Moneyless Society: The Next Economic Evolution

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While getting my dinner this evening I was reminded of the comments of a friend about a month ago. He's a plumbing contractor — and the people who work for him... won't. When he asked one why he wouldn't come to work, the response was, "why should I crawl in attics and crawlspaces when I can stay home on unemployment for the same amount?"

In a society without money it is really really hard to motivate people to do anything more than the bare minimum they can get away with. Quality goes down, progress slows to a crawl, maintenance becomes perfunctory, and eventually a point is reached where the entire economy is a heap of disfunctional rubble. And then you have a revolution... From a conceptual point of view there are four unsolvable problems with a purely communist society: Please note that I came within an inch of voting to close this question as opinion-based. I'm only answering it because your specific question, "would everyone accept to work for free?" has, IMO, only one plausible answer.

Very soon however, Marx (who, it must be remembered, was still working his way towards a full understanding of capitalism and socialism) identified “private property” rather than “egoistic need” as the root cause of people’s domination by money, in the sense that it was private property society that led to human beings being obliged to pursue their self-interest as the means to survive. In some unpublished notes he made in 1844 after reading James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy (which marked the beginning of what was to become a life-long study, and critique, of political economy) Marx argued that in private property society people produce with a view to exchanging their products for money, so that what they produce becomes a matter of indifference to them as long as they can sell it, and that it is this that leads to money dominating their lives: Clearly, one could be afraid that if we remove the finiancial incentive and move toward removal of workers' alienation, some jobs would be vulnerable to extinction. But currently a lot of working positions are the so-called bullshit jobs which are in fact pointless, or even damaging to both the workers and the society. It is hard to make a claim, that disappearence of such jobs would be a bad thing. I was reading about non monetary economies and it says that it is a kind of economy that do not have any money in the economy and all goods and services are free to everyone according to Wikipedia. There still be some people with a strong sense of responsibility who will work because they believe that it is something they ought to do. There will be some people who work because it is the lesser of the two evils (I hate dirt more than cleaning toilets). And, of course, all those people who work because they enjoy it, find it personally gratifying, fulfilling, etc. will continue working. However, there will be quite a few people who do not work at all because they are not being rewarded.

Depending on how you pay, this record may be more or less extensive and may be visible to a few or several organisations. It may comprise information that shows who you are, where you were, how much you spent, what you bought and from whom. Your smartphone might reveal just as much information, if not more, but it’s still possible to leave your device at home, or even go without one. The equivalent choice won’t be available if cash goes.

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Large-scale algorithmic distribution (as envisaged by Stefan Heidenreich) for negotiating "matched transactions," each of which "has effects beyond all immediate participants." Yet, the procedure emulates money "when our profiles, our likes, and our consumer histories are used to calculate who will buy what and where." [20] The transactions are recorded and, along with utility/urgency and reputation/personal history, the "matches" are determined. [21] a b "Tax Exemption for Organizations That Administer Time Banks, Barter Networks, or Currencies". www.communitycurrencieslaw.org. SELC.

In an earlier passage Marx had once again contrasted this with the situation that would obtain in socialism, where the object of production would be to satisfy real human needs, above all the need for human relations with other human beings. This—a society in which people would relate to people, not as “atomistic individuals”, but as a “true human community—was Marx’s somewhat philosophical definition of socialism at this time. Living or traveling without money and adapt your life to this is a huge personal challenge. You really embark on an exploration by living this way. But how would it be of the entire society or even just a community would be focused on a moneyless existence? Said differently: a world without money, how would it be? Would it be possible? Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. " How Much Does It Cost To Produce Currency and Coin?" Training humanity to accept the lowest-common-denominator when it comes to living would require training them to accept the drudgery of effort without finding the joy of life. As soon as someone tells a friend across the country that they saw a beautiful butterfly, that friend will want to change locations because (true or not) they will believe there are no beautiful butterflies where they live. In extreme cases of survival, the open nature of the household economy is most evident. Food, clothing, toiletries, and basic necessities were often shared or exchanged amongst war-torn, impoverished families in East Europe post-communism. [7] Cooking, cleaning, clothes-making, and forms of work may seem to be intuitively thought of as work. An Australian study (1992) determined that an estimated 380 million person-hours per week were spent on these types of unpaid activities, compared to 272 million hours per week at paid work. [8]

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If slaves produce all the required goods, the non-slave population can live in wealth and splendor, free of the worries of money. They just do the prestigious stuff, research, art, architecture and such, whatever they feel like on the day. Even in a monetary economy, there are a significant number of nonmonetary transactions. Examples include household labor, care giving, civic activity, or friends working to help one another. These nonmonetized labors represent an important part of the economy, and may constitute half of the work done in the United States. [1] These nonmonetary subeconomies are referred to as embedded nonmonetary economies. The biggest issue that time bank coordinators face, as a result, is funding. Time banks do not rely on volunteers, but require financial support — to pay the time broker’s salary, for a publicly accessible drop-in office, for marketing costs — to successfully attract socially excluded people in deprived neighborhoods. While many UK time banks have been supported by grant funding from the National Lottery, over time it becomes harder to secure ongoing funding, or to increase the funding available for time banks overall, and established projects close while new ones are begun elsewhere. [3] United States time banks and the IRS [ edit ] It is a popular saying that capitalism stimulates innovation. I also read and heard many times that any non-capitalistic country will always and inevitably lag behind in innovation. I am not sure that this is entirely correct.

Money exist to solve the problem of barter, which is that to a drowning man water is useless and to someone dying of thirst nearly infinite in its value, and both of them would sorta like to have eggs tomorrow morning. Money is just barter on a humongous scale (also why you want your money to be as nearly worthless as possible). Their basic needs are met without fear of losing their jobs and their incomes having the risk of becoming a homeless or a criminal; Private business frequently focuses their research on consumer products that can bring profits and increase the company's value. They are not concerned with the public good and even if they are a responsible company and they have some considerations it is not their top priority or primary goal. It is even possible to argue that while capitalism indeed led to the increase in the quality of life short-term it is also responsible for the massive decrease in the quality of life in the future due to the harm caused to the environment. We shall execute our king instead, sir, and exalt our tailors," said Chauvelin in Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel. To which Sir Percy replies, "More's the pity. Then your tailors will rule the land, and no one will make the clothes. So much for French fashion, and French politics." But in a communist society there is no money. Since there is no money, there are no prices. Since there are no prices, there is no way for production to be informed of what's needed to be produced. Since there is no way for production to be informed of what's needed to be produced, you will always have overproduction of some things and underproduction of other things.I would be sceptical of anyone who makes any definite statements when it comes to innovation because we do not have any points of reference and/or data to support our conjectures. As a result, most predictions are based on ideology and assumptions about human nature 2. Such system works worse if people are diverse and complicated in their needs and wants. Which will encourage the authorities to try to make people more standard in their needs/wants. The easiest way would be for the Government to get rid of non-standard people, to bully/brainwash them into behaving like the general population, or just left their needs/wants unfulfilled. Like chronically ill and disabled people will have needs/wants that are different from needs/wants of an average Joe, so the government can decide to heal them once and for all, ignore their problems, or even to kill them. Such society will see being different as deeply problematic, people will feel ashamed/depressed for being different. The social economy refers to the space between public and private sectors occupied by civil society, including community organizations, volunteering, social enterprises, and cooperatives. The social economy represents “a wide family of initiatives and organisational forms — i.e. a hybridisation of market, non-market (redistribution) and non- monetary (reciprocity) economies”. [3] Rather than being fringe activities at the margins of the formal economy, this amounts to a significant level of activity: The "civil society" sector of the United Kingdom employs the equivalent of 1.4 million full-time employees (5% of the economically active population) and benefits from the unpaid efforts of the equivalent of 1.7 million full-time volunteers (5.6% of the economically active population), and contributes 6.8% of GDP. [3]