What they were describing was basically a society that relies on a gift economy, which has already existed in the past, and still exists in some places and forms today. We’ve been brainwashed by capitalist societies to think that would be a “hippy-dippy, fantasy land” because capitalism and bartering are what is natural to us, but it’s been shown that a gift-based economy is what a lot of uncontacted tribes use. It’s also how a lot of friend groups interoperate - hell, start a minecraft server (some other survival game will do) with your friends right now, and you will almost certainly naturally default to using a gift based economy.
Uncontacted tribes also don’t have advanced medicine (though not to say they haven’t discovered a great deal of important things on their own) or well… videogames. If you want to live like that more power to you, but for all the faults of modern society it has massive benefits as well.
I think there’s plenty of middle ground to be found where we can have our cake and eat it too even if it looks wildly different from what we have now. Gift economies just don’t work when you have billions of people involved. It’s ultimately more efficient to give people money and then they can spend it on what they need or want. Even the idea of a corporation or company isn’t inherently broken, people will always have a need to organize themselves to create efficiencies and build bigger things than they could on their own.
Capitalism is shit, the concept of money, and organized labor, is quite good.
Uncontacted tribes are not the only ones that have used such systems; plenty of other societies throughout time have used similar systems, some quite recently even. It is not antithetical to modernity. For a recent example of a society that used a gift economy, you can look up “Korean People’s Association in Manchuria”. I was using uncontacted tribes merely as one example to illustrate that the idea that bartering and capitalism are “natural” and “how it always worked” isn’t true, despite that being what many believe.
It’s ultimately more efficient to give people money and then they can spend it on what they need or want.
Why is it more efficient, exactly? In a gift economy, you don’t have to give anyone money for anything and won’t starve for not having enough money. In a gift economy, you help each other where possible and do things such as art or science for fulfilment and not because you have to put food on the table. Someone who can help, but rarely does, slowly begins to get shunned by the rest of society.
EDIT:
To read more on gift economies and anarchism in general, you can read:
Petyr Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread is a good one; that’s more theory
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; a sort of memoir of Orwell’s time in Catalonia fighting alongside anarchists
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed; a sci-fi story about a futuristic anarchist society living on a planet that mutually orbits another planet that is inhabited by other societies.
How do I get a computer?
My neighbors do not make computers.
The next 100 towns over don’t either. (at least not in whole)
Do I go to the computer people in taiwan with a bunch of stuff the engineers and manufacturing technicians need?
How much time would I have to spend to do that?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we agreed on a medium of exchange that represented my labor, fair share, or value to society that I could just send electronically and could be exchanged again locally for what they need specifically?
It sure is the way we lived naturally in small tribes, but that’s not tenable at a certain point and it’s why almost every society that has grown to a sufficient size to make good use of it has invented some form of currency.
Money isn’t the problem, it’s the way it’s used.
Also society is so large there’s no way to have that level of accountability for everyone unless you create some neofascist social credit system.
Well, firstly: people would still make them the way they do now. Some would organize and collect materials, and some would refine and make them into parts that eventually make it into computers. The whole chain would still exist, except now it would be done voluntarily. That’s it. Organized labour does not stop existing once you get rid of money. I’m sure you’ve heard of open source software projects.
Which leads into the second part of my comment: it seems to me that your real fear is that there wouldn’t be volunteers for one or several parts of the chain… at which point I have to ask you to take a step back and think about it is that you want, and what you are defending. If there are no volunteers to do a job in such a society, and the only way to get people to do it is threatening them with poverty and starvation, then it is not a job worth doing if you value human rights and dignity.
You probably didn’t catch because I edited late, but I gave some recommended reading at the end of my previous comment. To those, I’ll add David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything and Bullshit Jobs.
The logistics just boggle the mind. It’s an interesting concept I do want to explore and will when I have some time to look into it deeper. I think I know what you are saying a little better, I just can’t envision it working in such a global economy that’s required to give people a high quality of life.
Also I don’t think the choice ever should be shit job or starve, I just don’t think you need to eliminate the concept of money or regulated “free markets” to do that. In a rational market system you gain a lot of efficiency by having it steer people to more efficient processes and encourage people to do the difficult or unpleasant things that need done with rewards.
We value similar things we just have different ideas of how you get there.
What they were describing was basically a society that relies on a gift economy, which has already existed in the past, and still exists in some places and forms today. We’ve been brainwashed by capitalist societies to think that would be a “hippy-dippy, fantasy land” because capitalism and bartering are what is natural to us, but it’s been shown that a gift-based economy is what a lot of uncontacted tribes use. It’s also how a lot of friend groups interoperate - hell, start a minecraft server (some other survival game will do) with your friends right now, and you will almost certainly naturally default to using a gift based economy.
Uncontacted tribes also don’t have advanced medicine (though not to say they haven’t discovered a great deal of important things on their own) or well… videogames. If you want to live like that more power to you, but for all the faults of modern society it has massive benefits as well.
I think there’s plenty of middle ground to be found where we can have our cake and eat it too even if it looks wildly different from what we have now. Gift economies just don’t work when you have billions of people involved. It’s ultimately more efficient to give people money and then they can spend it on what they need or want. Even the idea of a corporation or company isn’t inherently broken, people will always have a need to organize themselves to create efficiencies and build bigger things than they could on their own.
Capitalism is shit, the concept of money, and organized labor, is quite good.
Uncontacted tribes are not the only ones that have used such systems; plenty of other societies throughout time have used similar systems, some quite recently even. It is not antithetical to modernity. For a recent example of a society that used a gift economy, you can look up “Korean People’s Association in Manchuria”. I was using uncontacted tribes merely as one example to illustrate that the idea that bartering and capitalism are “natural” and “how it always worked” isn’t true, despite that being what many believe.
Why is it more efficient, exactly? In a gift economy, you don’t have to give anyone money for anything and won’t starve for not having enough money. In a gift economy, you help each other where possible and do things such as art or science for fulfilment and not because you have to put food on the table. Someone who can help, but rarely does, slowly begins to get shunned by the rest of society.
EDIT:
To read more on gift economies and anarchism in general, you can read:
Petyr Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread is a good one; that’s more theory
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; a sort of memoir of Orwell’s time in Catalonia fighting alongside anarchists
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed; a sci-fi story about a futuristic anarchist society living on a planet that mutually orbits another planet that is inhabited by other societies.
How do I get a computer? My neighbors do not make computers. The next 100 towns over don’t either. (at least not in whole) Do I go to the computer people in taiwan with a bunch of stuff the engineers and manufacturing technicians need? How much time would I have to spend to do that? Wouldn’t it be nice if we agreed on a medium of exchange that represented my labor, fair share, or value to society that I could just send electronically and could be exchanged again locally for what they need specifically?
It sure is the way we lived naturally in small tribes, but that’s not tenable at a certain point and it’s why almost every society that has grown to a sufficient size to make good use of it has invented some form of currency.
Money isn’t the problem, it’s the way it’s used.
Also society is so large there’s no way to have that level of accountability for everyone unless you create some neofascist social credit system.
Well, firstly: people would still make them the way they do now. Some would organize and collect materials, and some would refine and make them into parts that eventually make it into computers. The whole chain would still exist, except now it would be done voluntarily. That’s it. Organized labour does not stop existing once you get rid of money. I’m sure you’ve heard of open source software projects.
Which leads into the second part of my comment: it seems to me that your real fear is that there wouldn’t be volunteers for one or several parts of the chain… at which point I have to ask you to take a step back and think about it is that you want, and what you are defending. If there are no volunteers to do a job in such a society, and the only way to get people to do it is threatening them with poverty and starvation, then it is not a job worth doing if you value human rights and dignity.
You probably didn’t catch because I edited late, but I gave some recommended reading at the end of my previous comment. To those, I’ll add David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything and Bullshit Jobs.
The logistics just boggle the mind. It’s an interesting concept I do want to explore and will when I have some time to look into it deeper. I think I know what you are saying a little better, I just can’t envision it working in such a global economy that’s required to give people a high quality of life.
Also I don’t think the choice ever should be shit job or starve, I just don’t think you need to eliminate the concept of money or regulated “free markets” to do that. In a rational market system you gain a lot of efficiency by having it steer people to more efficient processes and encourage people to do the difficult or unpleasant things that need done with rewards.
We value similar things we just have different ideas of how you get there.