buy things that I will own and see to use however I see fit for it to be used.
Define “right” in this context please. If you mean legal right, we’re talking about an entirely different system that would have different laws. The rights you have now may not apply. If you mean moral right, what gives you the moral right to consume resources that need not be consumed that could serve others also? Those seem like some pretty horrible morals if that’s what you believe.
Yes, I mean a legal right, and I would like to have that legal right in the future, thank you very much.
The barter system is a myth, it never existed. Not in the ‘I want bricks but only have a sheep and you don’t want a sheep so we both get nothing’ way that it’s taught in highschool econ class.
Before cash, trade could use items of high constant demand - salt, cacao beans, dried tea, etc. - as a medium of exchange. Maybe you’re fine for salt, but someone will always want more salt. It was also much more common to just rely on debt. Sure, take my extra bricks and when you have something of equivalent value that I want, you discharge your debt.
You just described commodity money.
Honestly currency is fine, but not bastardized by the real villain: capital markets. It has made our currency representative of backwards, antisocial values, and in great quantities, proof of how good one is at extracting value from their fellow humans.
Capital markets have gone from supposedly a means for seed funding for businesses to the final word, despite contributing NO LABOR to the products or services they take almost all the produced profit from. And in our terminal state market capitalism, they’re eating one another and playing economic tricks for short term cash grabs they enforce on companies through threats of lawsuit, breaking entire economic sector’s ability to make the products/services they literally existed to provide in the process. LABOR makes the world run, grows the food, makes the discoveries, capital investment just takes all the fruits and leaves a few crumbs.
We’re going to collapse, but if we cared, we’d remake our economy that rewards cooperatives and punishes corporations, and capital investment would receive a small fraction of what labor produces instead of the opposite as it is today.
And yes, going back to a barter system would be better than this. We might even still be able to breathe above ground in 50 years.
I know this is going to be necessary, but I’m selfish enough to hope it happens after I get old and die. I really don’t want to have to live through the violent revolution it will take for that to actually get done.
A least you’re more honest than the relatively small class of benefactors of this corrupted economy who don’t even acknowledge that, being supported by skilled laborers at every level of profit and life, but truly self-deluding themselves and others into believing they earned and should have society/politics/media warping levels of wealth. Reward good ideas and harder work yes, but within reason.
Are we a civilization or not? I want us to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-gdHrINyMU
That’s a function of power, not money. Even if you magically made the concept of money disappear, there will still be people who find a way to gather power over other people.
But money is much easier to amass in larger amounts for all time than say cacao beans. A perfect world is not possible, but a better world is very possible.
Sitting here eating all my chocolate chips / life savings
I take it you’re one of those funny sovereign citizen types?
Nope more of a globalist, socialist “economies are supposed to be in service to societies” type.
You sound like a sovereign citizen
I see what you’re trying to say. But I gotta ask tho: did “we all” actually, really agree on that?
Yes. We have all agreed to exchange tokens (which have little to no inherent value) for goods and services, in lieu of trading other goods and services directly.
All other mechanics surrounding money are up for debate, but for any society more advanced than the hunter-gatherer stage, some form of “money” is required to facilitate trade.
Why? Library economies are moneyless, and highly adaptive to technological progression and climate change.
How does a library handle consumables?
it would look more like a food bank than a library tbh, but the concept remains the same. This video is a much better primer on the topic in general
What are consumables in a library economy?
Who makes the consumables in a library economy? Why on earth would I farm for love of the game?
You don’t want the librarian to starve, or the blacksmith.
Someone else will do it then, surely? I can just play video games and check things out permanently from the library and get free food from the farmer?
If you ever use money to buy the thing with the price agreed upon, then yes, you agree on that. This is sovciv level post…
deleted by creator
Every comment that correctly says that they are on some sovcit BS seems to be downvoted.
There’s a significant difference between recognizing the irredeemable, systemic corruption of this economy, and believing no society or economy should exist ever.
The former wants a just, equitable society, and recognizes this is the opposite of that, and the latter just openly wishes they could shoot their way through life with impunity.
When you say “I never agreed to it” as a retort to a comment that boils down to “I think that money is real”, you are either using the same logic and talking points of a Sovcit.
Maybe you are just wording things poorly, but you sound like a Sovcit.
Sovcits are gullible fools that think that saying incantations to police about moving vs travelling will somehow make them immune to the law. They generally have nothing to say about the application of money as they still attend jobs and bring home incomes.
I don’t think you know what sovcit is. Money is intrinsically worthless. It’s just a stand in for things that actually have worth.
Problem is the majority of money is tied up overseas and in shit like the stock exchange, the insurance market, crazy real estate speculation and various other investments. If any decent portion of that gets leveraged back into material goods everyone trying to simply live is suddenly poor as fuck and starving to death. The value of money is based on so many assumptions it’s unsound.
Not that you’re wrong in practice, but there’s nothing at guaranteeing that practice is stable and people’s lives depend on that very stability.
Careful with that thinking there, mister. Soon enough you’ll be rederiving civilisation and suggesting things like power structures and statutory social order.
deleted by creator
the origin of the idea is that since you can no longer simply go exchange your money for its equivalence in actually valuable metals, you can’t expect prices to be based on the value of their material components and labour any more. Money is no longer a promisory note for gold. Admittedly, that logic is a little iffy, and yet the threat has come true:
the more updated version of that is to simply go to any big store and look at the prices - say, $65 for a DVI to HDMI signal converter - and see that price has been divorced from the real value of products in favor of capitalist bullshit like artificial scarcity and the total enshittification of society, which i daresay has already been achieved.